killing democracy from the inside out

There's an infuriating and depressing article in the New York Times about a top climate scientist at NASA who's complaining about being muzzled by the Administration for trying to warn about global warming. The papers have been reporting this kind of thing for the last several years, and the scientific community is utterly fed up with the Administration, and still they keep on doing it.

They don't know much about building democracy, those guys, but they sure know how to destroy it:
harass and intimidate honest civil servants, drive them and their expertise out of government, leaving only corrupt and inept political appointees;
deny and distort scientific findings so frequently and so deeply that the population eventually comes to mistrust science entirely, and with science, the idea of facts;
paving the way for all truthiness, all the time.

Democracies need infrastructure. They need honest and competent people to serve in government in a non-partisan way. They need voting systems that work. They need transparency and accountability. They need facts.

Destroy these things, and you don't have to burn the constitution, proclaim a coup, or crown yourself emperor. You're done. And the people will be left wondering how it happened, with only a million little news articles like this one to show us.