Institutional ramparts and simple joys It remains to be seen whether or not reports of this country’s demise are greatly exaggerated. On the demise side, a majority of Americans on Tuesday chose to end this nation’s 250-year experiment in self-government. Not that they know it yet. This week, argues Brian Beutler, they handed “unchecked power to a narcissistic criminal demagogue because the price of bacon increased.” They may also, in fact, have surrendered their sovereignty without firing a shot. (What will the more militant do with the guns and ammo they’ve stocked for the coming civil war about which they’ve fantasized?) On the greatly exaggerated side are people like Beutler in England, who, being shielded from Trumpism by the Atlantic Ocean, have perspective lacked by those of us staring down its barrel. He taxonomizes this week’s voters into three classes: True Never Trumpers, the Hold Your Nose Brigade, and people for whom “The Cruelty is the Point.” Afterwards, he considers what life in an authoritarian United States means for those of us not in the cult or cult-adjacent: What’s most dangerous, then, is turning a democratic state into an authoritarian one. And the way you do that is by warping institutions and removing constraints on the powerful, ensuring that bad policy cannot be reversed, obliterating responsiveness and avoiding accountability. So, for example, a corrupt president who faces no oversight because the courts have been captured and the bureaucracy has been purged is a far more lasting and dangerous erosion of…