There’s a widespread tendency to collapse Bad Things into The Bad Thing. To me, degrees matter, scale matters. The path of the last three weeks is a path that plausibly leads to the end of U.S. democracy, which was already straining and compromised and had been ever since the end of Reconstruction. Some people like to say that we are already in full fascism, we do not live in a democracy, this is as bad as it gets. This is short sighted, entitled, and ethnocentric. This is not as bad as it gets. It matters to prevent it from getting a lot worse.