How to Lose a Country in Three Weeks

What happened to checks and balances and strong institutions as bulwarks against tyranny?

Is it really only February? What I would give to live in boring times!

On good days, I think, “This is the last gasp of people who are losing, and the only way they can hold on their (undeserved) power is to smash everything.”

On bad days, which are becoming too uncomfortably common, I think, “We are doomed.” I used to think the ecological crisis will be our undoing. I now think we’re going to destroy ourselves before the climate gets to us.

As we brace ourselves for more whiplash, I just want to remind everyone, including myself, two key pieces of advice from John Amaechi: strategic self-care and shared solace. Eat and live as well as you can, so we have the strength to look out for each other and keep fighting.

In that vein, I’d like thank the folks who have let me vent and who pointed me to some great thinkers as I try to make sense of what’s happening. You know who you are.

So here’s the thing. As someone who spent their formative years under a military dictatorship, namely Burma/Myanmar, it was a source of comfort to me whenever I hear people talk about how building checks and balances and strong institutions are crucial to resisting tyranny.

For the first decade of my life, my country was ruled by a superstitious, unpredictable, and vicious autocrat who turned a once-thriving (albeit complex) country into one of the poorest in the world, while amassing riches for himself and his acolytes. Ne Win also turned the guns on his own citizens.

When he stepped down, what followed was a succession of dour-faced, uncharismatic, and xenophobic generals who make up for their short stature by cruelly and needlessly suppressing their own people, even surpassing Ne Win’s brutality. For all their power, they were consumed by fear, as those who rule unjustly are wont to do.

There were really only two strong institutions at the time: the Sangha (the Buddhist monks) and the Tatmadaw (the military’s name in Burmese).

The former was supposed to be the moral guide and authority, but as I would later find out, there was an undercurrent of sexism and racism baked into some of the key rituals and beliefs I grew up practising. Of course, many monks strictly follow Buddha’s teachings of love and tolerance. There are also many who pay lip service.

As for the latter… well, see above.

So the idea that mechanisms like checks and balances and strong institutions could limit the concentration of power, promote accountability, protect people’s rights and liberties, and provide much-needed stability and resilience was very appealing.

I also heard that idea being repeated ad nauseam whenever I travelled back home during the years of Myanmar’s opening, usually espoused by highly-paid foreign consultants who were there courtesy of an impressive list of donors, including USAID.

What you now see when you visit USAID website.

But the events of the last three weeks (three!!!) has made me think all of that is a sham.

I have friends who believed the U.S. has enough checks and balances to prevent one branch of government from gaining absolute power. I have friends who trusted the institutions to withstand undemocratic assaults even if they didn’t trust the person now leading their country.

Then came the barrage of orders and actions that leave very little to the imagination that a coup is unfolding before our eyes. A coup that will embolden the world’s autocrats, diminish democratic ideals, potentially kill millions of people around the world, and leave the world woefully unprepared for the coming climate collapse.

If we all get a dollar every time someone on our timelines goes, “How is this possible?/ How could he do this?”, we’d be quite wealthy by now.

It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed: the tariffs and the deportations, the aid freeze and the disappearance of USAID almost overnight, the scrubbing of climate change from federal agencies’ websites, the targeting of DEI, the takeover of the Treasury, that unhinged and disgusting comment on Gaza, the list goes on.

How do we scream at the inhumane cut in foreign aid - “The World’s Richest Men Take on the World’s Poorest Children”, according NYT’s Nicholas Kristof - when even the supposed Democrats think that is a fight not worth having?

Abolishing USAID is also somewhat of an own goal for such devout adherents of the “America First” cult. As Tortoise Media, Civil Eats, and journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis have pointed out, the agency’s programmes have massively benefited American farmers and businesses.

Thinking about the millions of people left without lifesaving medicine or cash vouchers to buy food, and the communities who lost critical support to protect themselves from corporate interests, makes my blood boil. As does the plight of brave journalists suddenly finding themselves without any income or the hardworking scholars whose futures have gone dark.

The Slate article.

So yes, there’s a lot of noise and mayhem and emotions, and that’s intentional. See Ezra Klein’s column.

But the key thing, as wiser folks have pointed out, is the dismantling of the U.S.’s governance and institutions by an unelected billionaire with a Nazi fetish, supported by a convicted felon. The idea would be both preposterous and laughable if it wasn’t so frightening and happening in real time.

This brilliant Feb 4 piece on Slate by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern spelled this out very vividly.

“What we are witnessing is an unconstitutional seizure of power unfolding so rapidly that, by design, the public and media cannot keep up,” they wrote. “(Musk) is, in effect, serving as co-president without winning a single vote, as the actual president looks on from the sidelines.”

“We are accustomed to the notion that a coup, or “self-coup,” happens when tanks are on the streets. But as experts on authoritarianism in this century have shown, a coup is more likely to be put into effect by “government lawyers” wielding briefcases and official-looking orders than by armed men on the streets (though that is already happening in immigration enforcement).”

Meanwhile, some in storied newsrooms were tying themselves into knots to describe what Trump is doing. The NYT went with “President Trump has opened the throttle on blowing through apparent legal limits” in its Bluesky post and called his plan to “take over the devastated seaside enclave” (read: Gaza) as “audacious”.

WIRED is one publication that has been knocking it out of the park. They’ve doggedly documented what Musk and his team of 20-something lackeys have been doing.

Timothy Snyder, “the OG” as one of my friends called him, explained in his Feb 2 piece, “The Logic of Destruction”, how we got to where we are today.

“The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes. All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now.”

In a following piece, “Of course it’s a coup”, he talked about how power in this day and age is “more digital than physical” and that’s why Musk and his followers are trying to gain access to the computer systems.

A Politico headline of the fight.

Things aren’t so great on this side of the pond either.

In Brussels, right-wing parliamentarians are spoiling for a fight with environmental NGOs who are pushing them to uphold Europe’s climate and biodiversity ambitions and support The Green Deal.

The lawmakers want to restrict the funding the NGOs receive, claiming to have “discovered massive problems” with how funds were disbursed through the EU's environment and climate funding programme, known as LIFE, according to Politico, which has been solid in their reporting on the issue.

MEP Monika Hohlmeier, vice-chair of the budget committee, even went on to claim she has evidence the Commission requires NGOs to lobby its own departments to support The Green Deal.

The alliance spearheading this are the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the largest political group in Parliament, and the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

Politico say it has been digging into the small print. Of the 28 contracts they’ve analysed so far, “there appears to be no part in which the Commission made the distribution of funds to NGOs conditional on promoting the Green Deal”.

But who needs facts when you have politicians and media outlets to amplify the charge? Because obviously environmental destruction is a niche concern that has little bearing on any of us. Right?

The fact is, without something like the LIFE programme, there is no way green groups can match the deep pockets of the private sector.

Then there was this news that Friedrich Merz, the leading candidate to become Germany’s next chancellor, broke a political taboo and worked with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party Musk has been championing and one with well-documented links to neo-Nazi ideologies. It led former Chancellor Angela Merkel to publicly criticise her own party leader.

Of course, many countries in Europe already have right-wing (or far-right) governments: Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Finland, just to name a few. We’ve also seen how hard it is to rebuild democratic institutions or re-establish checks and balances after strongmen has been in power. See: Poland, Hungary, and yeah, my own country.

Some of WIRED’s coverage.

To better understand how we got here, I spoke to a constitutional law expert who prefers to remain anonymous but whose analysis I found insightful.

Flawed founding: The elements of the checks and balances system was “highly politically manipulated” even at the point of inception, they said, pointing to things like gerrymandering that has become more and more egregious over time.

The United States is a democracy with “strong illiberal tendencies around voter suppression (and) exclusion”, they added.

A supportive judiciary: Every time the Supreme Court has come into direct conflict with the executive branch, at an existential level, the court has backed down, they said. So these systems worked “within a context of…. a Kabuki dance.”

In addition, a series of Supreme Court decisions continually expanded the power of the President, including their ability to appoint and remove officers, and the immunity ruling being the most recent example.

“We just didn't have a president at the time, Biden, who was willing to manipulate those changes to actually push the envelope. Now we have a president who's saying, not only am I going to occupy this expanded space, I'm going to push on everything, and nothing's illegal till the court says it’s illegal.”

A tame legislative branch: A Congress that has (so far) decided to stick with partisan allegiance instead of being an equal part of the government. One way to prevent this from happening is to impose term limits, which the U.S. currently does not have.

A change in demographics: With demographic changes occurring in the United States, it has become difficult to maintain the supremacy of a single race. The only way to do so is through authoritarianism.

The rise of corporate power: The corporate capture of the legislative and regulatory process plays a big role.

Corporations are treated as people for some purposes, with individual rights including the right to spend money in candidate elections and the right to refuse to comply with a federal mandate on religious grounds.

This allowed the growth of a whole set of institutions with little checks or balances and then, bingo, oligarchy on the rise!

How we got here: “Are there strong institutions? Yes. Were they weak in just the right ways? And did we allow the weaknesses of our institutions in service of propping up inequity?”

A litmus test: “The biggest concern I have is when the Court tells this President to do something, and he refuses. At that point, the military or the Congress or the police agencies or whoever have to decide (because he's already fired the oversight team): is our allegiance to the court decision holding up the Constitution or is our allegiance to the person who's in the White House?”

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.