I don't know if anyone's noticed, but there's a groundswell of authoritarianism in America, and it's entirely centered in the current Republican Party. It wasn't three weeks ago that we saw supporters of Donald Trump attack the U.S. Congress in an attempt to install the loser of the election. It was a stunning sight, but it wasn't something we should've been that surprised to see. Don't get me wrong; living through it was surreal. But there were a lot of people who saw the growing danger over the last four years, particularly regarding the potential for violence around the election. One of those people was Willamette University historian Seth Cotlar, who agreed to sit down and talk with me about all the historical contingencies that led him to be concerned about the tide of anti-democracy rising in the American body politic. Prof. Cotlar makes a lot of interesting connections between the past to our current era, and I think the conversation says a lot about our current political moment. Somehow, we're going to have to figure out how to move forward as a country, and while history can't tell us what the future will look like it can tell us how we came to find ourselves in such a divisive national climate. If we can find out where we went wrong, maybe we can figure out a way to make it right. If we're going to have a chance, though, we have to address the strain of anti-democracy that runs all the way through American history. 

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