Nothing unexpected in only 4% of responding Kossacks thinking we had a healthy democracy. This numberr, however, is only useful if someone knows how much of the RepubliCon opposition we represent. Is it 5%? 50%? Most of it?
But what I would really like to discuss is right out of Street Smarts 101. The chapter I call the Argentine General Rule.
Briefly, one cannot safely assume that in the 21st century, that if you can take a poll about fascism then you are not yet living under fascism.
There is a learning curve that even fascists can understand. If one arrests editors, nosy reporters, smashes presses, ruins publishers, then, people protest and days of production are lost. It took awhile for them to figure out that if people could read about how bad they were, they would read and not fight. To keep it from getting too out of hand, they could threaten a writer or his family and watch him flee the country. In true Bush-speak they would say, "If he was telling the truth, why did he run?"
In this day and age it would be so difficult to control the people's news flow, they wouldn't try. Just a clause in the Patriot Act that could define your internet usage as anti-American and we would have an apparent free press and a totalitarian oligopoly.
It could all have happened yesterday. Didn't it? Aren't we still taking polls? The word for today is: the disappeareds, since we'll say it in English.
A democracy that is fixed, is broken.