The countless indictments against Trump remind me of the innumerous indictments
against Navalny in Russia. The indictments against Trump look to me totally
justified. He tried to undermine and to destroy the democratic system by all
kinds of lies and deceit and treachery, by the things that Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls
the authoritarian playbook - by violence, corruption, lying, election fraud.
Now the democratic system is strong enough to protect itself and strikes back.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lucid/p/to-escape-prosecution-mussolini-hadThe
indictments against Navalny on the other hand are similar in magnitude, but
they are clearly fabricated. Again we have a system - this time an autocratic
and authoritarian one - which defends itself. In Navalny's case we can observe
a deceitful autocratic system that fights against an opponent by using
unjustified indictments and deceitful accusations. In Trump's case we can
observe a democratic systems that defends itself against a deceitful opponent
by using truthful and justified indictments.What's interesting to me is that
democracy and autocracy as a system are apparently both resilient and resistant
to change. If the system is threatened, then it tries to protect itself. This
could be observed also in the protests in 2020 in Belarus after the election
and in the protests in 2022 in Russia after the invasion that have been
squashed by mass imprisonments. The protests in Iran in 2022 have been silenced
by mass imprisonments and capital punishments as well. Democratic backsliding
can happen, but it doesn't have to as long as the democratic system is able to
defend itself. Similarly a collapse of an autocratic system is not happening if
the system is able to silence protests by mass imprisonments and capital
punishments. This blog article from last year still seems to
fit.https://blog.cas-group.net/2022/05/modeling-democratic-backsliding-into-authoritarianism/-J.
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