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Calling Congress is the best way to get your message across.

A woman looks at her phone as she walks past an electric light board designed as the US national flag in New York's Times Square on Feb. 7, 2017. (Photo by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

Millions of Americans are in despair. They know our democracy is in great peril from plutocrats, organized groups using dark money to control Congress and ideologues determined to rip up Social Security, Medicare and much more. The law of the jungle is being imposed.

We can stop this. We can break the grip of powerful individuals on Congress and restore democracy of, by and for the people. But if we want to win, you and I must mobilize. A new approach, FiftyNifty.org, makes this not just possible, but actually easy.

How is any individual citizen supposed to impact a political decision-making process that largely takes place behind closed doors? The answer is obvious: Let your congressional representatives know what makes you angry.

Every member of the House is up for re-election in November 2018, and one-third of the Senate is too. In the past few weeks we have seen what happens when we confront our representatives in town hall meetings. They hide or run. They also start to get the message: Listen to us!

But in-person confrontation is hard to sustain. People have jobs, families and community obligations. Some Republicans already decline to hold genuine town halls. In these tense times, calling Congress is the best way to get your message across.

Yes, Congress has learned to dodge individual calls. But what if you are not the only one expressing a view? Imagine the impact if you can reach out to people you know throughout the country and convince them to together become a mighty chorus-by-phone. Now you have built your own campaign; even perhaps a crusade.

How one callers network can spread the activism bug. (Image: FiftyNifty.org)

This might sound like a lot of work, but a new website created by Andy Lippman and his Viral Communications Group at MIT makes it quick, easy and actually fun to build effective pressure on Congress in exactly this way. FiftyNifty.org uses a game-like structure to encourage people not just to call their own senators and representatives, but also to persuade family and friends elsewhere in the country to do the same.

The website lets you see where in the country you have made connections and how many calls have been made. The maps you build and family-tree graphics that track your progress are very cool. (I am an adviser to this group, which is an MIT research project with very strong privacy and data protections. All the hard work is done by Andy, Leopold Mebazaa, Travis Rich and Jasmin Rubinovitz.)

Building connections and mobilizing your social network across state borders to call Congress! will help restore American democracy in five ways.

First, phone calls send a valuable signal to members of Congress. Facebook comments are deleted, emails are ignored, and now we hear false claims that angry town halls were not attended by actual constituents. But congressional staffers still answer the phones and they typically ask your name and address, primarily (and quite reasonably) to verify you are a constituent. According to a former congressional staffer:

What representatives and staffers want to hear is the individual impact of your individual story.

And, understandably:

I couldnt listen to peoples stories for six to eight hours a day and not be profoundly impacted by them.

These days many people do not like to make phone calls. But this is exactly what makes phone calls so valuable it tells politicians how intensely you feel and how much youre engaged about an issue. In fact, you should really call someone in Congress every day about an issue that matters to you. Concerted, consistent, polite pressure is best. You are signaling on what basis you will vote in just under two years.

Second, if members of Congress ignore the phone calls they receive, they will pay for this at the ballot box. Many Republican members of the House have relatively safe seats, but even they should fear the potential wave election that often happens two years after a presidential election.

Get out of your local comfort zone and ask every individual in your dispersed network: What do you care about?

Asking senators and representatives to act and then holding them accountable is entirely fair. In fact, it is precisely how this democracy was designed to operate.

Third, to win at FiftyNifty, you need to think about how people in other parts of the country view the issues of the day. Get out of your local comfort zone and ask every individual in your dispersed network: What do you care about? Mobilize your friends around what matters to them and in ways that make sense to you. Fight back against all forms of geographic polarization. (The name FiftyNifty comes from the classic song that helps children learn about our country.)

Andy Lippman has made fourphone calls himself, all in Massachusetts. But he has inspired 88 phone calls in 17 other states. Ive made two phone calls and encouraged other people to make a total of 78 calls across 11 states. (Im currently in second place, behind Andy, according to the leaderboard. If you would like me to overtake him, please register using this link, which is specific to me.)

Fourth, FiftyNifty allows people in gerrymandered districts to have a say. You can only vote where you live, but you can talk to people anywhere.

And there are at least 4 million citizens residents of the District of Columbia and US territories such as Puerto Rico who have no voting representative in Congress. Residents of those places can either spend their time complaining or focus on connecting with folks who live somewhere that does have full congressional representation. Get your friends to make the call.

Fifth, we need to push back against the abuse of technology and automation in politics. The last 10 years have seen the rise of trolls (aiming to drown you out with noise and abuse) as well as bots (short for robots, i.e., fake personas) throughout the internet. Now we have algorithms being applied to developing hate messages on Facebook and other media. The extreme right has become very sophisticated in this space including in the UKs Brexit referendum last year, in Trumps campaign and now in the French presidential election.

The best way to fight back is with real people making real phone calls. Artificial intelligence is getting smarter, but it cannot (yet) mimic a voter calling his or her representative with a personal message. Technological abuse is worse where the frictions are zero meaning in purely electronic communication.

Phone calls involve real effort and that is the point. Take back democracy from extremes and from the machines.

Make the phone call and mobilize your social network.

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Restore American Democracy Mobilize Your National Network - BillMoyers.com

Dartmouth professor John Carey

What is the state of American democracy in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election? A project founded by two Dartmouth professors asked more than 1,500 political scientists to weigh in.

The picture is sobering.

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About 86 percent of those who took part in a survey by the Bright Line Watch project believe the United States met or mostly met an acceptable standard for free and fair elections. But only about half believe other branches could effectively check the power of the executive branch.

Metro Minute asked Dartmouth professor John Carey to reflect on the research. (Comments edited for length.)

What led you and your colleagues to start Bright Line Watch?

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Most of us have done work outside of the US, so wed seen places were democracy has been stripped away. ... So, when we saw things we consider deviations from things wed consider usual behavioral norms, such as hyper-partisanship or political parties reluctant to investigate potential breaches in security happening here, we thought wed try and see what other people thought. You know, when its happening, theres no consensus that democracy is dying.

So just how healthy is American democracy?

Were in territory that Ive never seen before. Overall, I think were still good. ... But there have been worrying signs. Congresss lack of willingness to investigate Russias potential involvement in the election is troubling. If there is an outside power hacking communication of one candidate and the other candidate knew or endorsed it, that would be a huge deal. ... Were not trying to say that the president is trying to destroy democracy, but his election is a part of the deviations that weve been watching.

Whats next for your organization, and US democracy?

Were going to repeat the survey every quarter. We want to get a timeline of how things change. If we get the answers back in a year and theyre the same, that would make for a boring story, but it would be telling. However, if, in a year, our responses are wildly different, thats more concerning. ... While Im less confident than I was five years ago, Im still betting on democracy. The data shows that there is overwhelming confidence in the integrity of our elections and in freedom of expression and speech. Thats reassuring.

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A check-up for US democracy - The Boston Globe - The Boston Globe

Winston Churchill once famously declared: Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Underpinned by the rule of law and the popular will, democracy is the only way we can prevent the arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power: suppression of free speech; curtailment or abolition of civil liberties; laws passed by decree without public debate or popular approval; arrest and imprisonment without trial; torture and murder by unchecked agencies of the government; and theft, extortion and embezzlement by politicians in power, who inevitably turn into kleptocrats when democracy is destroyed.

Yet democracy is a fragile creation. After a period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when constitutional democracy spread to many countries not just in Europe but across the globe, and Francis Fukuyama declared that history had come to an end, the tide seems to have turned. Democracies are now being destroyed in Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Poland, as strongmen such as Putin, Orban, Erdoan and Kaczyski dismantle civil liberties, silence critical voices and suppress independent institutions. What makes itworse is that such would-be dictators enjoy popular support for what they are doing. A similar process may well be under way with the advent of the Trump regime in the United States.

How we defend ourselves against the suppression of fundamental freedoms has once again become a matter of great urgency

How we defend our most fundamental freedoms has once again become a matter of great urgency. The historian Timothy Snyder has produced this short book as one response. History, and especially the history of the 20th century, has lessons for us all, he contends. Aspecialist on east-central Europe, Snyder made his name with abook, Bloodlands, that argued, less than persuasively, for an equivalence of Stalins purges with the Nazi Holocaust. More recently, he has declared in Black Earth that the Holocaust was not about the implementation of paranoid antisemitism but an attempt to gain controlof more agricultural land as an alternative to using science to improve the natural environment. His argument did not find many supporters. What does he say in his latest tract?

On Tyranny is less an anatomy of tyranny itself than an essay about how we might stop it from happening. Do not obey in advance, he says. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. After Hitler came to power, many if not most Germans voluntarily offered their obedience to his regime. We should heed this warning and refuse to do so ourselves. And certainly, the millions of state servants who ran Germany did indeed rush to join the Nazi party to save their jobs. Later on, few opposed the growing antisemitism of the regime or its genocidal outcome. But Snyder forgets the degree of coercion to which they were subjected. It was no easy thing to risk your job when over a third of the workforce was unemployed, as it was in 1933. Hundreds of thousands of Nazistormtroopers were roaming the streets beating up and killing the Social Democrats and Communists who were the regimes main opponents. Up to 200,000 people, overwhelmingly thoseon the political left, were throwninto concentration camps and brutallymistreated. The great mass ofGermans did not obey in advance: they obeyed when tyranny had already set up its tent.

In Germany in 1933, most oppositional parties were suppressed by force or the threat of force

In Czechoslovakia in 1946, to take another example offered by Snyder, free elections resulted in 38% of the vote going to the Communists (by an interesting coincidence, roughly the same as the popular vote for the Nazis in 1932); within the next three years, democratic institutions were annihilated as people followed their drive to monopolise power. Here too, however, the driving force was the occupying Red Army, and even in other east-central European states such as Romania, Poland or East Germany, where support for communism was far weaker, the same thing happened: Stalinism came to power at the end of a Red Army bayonet. Its not always easy to refuse to obey in such circumstances, and what we really need is to work out how to resist the imposition of a dictatorship when its not backed by massive violence against its opponents but claims to be establishing itself with popular consent and the validation of the law.

Snyders second lesson is to defend institutions, by which he means the courts, the constitution, the press, the trade unions, the parliament and so on. The example he gives, however, illustrates a different point: he shows German Jews underestimating the Nazis and assuming Hitler would be controlled by his conservative coalition partners, calm down and become more moderate once he got into power. We do not need the example of Nazi Germany to demonstrate the fallacy of these beliefs: Trump has already shown how mistaken they are in the first few weeks of his presidency. It is not at all clear, though, that people actually have underestimated Trump. He clearly is impulsive, ignorant about foreign policy and inconsistent in many of his statements unlike Hitler, who arrived with clear purposes at home and abroad, and prepared everything he said carefully beforehand. The mistake some have made is to assume that Trump would be curbed by more moderate advisers. Even if he does submit to control, his choice of advisers has steered clear of moderation.

Snyders third lesson is beware the one-party state. As he rightly remarks, this is in a way unnecessary, because most people will realise that the suppression of oppositional political parties is a glaringly obvious step on the way to dictatorship. Here again, however, it is important not to ignore the element of coercion in this process. In Germany in 1933, most oppositional parties were suppressed by force or the threat of force; even the large Catholic Centre party was threatened with violence as well as bribed with false promises of Nazi respect for the institutions it held dear. And sometimes the preservation of a multi-party system can mask the creation of a dictatorship: Communist-run East Germany, for example, had a multiplicity of political parties right up to the end, including its own version ofthe Christian Democrats. But these parties were all kept rigidly in line, used by the regime as transmission belts for the communication of its ideology to areas of society active Christians, former Nazis and so on who might otherwise be impervious to it.

Snyders fourth lesson is take responsibility for the face of the world in other words, be sceptical about propaganda. This lesson is essentially the same as various others he suggests: be kind to our language, believe in truth, investigate, listen for dangerous words. And indeed when Trump brands any criticism as fake news and proclaims blatant untruths as facts, we have entered the era of post-truth and alternative facts. No wonder sales of George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four have surged in the US. We certainly need to be persistent and unyielding in nailing politicians lies, though it is doubtful whether Snyders recommendation, which involves reading that old authoritarian Fyodor Dostoevskys double-decker novel The Brothers Karamazov, will be of much use.

Snyder also tells us, somewhat unnecessarily, that we can survive tyranny by establishing a private life and staying calm when the unthinkable arrives. The creeping destruction of democracy can be stopped or reversed; its not inevitable, as his injunction to be as courageous as you can implies. In this book, as in his others, Snyder provokes us to think again about major issues of our time, as well as significant elements of the past, but he seems to have rushed it out rather too quickly. Itcould do with far greater depth of historical illustration, not to mention recourse to the many thinkers whose wisdom we might profit from in dealing with the issue of tyranny and how to combat it. Democracy dies in many different ways, and to help us in defending our rights we need a more thoughtful book than this.

Richard J Evans The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 is published by Penguin. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is published by Publisher. To order a copy for 7.64 (RRP 8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder review how to defend democracy in the age of Trump - The Guardian

When Turkeys Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, it generated considerable debate between those who saw its success as a potentially liberalizing force and critics who feared it would ultimately bring the end of Turkish democracy. Depending on who you spoke to, the AKP was poised to turn Turkey into either Sweden or Iran; to finally realize Ataturks vision of making the country modern and Western or permanently destroy it.

Today, a decade and a half later, the future of Turkish democracy certainly looks grim. With President Recep Tayyip Erdogan now leading a heavy-handed campaign to further enhance his powers through a constitutional referendum in April, every day seems to provide new evidence that the partys earliest critics have been vindicated.

But looking back at the AKPs rise and transformation, this seems a bit like concluding that the boy who cried wolf was vindicated at the end of the fable when the wolf finally arrived. The alarmism that accompanied the AKPs rise prompted a series of undemocratic interventions that only strengthened its hold on power, furthering the partys descent into authoritarianism, and the countrys along with it. Military and legal threats against the AKP in its early years bolstered the partys support among loyalists and skeptics alike. Those threats also helped confirm a narrative of righteous persecution that Erdogan has continued to draw on as he transformed the party from a potentially liberalizing force into the nightmare it has become today.

During its early years in power, the AKP won liberal acclaim as it challenged the entrenched influence of Turkish military, expanded cultural rights for Kurds and promoted accession to the European Union. In retrospect, it is easy to identify champions of the AKP who were excessive in their enthusiasm for the party or their confidence in its liberal rhetoric. Yet for others, support for the AKP was more measured. If Erdogan was using democracy instrumentally he infamously claimed democracy was like a train from which you disembark when you reach your stop many liberals were equally instrumental in their support for him. In the early days, when the AKP itself appeared weak, it made sense to think the party could help clear away the undemocratic forces in Turkish society while still being constrained by political institutions, and, ultimately, voters. In 2003, the AKP was also more than just Erdogan. At the time, it included a far more diverse coalition of business interests, liberals, and democratically-minded religious conservatives.

Whats more, Turkeys political landscape in the early 2000s offered few liberal alternatives to the AKP. The countrys main opposition party, the CHP, cast its lot with the military, often seeming more concerned about secularism than democracy and more comfortable with coups than headscarves. The ultra-nationalist (not to say overtly racist or quasi-fascist) MHP, meanwhile, appeared a lost cause, while the countrys Kurdish party remained in the thrall of PKK-leader Abdullah Ocalans violent and authoritarian brand of Kurdish nationalism.

Given this backdrop, one could be clear-eyed about Erdogans faults and still see the AKP as the best of a bunch of bad options. In early 2004, U.S. Ambassador Eric Edelman wrote a cable (subsequently published by Wikileaks) in which he presciently detailed Erdogans overbearing pride, unbridled ambition, authoritarian loner streak, and overweening desire to stay in power. Still, the cable went on to conclude that despite these manifest faults, Erdogan was, at the time, the only partner capable of advancing toward the U.S. vision of a successful, democratic Turkey integrated into Europe.

Whatever hope there was for this vision, the behavior of the AKPs fiercest opponents over the ensuing decade was not conducive to realizing it. The Turkish military in particular did its part to ensure that the AKP would maintain its image as a champion of democracy or at least the liberal democrats lesser evil well after that ceased to be the case. Given the Turkish militarys history four coups in as many decades, the most recent in 1997 against the AKPs Islamist predecessor it already faced considerable suspicion; its response to the AKP only made things worse. Despite having the wisdom to recognize that it lacked both the domestic and international support for an overt coup, the countrys top brass expressed just enough interest in trying to force the AKP from power to bolster the partys popularity and confirm widespread suspicion that the military itself still posed the greatest threat to Turkish democracy.

Details of the militarys activity in 2003-2004 are still shrouded in mystery, but what evidence subsequently emerged was damning enough to cast a sinister shadow over subsequent developments. In 2007, a Turkish magazine published leaked entries from a diary kept by Admiral Ozden Ornek, commander of the Turkish naval forces during the 2003-2004 period. Orneks diary described high-level discussions of a military-led campaign to foment unrest through civil-society mobilization, anti-AKP propaganda and mass demonstrations as means to bring down Erdogan and his party. The authenticity of some parts of the diary were subsequently disputed and there was no evidence the military ever acted on these plans. But the overall picture it painted of the militarys thinking at the time was, by many accounts, accurate and helped damage public perceptions of the military going forward.

In the following years, the AKP would face a series of challenges that further rallied supporters against what appeared to be the fundamentally anti-democratic forces resisting them. In 2007, a crisis emerged over who would fill Turkeys then largely symbolic office of President. With Erdogan widely seen as too controversial, the AKP put forward co-founder Abdullah Gul. Amidst a heated debate that often focused on Guls wifes headscarf, the Turkish military issued a late night memorandum on its website stating it was watching with concern and was resolute in its commitment to defend secular principles. Among other anti-secular activities that caught the militarys eye, the memorandum noted with alarm that in several elementary schools, female students in head scarves had been singing religious songs. While the objectives of the militarys statement remain opaque, in a country that had already had one coup-by-memorandum, citizens were quick to perceive an explicit threat. And they responded defiantly. Several months later, voters went to the polls and returned the AKP to power with 46.5 percent of the vote, a 13 percent increase over its total in the previous election.

The next year, Turkeys head prosecutor launched a court case to close the AKP and ban 71 of its leading members from politics. While cases against previous Islamist parties had regularly succeeded, this one failed, defeated by one vote in Turkeys 11-member constitutional court. But despite the outcome, the case helped confirm in the minds of many AKP supporters the implacable nature of the political establishment they were up against.

For Erdogan of course, this perception would pay lasting political dividends. Having succeeded in maintaining its hold on power in the face of undemocratic resistance, Erdogan built on this narrative to maintain support for his own increasingly undemocratic behavior.

After surviving the closure case, the AKP went on to consolidate control through a series of trials that left many military leaders and prominent secular critics in jail. The trials began in 2008 as an investigation into a sprawling coup plot called the Ergenekon conspiracy. Over the following years, it emerged that the real conspiracy was the case itself. Orchestrated by members of the Gulen movement in the police and judiciary, the case relied on forged evidence and selective leaks, manipulated to target opponents of Gulen and the AKP. Yet while often worrying about the prosecutions abuses, many liberal observers continued to treat it as a necessary step in breaking the militarys hold on politics. The driving force behind this deeply mistaken calculation was the assumption that where theres a history of smoke, there must also be fire.

In 2011 and 2012, Erdogan restructured the AKP to empower his own loyalists while forcing out more liberal members and supporters of his rival, Abdullah Gul. Then, as he consolidated his hold over the party, he succeeded in discrediting the growing opposition he faced by emphasizing, accurately or not, its undemocratic character. When widespread urban protests against the government broke out in 2013, for example, they were viewed with a degree of sympathy by some of the AKPs more liberal members. Yet Erdogan, drawing implausibly but effectively on the Turkish militarys previous plans for instigating mass protests, presented the popular demonstrations as an organized conspiracy seeking to topple the AKP. Months later, prosecutors affiliated with the Gulen movement which had fallen out with the government in an increasingly naked power struggle moved to arrest several prominent members of the AKP and their children on corruption charges. In this case, though, the Gulenists history of secretive and illegal activity enabled Erdogan to portray the arrests as part of another coup plot, convincing his supporters to overlook the inconvenient fact that the charges themselves were probably true.

Of course, Erdogans efforts to play the victim received ultimate vindication last summer, when elements within the military really did launch a coup. In its aftermath, Erdogans popularity increased dramatically and his loyalists launched a wide-ranging series of purges that effectively forestalled opposition from rivals within his own party. After years during which observers hoped more democratically-minded figures like Abdullah Gul or former Prime Minster Ahmet Davutoglu might finally challenge Erdogan and set the AKP back on a more moderate path, the coup seems to have put an end to this possibility. Amidst conspiratorial accusations that Gul and Davutoglu were themselves in league with the coup plotters, Erdogan could almost certainly now get away with having both men jailed if they ever seriously threatened him.

Whether Erodgan succeeds in enhancing his powers through a coming referendum or not, his position seems secure for the foreseeable future. This is a result not only of his ample ambition and political skill, but also of the missteps of opponents who tried to resist him the wrong way.

Nick Danforth is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He completed a PhD in Turkish history at Georgetown University and has written widely on Middle Eastern politics.

Image:Miguel Carminati, CC

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Tutored by the Tragedy of Turkish Democracy - War on the Rocks

President Donald J. Trump enters the Oval Office on March 5, 2017 in Washington, DC.Erik S. Lesser-Pool/Getty Images

President Donald Trump and his advisors are all about the American people. But their continual invocation of these people reveals how the language of democracyparticularly when accompanied by colorful pictures of cheering crowdscan become a powerful tool in the consolidation of profoundly undemocratic political processes and ideas.

When, for instance, Trump calls the press the enemy of the people, he is possibly not even aware of the history behind the phrase as a rallying cry for the Soviet Unions Stalin-era witch hunts for hidden traitors. Such attacks are not intended only for journalists critical of him, but broadly apply to the entire edifice of public servantscareer diplomats, policy experts, analysts, and pressthat the White House portrays as a drag on U.S. democracy. This appears to be one small piece of a larger administration effort to develop a division in the U.S. public imagination, with the public servant class on one hand, and Trumpthe chosen emissary of Americas no-longer-silent majorityon the other.

Since the election of Jimmy Carter, almost every president, Democrat and Republican alike, has come to power by positioning himself as an outsider, assailing politics as usual and threatening to shake up the Washington establishment. But Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannons promises to launch a deconstruction of the U.S. administrative state go beyond such standard critiques of the status quo. Instead, the Bannon camp is suggesting that a host of agencies and organizations long considered central to good governance are full of inefficient and unreliable schemers, catering to their own interests rather than to the peoples real needs.

Trump presents himself as the oppositean instrument of direct democracy with an unfiltered connection to the ordinary American and a determination to defy all cowardly intermediaries who might wish to hamstring the bold words and actions that he claims reflect the peoples will. ( You think it, I say it , was a standard campaign phrase.) In truth, Trump favors stadium rallies over face-to-face meetings with small groups of constituents. During the New Hampshire primaries, he marveled at how slow the process of actual connection could be. People would go and have dinner with the voters like, five people, a family and theyd sit there and have dinner for two and a half hours If I did that people would lose respect for me. Instead, he prolifically tweets to his over 26 million followers, manufacturing a sense of uncensored immediacy.

We should care about this rhetorical strategy because Trump advisors are starting to redefine the very meaning of democracy, in much the same way they have already succeeded in transforming the meaning of fake news. The figure of the president, keeping his promises to the American people, is being upheld as fundamentally rival to a system of checks and balances designed to contain the executive branch and another system of expertise intended to advise it.

In continually allying himself with the people in opposition to institutional power, Trump is doing several things. First, he is undermining the role of deep knowledge in government decision-making and removing opportunities for experts to air their views, particularly when those views might diverge from a predetermined political line. Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Health and Human Services, and other government-funded agencies have been forbidden to publish or speak publicly about their work without White House approval. The State Department, which employs nearly 70,000 people worldwide, is facing a 37% budget cut , and the administration has given short shrift to much of the analysis the department puts out. Meanwhile, Trump is the first president since World War II to eschew a daily security briefing. The reports, he has stated publicly, are repetitive, and since he is a smart person, he doesnt have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years .

At the same time, the president is encouraging the splintering of authority in the civic sphere, among those voices outside government that cannot be so easily controlled. He is doing so by proclaiming a large segment of the mainstream media to be not simply biased but deliberately fake and aimed at discrediting the true American polity. Those journalists, Trump warned a crowd in Melbourne, Fla., have an agenda, and their agenda is not your agenda.

But Trump and his advisors are also praising the increasing fragmentation of Americas information landscape as yet another laudable manifestation of direct democracy. Applauding the fact that people get their news now from literally hundreds and thousands of sites, the president of the American Conservative Union termed this historical moment a time of great democratization in journalism.

Encouraging the proliferation of a multiplicity of media voices may not seem like an authoritarian strategy. It certainly diverges sharply from the media policy of a more textbook type of top-down regime like Russias. There, the three major television channels are unified around positive coverage of President Vladimir Putin, and a background apparatus of censorship is in place to portray him not only as a man of the people, but also as an uncontested leader above the fray and backed by a hegemonic state apparatus.

Trumps people, in contrast, encourage chatterthe emergence of a relativized world where every opinion can be of equal value. As described in a recent Foreign Affairs article, How America Lost Faith in Expertise, the current social climate is one where any guy on the street is entitled to know as much about any issue as, say, a Nobel Prize winner. These days, author Tom Nichols writes, members of the public search for expert errors and revel in finding themnot to improve understanding but rather to give themselves license to disregard all expert advice they dont like .

In such a corrupted environment, where even the most straightforward of facts can find a challenger, Trump can shine as the loudest, brashest voice of self-proclaimed authority. Its not about truth, as much as power. As he himself puts it: The era of empty talk is over, its over. Now is the time for action.

Cynthia Hooper is an associate professor of history and director of Russian and Eastern European studies at the College of the Holy Cross .

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Donald Trump's Definition of Democracy Is Dangerous - Fortune