And — lo and behold! — now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of this century is already being weaponized in a startling fashion in the second era of Donald Trump. In fact, the deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past. Think of it, in fact, as — if you don’t mind my inventing a word for this strange moment of ours — the “perversification” of war-on-terror era law and policy, which might once have been hard to imagine in this country.
While there are already all too many examples of that very sort of perversification, let me just focus on several that could prove crucial when it comes to the future of our imperiled democracy.
