When you live in rural America, you learn to measure crises by ripple effects, not headlines. A drought here means higher grocery prices there. A factory closing in one county means empty shelves in another. But lately, the ripples aren’t just economic — they’re existential.
Across the country — from the State House steps in Concord, New Hampshire, to Portland, Oregon’s downtown squares — citizens are gathering under the banner “No Kings”: a simple, defiant reminder that this nation was never meant to bow to one man. What began as dozens of peaceful rallies across America has now spread coast to coast, with events in more than 2,000 locations nationwide and crowds numbering in the millions. Their message is clear: accountability, restraint, and the shared belief that no one — not even a president — is above the law.
“No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it.”
Theodore Roosevelt
And yet, even as people fill the streets demanding limits on power, Washington offers a darker spectacle: a wave of political pardons so sweeping and self-serving that they’ve turned justice into a loyalty program. Allies absolved, cronies rewarded, violent offenders rebranded as “patriots.” The message is unmistakable: loyalty is currency, and truth is optional.
This isn’t politics as usual. It’s the soft collapse of the rulebook.
The Authoritarian Playbook, in Real Time
Authoritarianism rarely arrives with a marching band. It seeps in through the cracks — a pardon here, a threat there, a rally where violence is winked at instead of condemned.
We’ve seen the President share an AI-generated “Grim Reaper” video depicting political opponents as targets. We’ve watched rallies celebrate vengeance more than vision. We’ve seen pardons handed down like party favors to those who undermined democratic order.
And we’ve watched as the rest of us — teachers, veterans, parents, farmers — are told to “move on” and “stop being dramatic.”
But ask anyone who’s lived through it — from Budapest to BrasĂlia — and they’ll tell you that democracies don’t fall because of chaos. They fall because ordinary people stop reacting to it.
The Local View from a Fractured Country
In my corner of northern New Hampshire, people still hold doors for each other. We trade eggs, firewood, and advice. We disagree on policy but still wave at one another on back roads.
And yet, something has shifted. Conversations that once ended in debate now end in silence. Neighbors whisper about politics in the same tone they use for illness. The intimidation works — not because of what’s been said, but because of what’s been normalized.
When a leader glorifies violence, mocks the disabled, pardons corruption, and calls critics “traitors,” it doesn’t just change politics. It corrodes decency itself.
That corrosion has real-world fallout: government shutdowns that halt food programs like SNAP and WIC; veterans waiting months for benefits; rural hospitals on the brink of closure while Congress fights over loyalty tests instead of budgets.
I wrote about some of this in my op-eds for The Berlin Sun, Union Leader, and Concord Monitor — because if small-town voices don’t speak up, we leave the story of America to be told only by those who profit from its unraveling.
The Danger of Selective Justice
Pardons were never meant to be weapons. They were meant to be acts of mercy — the final check of a system that values fairness over vengeance. But mass pardons for political allies and convicted extremists? That’s not mercy. That’s erasure.
Every time justice is rewritten to serve the powerful, someone else’s pain is wiped from the record — a police officer assaulted, a civil servant threatened, a democracy diminished.
The damage goes deeper than the individuals freed. It tells the public that accountability is negotiable. That if you’re close enough to the throne, the law will bend for you.
And if the law bends too often, it eventually breaks.
The Cost of Looking Away
We like to imagine authoritarianism as something foreign, something that could never happen here. But it’s already peeking through the seams: school boards harassed, journalists threatened, librarians doxxed, civil servants quitting in fear.
Freedom doesn’t disappear all at once — it leaks out through exhaustion. People get tired of caring, tired of fighting, tired of hoping that truth will matter again.
But this moment demands the opposite of fatigue. It demands defiance — quiet if necessary, steady if possible, but defiance all the same.
The Path Back: Reclaiming Our Common Ground
The answer isn’t despair; it’s participation.
Show up — at rallies, at meetings, at the polls. Speak out even when your voice shakes. Refuse to let political fear-mongering define your decency.
And when you see the machinery of democracy grinding under the weight of cynicism, remember: we are the guardrails. Not the courts, not the politicians — us.
We can’t all march on Washington, but we can demand integrity from those who do. We can resist the normalization of cruelty. We can call a lie a lie.
Final Thought: The Firebreak
The Constitution was never meant to save us from ourselves; it was meant to empower us to save it.
The No Kings rallies aren’t just about one man. They’re about rejecting the idea that any leader should rule by fear. The pardons aren’t just legal maneuvers — they’re moral stress tests, and we’re failing them in real time.
But the story isn’t over. It’s still ours to write — in Berlin, in Concord, in every small town and city square where someone still believes democracy is worth defending.
Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Related Reading
My recent op-eds and letters to the editor in The Berlin Sun, Union Leader, and Concord Monitor explore how political intimidation is on the rise, the harsh realities of domestic violence in rural America, how government shutdowns and economic cruelty hit families hardest — and why silence is not an option.
