Sunday Commentary: Dusk for Democracy – How Unchecked Power Threatens American Freedoms

Key points:

• President’s mass deportations and border fortification reassures base but raises concerns.
• Uniforms blur into masks, courthouses into ambush points, and due process into a rumor.
• The militarization of American policing is overwhelming oversight and due process.

There are two ways to look at what’s unfolding. One image snaps into focus: a president delivering exactly what he promised—mass deportations, a fortified border, a show of force that reassures his base he’s “doing something” about crime and disorder. 

Then the picture flickers. The uniforms blur into masks, the courthouses into ambush points, the National Guard into a domestic army, and due process into a rumor. In this second image, the impulse isn’t law and order; it’s power and impunity.

That’s the frame Radley Balko and Ezra Klein argue we need to hold in view—before the flicker becomes our fixed reality.

Balko’s latest dispatch from a conference on liberalism and modern authoritarianism lands with the weight of someone who’s spent two decades tracking the slow militarization of American policing—and now sees a sharp turn. He relays the sober fear of scholars and dissidents who’ve confronted the real thing abroad. 

When a veteran observer of autocracy says his level of worry is “at eleven,” this is a barometer of where we are—but too many people are ignoring the warning signs. The point isn’t just that tactics are intensifying but rather we see that the target is no longer a discrete crisis but the political order itself—its courts, its press, its culture of independent institutions.

Klein’s conversation with Balko traces the mechanism. Follow the money. As traditional federal crime agencies face cuts, immigration enforcement is put on a budgetary rocket—so large that ICE alone now eclipses every other U.S. law-enforcement agency, and the combined immigration apparatus rivals the military budgets of most nations.

The playbook: Build the unit that will be most loyal. Lower the standards to hire fast. Signal, even with recruitment imagery and dog whistles, the kind of enforcer you want. Then flood the zone with operations designed as much for spectacle as for safety. 

“They want people whose first and ultimate loyalty … is to the president,” Balko says.

He argued this is not about public safety at all—it’s about a leader building a personal force.

Consider where “spectacle policing” has been staged. Klein catalogs masked agents grabbing people outside courthouses, armored sweeps through immigrant neighborhoods, and military pageantry repurposed for domestic optics. 

The legal theory is two-track—what scholars of fascism once called the “dual state.” In court, the claims are narrowly tailored: immigration enforcement is a federal power; Washington, D.C., is unique. On stage, the rhetoric says the quiet part out loud: we’ll “liberate” blue cities from their elected leadership. 

Courts take the filings at face value. The base gets the message. Both prongs advance the same project.

Balko adds the institutional angle.

The point of moving fast on so many fronts isn’t only to achieve each objective; it’s to overwhelm oversight. If a president faces no immediate civil or criminal exposure for “official acts,” if federal agents are insulated from liability, if pardons hang like a safety net, then the practical downside to excess is minimal. The worst case is a court opinion years later saying “don’t do that again.” 

I am frankly amazed it was as easy to unravel the guardrails on American democracy so quickly and almost without a murmur of protest.

And then there’s the military—for most of our history, the armed forces have been the institution most resistant to domestic policing roles. That is by constitutional design. 

What Klein and Balko—in my view—accurately describe is an effort to change the personnel so the institution changes its mind.

Purge the legal and command layers most likely to say no; elevate leaders who romanticize “lethality,” “holy war,” and loyalty to the man rather than the law; create “specialized units” that blur the line between Guard support and everyday enforcement; and normalize deployments into cities over the objections of local officials. 

You don’t need to formally invoke the Insurrection Act if you can approximate its effects by policy memo and practice.

Once you militarize routine governance, the odds of tragedy skyrocket. 

A masked agent misreads a motion; a Guard member mistakes a backfire for a shot; a frightened protester throws a bottle. The incident becomes pretext; pretext becomes policy; policy becomes precedent.

Balko’s warning, drawn from the testimony of Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, is not that we are Russia. It’s that the autocratic playbook is depressingly portable when elites excuse the early moves as “just politics,” and when the opposition mistakes normalization for prudence.

It’s tempting—in the name of balance—to say: voters asked for mass deportations, and democracy sometimes delivers outcomes we despise. But that conflates policy preference with permission to nullify rights. 

The Bill of Rights is not a menu we reorder after each election.

 You can’t vote away due process. You can’t campaign your way to secret detention. You can’t win a mandate to end accountability. That’s why the most chilling images aren’t the raids themselves; they’re the masks. 

When agents hide their identities—when the last remaining check is social opprobrium, and even that is blunted—it signals not authority but impunity.

There’s a second temptation: to blame “wokeism” for MAGA’s rise and prescribe trimming back civil-rights commitments until the bullies tire of bullying. 

Balko’s rejoinder: the caricatures themselves are false—police weren’t “defunded”; Democrats downplayed culture-war fights; the infamous Harris “ad” about surgeries never existed—and even if they were true, you don’t defend a liberal order by abandoning its animating promises.

If a Black woman’s mere presence at the top of the ticket is recoded as “divisive,” the answer cannot be to make whiteness a litmus test for electability. 

Where does that leave the rest of us—journalists, lawyers, mayors, governors, civic groups—who still believe that means matter?

 First, stop getting played by the spectacle. An operation designed for social-media virality doesn’t become legitimate because it looked cinematic in MacArthur Park. Metrics and body-counts are not governance. 

Second, litigate relentlessly, but don’t outsource conscience to courts. Injunctions are crucial; so is public clarity that masked dragnets and courthouse ambushes are wrong even if a panel hasn’t yet said so. 

Third, fortify the institutions still standing. Universities, newsrooms, and law firms that cave at the first blast of presidential ire are teaching a masterclass in how autocracy wins without firing a shot. Courage at scale matters most where power resides.

Fourth, build state-level counter-capacity. 

If Washington fuses immigration policing with political theater, states and cities must tighten sanctuary policies within the law, fund universal representation in immigration courts, and coordinate rapid-response legal teams so families aren’t disappeared by logistics. 

When agents violate local rules or constitutional lines, document and sue—every time, in every venue. And when the White House tests military deployments over local objections, governors must assert their own constitutional obligations to protect residents—clearly, lawfully, and fast. The right answer to saber-rattling is not reciprocal chaos; it’s disciplined federalism.

Finally, remember what resistance looks like in a democracy. Klein points to Little League coaches telling off unlawful questioning, students shaming of federal agents, and mass protests under the banner “No Kings.”

These, Balko and Klein argue, are continuity plans for a civic culture that refuses to be governed by fear.

The paradox of authoritarian politics is that it feeds on the demoralization it creates.

When the spectacle says “We can touch you anytime, anywhere,” the counter-message must be: “We are everywhere, all the time—lawyers, pastors, teachers, neighbors, reporters—watching, documenting, insisting.”

This is not 1970s Watergate redux.

In Balko’s telling, Watergate now reads quaint—a corruption scandal inside a system that still felt shame, with party leaders who could be embarrassed into cutting loose a president gone too far.

There were still guardrails and a braking mechanism.  That’s now gone.

Today’s project is committed to shamelessness as a governing technique. That is precisely why the smallest concessions—editing a broadcast to appease power, scrubbing a website to avoid wrath, canceling a pro bono program for fear of retaliation—loom large. They’re not one-offs; they’re compliance rehearsals.

We don’t need to imagine jackboots to see where this road goes. We just have to stop averting our eyes when the picture flickers. Klein is right: you can destroy a democracy somewhat democratically (we have seen it in history time and time again in the last 100 years). 

Balko is right: by the time the tactics feel unthinkable, they’ll already be routine. The work, then, is unglamorous—lawyering, statecraft, editorial backbone, street-level solidarity, and the discipline to keep saying out loud what the spectacle wants us to forget: that the Constitution binds presidents as tightly as it empowers them, that rights aren’t polls to be won or lost, and that the only “personal army” authorized in this republic is the citizenry, armed not with rifles but with resolve.

Much of this is already happening.

When masked agents show up at a courthouse in our region, we should already have observers and attorneys there. 

When raids surge, our phones, networks, and cameras should surge faster. 

When governors threaten deployments, we should demand chapter-and-verse legal justifications and insist on legislative oversight. 

And when neighbors are told to be afraid, we should invite them into rooms where fear is replaced by plans. 

The authoritarian temptation thrives on isolation. A public that stays together, across differences, is the one force it cannot co-opt.

Still Balko and Klein, as much as folks will argue they are being melodramatic, may be more optimistic about this than I am.  I wonder if we haven’t already gone too far down this road to walk it back.  Read the voices that push back against this piece and you’ll see what I mean.

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