American Politics Is Now Democrats Versus Authoritarians
When one party respects the rule of law but the other doesn’t, political discourse can’t be normal.
What Democrats are battling against.
Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images North AmericaThe Democratic Party now confronts a predicament familiar to democratic political parties in authoritarian states such as Hungary and Russia. As those parties have learned, there is no good answer to the problem.
The proximate cause of the difficulty for Democrats is that Republicans are suddenly fond of subpoenas again. They plan to issue them to “a wide variety of Obama administration officials” in connection with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week: “The American people deserve answers about how such abuses could happen.”