Protests come during democratic backslide

The third “No Kings” protest is being organized across our nation including here in Brookings from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, March 28 on the Sixth Street side of Hillcrest Park.

The protests are being scheduled during a time when multiple organizations including V-Dem, Freedom House, The Century Foundation and Brookings Institution are reporting democratic backsliding in the United States and other global liberal democracies.

The V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026:” Unraveling the Democratic Era” concludes that democracy in the United States is deteriorating at unprecedented scale and speed. The report in noting the rapid concentration of powers in the presidency states, “The current US Administration has been undercutting institutionalized checks and balances, politicizing civil service and oversight bodies and intimidating the judiciary alongside attacks on the press, academics, civil liberties and dissenting voices”.

We must observe with alarm what multiple independent academic organizations conclude regarding the state of liberal democracy in our nation. Political conflict in the U.S. is no longer confined to partisan differences within a stable liberal democratic framework. The conflict today includes profound differences between those who wish to preserve our tenets of liberal democracy and those who are willing to allow our framework of checks and balances and rule of law doctrine along with individual liberties and elements of political equality slide for the sake of populist rule.

The V-Dem report cited above includes evidence of a decline in freedom of expression and a growing violation of rule of law and checks and balances during the second Trump presidency. These conclusions are not news to Americans who stay abreast with political and legal happenings in our nation, but studies reveal that too few Americans are informed about the state of democracy in the United States as competing demands for the time and attention of our citizenry prevail.

The widespread lack of understanding of the perils that our democracy faces today is reason for mass nationwide protests that might capture the attention of those otherwise distracted from the undoing of our democracy by the pretend monarch currently residing in and destroying the White House.

It is possible to reverse the backsliding direction of liberal democracy in the United States, but it will require an aggressive education initiative and political activism seeking democratic ideals as the end as opposed to personal gain.

This is what the struggle in 1776 was all about.

It was a struggle between patriots seeking a system of governance free from the whims and self-indulgences of the monarch and English loyalists who benefited from the monarchical rule of the time.

Rather than anticipating Trump planned ultimate fighting contests and street races to celebrate 250 years since colonial patriots declared independence from tyrannical rule, “we the people” must seek to reaffirm and regain what 250 years of freedom fighters and peaceful activists have won for us and our posterity.