»When Your Democracy Is on Fire, It’s All Hands on Deck«

As an American academic, I have been appalled by what is happening to my country under the Trump administration.Universities have been attacked; scientific and medical research has been held hostage by a quack; media companies and law firms have been blackmailed into contributing millions to Trump's coffers; the Trump Cabinet is run by stunningly incompetent lackeys who think their first and only task is to please their boss; the Department of Justice has been perverted into the Department of (Personal) Revenge; foreign policy has been turned upside-down so that we alienate our friends and embrace our enemies; tariffs have been levied on almost all imported goods, to the detriment of our economy and inflation -the list goes on.For someone living daily with these abusive and outrageous practices, it is no exaggeration to say: US democracy is on fire.I speak only as a US citizen; I will not presume to say to what extent these conditions exist elsewhere -or could.However, if you recognize these tendencies in your own country and feel alarmed, this message is for you.The list of questions the journal editors proposed for these comments is miscast.It fundamentally assumes our choice is to continue along the same trajectory, or to quit altogether.When asking, for example, if political objections [are] compatible with established epistemic standards, and then qualifying it by noting that progressive agendas may call these into question, it implies that the agendas themselves should not be challenged.But I think they need to be, and urgently so.A better question is this: How can academics, intellectuals, scientists, and medical professionals make a real difference in changing the swing toward authoritarianism and anti-democratic practices right now?The answer is both obvious and difficult to achieve: we need to convince our fellow citizens that democracy is better than authoritarianism, that traditional democratic guardrails make society better for everyone and need to be respected, and that the rule of law is far superior to the whims of a dictator.To achieve this,