Donald Trump, now convicted of a criminal felony, is also the presumed presidential nominee for the Republican Party and leads in several key battleground state polls. A sexual assaulter as confirmed by a civil court and an admirer of Adolf Hitler, Trump is an aspiring dictator who is threatening to imprison his perceived enemies. These are truly unprecedented existential challenges for the United States.
But these extreme dangers to democracy are not confined to the United States. They are global. The United States is the world’s most powerful country and has been described as a type of shining city on the hill, a beacon of global democracy. In reality, America’s democracy is deeply flawed and has been a real democracy for only some sixty years because of the victories and sacrifices of the civil rights movement and the long Black Freedom Struggle in defeating Jim and Jane Crow. If Trumpism and neofascism take power the United States will become the opposite: A premiere example of how democracies rot and then die from within.
