Author: Robert Reich

Democracy is not just under attack in America. In some states, it is being lost. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once suggested that states could serve as laboratories of democracy, but these states are more like laboratories of autocracy. Take Wisconsin. The GOP has so successfully rigged state elections through gerrymandering that even when Democrats get more votes, Republicans win more seats. In 2018, Republicans won just 45% of the vote statewide, but were awarded 64% of the seats. Wisconsin is one of several states where an anti-democracy movement has taken hold — but it wasn’t always this way....

We tragically fool ourselves if we believe that the televised hearings of the January 6 committee will change the Republican party or end Trump’s attempted coup. The Republican party is becoming ever more divorced from reality, and Trump’s attempted coup continues unabated. The first four hearings of the committee demolished the myths of voter fraud repeated incessantly by Trump. Yet the Republican response to those hearings has ranged from indifference to hostility. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House, tweeted that the members of the committee “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” and called the...

The United States presents itself as the beacon of democracy in contrast to the autocracies of China and Russia. Yet American democracy is in danger of succumbing to the same sort of oligarchic economics and racist nationalism that thrive in both these powers. After all, it was not long ago that Donald Trump, who openly admired Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, encouraged racist nationalism in America while delivering much of the U.S. government into the hands of America’s super-rich. Now state-level Republicans are busily suppressing votes of people of color and paving the way for a possible anti-democratic coup,...