A Short Meditation on Democracy in Depth

I met some beasts, and now I'm back

Good Morning:

Beasts I met in Wyoming

I did not expect my trip to Wyoming for a week to be a beast safari. I was kind of hoping to see a moose, an elk, a bear, or a bison. If I’m being candid, I was definitely not expecting to see a nursing baby bison—and I had never even heard of a pronghorn (the fastest land beast in North America) or a ground squirrel (which has awesome cannibalistic tendencies).

I will be taking over the #BeastOfTheDay duties from

EJ Wittes

this week to share some of these beasts.

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Meanwhile, if you ever doubt that I am the only thing that keeps Washington from falling apart altogether, consider that I leave for a week and we end up bombing Iran.

I have not yet caught up on the various commentary—strategic, political, or legal—on the subject, but I hope to write on it in my “The Situation” column this evening. And I will be doing this livestream at 11:30 this morning:

I also just finished discussing the legal side of the matter on #DogShirtTV this morning with the very estimable Marty Lederman. That discussion will post at 5:00 pm.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is this bear, whom I met at the side of the road in Yellowstone. It was contentedly posing for pictures while eating flowers:

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A Short Meditation on Democracy in Depth

I spent some time while I was away thinking about both democracy, both democracy in depth and democracy in decay. I left town the day of the military parade and the accompanying “No Kings” protests around the country. (No, I didn’t plan it that way. The vacation was scheduled long before either the parade or the protests showed up on the calendar.) And I spent a pair of flights periodically checking my phone to see how the parade was going (low energy, not a lot of people) and how the protests were going (large, high-energy, a lot of people).

As I have noted before, I believe a lot of people are being a little too glib about declaring the end of democracy in America. We definitely have an authoritarian challenge of an unprecedented sort. But reports of democracy’s death here are, at a minimum, premature.

Consider the obvious. A true authoritarian regime does not allow millions of people to turn out in the streets to mock the leader. And it requires that people attend its displays of authority and power.

Now consider the less obvious.