Thread by @shadihamid

My new essay in @TheAtlantic is out today:

How American democracy didn't die

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

The collusion charge wasn't the only thing commentators got wrong. There was another, related charge that was graver but also more implausible: that Trump would (or could) destroy American democracy

When I started looking back at what prominent, mainstream pundits were saying about Trump ending democracy, I was taken aback. I'd forgotten how common the Hitler comparisons once were. These weren't just mistakes. They were wrong on a fundamental level. And it was irresponsible

As I argue in the piece, if we exclude cases of military occupation, there aren't really clear cases of longstanding, established democracies becoming autocracies

In other words, it's very difficult for certain kinds of democracies to "die":

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Germany is a touchstone for conversations about democracy's fragility. But what exactly does the fall of Weimar Germany have to do with Donald Trump? As it turns out, almost nothing. From a purely factual standpoint, it's hard to think of a more misleading political analogy

Interwar Germany was a fundamentally different sort of democracy than the US. It was a young democracy—inherently fragile by definition. So that Germany fell to dictatorship tells us little about what might realistically happen to a democracy, like ours, that isn't young at all