Thomas Legrand’s post
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With the inauguration of Trump and the growing power of his sidekick Elon Musk in politics and in people’s minds, it is more than a sequence that begins: it is a bicentennial cycle that ends.
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Will 2025 be the year of the great global authoritarian shift and the end of the pre-eminence of democracy as an unsurpassable horizon? The first institutional event that will shake the proponents of the rule of law and the balance of powers will take place on January 20 in Washington, with the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump. The head of the most powerful state on the planet is now officially illiberal. Not only did he overturn all the codes of decency that prevailed in the democratic world, but Trump also defied all the institutions and intermediary bodies that, until today, limited the power of those who have power. These institutional counter-powers (justice, control agencies) or civil and private (associations, press) have had an ever-increasing latitude for two hundred and fifty years in the United States and nearly two hundred years in Europe. It is by the yardstick of their establishment throughout the world that universal progress was judged.
Why think that we are witnessing
