New York Times gift articles

Article is largely comprised of opinions from academics who study Government, Democracy, and/or Authoritarianism.

This quote from Prof Sean Westwood hit me particularly hard, motivating this post:

The most permanent damage, however, is the precedent. With these guardrails shattered, the temptation for a future Democratic administration to launch its own campaign of retribution — using a weakened system for its own ends — becomes immense. This is the grim, iterative nature of democratic backsliding: each transgression lowers the floor for the next, creating a cycle of political revenge that, once started, is nearly impossible to unwind.