Presidential biographer and historian Jon Meacham proverbially described the state of American democracy as close to failure in an interview Tuesday with MSNBC.
“I think democracy is hanging by a thread. It’s not just the president’s agenda, and I don’t mean to be hyperbolic,” Meacham told Brian Williams. “The previous president attempted to lie and scheme his way to overturning the Constitution.”
Meacham said some Republicans were blindly willing to trust an authoritarian over the Constitution.
“They are in flight from fact,” he continued. “They are in flight from truth, privileging the will of the power over the checks and balances and inherent imperfections and compromises of a constitutional order.”
The former Newsweek editor-in-chief pointed to weaponized propaganda, anti-immigrant sentiment, and identity politics as lasting American problems which seem to have dangerously converged in this present moment.
“The waters are about to jump the levee,” Meacham predicted. “To paraphrase President Kennedy, I really do believe this is democracy’s hour of maximum danger.”
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