Harvard Professor Issues Stark ‘Virus’ Summary Of America

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe warned this weekend that America’s democratic foundations are being eroded not by a single explosive crisis but by a slow, insidious decay that’s now speeding up under President Donald Trump.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Tribe cautioned against waiting for a dramatic turning point. “Looking for an explosion, a kind of moment of crisis ― what physicists like to call a singularity in a kind of unique episode of presidential defiance of a court order ― that’s misleading,” he said. “It frames what we are experiencing in the wrong way.”

Tribe cited T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

“For years, we have allowed the body politic to be hollowed out by a virus,” he said. “A virus that attacks the very foundations of the rule of law on which the government really rests. It’s a virus we have to fight with all our energy, without waiting…