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Among the many different forms of government, democracies are unique in the extent to which their stability depends on legitimacy - a belief on the part of the public that the system of government in the country has what the late Seymour Martin Lipset called "a moral title to rule".

Moral assessments of political authority are always to some extent relative. People may not love their system of government, but it is important that they at least see it as better than any alternative they can imagine. Social scientists thus have increasingly been inclined to measure political legitimacy with Winston Churchill's famous declaration in mind: "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

With the defeat of fascism in World War II, and then of communism in the Cold War, and with the general decline of various other forms of military, one-party, and personal (strongman) dictatorships since the mid-1970s, democracy came to be seen globally as the one truly legitimate form of government. But there is a difference between popular acceptance of a regime in the absence of any immediate alternative and a deep popular commitment to its moral worth.

Dr Lipset, a leading theorist of American democracy, and other social scientists have also distinguished between what we call "performance legitimacy" and "intrinsic legitimacy". The former is more superficial: People support a political system because it works for the moment to maintain order, generate economic growth and produce other public goods. But the danger with legitimacy that is based purely on performance is that it can evaporate when the performance goes bad. A democracy is thus only truly "consolidated" when most of its citizens come to believe that the constitutional system is the most right and appropriate for the country, irrespective of how well it performs in any given period of time.

Dr Lipset argued that once democracies had functioned well over an extended period of time, they would build up a reservoir of intrinsic legitimacy that they could draw on in difficult times.

But what happens if "difficult times" last a very long time?

Political legitimacy has many possible sources. As German sociologist Max Weber wrote, legitimacy may be based on tradition - people see authority as morally right because it has a long and deeply rooted historical vintage. It may be forged by the personal charisma of a transformative leader; whether democratic, such as George Washington or Nelson Mandela; or autocratic, such as Lenin, Fidel Castro, or Ayatollah Khomeini. But charismatic authority is fleeting as it depends on a personality.

So to be sustained, legitimacy must be institutionalised through rules and procedures, what Weber called "rational-legal" bases of authority. People will obey rules when the rules are perceived to work fairly and well over the long run - or in the absence of any alternative. But in the face of an extended crisis of performance - for example, a protracted increase in economic inequality; two or more decades of stagnant or declining incomes for a large swathe of the population; or a broader sense of unaddressed threat to group identity and national sovereignty - much of the population may lose faith in the political system. And when that happens, a systemic alternative is bound to present itself. This can be the military, an authoritarian movement or party, or simply an authoritarian individual leader who denounces the system as weak and corrupt and who claims "I alone can fix it".

The ultimate guarantor of any democracy is that its citizens are committed to it unconditionally - again, independent of what it produces for them at any moment in time and of whether the party they favour is in power or not. A reasonable minimum threshold for democratic consolidation is that no less than 70 per cent of the public express commitment to democracy as the best form of government, and no more than 15 per cent of the public express support for an authoritarian regime option. This is a tough standard that is met by only a few democracies outside the West.

We have generally presumed that popular support for democracy remains extremely high in the established Western democracies. However, recent analysis by researchers Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, published in the Journal Of Democracy, shows that support for democracy in the US and Europe has declined over the last 20 years in almost every age group, and that the young are the most sceptical (with more than 20 per cent of those below age 35 saying that "having a democratic political system" is a "bad" or "very bad" way to "run this country"). Moreover, the percentage of Americans saying it would be good or very good for the "army to rule" rose from about 6 per cent to 16 per cent between 1995 and 2011.

More disturbing still, the percentage of Americans who answer that having "a strong leader who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections" increased in this same period from about 20 per cent to 34 per cent. Most of the countries surveyed by the World Values Survey between 2010 and 2014 showed similar increases. In fact, in all of the advanced industrial democracies surveyed in this period, support for a "strong leader" is at or above 20 per cent (for example, 21 per cent in Germany, slightly above 25 per cent in Sweden, Australia and the Netherlands, and 40 per cent in Spain).

Surely not all of the above surveyed citizens imagined that they were expressing support for non-democratic rule. But the real danger that the established democracies face is not an army takeover, or a blatant suspension of the Constitution by a would-be civilian dictator. The peril is rather the creeping path to autocracy in which a "strong" elected leader would seek to sideline or undermine established institutions and constraints - the Congress, the courts, the media and the political opposition. Then such a leader would not need to "bother" with constitutional constraints and could simply "get things done".

This is a playbook that has been utilised in the last two decades by a number of "strong leaders" who came to power in competitive elections and then proceeded to dismantle checks on their executive power - and eventually the ability of opposition parties to challenge them on anything like a level playing field. The early practitioners of this incremental assault on democratic constraints were Russia's Vladimir Putin and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. In the early 2000s, Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra pursued a similar path, but the military overthrew him before he could consolidate power. More recently, Mr Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Mr Viktor Orban in Hungary have gradually strangled democratic pluralism in their countries. The Law and Justice Party led by Mr Jaroslaw Kaczynski is attempting to do the same in Poland, but it lacks the parliamentary strength to amend the Constitution to rig the system in favour of the ruling party, the way Mr Orban did in Hungary.

It is important to note that all the instances of "creeping autocracy" have been accomplished in political systems that lacked the long duration, deep historical roots and strong countervailing institutions that characterise the democracies of North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. It would be a much greater shock if any of these democracies were to succumb to the wave of (largely right-wing, nativist) populist authoritarianism sweeping through Central and Eastern Europe and several developing countries, most recently the Philippines since the election of Mr Rodrigo Duterte last year. In the long-established democracies, the institutional underpinnings of democracy are much stronger.

But institutions in the end are rules and patterns of behaviour that are perpetuated by people and must be defended by people. If people abandon the unconditional commitment to democracy as the best form of government, if they come to put short-term programmatic or partisan advantage above the most fundamental rules of the democratic game, then democracy will be endangered. Political polarisation, which has been steadily increasing in the United States, facilitates this slide toward the autocratic abyss, because it makes politics a zero-sum game in which there is no common ground uniting opposing camps. Therefore anything can be justified in the pursuit of victory. Over the last century, this dynamic of polarisation eroding the rules of the democratic game, paralysing the democratic process, and paving the way for a strongman has been a common scenario for the failure of democracy.

If there is a lesson that stretches across the history and the public opinion data, it is that nothing should be taken for granted. The laziest and most fatal form of intellectual arrogance is to assume that what has been will continue to be, simply because it has a long history. Legitimacy is nothing more than a set of individual beliefs and values. If we do not work to renew those beliefs and values with each generation, even long-established democracies could be at risk.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

This essay is part of an Inquiry, produced by the Berggruen Institute and Zocalo Public Square, on what makes a government legitimate.

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Are Americans fully committed to democracy? - The Straits Times

As a full-service store, the Co-op will be in a position to fill this need. While community-supported agriculture and farmers markets have greatly increased interest in local products, the Co-op, as a professionally run store dedicated to contracting with local growers and offering the same hours and accessibility as conventional grocery stores, will vastly expand access of local products to shoppers.

Cooperative grocery stores are well suited to working with small- and medium-sized farms because their respective operations are similar in size. According to national averages, a cooperative grocery store works with 157 local farmers and producers, compared with 65 at a conventional store.

The effort to start a co-op in the Salt Lake area began in 2009, with a conversation between three colleagues who moved to Utah and were member-owners of grocery cooperatives where they lived previously. Because Salt Lake is such a vibrant community, they were surprised to discover that Salt Lake City didn't claim one of the 300-plus member-owned cooperative markets already operating in the U.S.

After numerous meetings with like-minded residents, ideas coalesced around improving access to excellent food by broadening the customer base of local farmers and creating community around food. Why not create a year-round, seven-daysa-week venue for local farmers and artisans to sell their products and be a place for people to gather?

Even before opening the store, the Co-op is in partnership with local farmers through "farm mobs" (volunteers help farmers with such critical projects as winterizing barns, clearing fields, building structures), promoting their farms through social media and sponsoring the Winter Market at the Rio Grande.

The greatest challenge the Co-op faces is at hand growing our member-owner base to 750 in order to enter into negotiations on a store site with strong financial backing. As we face this challenge, we find inspiration in the idea that supporting local co-ops is one of the strongest actions we as citizens can take to guard our food system, ensure humane treatment of animals and protect our Earth. The benefits to our farmers, the community and the environment allow us to use our money not only to meet our shopping needs but to enrich our entire community.

According to Bill Gessner, of CDS Consulting Co-op and a 30-year veteran of consulting services for more than 300 startup and existing co-ops, "For a food co-op to be competitively successful today, they need to be well-capitalized, well-managed, and anchored in a solid foundation of member ownership and governance."

In addition to the 300 operational co-ops, 150 co-op grocery stores are in various stages of development across the country. The Co-op is entering the planning portion of the second stage of its development: feasibility and planning. The closest co-ops to Salt Lake are in Moab and Pocatello, Idaho. Boise's co-op, with more than 29,000 active member-owners and two stores, shows what is possible when the community supports it.

Following one of the seven principles that all cooperatives uphold voluntary and open membership all Utahns can be member-owners of the Co-op by making a one-time equity investment of $300. Current member-owners live in nine Utah counties stretching from Cache to Iron and from Salt Lake to Uintah.

Visit http://www.wasatch.coop.com or the Co-op's Facebook page for more information and get involved.

Thom Benedict, Beth Blattenberger, Stephanie Buranek, Candace Cady, Jodie Grant, Benjamin Jordan, Barbara Pioli, Allen Stutz and Erin Whitelock are members of the board of directors of Wasatch Cooperative Market.

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Op-ed: For us, democracy in action means starting a co-op market - Salt Lake Tribune

South Korea is in an uproar. Crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands have been surging through the streets of Seoul, the capital city. Some of the marchers are celebrating a ruling Friday by the Constitutional Court, which has upheld the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Others who support the president have been angrily denouncing the court, leading to clashes with police that have resulted in the deaths of two protesters.

All of this turmoil is taking place against the backdrop of ominous gestures from North Korea, which fired off a salvo of four medium-range missiles in a test Monday. The distance traveled by the missiles would have enabled them to hit a U.S. military base in Japan a point explicitly mentioned by the North Koreans in a communique accompanying the launch.

What are we supposed to make of all of this? Is the Korean Peninsula descending into chaos?

Its important to keep two things separate here. First of all, the latest developments in South Korea follow revelations of corruption at the highest levels of political power. The allegations encompass not only the conservative President Park who is accused of using her close friend, Choi Soon-sil, to funnel bribes to businessmen but also the de facto head of Samsung, the vast business conglomerate that accounts for more than 10 percent of the countrys GDP. The companys vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong, was maneuvering to expand his power at the top of the Samsung hierarchy. His trial on corruption charges has just gotten underway.

Eight court justices voted unanimously to remove the president from office. Parks actions in office, said acting chief justice Lee Jung-mi, betrayed the trust of the people and were of the kind that cannot be tolerated for the sake of protecting the Constitution. Note: It was all about the people and the Constitution. The courts act of institutional defiance is especially remarkable when you consider that democracy in South Korea is a mere 30 years old

This is the first time in Korean history that a democratically elected head of state has been removed from office by nonviolent, legal means. But thats not all. The fact that Parks fate became intertwined with that of Lee, a scion of the immensely powerful clan that controls Samsung, has given her case even greater resonance. This is a major landmark in the young political history of the South Korean state, says Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Its significant because it really speaks to the deep problem of collusion between the government and big business. The scandal has fueled the outpouring of public anger by reminding the public that the people in the country who have money and power feel theyre above the law, says Lee. In this sense, this is a big blow against the old political culture. Its a victory for the rule of law.

Now the country faces fresh elections within the next 60 days. The current front-runner is the opposition leader Moon Jae-in, head of the Democratic Party. Among other policy proposals, he favors a return to the so-called sunshine policy, a program of rapprochement with North Korea that was favored by left-wing governments in the 1990s and early 2000s. Parks conservative administration, routinely vilified by North Korea, preferred sanctions to negotiations.

At the moment, North Korea doesnt appear to be particularly interested in compromise. The rhetoric coming from the regime of Kim Jong Un has been especially harsh lately, and this weeks missile launch (not to mention the bizarre assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the current rulers half-brother) doesnt exactly sound like an overture to reconciliation. Yet Sung-Yoon Lee, the Tufts scholar, notes that North Korea has little incentive to moderate its appalling behavior since thats the only way it can get regional powers to treat it like a player. (Plus, a revival of the sunshine policy would give the North a new lease on life by allowing it to squeeze financial and material benefits from the Southerners.)

For the time being, though, not even North Koreas military prowess or South Koreas current political instability can conceal the fundamental divide between the two. North Korea remains one of the worlds few examples of a fully totalitarian state, its leaders presiding over an impoverished and brutalized population. South Korea, which boasts one of the worlds most dynamic economies, continues to evolve and broaden its democratic institutions. Observers sometimes invoke the rivalry between the two states, but it isnt really much of a competition, and it hasnt been for years. Thats worth contemplating at a time when many around the world are bemoaning the authoritarian resurgence and the ills of democracy.

To be sure, South Korea still has many problems. But its people, buoyed up by an extraordinary wave of civic activism, are showing that they arent prepared to accept the established way of doing things. They have mounted a remarkable campaign for change, and today that campaign has borne fruit of the most dramatic sort. Their cousins to the north can only dream of similar acts of defiance which is why their country remains frozen in time, beholden to a leader whose only plan for the future is tied to the machinery of violence.

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South Korea shows the world how democracy is done - Washington Post

Unless we act fast, the world may have already reached peak democracy.

After World War II, there were only a few lonely democracies scattered across the West. This began to change dramatically in the 1980s, when most of Latin America joined that exclusive club. But most crucially, in the 1990s, the fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a rapid and broad expansion of democracy across the world. From Eastern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, civil liberties rose as dictatorships fell.

That rosy trend has reversed. In each year since 2006, the world has become less democratic. We have now suffered more than a full decade of declines for global democracy.

At the same time, despots across the globe are becoming more authoritarian. Their abuses are becoming more brutal; their violations of democracy more egregious. From Turkey to Russia to Iran, ruthless regimes are steadfastly suffocating the dying gasps of pro-democracy reform movements in their societies. Indeed, in the last 11 years, 109 countries have seen a net decline in their level of democracy, according to the independent watchdog organization Freedom House.

The Westthat hodgepodge of developed countries that embody liberal values, from Canada to the European Union to Japanis partly to blame for the global recession of democracy. Misguided Western foreign policy, like backing friendly dictators, turning a blind eye to abuses of democracy, or actively toppling democratic regimes, hurt democracy in the long run. More recently, counterproductive foreign policy decisions have corresponded with the rise of illiberal populism.

Unfortunately, in the short term, the state of global democracy is going to get worse. US president Donald Trump certainly did not start the trend of democracys retreat, but his America First foreign policy guarantees its continuedand likely acceleratedglobal decline.

To understand why we find ourselves in this perilous tipping point, we need to look at our foreign policy choices over the past several decades.

The United States and its Western allies have, at best, a checkered relationship with promoting democracy around the globe. During the Cold War, American foreign policy was far more concerned with finding friendly pro-West, anti-Soviet regimes than it was with finding democratic ones. Indeed, in de-classified memos, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued that the biggest threat to American interests was the insidious model of a legitimately elected democratic regime that supported the Kremlin instead of the US. As a result, from Iran to the Congo to Chile, the American government has actively intervened (often with the help of European allies) to overthrow democratically elected regimes at various points in history.

That calculation shifted when the Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall crumbled, and despotic regimes collapsed. Western foreign policy began to earnestly support democracy in a much stronger way. It was still imperfect, of course. But there was genuine, sustained diplomatic pressure exerted in an attempt to liberalize authoritarian states. The results were clear: The 1990s were so auspicious for the spread of democracy that Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama even claimed that the world was approaching The End of History, with democracy as the natural and inevitable endpoint of global development.

But we now live in a darker period for democracy. Certainly, the true culprits for democracys decline are dictators and despots, along with counterfeit democratsthose authoritarian wolves like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines or Viktor Orban in Hungary who cloak themselves in the faade of democratic sheepskins to gain political legitimacy.

They deserve the overwhelming blame. They have organized and executed a heist against democracy, from Turkey to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Afghanistan. But when you look closely, its clear that the West has often been driving their getaway car.

First, theres what I call the Saudi Arabia effect. The Westwith America at the helmhas, for decades, cozied up to awful, abusive authoritarian regimes out of geopolitical expediency. The United States knows that it is being two-faced, praising democracy publicly while inking arms deals with emirs and despots under the table. But the West proceeds nonetheless because it perceives some despotic regimes as key strategic allies. The same hard-nosed realpolitik calculation is made with many countries across the world, even though that type of global diplomacy inhibits democracy and empowers authoritarian regimes.

Second, increasingly since the 1990s, Western governments set laughably low standards for what constitutes democracy. This serves as a counterproductive incentive for cynical leaders to do only the bare minimumto simply appear democratic. This allows Western governments to accept deeply flawed counterfeit democracies so that they can work with them in seemingly good conscience. I call this the curse of low expectations.

In Madagascar, a few years ago, I met with the head of a political party who told me:

Unlike the other parties, we are a party of values.

Okay, I responded, which values?

A look of panic crossed his face.

I left the values in the car. Someone go get the values for the American.

This was a carefully choreographed charade gone wrong. He was trying desperately to play the part of an ostensibly committed democrat. He was expecting me to play the part of the Westerner waiting eagerly to see just enough glimmers of democracy. The problem, though, is that the more than 100 regimes around the world trapped between pure dictatorship and genuine democracy have no meaningful political competition, and no meaningful input from the people.

Nonetheless, the West often calls elections free and fair when they are not (which I saw firsthand in Madagascar) and often labels countries as democracies when they are not. In Azerbaijans 2013 election, US Congressional representatives even praised an election where the results were accidentally released on an iPhone app before voting took place.

Counterfeit democrats get foreign aid and political legitimacy that should only be conferred to genuine democrats. Yet that low bar for what counts as democracy, paradoxically, ensures that leaders in the developing world have absolutely no incentive to ever build a real democratic government.

The last issue is the botched Western military interventions that purported to be in support of democracyparticularly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Libya. These misguided efforts have given despots a gift of plausibility when they crack down on pro-democracy activists, foreign NGOs, and human rights organizations. Because America and its closest allies claimed to be invading those countries in the name of democracy, despots use those examples as a pretext to purge pro-democracy reformers.

Despots often falsely claim that any pro-democracy agenda is a Trojan horse, a ploy to craftily achieve the Wests true goal: regime change by force. Paradoxically, then, misguided and failed interventions in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have given anti-democratic forces key rhetorical ammunition to justify their authoritarian rule. And in the West, the risks of pushing hard for democracy has also reinforced the emerging consensus in Brussels, Washington, London, and Paris that the dictatorial devil we know is better than the democratic devil we dont.

Those three aspects of Western foreign policy coincided catastrophically with the rise of illiberal populism across the globe and a crisis of confidence in the concept of democracy in the West. This was the perfect storm necessary to halt democracys advance and transform it into a retreat back toward authoritarianism.

President Trump is already accelerating this retreat. Several authoritarian regimesincluding Chinaare already using his 2016 election as anti-democratic propaganda, arguing that Trump is clear evidence of the bad decision-making ushered in by democratic government.

More substantively, Trumps early foreign policy decisions (and especially his America First rhetoric) has sent a clear signal that the United States will be shifting its focus away from global human rights to focus exclusively on its narrow conception of self-interest. Indeed, his budget proposal would gut the State Department budget, axe pro-democracy foreign aid, and make it far more difficult for the United States to promote democracy generally. Thats not the right approach, even though there is room to improve the strategies that the United States uses to boost democracy across the globe.

Beyond the budget, US secretary of state Rex Tillerson bucked longstanding tradition and did not unveil the State Departments annual human rights report personally, thereby signaling the United Statess diminishing focus on human rights.

Such signals matter. The United States and its Western allies used to be an important referee on the global stage, blowing the whistle on the most egregious abuses of democracy and human rights. Certainly, America has been a biased refereeturning a blind eye to countries like Saudi Arabia and only lightly penalizing others that deserved harsher treatment. But its important that the referee exists. After just a month, Trumps rhetoric suggests that hes not even going to watch the game.

Follow Brian on Twitter at @brianklaas. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Read next: Harvard research suggests that an entire global generation has lost faith in democracy

Read next: The US has been downgraded to a flawed democracy, but not just because of Trump

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Democracy is dying around the worldand the West has only itself to blame - Quartz

Donald Trumps presidency is just one element of our disintegrating democracy.

A voter pulls back the curtain as she leaves a voting booth on November 8, 2016. (Kristopher Radder / The Brattleboro Reformer via AP)

Today, less than two months into a new administration, we are now facing the biggest crisis of legitimacy of our democracy in a generation or more. But the crisis has been building for years.

Normally, our democracy is considered the most legitimate form of government because the power rests with the people. But when this power dynamic is altered and citizens lose their influence, the legitimacy of the system is threatened. And thats what we now face: a system in which money speaks louder than voters, voting is increasingly difficult, and the votes that are cast may not matter because of an archaic system known as the electoral college. As a result, we, as citizens, are governed by representatives who do not reflect or respect the values and priorities of the majority, and our democratic legitimacy is in grave danger as a consequence.

To understand the roots of our current crisis, we must first look to the orchestrated attack on the pillars of our democracy that began seven years ago, starting with the lawless Citizens United decision. In the years that followed, the attack continued with the recent wave of racially targeted voter-suppression laws, last years hijacking of the Supreme Court by the GOP, and capped off by a president who lost the popular margin by nearly 3 million votes. Yet we cannot treat these issues as one-off concerns. Instead, we must respond as a citizenry, as a movement, to the broader threat, taking action from the local level on up, and refusing anything less than the restoration of the power of the peopleand our democratic legitimacy.

First, our democracy is built on the pillar that elections are determined by the votersnot by money. The Supreme Courts 2010 ruling in Citizens United has turned political campaigns into proxy wars between billionaires and giant, multinational corporations who dont seek to buy just election results but the legislative and policy decisions of the government itself. The result has been a Gilded Age on steroids, with more than $6.8 billion spent on the 2016 election alone. In my recent race for the US Senate, I saw personally how much influence these dark money groups now enjoy, and how normalized their influence over down ballot elections has become. In fact, the press now treats the strategy and plans of these groups as near-definitive indicators of whether a candidate can win. In the eyes of pundits, support from a billionaire now means a candidate on the rise. Only seven years after Citizens United, activity from the groups it created is assigned as much predictive power as any credible poll. This era of massive institutional corruption must end, and the only way to do so it by returning elections to the voters with a system of elections that puts power back in the hands of individual voters.

Second, the fundamental right to vote must not, once again, be restricted for cynical, political purposes. Voter-ID requirements may be the latest tactic, but weve seen this evil before, in the form of the literacy tests and poll taxes of Jim Crow, which unconstitutionally suppressed the voting rights of African Americans. In todays version, Republicans, despite no evidence, have invented charges of voter fraud in a deliberate attempt to justify voter-suppression laws that disproportionately, and intentionally, suppress minority and low-income voting. We must fight back, both by using litigation to overturn these laws, and by working directly with the communities these laws disenfranchise. We cannot allow a new generation of black voters to face exclusion from our most sacred right.

Third, protecting the vote means protecting the power of the popular vote. Two of the last three presidents have been elected by the electoral college in defiance of the national popular vote. The electoral college is a historical relic designed to balance power between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. Our democracy has come a long way since then, and yet we have stuck with this electoral relic. It is time to leave it to the history books and ensure that the popular vote decides national elections. The best solution is a constitutional amendment that removes the electoral college. But states also have the power to at least nullify the electoral college by joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact; 11 states have already done so and more should join.

The stakes are higher now than ever. Get The Nation in your inbox.

Finally, the legitimacy crisis facing our system of government has also extended to the Judicial Branch, when, last year, GOP senators decided to abandon their constitutional responsibilities by blocking Justice Merrick Garlands nomination. They offered no legal justification for their actions, fully admitting that their sole intention was to sacrifice the legitimacy of the Supreme Court on a bet that a Republican would win the White House and they could secure their own nominee. I have never seen a type of politics more cynical than this strategy, crafted by keader Mitch McConnell. The severity of this action and what it means for the country cannot be overstated, because the legitimacy of the court will be questioned for a generation. The difference between Garland and Gorsuch could be the difference between overturning or cementing voter suppression laws, with future elections in the balance.

Dark money and voter suppression would be severe problems even in isolation, but combined they are devastating threat to the standing of voters in our democracy. This is the crisis of our lifetimes, and must be met with a call to actionto restore our democratic legitimacy. As citizens, as voters, we have work to do. And it starts at the local level. Ensuring we have a democratic governor in Virginia to prevent hyper-partisan gerrymandering. Increasing the number of states that enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Overturning Citizens United. We may not have another national election for four years, but there are nationally-relevant laws being debated and issues being addressed right now. What happens in four years depends on what we do today. And nothing less than the legitimacy of our democracy is at stake.

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The Very Legitimacy of Our Democracy Is Under Threat - The Nation.