The "banana republic" fallacy

In each case, the democrats feared that their institutions were too weak to hold under the assaults of the demagogues from the outside. So they attempted to give them power in the hope that it would stop the anti-democratic assaults. But the task of undermining democracy didn’t end when the anti-democrats were given power. They didn’t become responsible stakeholders of liberal democracy any more than China became a responsible stakeholder of liberal world order after its accession to the World Trade Organization. It only picked up steam. And that is because all three were close to being banana republics. (Or, in Italy’s case, a banana kingdom.)

If the United States’s institutions are strong enough to resist Donald Trump and his movement, as conservatives have insisted for many years, then America is, by definition, not a banana republic.

And as such, then prosecuting a former politician with cause for crimes he might have committed is a sign of political health, not institutional weakness. More than that: Letting powerful people go without consequences for their misdeeds purely because you fear the power of their populist movement is anti-democratic. It’s exactly the kind of weakness that both exposes banana republic status and exacerbates it.