Democracy on the Edge: How We Let the Pendulum Swing Too Far

By Logan Andrew, Editor-in-Chief | FreeWire — Your News, Your Voice

It’s tempting—comforting, even—to believe that the current peril facing American democracy can be laid at the feet of one man. That if Donald Trump were to disappear from the political stage tomorrow, the storm would pass and the republic would right itself.

But that’s a dangerous illusion.

The truth is, Trump didn’t create the environment we’re in. He exploited it. What we’re witnessing now is the inevitable consequence of decades of constitutional erosion, driven by both parties and cheered on by supporters who were more concerned with short-term wins than long-term stability.

Every time power changes hands in Washington, the new occupant of the White House finds the executive branch just a little stronger than it was before. Each president pushes the boundaries further—signing statements, executive orders, military actions without congressional approval, surveillance programs, emergency declarations. The checks and balances designed to safeguard liberty and prevent tyranny? They’ve become inconvenient speed bumps, bypassed with increasingly creative legal justifications.

Clinton expanded executive secrecy. Bush used fear and tragedy to launch a war without end and build a surveillance state. Obama normalized drone warfare and executive fiat as solutions to congressional gridlock. Trump took this growing imperial presidency and applied it with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. And Biden, despite his rhetoric about restoring norms, has largely preserved these tools of unchecked authority.

It didn’t start with Trump, and it won’t end with him. He’s a symptom, not the disease.

We, the people, bear some responsibility too. We cheer when “our side” wins, regardless of how. We excuse abuses when they benefit our agenda. We elect showmen, not statesmen. We obsess over the culture war and ignore the slow administrative creep of centralized power.

This didn’t happen overnight. It happened because we stopped asking hard questions. Because we allowed loyalty to party or personality to outweigh loyalty to principle.

Democracy doesn't die in one dramatic moment. It erodes gradually—through apathy, through complacency, through justifications that begin with “just this once.” And by the time people realize the system is broken, the mechanisms to fix it are already gone.

If we want to reclaim democracy, it won’t be enough to vote against a man. We need to vote against the mindset that got us here. We need to demand limits on executive power no matter who holds the office. We need to stop treating every election like a war and start treating it like a renewal of shared responsibility.

The pendulum will swing again. The question is whether we’ll keep letting it knock over the very foundations of the republic each time it does.