Harvard Law Professor Compares MAGA Politics To Deadly ‘Virus’ Set To Take Out American Democracy

Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day.

Looking for an explosion, a kind of moment of crisis ― what physicists like to call a singularity in a kind of unique episode of presidential defiance of a court order ― that’s misleading. It frames what we are experiencing in the wrong way.

For years, we have allowed the body politic to be hollowed out by a virus. A virus that attacks the very foundations of the rule of law on which the government really rests. It’s a virus we have to fight with all our energy, without waiting for just the right moment. You know, it’s a disease if you think about it. …

Looking for the moment of crisis is like looking for the shiny object and taking our eyes off the disease that is spreading and that we really have to fight ― the virus we need to fight.

— Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, in comments given during a recent appearance on MSNBC, where he compares the deterioration of democracy in the United States to a virus, noting that it “reached fever pitch around the Jan. 6 insurrection,” and that now even judges aren’t able to “fully keep pace with the mayhem.”

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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