Although I would warn my students that no country is immune to these stealth authoritarian threats, these lectures, I could tell, never really resonated. My students assumed that authoritarian takeovers happen only in backward, faraway lands, in countries riddled with corruption and incompetence, and in nations that end with -stan.
So I decided to go rogue.
I threw away my lecture notes and instead asked my students to do something they had never done before: Play the role of an aspiring dictator and come up with ways to decimate democracy in the United States. The students studied the playbook of modern authoritarian governments and adapted it to the United States. They then switched roles and devised measures to guard against the most serious threats.
In creating this exercise, I followed the lead of Merck’s CEO, Kenneth Frazier. Like most executives, Frazier wanted to promote innovation at Merck. But unlike most executives who simply ask their employees "to innovate," Frazier asked them to generate ideas to destroy Merck and figure out how to put Merck out of business. The executives then reversed their roles and crafted strategies to avert these threats.
The "kill American democracy" exercise, an adaptation of Frazier’s "kill the company," should be happening‐not just in my law school classroom‐but in town halls and at dinner tables across the United States.
Here’s why.
Continues.