Will America die gradually, then suddenly? As we look at the upcoming year this New Year's Eve,

the most urgent question facing us is whether the assault Putin, Orban, Trump, Musk, and Vance

have planned for our political system in 2025 will succeed. In 1926, Ernest Hemingway published

his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this

extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life and how governments

rise and fall. How'd you go bankrupt, Bill asked. Two ways, Mike said, gradually and then suddenly.

What brought it on?

Friends, said, Mike.

I had a lot of friends.

False friends.

For some unfathomable reason,

Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their friends.

They are not friends.

With few exceptions, they are systematically destroying American democracy with a clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.

Right now, they're moving gradually, infiltrating police departments in the enlisted ranks of the military, taking over school boards and local boards of elections,

firing principals and teachers who defend multiracial, multicultural democracy while banning books

that contain such dangerous ideas, demonizing queer people and outlawing drag shows,

working with Tucker Carlson and Fox so-called news to completely rewrite the history of January 6th,

gerrymandering states so regardless of how people vote, Republicans control the levers of power,

changing election laws so they can both make it harder for city dwellers to vote and to ignore

and then change the outcomes of elections they don't like. Building media structures that will

support the authoritarian takeover when it happens,

...