A Dark New Era For America, and the World

Don't miss this harrowing reflection from the historian Christopher Browning, on the parallels between 1930s Germany and the present: "If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell."

Also worth reading is the invaluable Adam Serwer on this week's events:

Sometimes, when democracies die, they do so in grand gestures. But often there is no single event that heralds the end of the rule of law, but a slow, imperceptible erosion of the safeguards against political abuse of state power.

Any sense of civic obligation among Republicans is quickly fading: the idea that the opposition has rights, that judges and elected officials serve all of the American people and not simply their own party’s base, that the judiciary does not exist as a partisan fiefdom to further one side’s ideological agenda. In its place is a growing adherence to reflexive Trumpism. No objection the opposition could have is legitimate, because no opposition is legitimate. Those who support Trump are good, and those who oppose him are bad.

...As for Kavanaugh, every opinion he writes, every decision he joins, and every day he sits on the bench will be tainted with illegitimacy. As senators who represent a shrinking portion of the population prepare to confirm a justice more Americans oppose than support, who was nominated by a president for whom most of the electorate did not vote, the crisis of American democracy comes into sharp relief. Whatever their self-perception, Republican control of the three branches of government is countermajoritarian. With the guardrails of separated powers broken, the last remaining defense for American democracy and the rule of law is the electorate itself.

Finally, wash it all down with this comment from David Wallace-Wells, on the U.N.'s climate report. Amid the (un)American experiment in ethno-nationalism and would-be authoritarian rule, the most important story in the world remains neglected.