Justice Antonin Scalia, the staunch conservative originalist, once offered a warning that has only grown sharper with time. When centralized power undermines the structure of government, he said, constitutional protections become nothing more than “a parchment guarantee” — words on paper, stripped of the force that makes them real.
It’s a sobering image, and that kind of power consolidation always ends the same way — in darkness. But understanding what authoritarianism does helps clarify what democracy is for.
