The Trump postal service mess is another threat to freedom sounding the death knell for democracy

Crack downs on peaceful protests and attacks on the post office are meant to hinder the ability of citizens to dissent, whether through demonstrations or voting

Last week, I woke up to dozens of tweets from Zimbabweans, amused at a tweet I had sent a few days before. “Stay safe, Chi-Town friends,” I tweeted as storms ripped through Chicago. I was confused, but a little Googling informed me that Chitungwiza, the third largest city in Zimbabwe, is also known as Chi-Town. Later in the day, a man asked me to amplify #ZimbabweanLivesMatter, a hashtag activists in the southern African nation are using to protest corruption in their government. The Zimbabwean government, in turn, has responded by sending in the military, banning demonstrations, and incarcerating political dissidents, whom it is accused of torturing in custody.

On Thursday, Donald Trump explicitly stated that he was withholding funding to the United States Postal Service to suppress votes. “If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it,” he told reporters.

The following day, in response to sustained protests outside the state capitol, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill banning certain forms of protest and stripping voting rights from those convicted of breaking this new law. “If people … knowingly thumb their nose at authority and don’t do what authorities have requested they do, they should be charged with a serious crime,” Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally explained on Wednesday.

McNally’s words tell us more about what is happening than perhaps he intended. Across the United States, Republicans are cracking down on protests and making it difficult to impossible to vote, all in the name of preserving their authority. Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service aren’t about the cost-effectiveness of our post offices, as Trump crony Richard Grenell tried to pretend, but about making it harder for people to vote. Trump believes this increases his chances of holding onto office, and therefore authority. Saying so isn’t “politically manipulating the Postal Service,” as Grenell claims. It is literally repeating what Trump himself has said.

Both the Tennessee law and the attacks on the post office are meant to hinder the ability of citizens to dissent, whether through protest or voting. These are laws which are meant to shore up Republican power, increase and exert the authority of the state – controlled by the Republican Party – over the lives of the people, and to deny Americans the right to oppose and change their government – rights which are enshrined in the constitution and are the very bedrock on which the country was purportedly built.

Thinking about all the ways Republicans are trying to destroy our republic, and all the ways in which they’ve already been and might continue to be, successful, quite literally keeps me up at night. I have not been more terrified or more uncertain of the future and security of the US at any time in my life, including after the 9/11 attacks. Whether deploying violent federal officers to disappear protestors in Portland or teargassing them for a photo-op in Washington’s Lafayette Park, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he has no problem using the authority of the state to crack down on dissidents and maintain his ever-weakening grasp on power. In turn, the Republicans have shown they are unwilling to stop him.

In a piece for The Verge earlier this month, Sarah Jeong was criticised for saying the question of whether the US is better at human and civil rights than China is “becoming a genuinely difficult question to answer.” A lot of critics on Twitter pointed out the fact that Jeong was even allowed to ask the question demonstrates the United States is better than China.

That may be technically true, but “we’re not as bad as China” is a depressingly low bar. Reading about the authoritarian crackdown in Zimbabwe, or watching the footage of protesters march for democracy in Minsk, or seeing demonstrators attacked in the streets of Hong Kong, many Americans shake their heads pitifully, saying a silent prayer of solidarity with those freedom fighters and thanking God it isn’t them. But as Jeong points out, we have kids in cages on our borders, a president who has seriously floated postponing our election, and federal law enforcement which shoves dissidents into unmarked vans. If that wasn’t frightening enough, we also have millions of Americans who are perfectly okay with this.

“A republic, if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin is purported to have said in 1787, following the Constitutional Convention. Whether Americans can, or are even willing, to keep a republic – and indeed democracy and the civil liberties enshrined in the constitution Franklin had just helped craft – remains to be seen. The agonised cries of protestors teargassed for a photo-op, and that sound of wrenching metal as mailboxes are removed from city streets? That could well be the death knell of American democracy.

No doubt Ben Franklin is turning in his grave while supposedly patriotic Americans are turning a blind eye. Because while things may not be as dire in Washington as they are in Harare, it turns out we can be taken over by authoritarian strongmen just as easily as any other country. The only thing standing between democracy and autocracy are those willing to fight for freedom. We need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those freedom fighters, whether in Chitungwiza or Chicago.