As authoritarianism twitches its muscles, the rule of law has never been more important

"In the past 50 years, England and Wales have moved from their common law roots towards a civil law approach under the influence of increasing government intervention and regulation, coupled with accession to the laws of the EU."

"In the past 50 years, England and Wales have moved from their common law roots towards a civil law approach under the influence of increasing government intervention and regulation, coupled with accession to the laws of the EU."

"nnTim Alberta of The Atlantic starts six months earlier, when Trump accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of cheating in the Iowa caucuses."

This is a negative sentiment.

"nnTim Alberta of The Atlantic starts six months earlier, when Trump accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of cheating in the Iowa caucuses."

This is a negative sentiment.

"What Miller calls "the game" becomes "the joke" in Leibovich's book, the depressing tale of the high-level supplicants who surrounded Trump during his presidency and continue to grovel in what they hope will be an interregnum."

This is a negative sentiment.

"What Miller calls "the game" becomes "the joke" in Leibovich's book, the depressing tale of the high-level supplicants who surrounded Trump during his presidency and continue to grovel in what they hope will be an interregnum."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 Republican House members to vote in favor of Trump's second impeachment, says the joke is well understood among his party colleagues."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 Republican House members to vote in favor of Trump's second impeachment, says the joke is well understood among his party colleagues."

This is a negative sentiment.

"In "The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party," the Washington Post columnist (and my former colleague) Dana Milbank offers a far longer accumulation of lies from the right: The notion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in the death of the White House lawyer Vince Foster, the illusions behind President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, the birther concoctions, the death-panel ravings -- all building toward the big one."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Pompeo got the big joke about the big lie."

This is a negative sentiment.

"And much as support for the 2020 election lie provides a loyalty test in the Trumpified Republican Party, a willingness to believe the worst of Obama was a near-requirement in the party during his presidency."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as communications director in the Trump White House, told PBS's "Frontline" that the president admitted defeat in the days after the election was called for Biden."

This is a negative sentiment.

""For all but a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew that the election was fully legitimate and that Donald Trump was a joke," Kinzinger told Leibovich."

This is a negative sentiment.

""We got 12 million more and we lost," Trump said, before recovering."

This is a negative sentiment.

"He points to Republicans' ability to compartmentalize concerns about Trump."

This is a negative sentiment.

"No, the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence."

This is a negative sentiment.

""A testing ground for Republican squishiness was how strongly, and how bitterly, one opposed Obama," the historian Nicole Hemmer recalls in her new book, "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s," on the rise of the post-Reagan right."

This is a negative sentiment.

"It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan.u200920.""

This is a negative sentiment.

"I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke."

This is a negative sentiment.

"History should not remember the effort to delegitimize Obama's presidency as just another rung on the ladder toward the big lie."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Its underlying racism rendered the grotesque theory about Obama's birthplace especially repugnant, but the basic assertion is familiar: that a president whom the American people lawfully chose is not legitimate, is something less than the real thing."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Miller grasps the futility of seeking a single origin story -- "I'm sure a student of history might be able to trace it back to the Southern Strategy or Lee Atwater or, hell, maybe even Mark Hanna (give him a Google)," Miller writes -- but he does hazard some explanations."

This is a negative sentiment.

"In his j'accuse-y yet semi-confessional "Why We Did It," Miller, now a writer at large for the anti-Trump conservative forum The Bulwark, tries to grasp why his old colleagues followed Trump all the way to his rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6."

This is a negative sentiment.

"In his j'accuse-y yet semi-confessional "Why We Did It," Miller, now a writer at large for the anti-Trump conservative forum The Bulwark, tries to grasp why his old colleagues followed Trump all the way to his rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6."

This is a negative sentiment.

"(Miller acknowledges his own paid work helping the confirmation of Scott Pruitt as Trump's Environmental Protection Agency administrator, a stint that makes Miller more of a Barely Trumper than a Never Trumper.)"

This is a negative sentiment.

"(Miller acknowledges his own paid work helping the confirmation of Scott Pruitt as Trump's Environmental Protection Agency administrator, a stint that makes Miller more of a Barely Trumper than a Never Trumper.)"

This is a negative sentiment.

"This figure is comparable with the 71 percent of Republicans who said in late 2021 that they believed President Biden was not a fully legitimate president."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Donald Trump's so-called big lie is not big because of its brazen dishonesty or its widespread influence or its unyielding grip over the Republican Party."

This is a negative sentiment.

"You needn't pick between Buchanan and Gingrich -- it's enough to say that Buchanan gave the modern Republican Party its substance and Gingrich provided its style."

This is a positive sentiment.

"Most of all, his old colleagues succumbed to Trump because they believed they were playing "some big game devoid of real-world consequences.""

This is a negative sentiment.

"When Trump dispatched his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, telling them to "fight like hell," urging them to preserve a country that was slipping away, calling them patriots who could take back an election stolen by the radical left, he was channeling both men."

This is a negative sentiment.

"nnThe platonic ideal of the big joke was immortalized in The Washington Post the week after the 2020 election, uttered by an anonymous senior Republican official reflecting on Trump's election claims."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Gingrich made compromise a thought crime and labeled his opponents as sick and traitorous, tactics that should also sound familiar."

This is a negative sentiment.

""The LOLNMRs had decided that if someone like Trump could win, then everything that everyone does in politics is meaningless.""

This is a negative sentiment.

"In his rally last weekend in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump reiterated his commitment to the lie."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Lemire notes how Trump's assertion that he had been wiretapped by President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign seemed like a pretty gargantuan lie at the time, one that Trump tweeted "without any evidence.""

This is a negative sentiment.

"Lemire notes how Trump's assertion that he had been wiretapped by President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign seemed like a pretty gargantuan lie at the time, one that Trump tweeted "without any evidence.""

This is a negative sentiment.

""There was one moment where in this period he was watching Joe Biden on TV and says, 'Can you believe I lost to this (blank) guy?'"But what once may have sounded like a rhetorical lament -- can you believe I lost?"

This is a negative sentiment.

"Reince Priebus, during his incarnation as Republican National Committee chairman before his six-month sojourn as Trump's White House chief of staff, explained to Leibovich that of course, he got the joke."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Recent books like "Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell" by a former Republican operative and campaign consultant, Tim Miller, and "Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission" by The Atlantic's Mark Leibovich place this long-running gag at the center of American politics."

This is a negative sentiment.

"Recent books like "Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell" by a former Republican operative and campaign consultant, Tim Miller, and "Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission" by The Atlantic's Mark Leibovich place this long-running gag at the center of American politics."

This is a negative sentiment.

"In his book, "The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020," Politico's Jonathan Lemire pinpoints an August 2016 campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, during which Trump first suggested that the contest against Hillary Clinton would be rigged against him."

This is a positive sentiment.

"In his book, "The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020," Politico's Jonathan Lemire pinpoints an August 2016 campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, during which Trump first suggested that the contest against Hillary Clinton would be rigged against him."

This is a positive sentiment.

"Miller lingers on this game -- the amoral world of tactics, messaging and opposition research, the realm of politics where facts matter less than cleverness and nothing matters more than results."

This is a positive sentiment.

""This was his way of reassuring me that he understood what was really happening beyond his surface niceties about unity, tolerance, grace, or the idea that Trump could ever 'pivot,'" Leibovich writes."

This is a positive sentiment.

"The chroniclers of Donald Trump's election lie typically seek out an origin story, a choose-your-own adventure that always leads to the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021."

This is a negative sentiment.

"The R.N.C.'s statement, part of a resolution censuring Kinzinger and Representative Liz Cheney for participating in the House's Jan. 6 investigation, seemed to rebrand the assault as an exercise in civic virtue."

This is a positive sentiment.

"The R.N.C.'s statement, part of a resolution censuring Kinzinger and Representative Liz Cheney for participating in the House's Jan. 6 investigation, seemed to rebrand the assault as an exercise in civic virtue."

This is a positive sentiment.

""There will be a smooth transition," Pompeo responded, making the slightest of pauses before adding, "to a second Trump administration.""

This is a positive sentiment.

""There will be a smooth transition," Pompeo responded, making the slightest of pauses before adding, "to a second Trump administration.""

This is a positive sentiment.

""It's one small lie, followed by a demand for a bigger lie and a bigger concession, a bigger moral lapse, until, you know, these folks that I admired and respected, because I believe that they believe what they were saying, had given themselves up so completely to Donald Trump.""

This is a negative sentiment.

"For Hemmer, the Republican Party's evolution from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump began with Pat Buchanan, the White House aide, television pundit and authoritarian-curious presidential candidate who "fashioned grievance politics into an agenda," she writes -- a program that emphasized identity, immigration and race as its battlegrounds."

This is a negative sentiment.

"And Leibovich quotes Representative Adam Schiff's view of how his House colleagues slowly submitted to Trump's fantasies."

This is a positive sentiment.

"And Leibovich quotes Representative Adam Schiff's view of how his House colleagues slowly submitted to Trump's fantasies."

This is a positive sentiment.

"Leibovich recalls how in 2016, 72 percent of Republicans said they believed Trump's lies about Obama's background."

This is a positive sentiment.

"Leibovich recalls how in 2016, 72 percent of Republicans said they believed Trump's lies about Obama's background."

This is a positive sentiment.

"A few days after the election, a reporter asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the State Department was preparing to work with the Biden team to facilitate a "smooth transition" of power."

This is a positive sentiment.

"A few days after the election, a reporter asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the State Department was preparing to work with the Biden team to facilitate a "smooth transition" of power."

This is a positive sentiment.

"For Milbank, it was Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and the "savage politics he pioneered" in advance of the Republican Revolution of 1994."

This is a positive sentiment.

""Practitioners of politics could easily dismiss moralistic or technical concerns just by throwing down their trump card: 'It's all part of the Game,'" Miller writes."

This is a positive sentiment.