A Trump supporter carries a Confederate flag in the US Capitol on 6 January. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo\/EPA Liberal democracy is under attack from within. Institutional trust erodes . Fewer than one in six Americans believe democracy is working well, nearly half think democracy isn’t functioning properly, and 38% say democracy is simply doing meh. Atomization, bowling alone and nihilism have converged at the ballot box. Related: The Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s trauma Republicans are hellbent on shoving the events of 6 January, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol, down a deep memory hole. GOP governors in Florida , Mississippi and Texas remain sanguine as Covid-19 dispatches children to intensive care. Seven months into his presidency, Joe Biden looks to some like Jimmy Carter redux, competence and judgment seriously doubted , allies strained and divided. FDR, he’s definitely not. Into this morass parachutes Tom Nichols, with a meditation on the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tom Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln – on how American democracy can only be brought down from within<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[90,19,42,41,85,43],"class_list":["post-173040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-books-literature","tag-entertainment","tag-politics","tag-potus","tag-presidential-election","tag-u-s-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}