The Christian Science Monitor

Democracy is under fire, but also underrated

Of all the scenes of anger and confrontation from the ongoing street battles in Portland, Oregon, one video in particular has hit home for me: footage of a pair of federal agents in full camouflage gear detaining a solitary, unresistant protester, bundling him into an unmarked minivan and taking him away.

It aroused almost visceral echoes from my years as a foreign correspondent: memories of marauding Syrian “peacekeeping” troops on the streets of Beirut, South African forces in the sprawling black township of Soweto under apartheid, or the , Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, in the early years

Twilight of democracy?Autocrats rise, democrats fight back

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