From #AgainstTrump

. . . . The fact is that the Trump administration is a uniquely dangerous, authoritarian administration. It is headed by a small group of people, most of whom have no experience of public service, and who are hostile to all forms of proceduralism, institutionalism, and constitutionalism. In Bannon, they have an ideologue who has quite emphatically committed himself to disrupting the basic operations of the state. They are starting to make real headway in this agenda. And in response, there is an emerging resistance by public officials. Within the State Department, and the Justice Department, and the Department of Education, and the EPA, civil service employees and long-term appointees committed to the missions of their agencies are offering bureaucratic resistance to Trump’s most disturbing initiatives. Is this bad? Does it automatically become bad when it involves intelligence officials who are in possession of explosive information about serious wrongdoing and who confront a paranoid administration committed to public dis¬simulation and deceit?

We are in the midst of a serious political and constitutional crisis. No major social, economic, or political institution is untouched. The Trump administration is not the “cause” of the crisis. But it has brought this crisis to a head, and has promised and begun to enact one very frightening way of resolving the crisis—through the creation of a truly anti-liberal, xenophobic, and authoritarian regime.

To ignore the questionable circumstances under which it came to power, and even more to bracket out the very dangerous ways it has already begun to exercise its power, and to treat it as an expression of “democracy” and to treat intelligence whistleblowers as agents of “the deep state” or even enemies of democracy—this represents a serious lapse of good political judgment. That a similar rhetorical tack is being relentlessly pursued by Trump and his lackeys is something much worse—a form of pure cynicism.

The current clear and present danger to democracy is the man who won 306 Electoral College votes, Trump, the so-called president of the United States, who has already placed his administration on a collision course with liberal democracy and with reality.

The danger is not a “soft coup” by “the deep state.” The danger is a hard push to authoritarianism by an elected president committed to making war on science, public education, a free press, rational bureaucracy, the rule of law, and all forms of intelligence. The main work of resisting this danger falls to citizens acting autonomously. But we can only hope that there will continue to be conscientious journalists willing to relentlessly pursue leads, and conscientious public officials and civil servants willing to disclose publicly important information even when, and especially when, elected leaders do everything in their power to keep it secret.