Guys they're just protecting our democracy by ending democracy.

If the people use their votes in bad, authorized ways, the smart Guardians of Democracy will just have to take their votes from them and disqualify the people they elect.

That's what this article says.

And it hints at even more radical methods.

This was published before the election. They're already planning a "color revolution" in the US -- a supposedly spontaneous uprising by "the people," but actually fomented and coordinated by the US "intelligence" services.

There Are Four Anti-Trump Pathways We Failed to Take. There Is a Fifth.

By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Mr. Levitsky and Mr. Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard and the authors of "Tyranny of the Minority."

Democratic self-rule contains a paradox. It is a system premised on openness and competition. Any ambitious party or politician should have a shot at running for office and winning. But what if a major candidate seeks to dismantle that very system?
America confronts this problem today. Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy. He was the first president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, and he illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, on the brink of returning to the White House, Mr. Trump is forthrightly telling Americans that if he wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.

...

We have been studying democratic crisis and authoritarianism for 30 years. Between the two of us, we have written five books on those subjects. We can think of few major national candidates for office in any democracy since World War II who have been this openly authoritarian.

...

We spent the last year researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within. We have found five strategies that pro-democratic forces around the world have employed....

The traditional American response to extremism is laissez-faire which makes it almost odd to call it a strategy. We rely on the self-correcting power of electoral competition. The belief is that all opinions should compete freely, allowing the marketplace of ideas, or what John Stuart Mill called "the collision of adverse opinions," to play out. If we let all candidates compete, the thinking goes, good ideas and candidates will ultimately beat out the bad ones.

Did you hear that? They just dismissed leaving it up to the public to vote for the representatives they choose as a "laissez faire" non-strategy which must be rejected in favor of more... proactive measures.

Electoral competition is, of course, essential to democracy. But a laissez-faire approach has two important limitations.

As they say: Ignore all the rhetorical throat-clearing before the "but." What comes after the "but" is the real position.

First, in the United States, competition is distorted by an 18th-century institution, the Electoral College, that allows election losers to win power.

Oh, that's the least of it.

...
Yet democracies are not helpless. There are four other strategies for fending off authoritarian threats from within. One of these is a far more muscular approach, known as militant or defensive democracy.

Born in West Germany as a response to Europe's democratic failures in the 1930s, the militant democracy approach empowers public authorities to wield the rule of law against antidemocratic forces.

In the beginning of the article these fascist communists were whining that Trump might prosecute Democrats for their crimes (after Democrats prosecuted Trump and his allies for four years).

They say the fix is simple: We'll just use the government to prosecute them!

Haunted by the experience of Hitler's rise to power via the ballot box, West German constitutional designers created legal and administrative procedures that allowed the state to restrict and even outlaw "anti-constitutional" speech, groups and parties...

Arguing against unlimited immigration, and against covid shut downs, are two forms of "nazi-like" speak these people have attempted to suppress.

They pretend they're talking about suppressing Hitlerism. They're really just talking about suppressing speech that is merely anti-leftist or simply dissident.

Nevertheless, most contemporary democracies employ elements of militant democracy.... Last year, a former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who, like Mr. Trump, tried to discredit and then overturn an election, was barred from public office for eight years.

And they cite that as a success.

The United States has a tool on the books for disqualifying anti-constitutional candidates: Section III of the 14th Amendment disallows former public officials who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" from holding office. Intended to bar Confederate leaders from public office, Section III might have been used to disqualify Mr. Trump from the ballot -- as Colorado's Supreme Court ruled in late 2023 with regard to its state's primary ballot. Earlier this year, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, barring congressional legislation, the 14th Amendment could not be used to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot. With that decision, for good or ill, America chose to forgo the path of militant democracy.

A third approach to defending democracy is partisan gatekeeping.

Long story short, they whine that the Republican Party should have banned Trump and his voters but were too cowardly to do so, so now we have to resort to more stringent measures.

..

Today's Republican leaders have abandoned gatekeeping. Even after Mr. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, they protected and supported him. Had Senate Republicans voted to convict and disqualify Mr. Trump after his second impeachment, he would not be a candidate today. But they did not....

When authoritarians make it onto the ballot, prodemocratic forces may turn to a fourth strategy: containment, in which politicians from across the ideological spectrum forge a broad coalition to isolate and defeat the authoritarians.

The Deep State/Regime did this. It was all unconstitutional and often straight-up illegal.

But if you want to make an anti-fascist omlet you have to break a few eggs!

...

That leaves a fifth strategy: societal mobilization.

This is calling for a color revolution in the US. He again returns to Germany's criminalization of the AfD as a good start for Trump and his voters.

They call for all corporations to band together -- with Regime government forces, of course -- to fight the "authoritarians."

Say, what is it called when corporate power is united under government power to impose a single-party rule on a people...?

...

Although many individual business leaders have worked to defend democracy, leading national business associations like the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce remain on the sidelines, refusing to repudiate Mr. Trump's authoritarianism.

...

The U.S. establishment is sleepwalking toward a crisis. An openly antidemocratic figure stands at least a 50-50 chance of winning the presidency. The Supreme Court and the Republican Party have abdicated their gatekeeping responsibilities, and too many of America's most influential political, business and religious leaders remain on the sidelines. Unable to rise above fear or narrow ambition, they hedge their bets. But time is running out.

What are they waiting for?

They're the anti-fascists, remember?

The left is creating a roadmap for what we should do to them.

If you say these are the rules: I believe you.