Is This the Beginning of the End for US Democracy?

I covered dictatorships for CNN. Now, I recognize the first act. First come the words: “war,” “domestic terrorists,” “full-force.” Then the decrees: control, discipline, submission. Authoritarianism is not improvised; it is scripted. Now, as I sit in a Portland cafe, doomscrolling headlines about my own home, I am struck by an eerie parallel: the incipient rumblings of the Syrian civil war. Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown did not begin with barrel bombs and chemical weapons. It began with a few scattered protests, anti-government graffiti tagged on a schoolyard wall in Daraa, and a branding of dissenters as enemies of the state.

As I glance outside the window, a farmers’ market thrives, and children ride bikes through an archway of late summer blooms. The city feels as it always has to me: alive, quotidian, and safe. A few blocks over, however, a different scene unfolds. Federal agents arrive as Department of Homeland Security (DHS) helicopters buzz over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices. Armored vehicles transform an otherwise ordinary boulevard into a landscape of occupation.

As a dual citizen, born in Australia to an American bloodline, I always admired the US for the audacious democratic experiment that defined the modern world. But today, more than a decade after I first planned my move to the US, I am now planning a just-in-case escape route from Portland, through Washington state, toward the Canadian border. Maps bookmarked, gas tank kept full, passports always within reach. I am, after all, a persona non grata: a journalist, a CNN “fake news” alumnus no less. US President Donald Trump has said of journalists: “I would never kill them but I do hate them.” Cold comfort.

Since leaving CNN, I have also written in opposition to the current administration following the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe, and for the rights of the unhoused during the Trump administration’s punitive measures in Washington, DC. I have confronted the rhetoric and policies that strip the vulnerable of rights and recognition. In 2025 America, my voice puts a target on my back. Still, on October 18, I will take to the streets of Portland, joining millions across some 2,000 cities to remind those in power of a truth older than the republic itself: America has no kings.

The question now is not whether Americans can hear the warning bell of authoritarianism, but whether they will heed it before it is too late.

History reminds us that totalitarianism seldom arrives as a cataclysm, and instead as a creeping normalization of rhetoric that softens us for what’s to come. Scholars call it “democratic backsliding”: slow, at first, mundane and almost imperceptible. Death by a hundred incremental erosions. When state legislatures in the US criminalize gender-affirming care, they echo morality laws of the junta-run nation of Mali, where both same-sex couples and their tacit neighbors will now be persecuted. Women’s autonomy shrinks here under abortion bans; in Afghanistan, the rollback began with veils and movement restrictions. When late-night show hosts vanish from screens here, recall Bassem Youssef’s forced exile in Egypt.

It often starts with “us-versus-them,” and a chorus of dehumanizing labels like “invaders,” “illegals,” and “animals”; in Nazi Germany, Jewish immigrants were called “rats” and “parasites.” For those there, who went about their lives, choosing not to react to each stroke of a pen and press release, each edict alone no doubt felt survivable. But together, when left unchallenged, they would go on to suffocate and extinguish all aspects of democratic freedom, with consequences for the entire populace, not just those initially marked.

When President Trump flirts (however flippantly) with the idea of extending his presidential term beyond the 22nd Amendment, we know enough to infer that intimations are rarely benign. He is borrowing from the authoritarian playbook: the normalization of permanent rule. Consider Russia’s Vladimir Putin: First democratically elected in 2000, he soon discovered how to exploit constitutional loopholes. By orchestrating the Medvedev interregnum, he reset the clock on term limits, ultimately turning Russia’s democratic process into a seat of his own self-serving and indefinite rule. Or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey: Once the symbol of democratic Islamic governance, he hollowed out systems of checks and balances from within until term limits collapsed.

American history books teach us that the authority of this nation flows upward, not downward, from its people, not its rulers. And yet, in Portland, we have watched how federal power can be deployed domestically under the banner of “order.” In 2018, the city became the cradle of Occupy ICE, where protesters against family separation shut down a local ICE facility, leading to copycat demonstrations in other cities. In 2020, the administration sought to forestall another public humiliation. Under “Operation Diligent Valor,” protesters were dragged into unmarked vans and state-sanctioned tear gas choked downtown blocks. Civil-liberties groups, legal scholars, and local officials condemned these moves as escalatory and extrajudicial; Portland’s mayor called it a “federal occupation.”

Assad had once labelled early dissenters “armed terrorist gangs” to justify his violent crackdowns and later the systematic extermination of his own citizens. In Portland, in 2025, we hear echoes of the same beginnings: protesters recast as “terrorists,” and enemies within, and federal troops poised to turn against us. Today it is Portland. Tomorrow, it could be any city that dares to dissent.

The question now is not whether Americans can hear the warning bell of authoritarianism, but whether they will heed it before it is too late. The only sustainable reply is peaceful defiance: citizens assembling in public forums, online and off, and insisting on their rights. History shows that authoritarian rule falters when met with unified resistance, and even the most persistent forces struggle to withstand a people’s refusal to kneel.