For much of Donald Trump’s presidency, I remained silent. Not out of fear of reprisal, but out of a misplaced faith that restraint, patience, and social harmony might still matter more than speaking plainly. I believed that the system — our laws, institutions, and traditions — would hold, as they always had.
That belief — that cowardness on my part — is no longer defensible.
In recent weeks, brave voices in our two local newspapers have said aloud what many of us have been thinking but avoiding: that something fundamental has broken in our government and ourselves. Their willingness to speak publicly matters, because the danger we face is no longer abstract or partisan. It is structural. It concerns whether this country will continue to function as a constitutional democracy at all.
We no longer need to rehearse the familiar list of transgressions. The normalization of corruption. The open contempt for the rule of law. The steady dehumanization of political opponents. The use of racism, sexism, and fear as governing tools. These are not isolated failures; they are features of an emerging system—one that requires citizens to grow accustomed to abuses they would once have found intolerable.
What should alarm us most is how deliberately we are being trained to accept force in place of law.
Masked, armed men operating without clear authority.
Detention without warrants. The suggestion that voting itself requires “oversight” by paramilitary groups loyal to a single leader. Repeated statements that elections are valid only if they produce the “correct” outcome. These are not excesses of rhetoric. They are preparations.
No society loses its freedoms all at once. It loses them by degrees — by the quiet recalibration of what is considered normal, acceptable, or inevitable.
Democracies do not usually fall to dramatic coups. They erode while citizens tell themselves that this, too, will pass.
If you choose silence, you are not alone. Silence is comfortable. It preserves friendships. It avoids confrontation. But silence is also a form of consent. And once the habits of self-government are gone — once elections are compromised, courts disregarded, and force substituted for law — they are not easily recovered.
The United States has never been perfect, but it has been defined by a shared commitment to the idea that power belongs to the people, and that leaders are constrained by law. That idea — more than any policy or personality — is now at risk.
This fall, each of us will have a quiet, lawful, and profoundly consequential opportunity to defend that idea. Do not wait for the crisis to become unmistakable.
By then, it will already be too late.
History does not judge kindly those who say, afterward, “I did not think things would go this far.”
Steve Huggins, Madison