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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNYT Krugman "How Democracy Dies, American Style"
Sharpies, auto emissions and the weaponization of policy.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
Sept. 9, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/opinion/trump-democracy.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Democracies used to collapse suddenly, with tanks rolling noisily toward the presidential palace. In the 21st century, however, the process is usually subtler.
Authoritarianism is on the march across much of the world, but its advance tends to be relatively quiet and gradual, so that its hard to point to a single moment and say, this is the day democracy ended. You just wake up one morning and realize that its gone.
In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putins Russia, to Recep Tayyip Erdogans Turkey, to Viktor Orbans Hungary. Bit by bit the guardrails of democracy were torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of the ruling party, then were weaponized to punish and intimidate that partys opponents. On paper these countries are still democracies; in practice they have become one-party regimes.
snip
(about sharpie gate)
Why is this frightening? Because it shows that even the leadership of NOAA, which should be the most technical and apolitical of agencies, is now so subservient to Trump that its willing not just to overrule its own experts but to lie, simply to avoid a bit of presidential embarrassment.
Think about it: If even weather forecasters are expected to be apologists for Dear Leader, the corruption of our institutions is truly complete.
Which brings me to a much more important case, the Justice Departments decision to investigate automakers for the crime of trying to act responsibly.
snip - apologies for the paywall. well worth reading. (but then again, we all here could have written this. WE know it. We've known it for three years)
struggle4progress
(118,281 posts)Hermit-The-Prog
(33,328 posts)spanone
(135,828 posts)dalton99a
(81,455 posts)You might think that the auto industry would welcome this invitation to keep on polluting. In fact, however, automakers have already based their business plans on the assumption that fuel efficiency standards will indeed rise.
They dont like seeing their plans upended in part, one suspects, because they understand that the reality of climate change will eventually force the reinstatement of those rules. So they have actually opposed Trumps deregulation, which they warn would lead to an extended period of litigation and instability.
And several companies have gone beyond protesting. In a remarkable rebuke to the administration, they have reached an agreement with the State of California to comply with standards nearly as restrictive as the Obama rules even if the federal government is no longer requiring them.
Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department is considering bringing an antitrust action against those companies, as if agreeing on environmental standards were a crime comparable to, say, price-fixing.
This would be disturbing even if it came from an administration that had previously showed some interest in actual antitrust policy. Coming from people who heretofore havent indicated any concerns about monopoly power, its clearly an attempt at weaponizing antitrust actions, turning them into a tool of intimidation.
And its also clear evidence that the Justice Department has been thoroughly corrupted. In less than three years it has been transformed from an agency that tries to enforce the law to an organization dedicated to punishing Trumps opponents.
Whos next? In at least two cases, Trump appears to have tried to use his power to punish Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, which the president considers (like this newspaper) to be an enemy. First he pushed for an increase in the post offices package shipping rates, which would hurt Amazons delivery costs; then the Pentagon suddenly announced that it was re-examining the process for awarding a huge cloud-computing project that Amazon was widely expected to win.
In each case its hard to prove that these were efforts to weaponize government functions against domestic critics. But who are we kidding? Of course they were.
The point is that this is how the slide to autocracy happens. Modern de facto dictatorships dont usually murder their opponents (although Trump has been fulsome in his praise for regimes that do, in fact, rely on brute force). What they do, instead, is use their control over the machinery of government to make life difficult for anyone considered disloyal, until effective opposition withers away.