Would you fly on a plane with a failure rate of “only” 18%, worse than Russian roulette? We managed to weather the shock of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and his brazen attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, thanks in large part to a few courageous people. Ta. Trump, surrounded by his allies, has learned how to exploit the weaknesses of democracy by using the media for propaganda and tearing down the fragile guardrails that protect us from tyranny. He is now desperate to regain power, escape potential serious criminal charges, and exact revenge on his enemies. We can no longer afford to rely on luck to overcome the real existential threat he represents.
Democracy is much harder to restore than to destroy. Only by taking the threat posed by Mr. Trump, his political accomplices, and his millions of his supporters more seriously than we do can we get closer to zero. Mr. Willick’s essay did the opposite by presenting this as a probability problem in which the Constitution was likely to prevail.
In the late 18th century, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin warned that a lack of public morals and too much complacency threatened the republic. Democracies don’t collapse because of bad luck. They fall due to lack of will.