Nevertheless, they remain quite pessimistic
It had to happen: Even professors at one of the most progressive schools in the country are saying the world is not in imminent danger just because Donald Trump is back in office.
Swarthmore College, whose students erected the longest-lasting pro-Hamas encampment in the Philadelphia region and held a strike to protest the school’s “institutional anti-blackness” (and whose student paper promised to work “diligently” to report on threats from the 47th presidential administration), recently held a discussion about whether Trump’s first month in office constitutes a “constitutional crisis.”
Remarkably, the three participating (Swarthmore) political science professors, while pointing out what they deem are the dangers of the Trump’s second term, did not think the current political atmosphere is all that unique, according to The Phoenix.
“I don’t believe that America’s constitutional dysfunction began this past month,” said Warren Snead, a public law, public policy, and American political development expert according to his faculty bio.
What makes Trump different in Snead’s view is his (alleged) “wholesale rejection of any constraint on presidential power.”
Sam Handlin, who researches democracy, authoritarianism, and electoral politics, described today’s political situation as a “five alarm fire” but said a constitutional crisis “does not necessarily mean the end of democracy.”
Handlin worried about expanded Executive Branch powers, specifically the “persecution of opponents and censure of news outlets that are critical of the regime.” He also expressed concern regarding the “overriding of the branches that could otherwise implement protections for free and fair elections.”
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Handlin (pictured) also said the Democratic Party was “very invested” in the way things were before Trump’s re-election and it believes the usual checks and balances can “curtail Trump’s ‘aggressive’ overreach.”
Such overreach ultimately may prove unpopular, Handlin added, but “there might not be that much that can stop [Trump] from doing at least a tremendous amount of change and damage.”
While noting Trump’s second term might not become a “full-blown dictatorship,” Professor Susanne Schwarz said the U.S. is “drifting towards a competitive authoritarian regime.”
The head of the Historical Political Economy Research Lab, Schwarz claimed there’s not as much internal [GOP] opposition to Trump as there was in his first administration, and said our current political system “will not come out of [the next four years] unscathed.”
Discussion moderator Jonny Thakkar, a Swarthmore political science professor and author of “Plato as Critical Theorist,” said that for him “the limited exposure of left-wing points of view in the media reads as a continuation of oligarchy” … but under Trump we’ll see only “a slightly different type of oligarchy.”
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IMAGE: Gage Skidmore/Flickr.com; Swarthmore College