A new 28-page report by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group, proposes guidelines for news outlets to help them distinguish between “normal political jockeying” and truly dangerous conduct. Its primary author was Jennifer Dresden, a former scholar at Georgetown University who has studied democracy around the world.
In an interview, Dresden said she was driven by the conviction, backed by decades of research, that “authoritarianism doesn’t happen overnight.” Like a stalagmite, it develops from the slow drip of infringements on freedoms and breaches of longstanding democratic rules and traditions. That process is now well underway in the United States, she worries.