Tag: democracy

Ever since the earliest days of the second Trump administration, I’ve been telling people that I couldn’t get my head around where we’ll be in three months, or six months, or a year, let alone four years. Given the lightning pace at which Trump & Co. are rolling out a right wing police state (a blitzkrieg, some might call it), and the GOP’s shocking lack of concern for any kind of blowback from that endeavor, I just couldn’t fathom what things will look like down the road, short of the most dystopian scenario.

But now I’m beginning to think I can, and while it’s not quite at full Atwoodian level, it’s still incredibly depressing.

For so long I have been among those wondering when the moment will come when Don does something so egregious that America finally rouses itself in recognition that homegrown fascism has arrived in our shores—wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross, or wearing Trump brand sneakers and selling a meme coin, or what have you—and rises up in righteous democratic anger against it. But now I’m beginning to think that this expectation is much like the futile wait for the moment when, at long last, Republicans themselves turn on Trump, which we’ve been fruitlessly awaiting for almost a decade. In other words: it ain’t ever coming.

After all, he has already had people he dislikes kidnapped and disappeared into foreign gulags, already defied the Supreme Court, already eviscerated the federal government, already suggested suspending habeas corpus and said he’s considering a third term, to name just a from the first hundred days. What more do you want?

In short, I’m beginning to fear that autocracy—or whatever you want to call it (more on that in a moment)—is descending on us with nary a ripple of recognition or significant opposition from the body politic, if in fact it has not already done so. I’m not the only one who’s worried about that, of course. And luckily, some of those people have ideas how to counteract it.

BUDAPEST ON THE POTOMAC

In a piece for The New Yorker called “What It’s Like to Live Under Autocracy,” Andrew Marantz describes life in contemporary Hungary, the country whose “illiberal democracy” (sometimes called “competitive authoritarianism”) has turned so many American conservatives and Fox News personalities into slobbering fanboys for its strongman Viktor Orbán. Not coincidentally, it is also the country that credentialed, sober critics of Trumpism most often cite as a model for where we might be headed.

What Marantz describes in Hungary is a country where the ruling government has unchallenged de facto (if not de jure) one-party rule, along with control of the electoral process, the courts, the media, the universities, and every other important public institution, but still maintains a laughable façade of democracy. That, as we know, is the new paradigm for political oppression worldwide. Quoting the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, Marantz writes:

“Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Democracies still die, but by different means.” Some of this may happen under cover of darkness, but much of it happens in the open, under cover of arcane technocracy or boring bureaucracy. “Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts,” the authors write. “They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy.”

Yet Hungary is also a place where much of the citizenry goes on as before, accepting the oppressive rules of the Orbán regime in exchange for some semblance of the life that existed under its more democratic predecessor. The reason they do that is that, for most Hungarians, the price of dissent is too high, and the temptation to just accept the new normal is too easy. Marantz quotes a Hungarian social scientist named Péter Krekó:

“Before it starts, you say to yourself, ‘I will leave this country immediately if they ever do this or that horrible thing,’ ”…..“And then they do that thing, and you stay. Things that would have seemed impossible ten years ago, five years ago, you may not even notice.” (Krekó) finished his gnocchi, considered a glass of wine, then opted for an espresso instead. “It’s embarrassing, almost, how comfortable you can be,” he said. “There are things you could do or say—as a person in academia, or in the media, or an NGO—that would get them to come after you. But if you know where the lines are, and you don’t cross them, you can have a good life.”

A similar dynamic is clearly in the works here in the US.

Of course, that is the bargain is being offered to straight, white citizens under the Trump regime. People of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and—I would argue—women in general face a fare more brutal scenario. I recently saw someone write on Facebook: “America has become a living hell for immigrants.” Yes, and for the Stephen Millers of the world, that’s a feature not a bug. In fact, it’s far more than just a feature: it’s their primary goal. And they are counting on the rest of America not to care, much.

Describing the terror that graduate students studying in America feel in the wake of the Mahmoud Khalil atrocity, Marantz writes that even as these visitors fear being kidnapping off the street and disappeared by masked and anonymous federal agents, “(their) neighbors go about their lives—shopping at Whole Foods, picking up the dry cleaning, then going home to catch up on the news and curse the latest Trump outrage, as if it were all happening somewhere else.”

To make matters worse, the aforementioned Prof. Levitsky has expressed his belief that Trump is turning the US into an authoritarian regime much faster than Orbán did Hungary, which is concerning to say the least. As I wrote in these pages a few weeks ago, Orbán took decades “to undermine the judiciary and the media and other Hungarian institutions with kabuki-like gestures toward the rule of law while actually running a dictatorship. Trump is ripping through those same institutions in America while barely bothering even to pretend.”

Yet at the same time that Trump is moving at a pace that makes Orban look like a slacker, Trumpian autocracy is descending upon us so incrementally that many of us fail to register it…..and that is true not only of low-information Americans, but even people who are actively alarmed by the administration’s actions.

Marantz himself describes how this can happen:

In a Hollywood disaster movie, when the big one arrives, the characters don’t have to waste time debating whether it’s happening. There is an abrupt, cataclysmic tremor, a deafening roar; the survivors, suddenly transformed, stagger through a charred, unrecognizable landscape. In the real world, though, the cataclysm can come in on little cat feet. The tremors can be so muffled and distant that people continually adapt, explaining away the anomalies. You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if—still go on feeling as if—the big one is not yet here.

One does not often see Robert Frost invoked on the topic of a police state, but here we are.

Other experts who were once skeptical about the prospect of Trump-led American fascism have now done 180s. Marantz writes: “For years, Samuel Moyn, a historian at Yale, argued that liberals should stop inflating Trump into an all-powerful cartoon villain—that he was a weak President, not an imminent fascist threat. But in March, after the disappearance of the Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil, Moyn applied the F-word to Trump for the first time.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU, an expert on authoritarianism who was an early and vocal critic of Trump, made that switch several years ago. The political scientist Lucan Way told Marantz:

“When people would predict, ‘America will turn into Hungary,’ I would roll my eyes. But, boy, have I been humbled.” Way and Levitsky recently co-authored a piece in Foreign Affairs in which they wrote: “Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. US democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy.”

SMASH THE PATRIMONY

Cutting through the angels-on-the-head-a-pin debate over whether Trump is an autocrat, an authoritarian, a fascist, or just an fucking asshole, one of the very best pieces I’ve yet read about the second Trump administration is from the Brookings Institution’s Jonathan Rauch.

Writing in The Atlantic, Rauch describes what we’re facing as “patrimonialism,” a  term coined by the turn-of-the century German sociologist Max Weber, and recently revived in a book called The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, by Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine.

Essentially, patrimonialism is what we now more commonly call a “mafia state,” in which the country is run like a crime family, with its boss—the father or godfather figure—doling out favors and punishments according to his whim, based on who has pleased or displeased him at any given moment.  

This is “the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Rauch adds: “Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector.” (Trump—risibly—made that explicit claim on the campaign trail last year.)

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.

Sound familiar?

Patrimonialism is rife in the modern world, with states that subscribe to it—Hungary, Poland (for a time), Turkey, India, the Philippines—working as a kind of syndicate, as Anne Applebaum has written in her 2024 book Autocracy Inc.

Rauch writes that patrimonial states are suspicious of bureaucracies as obstacles and potential rivals; hence the need to disembowel them and replace their ranks with toadies and hacks. He also notes that, “Once in power, patrimonialists love to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of democracy, like Elon Musk justifying his team’s extralegal actions as making the ‘unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government’ be “responsive to the people.” Though it might rise to power democratically, and temporarily co-exist with it, eventually the mafia state all but inevitably destroys any democracy that it infects.

And the longer this goes on, the more entrenched a patrimony like Trump’s will become. Already we have a whole generation of young people who are accustomed to a US President whose public persona is like that of a pro wrestler (and a heel, not a face), who is wantonly corrupt and openly sells access to his office and political favors, and who professes ignorance of basic civics and of what is going on in his own administration. They don’t know anything different. When that vision of the presidency is normalized, in conjunction with the chokehold that right wing authoritarians are obtaining on American politics and the electoral process, our democracy is in what George H.W. Bush—a kind of quaint figure these days—called “deep doo-doo.”  

FROGS AND CROCODILES

The other hackneyed description for this dynamic of a slow slide into illiberalism is, of course, the “frog in boiling water,” in which an emergency creeps up so slowly and imperceptibly that its victims don’t realize the threat until it is too late.

To that end, this very week Way, Levitsky, and Ziblatt co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times called “How Will Americans Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?” In it they write:

The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule.

The authors propose what they call “a simple metric” for determining whether or not autocracy has taken hold: “the cost of opposing the government.”

In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition—that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections—is a foundational principle of democracy.

But under authoritarianism, those who cross the government—opposition politicians, media outlets, even private citizens—often find themselves investigated for trumped up charges, slapped with frivolous lawsuits that are nonetheless financially backbreaking to fight, subjected to tax audits, unjustly stripped of business licenses, or even targeted for vigilante violence. As we have observed in Hungary, it is quite easy for a citizenry to accommodate itself to that state of affairs, and kept its collective head down. “When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”

I need not list here all the ways that Trump & Co. are carrying out exactly that sort of campaign. (But Way, Levitsky, and Ziblatt do; check it out if you want a reminder.) The repercussions are stark:  

The administration’s authoritarian offensive has….changed how Americans behave, forcing them to think twice about engaging in what should be constitutionally protected opposition. Consequently, many of the politicians and societal organizations that should serve as watchdogs and checks on the executive are silencing themselves or retreating to the sidelines.

That, of course, is the goal. Kill one, frighten ten thousand, to go all the way back to Sun Tzu and The Art of War.

The acquiescence of our most prominent civic leaders sends a profoundly demoralizing message to society. It tells Americans that democracy is not worth defending—or that resistance is futile. If America’s most privileged individuals and organizations are unwilling or unable to defend democracy, what are ordinary citizens supposed to do?

The authors note that, “Americans are living under a new regime. The question now is whether we will allow it to take root. So far, American society’s response to this authoritarian offensive has been underwhelming—alarmingly so.”

Strategies of self-preservation have led too many civil society leaders to retreat into silence or acquiesce to authoritarian bullying. Small acts of acquiescence, framed as necessary defensive measures, feel like the only reasonable course. But this is the fatal logic of appeasement: the belief that quietly yielding in small, seemingly temporary ways will mitigate long-term harm. It usually doesn’t.

On the contrary: acquiescence large or small only encourages the oppressors to even worse behavior once they smell blood in the water. Witness Columbia University, whose craven surrender of its lunch money to Trump and his gang of schoolyard bullies has only emboldened those bullies to go further, even proposing to put the school under a consent decree in which it would effectively become a subsidiary of the administration, which is to say, of the Trump Organization. (And Trump University joins the Ivies at last.) I hate to root for Harvard, but its willingness to stand up to the administration stands in stark contrast.

“Autocrats rarely entrench themselves in power through force alone,” write Way, Levitsky, and Ziblatt, “they are enabled by the accommodation and inaction of those who might have resisted. Appeasement, as Churchill warned, is like feeding a crocodile and hoping to be the last one eaten.”

“When the most influential members of civil society fight back, it provides political cover for others. It also galvanizes ordinary citizens to join the fight,” W, L & Z note.Among the forces they suggest could lead the pro-democracy charge they single out the courts, progressive billionaires, well-endowed universities like that one up in Cambridge, deep-pocketed law firms, and “a vast infrastructure of churches, labor unions, private foundations and nonprofit organizations.” They also refer to “a well-organized and well-financed opposition party,” but I’ll confess that I don’t know who they mean by that.

More on point, they acknowledge that “So far, the most energetic opposition has come not from civic leaders but from everyday citizens, showing up at congressional town hall meetings or participating in Hands Off rallies across the country.”

When organizations work together and commit to a collective defense of democratic principles, they share the costs of defiance. The government cannot attack everyone all at once. When the costs of defiance are shared, they become easier for individuals to bear.

SIGNS OF LIFE ON THE LEFT

So is there hope?

The good news is that the proverbial wheels are coming off this administration (which was kind of a unicycle to begin with) as it continues to show its incompetence, malevolence, and simple cruelty. At the same time, resistance is building. Other countries have fought their way back to democracy—Brazil, Poland, Slovakia, South Korea and elsewhere. Bolsonaro is on trial and so is Duterte. Less dramatically, anti-Trump candidates recently triumphed in Canada, Australia…. and the Vatican, proving that Donald is indeed adept at winning elections, just not always for his side.

The administration’s weaknesses and missteps can be exploited, but it takes conscious and concerted effort. “America’s slide into authoritarianism is reversible,” Way, Levitsky, and Ziblatt write. “But no one has ever defeated autocracy from the sidelines.”

“In that sense, ‘How Democracies Die’ is actually a terrible metaphor,” Levitsky told Marantz. “Everything is reversible…..We are not El Salvador, and we are not Hungary. We spent centuries, as a society, building up democratic muscle, and we still have a lot of that muscle left. I just keep waiting for someone to use it.” A few public figures are heeding that advice.  When the mayor of Newark gets himself arrested to protest ICE detention in his state, that is an inspiring—and telling—statement.

Specifically, Rauch argues that patrimonialism has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.” That weakness is actually two-fold.

First, patrimonies founder in competition with modern governments peopled with competent professionals, because the erratic nature of a mafia state is at odds with competent politics. “Patrimonial regimes are simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance. At best they supply poorly functioning institutions, and at worst they actively prey on the economy.” But patrimony’s even greater liability is its inherently corrupt nature. Rauch again:

Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state.

We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.”

Rauch argues that this is the pressure point at which we should focus our attacks:

Corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you. The most dire threat that Putin faced was Alexei Navalny’s “ceaseless crusade” against corruption, which might have brought down the regime had Putin not arranged for Navalny’s death in prison. In Poland, the liberal opposition booted the patrimonialist Law and Justice Party from power in 2023 with an anti-corruption narrative.

(T)he history of patrimonial rule suggests that (Democrats’) most effective approach will be hammering home the message that he is corrupt. One thing is certain: He will give them plenty to work with.

He is surely right, and even low-information voters have begun to take note when Burgermeister Meisterburger Donald von Drumpf tells America’s kids they can only have two dolls at Christmas instead of thirty (thirty????), and that they don’t need so many pencils, while spending $92 million in taxpayer dollars on a military parade for his birthday, and $400 million to dip his new Qatari-built Air Force One in gold.

The counter-argument is that the public already knows how corrupt Trump is and, apparently, doesn’t care. But Rauch argues that “driving a strategic, coordinated message against Trump’s corruption is exactly what the opposition has not done. Instead, it has reacted to whatever is in the day’s news. By responding to daily fire drills and running in circles, it has failed to drive any message at all.”

Also, it is not quite true that the public already knows Trump is corrupt and doesn’t care. Rather, because he seems so unfiltered, he benefits from a perception that he is authentic in a way that other politicians are not, and because he infuriates elites, he enjoys a reputation for being on the side of the common person. Breaking those perceptions can determine whether his approval rating is above 50 percent or below 40 percent, and politically speaking, that is all the difference in the world.

HOLLOWED OUT

This is the way the world ends, T.S. Eliot famously wrote in “The Hollow Men”: not with a bang but a whimper. (My but this blog is literary this week.) It has become cliché. But that is how America feels as we slide into full blown mafia statism, which may well descend upon us and take root while we barely notice, let alone stir ourselves to appreciable complaint. I fear that there is no great inflection point coming, no “I am Spartacus” moment, no triggering event a la the murder of George Floyd that turns millions out into the streets. (On the contrary: every day I expect word of a pardon for Derek Chauvin on his federal convictions.) Instead, we daily slip further and further into a cruel parody of what the American experiment was meant to be, incorporating some of the worst elements of our complicated and not always flattering history, while adding new depths of neo-fascism to which we have never before sunk. Yet on we go, creeping in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded democracy. (Move over, Bob and Tom—Bill is here.)

And that is a place from which it will be very very hard to climb out. Especially if we don’t try.

*********

Illustration:  A frog. Duh.

So Trump blinked on the tariffs, and then behaved like an arsonist taking credit when the fire was put out. (The New Republic’s Timothy Noah compared it to a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.) Still, MAGA World continues to cling to the delusion that he’s some kind of genius, while the plutocracy humors him on that same front in hopes of preventing an encore. But let’s be clear: his megalomaniacal recklessness and ignorance briefly wiped out 12% of the market’s value in a single swoop and threatened even worse damage before those billionaire donors and others fired a dart into his neck and clawed back some semblance of common sense. (Jeff Bezos’s new MAGA-friendly WaPo offered this howlingly generous description: “From Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets.”) The long term damage of this intentional volatility remains to be seen, not to mention the possibility of Trump doing it again, or worse.

So all in all, just another example of why it’s a bad idea to have a deranged toddler with the morals of a rattlesnake as your head of state. Who knew?

Whether Democrats will be able to capitalize on the tariff debacle is another question, even though it would appear to be a slam dunk for them. But that party has a habit of smacking the ball against the rim and then falling to the floor and breaking its ankle. For example, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, oft mentioned as a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, gave a speech last week where she said:

I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and here’s where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America….Let’s give more hardworking people a fair shot at a decent life. And let’s usher in, as President Trump says, a ‘Golden Age’ of American manufacturing.

As The Bulwark noted: “We are but humble newsletter writers. But we’re not totally convinced Democrats should be out here offering even nuanced, guarded praise for the trade philosophy that is about to turbo-crash the global economy.” Fortunately, other Democrats—including governors like Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Jared Polis of Colorado, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania—have taken a more aggressive stance. “Literally all we have to do is point to the fucking disaster Trump is causing. We don’t need an econ 101 lecture ‘well actually’-ing the usefulness of tariffs,” wrote Brian Tyler Cohen, the co-founder of Chorus, a Democratic digital group, in response to a similar equivocation by Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.). “Why Democrats insist on squandering every moment is beyond me.”

But I don’t mean to be negative. Let’s rejoice in Trump’s humiliating own goal, even as we reckon with the damage, and spend this week’s essay on one of the handful Democratic politicians who clearly does recognize the clear and present danger we face, and has been boldly proclaiming we ought to respond accordingly.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DAYLIGHT, TOO

In the past twenty years, both of the two political parties in the United States have been destroyed. The Democratic Party, the only one of the two still committed to participatory democracy, is in complete disarray and totally dysfunctional. It may yet recover but, per above, at the moment it’s as useless as a lactating bull. Much worse, the Republican Party—whatever its flaws in the bad old days (and they were many)—has gone from being a center-right party that more or less deserved the label “conservative” to a radical, fascist party of theocratic white nationalism. And in case you missed it, that is the party that is currently in control of all three branches of the US government, although only one of them matters anymore.

As a result, at the moment the United States does not have a functional “small d” democratic party.

Among the Democrats, one of the few US Senators behaving like we’re really in an existential national emergency and not conducting  business as usual has been Chris Murphy of Connecticut. (I’d include Bernie and Booker in there as well, and Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, my Punahou homeboy, except for his vote with Schumer to rescue the GOP on its self-inflicted debt ceiling debacle.) Murphy has the bland white guy look of a background actor playing a senator in a movie, but he is a firebrand on the order of Sanders—a deceptively anodyne and familiar front that is actually quite useful for the broader public, I would like to think. Murphy has consistently called the Republican crusade out for what it is, insisted on confronting it with bold tactics, and been an increasingly public voice sounding the alarm for the rest of the country.

Murphy believes—as I do—that “we have months—not a year—before our democracy is rendered so damaged that it can’t be repaired.” But there is a bitter irony in play here. At a time when the Democrats’ internal chaos, demoralization, and general fecklessness has rendered them unfit to be a proper counter to the GOP, those very ills have also exacerbated public contempt for them among the very folks that the Party needs to rally to its side, like young people.

By contrast, Chris Murphy is a model of what the Party should be doing to combat the fascist threat.

Last week, in a powerhouse radio interview with The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick, Murphy said:

Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy. That’s what January 6th was all about—regardless of who won the election, they wanted to make sure that their person was in charge. They believe, and have long believed, that the Democratic Party progressives are an existential threat to the country, and thus any means justifies the end—which is making sure that a Democrat never again wins a national election.

So, this seems pretty purposeful and transparent—this decision to rig the rules of democracy so that you still hold elections, but the minority party, the opposition party, is rendered just weak enough, and the rules are tilted toward the majority party just enough, so that Donald Trump and Republicans and the Trump family rule forever….And that is, I think, the very concrete, very transparent plan that Trump and his White House are implementing right now.

That is as clear and direct a statement of the current crisis as you are likely to find anywhere. That it is coming from a US Senator is even more surprising and grave.

Murphy told Remnick “that over the last four years, those surrounding Donald Trump put together a pretty thoughtful plan to destroy democracy and the rule of law, and you are seeing it being implemented.” He notes that Trump & Co. have trained their assault in particular on academia and the legal community, including judges and the biggest law firms, two institutions that “are, in many ways, the foundation that undergirds the rule of law…..where people think about the rule of law, protect it, warn when it is being undermined.”

And so it is not coincidental that Trump is trying to force both higher education and the legal profession to capitulate to him, and to commit….to essentially quelling protest. And, of course, what the Administration is doing by taking on these very high-profile institutions is sending a warning to other law firms and to other colleges: if you take us on—if you file lawsuits against the Administration, if you support Democrats, if you allow for campus-wide protests against our priorities—you’ll be next.

Without using this precise metaphor, what Murphy is describing is a Pacific war-style island-hopping strategy, one that has been used in many other autocracies, where “the Administration won’t have to go after every institution or every firm, because most of them will just decide in advance to stay out of the way.”

“This is how democracy dies. Everybody just gets scared. You make a few examples, and everyone else just decides to comply.”

PARTY OF ONE

Murphy describes the Democratic Party as divided between those who think “we should just engage in normal politics—try to become more popular than Republicans” and his own faction, which believes “it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election.” To that end, Murphy believes that “everything we are doing right now, both inside the Capitol and outside the Capitol, should be geared toward trying to make Republicans stop this assault on the rule of law and democratic norms.”

The problem with opposing the Trump regime, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last recently wrote (as detailed in last week’s King’s Necktie), is that most of the Democratic Party is trying to use methods and a mindset from an earlier era that is woefully ill-suited to the current threat. Like Last, Murphy rejects the idea—common among the sclerotic Democratic leadership apparently—that the party can just keep on “pushing down (Trump’s) approval ratings, and eventually win the 2026 election, and set up a potential win in 2028.” On the contrary, Murphy believes that, “Every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.”

I’m not suggesting that there will be election officials out there stuffing ballots. What I’m talking about is that the opposition—the infrastructure necessary for an opposition to win—will have been destroyed. No lawyers will represent us. They will take down ActBlue, which is our primary means of raising small-dollar contributions. They will threaten activists with violence, so no one will show up to our rallies and to our door-knock events.

This is what happens in lots of democracies around the world; the opposition is just kept so weak that they can’t win. That’s what I worry about being the landscape as we approach 2026. And, if you believe that, then everything you do right now has to be in service of stopping that kind of weakening or destruction of democracy.

This is a crucial point, as it requires us to re-think how we conceive of a fair election. As I wrote in Resisting the Right:

(T)he jackbooted authoritarian regimes of the ’30s and ’40s are passé these days. In the postwar period, much more sophisticated forms of “soft” autocracy have arisen, carefully cultivated pantomimes of democracy that are no less brutal in many cases, and more treacherous for their veneer of legitimacy: what Moisés Naím, the longtime editor of Foreign Policy magazine, calls “stealthocracy.” These Potemkin republics feature the trappings of legitimacy—fair elections, a free press, commitment to civil rights, limits on the power of the head of state—but in truth employ them only as camouflage while the state maintains tight control of all the mechanisms that would otherwise serve as checks on its power.

That means kabuki elections, where there’s no need for the right wing ruling government to rig anything, because its rivals can’t raise money, can’t organize, and can’t effectively get their message out to inform and mobilize the electorate. As a mechanism of oppression, that approach is far better than hamfisted brutality, especially as it offers the useful excuse that, “Hey, the people voted and this is what they asked for.” Chief among the right wing state’s tools and deserving of special mention is control of the narrative—which is to say, supremacy in the media—which is already the case in the United States.

To that end, Murphy also thinks it’s all but a foregone conclusion that Trump will attempt to stay in office for a third term (and why not a fourth?), or a de facto one by passing the presidency off to a relative, thus keeping the Trump family in power. “If he breaks the Supreme Court and breaks the Constitution and pays no consequence for it, we could ultimately be living in a situation in which the President just declares that he will stay in office.”

ALTERNATIVE OUSTER

Maybe most important of all, Murphy believes that the Democrats’ 2024 argument that “democracy is in danger” failed to find purchase because the party was “shilling for the existing version of democracy—which is deeply corrupt, which does not work.”

Whoa: as noted above, Murphy looks like Charles Grodin, but he talks like AOC, stumping for once-frequently-discussed progressive policies, like campaign finance reform. “Somewhere along the line we stopped talking about reforming democracy, so it became easy for voters to just believe that we were all corrupt, and that neither Republicans nor Democrats were actually sincere in fixing what was wrong with democracy.”

Murphy notes that Trump is so open about his corruption that, maddeningly, he normalizes it: “It must not be corrupt if you’re doing it in public.” It’s a Bizarro World situation, where the absence of the usual secrecy and shame—replaced with boasting, no less—actually serves as a weird kind of absolution. He cites Trump’s “meme coin” as an example of Democratic failure—the idea of an item of merchandise that the President of the United States has for sale on his website that functions, in effect, as mechanism for wanton bribery:

I’m just shocked that the Trump meme coin isn’t, like, the only thing that we’re talking about. It’s probably the most massive corruption scandal in the history of the country. You literally have an—I guess—legal, open channel for private donations to the President and his family in exchange for favors. And we just think that it’s part of Trump’s right to do business in the White House. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s deeply immoral. And the fact that we didn’t talk about that every hour of every day, once he released that coin, was kind of a signal to the country that we weren’t going to take the corruption seriously.

Yet Murphy argues that Trump’s shameless, world-beating levels of greed and lawbreaking (he calls this “the most corrupt White House in the history of the country”) gives the Democrats an opportunity to run on an anti-corruption platform. If they find the intestinal fortitude to exploit it. But it requires courage, and actions that back it up. You can’t tell the American people that the Republicans constitute an existential threat to democracy and then play ball with them as if they are garden variety politicians and good faith actors. Not if you want to maintain your credibility and have the public to take your warnings seriously.

So what does Murphy suggest we do that is different from politics as usual, beyond a fundamental shift of mindset, huge and necessary as that is? In short, he recommends treating a housefire like the emergency it is.

At the most basic level, Murphy supported a full-on Democratic boycott of the recent State of the Union address, arguing that while Trump is destroying every aspect of American democracy, we should not accord him the normal courtesies that normalize and legitimize his actions. Small symbols of defiance announce that “that is not OK.” On a far more extreme and concrete front, he advocated letting the Republicans shut down the federal government and then forcing them to take the blame, as they should, rather than rescuing them as Schumer & Co. did.

This is not just GOP-style infantile obstructionism for its own sake. There is a strategic reason for it:

If the public doesn’t see us taking risks—tactical risks, daily risks—then they are not going to take what will be a risk on their part, standing up to a repressive regime where it’s clear that the government is willing to make you pay a personal price if you exercise your voice.

He echoed that idea in a separate interview recently with Jon Stewart, saying: “I don’t think you can ask the people of this country to do these exceptional things that are going to be necessary to save our democracy if we”—meaning the Democratic leadership—”are not willing to take risks.”

He continues to advocate for Democrats bringing the Senate to a grinding halt by refusing to let the Republican majority bring any bills forward at all, which it is within the minority party’s power to do. (In a similar move, the aforementioned Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii is currently blocking some 300 Trump nominees, Tommy Tuberville-style….except that this is in the service of democracy and not madness.) “(W)e have regularly been providing the votes to the Republican majority to move forward legislation that they care about,” Murphy told Remnick. “We could choose not to do that. We could say to Republicans: Unless you work with us on some targeted measures to prevent the destruction of our democracy, we are not going to continue to pretend like it’s business as usual….If you think that democracy is the No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 story, then you have to act like it.”

So ICYMI, I would argue vociferously that the Democratic Party is in desperate need of more Chris Murphys and fewer Chuck Schumers and John Fettermans. The good Senator one last time:

We desperately want to believe that we can play politics as normal because it’s uncomfortable—really uncomfortable—to play politics as not normal. It involves taking really big risks. And, of course, you just want to wake up and believe that you live in a country where people wouldn’t make a conscious choice to move away from democratic norms. But while some people are being hoodwinked into being along for that ride, others are making the conscious choice because our democracy has been so broken for so long.

So, yes, I believe that there is a chance that we miss this moment. We just wake up one day and we are no longer in a democracy, which is why I think we have to start acting more urgently right now.

POSTSCRIPT: THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT I WISH WASN’T

In addition to the tariffs, this was also a week in which Congress moved forward with yet another tax cut for the rich—even as it cuts programs for poor children—a move  that is set to add between $4 and $9 trillion to the deficit, which Republicans perennially claim to care about with near-religious fervor when any Democrat is in the White House.

It was also a week in which the inevitable and long-awaited showdown between Trump and the Supreme Court toward which we have been hurtling appears to have arrived.

With two decisions earlier in the week, the Court seemed to indicate that it was going to continue giving cover to Trump’s neo-fascist project, including the gestapo-like campaign of deportation/rendition, behaving exactly as it did in his criminal cases before the election: stroking its collective chin thoughtfully in a charade of good faith, while using the procedural mechanisms of the system to aid Donald at every step. (On Friday a lower court did likewise in affirming the White House’s right to detain and deport Mahmoud Khalil just because it doesn’t like his politics.) But Thursday’s unanimous unsigned Supreme Court decision in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, marks a change and a potential turning point for Trumpian authoritarianism.

Mr. Garcia is the El Salvadoran-born US resident—in this country legally, with court-sanctioned political asylum because of his well-founded fear of violent persecution in his home country—who was mistakenly/not mistakenly deported as part of the administration’s zealous campaign of sadistic xenophobia. He is now sitting in El Sal’s notorious CECOT prison, from which no one has ever been released as a matter of bluntly stated national policy under the Bukele dictatorship. If the Trump administration defies the SCOTUS order to bring Garcia back—or more likely, drags it feet, or makes a half-assed gesture at compliance and then throws up its collective hands in mock helplessness—we will have taken a giant step toward open, undisguised fascism.

The right wing majority on the Court brought this crisis on itself, of course. After protecting Trump from criminal prosecution for his various crimes, and openly aiding his re-election, and telling him outright that he’s a king who can do anything he wants, it’s rich that that majority is now upset that he is behaving that way and treating them like shmucks. The Garcia case is the first real test of how far he will go.

Depending how it shakes out, maybe people will find that Chris Murphy’s warnings were right on the money after all.

*********

Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Last weekend I was honored to be invited to speak at an online “emergency town hall” sponsored by Writers for Democratic Action and Books & Books in Miami. You can check out those remarks here.

The topic of the town hall was the ongoing autocratic emergency in America and potential responses to it, a subject I’ve been fixed upon for several years, pre-dating Trump’s re-election, as detailed in Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm.

Writers for Democratic Action is an activist group of—you guessed it—writers, formed in August 2020 to oppose Donald Trump’s administration and to promote the cause of—you guessed it again—democracy during this exceptionally fraught time in American history. Founded as Writers Against Trump by Paul Auster, Peter Balakian, James Carroll, Carolyn Forché, Todd Gitlin, Siri Hustvedt, and Askold Melnyczuk, it is a volunteer organization with a membership of over 3000. Its activities range from get-out-the-vote efforts, to the fight against book banning, to educational webinars with folks like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), authors such as Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, and Javier Zamora, and writers and scholars from as far afield as Ukraine and Turkey. (I was privileged to be the guest at one of WDA’s “Democracy Book Clubs” last summer.) Last July 19—the day before Trump accepted the Republican nomination—WDA also sponsored simultaneous readings of its homage to Sinclair Lewis, titled “It Can’t Happen Here—Again,” at 91 locations in 71 cities in 24 states.

I was flattered to be invited to the town hall by James Carroll, who was also my interlocutor at the Democracy Book Club last year. The other speakers were former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky; Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large of The American Prospect; Nancy Rosenblum, professor of politics and government at Harvard; and Gene Nichol, professor of law at UNC, as well as a vigorous conversation in an open forum. The full recording of the event is here.

If you or your friends or colleagues are interested in having me come talk, please DM me. In this fraught moment for America, solidarity with each other and the frank exchange of ideas are essential.

As the Boomtown Rats sang, I don’t like Mondays, and this coming Monday January 20^th promises to be my all-time least favorite.

There is a palpable sense that we are entering a dark new chapter in American history, and there is good reason to feel that way, because our incoming overlords have gleefully promised it. The New Deal era is dead. It had a good run—49 years—but the 44 subsequent years of the Reagan Revolution (a counter-revolution, really) unwound much of it, thanks to a relentless campaign by tenacious and deep-pocketed plutocrats, in alliance with cultural reactionaries (religious fanatics, racists, misogynists, John Birchers, et al), shielded by their increasing control of the courts (thanks, Leonard Leo!), and abetted above all by a massive right wing propaganda machine that now dominates mainstream American media.

So the dawn of Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s second term marks the Age of Roosevelt’s final curtain call. Oddly, in retrospect, his win in 2016 feels like only a preview, and the four years of Joe Biden a mere respite, like Adolf’s exile from ’23 to ’33, before a foolish citizenry and a hapless political system allowed him to retake power. Not to reach for too baroque a comparison, but it’s apt.

So yeah, Monday doesn’t look too inviting.

It is fitting, of course, that Inauguration Day will coincide with a blast of Arctic air that will plunge Washington DC into the single digits, forcing the—ahem—festivities indoors, and as ABC reports, leaving “the vast majority” of ticket-holding Trump fans shut out. Talk about a pair of on-the-nose metaphors. That it coincides with MLK Day is a different kind of bitter coincidence.

It’s also telling that Mike Johnson has ordered the US flag—currently at half-staff for a month of mourning for President Jimmy Carter—raised again for the day, to soothe the petty petty incoming president’s eggshell-fragile ego. Presumably he did so under pressure, if not as the result of a direct order, though with tyrants there is often no need for such an order, or even a Henry II-like whisper about meddlesome priests. The myrmidons instinctively know what the Dear Leader wants and what will please him, giving him the bonus of plausible deniability for upcoming crimes far worse than dissing Jimmy Carter.  

Once the second Trump administration gets underway, I am not sure that I will be able to muster the same righteous fury over every daily outrage like I did during the first go-round of this nightmare. I suspect many of you feel the same. In some ways that may be a good thing, at least for our mental health. Back then it was all fresh and new and every day we looked at each other and asked, “Can you believe this shit???” Now we are inured to it, and no longer surprised. That is also bad, of course, and not to say that we should accept it. A sense of defeat and resignation is exactly what the autocrats want from us.

So, lo, I bring you a little bit of good news, which is that the clock is already rapidly ticking on the new regime. Just 21 months remain before the midterms—21 and a half, to be exact—on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

Don’t roll your eyes. Yes, we just saw the American people willingly return to office the worst president in US history, so putting our faith in the wisdom of the voting public doesn’t look too appealing right now. And yes, even if we were to do so, there is a real danger that the GOP will use these next 21 months to further rig the electoral system to ensure that it stays in power permanently, whether the people want it or not. But so long as any semblance of free and fair elections remain in place, we have the chance to oust the party of open autocracy from at least one institution—the House—in less than two years, which would be a huge brake on the Trump agenda.

We all know that midterms traditionally favor the party that is out of power (see 2018). It could be especially so this time around, with the potential for buyers’ remorse among casual and low-information Trump supporters running high. The GOP’s House majority is only five seats—thin as thin can be, and there is enormous conflict within it, particularly from its far right “Freedom Caucus.” Even with shameless Republican gerrymandering, Trump’s inevitable overreach and screwups in make it a real possibility that Democrats could retake the chamber. (The Senate looks a bit harder, as Democrats would need to net four seats to regain control, and faced with a difficult map.)

I realize it sounds somewhat naïve to talk in these old school horserace terms when the Trump administration may have completely eviscerated American democracy by then. (We’ll see; that sort of transformation might prove harder than it looks.) But if we’ve lost faith in electoral politics altogether, then we are in a completely different conversation. The sharper question is whether the Democratic Party and other pro-democracy opposition movements in the US have the wherewithal to do what needs to be done to win.

But any way you look at it, November 2026 is barreling towards us with the inexorable momentum of a runaway locomotive. The only question is: who’s it gonna run over?

TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT

Trump is at the high water mark of his political career, with the possible exception of a few months from now if he succeeds in consolidating power even more and crushing all opposition as part of establishing his neo-fascist regime. But soon it will all inevitably begin to crumble.

As many have noted, Trump loves to run for office, and is undeniably good at it, the way demagogues and cheaters tend to be. But he is shitty at governing—the way incompetent greedheads and mental defectives tend to be—and soon he and his party, with control of all three branches of government, are going to own the ensuing shitshow. If you look at the trajectories of almost all US presidencies, the hope and optimism (and frequently, empty promises) with which they all begin almost inevitably end in anger and recrimination and thermostatic hostility from the electorate, deserved or not. Ask Joe Biden. It will be no different with Trump, and given his chaotic non-leadership style and general incompetence, likely much much worse.

In The New Republic, Jason Linkins seizes on this dynamic when he suggests that we “shove the Presidency down Trump’s throat.”

Trump is a bog-standard rich white guy whom the justice system is largely incapable of bringing to heel. He has powerful friends (oligarchs, Supreme Court justices), deep pockets, and a well-tempered ability to joust in the media.

But Trump has historically faltered when he’s been forced to contend with the actual pressure of the presidency and its myriad responsibilities (see also: the Covid-19 pandemic) because his ideas are bad and he doesn’t have a deep and abiding interest in public service to really make a sustained effort to confront, let alone solve, the biggest problems we face.

There is no way that a Trump presidency does not end in absolute chaos and vast damage and destruction on multiple fronts, from the return of polio to a federal abortion ban to various foreign policy disasters. How much people will give a shit is a separate matter. But since we Americans seem to care almost exclusively about our wallets, let’s focus on that.

With the notion that he is a champion of working people, Trump voters were sold the biggest bill of goods in modern American history—and, sadly, I include in that number some very dear friends and even loved ones. I will have very limited sympathy for them when it all goes Pete Tong. But as the opposition, it should be our goal to expose that con and wake these folks up. Yeah, he’ll inherit a historically robust economy—and oh, the injustice of that—but he will soon screw it up by skewing the system even more to benefit the rich, and the working and middle classes and the poor will pay the price.

In a recent Twitter video, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) laid it out very plainly. I’m going to quote it in full, because it is so clear and so direct:

So why is Trump talking about invading (or) buying Greenland, the Panama Canal? It’s because he’s trying to distract you.

The basic, bottom-line agenda for Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress is simple. They want to pass a massive tax cut for billionaires and corporations—all of Trump’s friends at Mar-a-Lago. And they want to pay for it by cutting benefits for seniors on Medicare, and poor children and families on Medicaid. That’s the bill they want to push through in the first 60 days of the new Congress.

Donald Trump doesn’t want you to know that. Republicans don’t want you to pay attention to the theft that is going to occur early in this year: another massive tax break to pad the pockets of the wealthiest people in the country, financed by devastating cuts to seniors and to poor children. And so this week it’s Greenland and the Panama Canal; who knows what it will be next week? But it is all an effort to distract you from the basic foundational agenda of Donald Trump: stealing from the middle class and the poor to pad the pockets of the wealthy and his corporate friends.

That is absolutely the Rosetta Stone of Trumpism. All the racism, misogyny, transphobia, Christian nationalism and the rest is very real, and very scary. But ultimately, for Trump and Musk and the mandarins of the GOP and the donor class that supports them, it is all in the service of this single, very simple, avaricious goal. Because that has been the animating principle behind right wing opposition to the New Deal, and the impetus for Reaganomics, and every other aspect of the Republican agenda, since 1932.

Don’t believe it? Witness the parade of billionaires filling Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s Cabinet and rushing to curry favor and be by his side, including the richest man in the world, Elon Musk himself, who will literally have an office in the White House. Or do you think that allegation of reverse Robin Hoodery is a level of mustache-twirling villainy too outrageous even for Trump? Lest we forget, in 2019 Trump and his children Eric and Ivanka and their family foundation were fined $2 million by a New York state judge and had the family foundation dissolved for illegally diverting charitable contributions— including to a children’s cancer charity—for personal and political purposes, a process commonly known as “stealing”

This past week, Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, had the huevos to sit in front of the Senate Banking Committee and speak in apocalyptic terms about how a failure to renew and extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the rich—you know, the one that added $1.7 trillion to the federal debt—would destroy the middle class, even though it overwhelmingly benefited the rich at the expense of the middle class. Because, trickle down I guess?

In an interview with Greg Sargent in The New Republic, the journalist Casey Michel notes that what we are seeing is “a global cast of characters of generally authoritarian regimes….that are now salivating at the prospect” of the new Trump administration. (Sargent points out that both Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, and his AG, Pam Bondi, were both registered foreign lobbying agents, not to mention the numerous foreign deals of Jared Kushner and the whole Trump Organization.) Michel:

(W)e have seen these plutocratic elements and things like the Gilded Age with robber barons in American history, but we have never seen such a singular cohort of so many deep-pocketed individuals with direct access to the White House. And beyond that, we have certainly never seen a president like Donald Trump who completely blurs and dissolves the lines between private interests and public policy….

They will not be targeted with sanctions. They will not be prosecuted. They will not be investigated. And frankly, they can use their money as much as these American oligarchs are in terms of influencing and accessing the Trump White House. This is really what it portends: an opening to any deep pocketed individual, whether American or not, to the White House, to the highest rungs of American power.

I doubt this is what the average American wants. The question is, can we cut through the fog of demagoguery, disinformation, and distraction enough to show them that this is happening? I am here to suggest that we can, because Trump & Co. will be so shameless and clumsy in declining even to hide it. Indeed: they seem openly proud. If the people of the United States have sunk so low that we will in fact applaud that—as Trump seems to believe, either out of arrogance or cynicism—then we are well and truly screwed, and deserve what we get.

But I’m not yet ready to believe that.

How long will the American people put up with openly being made shmucks by the richest among us, who are laughing while they do it? As Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: “A billionaire is in the White House, claiming to have the interests of the working class at heart, with the world’s richest man and his plentiful conflicts of interest operating alongside him. Democrats may be a party in crisis, but they should know how to fight this.”

If we do not seize control of that narrative and force the truth into the light, even for people who are stubbornly resistant to seeing it, it could certainly get worse, with even once reliably blue states like New Jersey bracing for downballot Republican candidates (in the governor’s race, for instance) who hope to emulate Trump.

From the Republican point of view, 21 and a half months is not a very long time to accomplish all that they want. They will have to move fast, and they will definitely try to do so. It’s true that Hitler destroyed Weimar Germany’s troubled democracy in just 53 days, but he was a far more disciplined tyrant. Many of the things Adolf did in that process— imposing massive tariffs on foreign goods, purging the bureaucracy of non-loyalists, threatening to turn the army loose against German civilians, promising the police impunity for acts of violence in suppressing dissent, deputizing goon squads like the SA as agents of the government, imprisoning his political opponents, arresting and deporting “undesirables,” offering amnesty and even lionization for his imprisoned followers—sound mighty familiar. And he did it all by legal means within the bounds of the Weimar constitution, and with the cowardly accession of the majority of German politicians, at least until the extralegal ploy of the Reichstag fire and the sweeping, PATRIOT Act-foreshadowing dictatorial powers that followed.  

I’m not saying that’s going to happen here. But I’m also not saying it’s not impossible that it can’t happen here. (Got that?)

SEND IN THE CLOWNS

It’s an absolute certainty that the second Trump administration will be a clown car of dysfunction, and it will surely crash sooner or later; ain’t no doubt about that. Of course, a clown with a handgun can do a lot of damage in the mean time—not to mention a clown with the nuclear codes, and a compliant Supreme Court.

The Atlantic’s George Packer has argued that Trump’s coalition is “more fragile than it now seems,” which is undeniably true, even if it seems pretty fragile already.

(Trump) will surround himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots, and because he has no interest in governing, they will try to fill the vacuum and turn on one another. The Trump administration, with a favorable Congress, will overreach on issues such as abortion and immigration, soon alienating important parts of its new coalition. It will enact economic policies that favor the party’s old allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off.

It’s quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history. But in the meantime, he will have enormous latitude to abuse his power for enrichment and revenge, and to shred the remaining ties that bind Americans to one another, and the country to democracies around the world.

The coalition that got Trump re-elected was dedicated to one thing and one thing only: getting Trump re-elected. It is not designed to govern. It is a temporary alliance of special interests whose goals don’t necessarily align beyond believing that Convicted Felon Donald Trump was their best path back to power. But the members of that uneasy alliance don’t agree at all on what to do now that they’ve got It. There is no better example than the ongoing intramural fight between Musk and MAGA, over immigration specifically.

However, we can’t just count on Trump self-destructing. He has already self-destructed so many times and in so many different ways, and yet America has not punished him in any appreciable form, let alone deserted him. So we need to figure out how to make the public rediscover its gag reflex and craft a cohesive campaign against him and the kakistocracy he represents.

The Washington Post reports that a majority of Americans strongly oppose Trump’s dictatorial plans. (If only they had known of those plans before the election and had some way to stop him!) Then again, the WaPo is where democracy died in darkness, where Bezos squashed an endorsement of Kamala, and where everyone from a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist to Jennifer Rubin has packed up and left in disgust. (Hugh Hewitt can finally have that corner office.) But at least it’s offering ”riveting storytelling for all of America.”

In that same WaPo poll, 40% of Americans express their confidence that Convicted Felon Donald Trump, who has said he would be a dictator—but just for a day—won’t really follow through. But just in case he does, Politico’s Asli Aydintasbas, formerly a journalist in Turkey under Erdoğan, offers this advice for combatting autocracy:

Trump’s return to power is unnerving but, as I have argued previously, America will not turn into a dictatorship overnight—or in four years. Even the most determined strongmen face internal hurdles, from the bureaucracy to the media and the courts. It took Erdoğan well over a decade to fully consolidate his power. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Law and Justice Party needed years to erode democratic norms and fortify their grip on state institutions.

Aydintasbas concedes that the United States is not immune to these patterns, but argues that our decentralized system of governance works to our advantage. (Franklin Foer makes a similar point in a recent article for The Atlantic about a new kind of blue state federalism as a hedge against Trump.)“Federal judges serve lifetime appointments, states and governors have specific powers separate from those granted federally, there are local legislatures, and the media has the First Amendment as a shield, reinforced by over a century of legal precedents.”

Sure, there are dangers, including by a Supreme Court that might grant great deference to the president. But in the end, Donald Trump really only has two years to try to execute state capture. Legal battles, congressional pushback, market forces, midterm elections in 2026 and internal Republican dissent will slow him down and restrain him. The bottom line is that the US is too decentralized in its governance system for a complete takeover.

Aydintasbas goes on to argue that we must not disengage—tempting as it is—but rather, stay connected. “Dancing, travel, meditation, book clubs—it’s all fine. But eventually, in Poland, Hungary and Turkey, opponents of autocracy have returned to the fight, driven by a belief in the possibility of change. So will Americans.” He also argues that the pro-democracy effort is itself re-energizing. “That’s why millions of Turks turned out to the polls and gave the opposition a historic victory in local governments across Turkey earlier this year. That’s how the Poles organized a winning coalition to vote out the conservative Law and Justice Party last year. It can happen here, too.”

Lastly, he counsels that the recriminations and infighting currently roiling the Democratic Party in the wake of Trump’s win are necessary in order to move forward, so long as the right lessons are learned, and a galvanizing candidate can be found to lead.

I’m gonna take him at his word.

IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

Let me emphasize in the strongest possible terms: in just 21 months we can deal Trump a major setback in the midterms and prevent some of his worst excesses from going any further. But that will depend entirely on what we do in the interim, including regrouping as a formidable opposition movement, obstructing him and his party at every step (rather than normalizing them with some feckless form of bipartisanship, which is tantamount to surrender), and above all, seizing control of the narrative to put the truth front and center and make it undeniable to all but the most brain-dead and Kool-Aid drunk.

Four years from now—or less—after Trump has done his damage and bottomed out and is a demented old man presiding over an epic shitshow riven with intra-Republican infighting, we may look back on this period when he was riding high and view it with vast irony. That moment is coming, but it can’t come soon enough….and it will be meaningless if we do not organize ourselves to capitalize on it.

Let’s go back to Aydintasbas:

Nothing lasts forever and the US is not the only part of the world that faces threats to democracy—and Americans are no different than the French, the Turks or Hungarians when it comes to the appeal of the far right. But in a country with a strong, decentralized system of government and with a long-standing tradition of free speech, the rule of law should be far more resilient than anywhere in the world.

Trump’s return to power certainly poses challenges to US democracy. But he will make mistakes and overplay his hand—at home and abroad. America will survive the next four years if Democrats pick themselves up and start learning from the successes of opponents of autocracy across the globe.

Preach.

When I was a young, newly commissioned infantry lieutenant, an old soldier told me that the key to getting through some of the highly challenging situations that awaited was to take each of them in small, psychologically manageable chunks. It was some of the best advice I ever got, and I use it all the time, even now, in all kinds of hard times…..this one included. If we think about the totality of four years of Trump, it’s too daunting and dispiriting—we’ll never make it. “You get through it day by day,” this old trooper told me. “Sometimes you get through it hour by hour.”

I expect to use that advice a lot in the coming 21 and a half months. But in the end, they will go by in a flash. Let’s make the most of them.  

If this was a test—and it was—we failed it. Bad.

The irony is, we were worried about Trump losing and trying to steal the election through various quasi-legal, parliamentary, and extrajudicial means including violence and the threat of violence. Instead, what happened was in its way far worse: A slim majority of the American people willingly handed him back the White House, in numbers that are resounding by contemporary standards.

Dobbs was supposed to galvanize American women into action, and yet it did not: Trump actually gained with white women. Insulting enormous swaths of the electorate didn’t matter either. (He also gained with Black voters, as he has done in each of his presidential runs, and with Hispanic voters especially, despite his regular racist invective and promise to deport some 11 million immigrants, which would devastate the entire country and that community especially.) Nor did staging a neo-Nazi rally, nor openly promising a dictatorship, nor being convicted of 34 felonies, nor trying to overthrow a free and fair election, nor being an adjudicated sex offender, nor behaving in the most rancid and vile way possible for any public figure let alone a candidate for president of the United States.

Once again, Adam Serwer’s observation from 2018 remains the lodestar of politics in the Trump era: all the things we think are horrible and disqualifying are, for many Americans, the very things they love. In other words, the cruelty is the point.

On Trump’s coattails, the GOP has also retaken the Senate and may yet get the House. As The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol wrote: “It’s hard to imagine a worse outcome.”

So this is who we are, and there can no longer be any denying it: a nation that flatters itself that it is an exemplar of freedom and democracy for the whole world has eagerly welcomed into power an openly fascist would-be despot, with mask off and teeth bared. All that remains is to ask whether we can survive and overcome that tragic mistake, and if so, how.

HOPE: A TRAGEDY (WITH APOLOGIES TO SHALOM AUSLANDER)

Walking around my neighborhood this morning, the feeling was somber and grim, but very different than it was on November 9, 2016, the day after Hillary lost, when people were visibly shocked, much as they were the day after 9/11. Now we are all like grizzled veterans who have already been through the wringer, even if we know it will be worse this time. But at least this time we know.

In a way, the Harris campaign inadvertently offered a kind of cruel, Lucy-and-the-football hope. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance in late June, there was a sort of garment-rending resignation in Blue America to the inevitability of a Trump victory. But Joe’s historic decision to step aside in favor of Kamala raised our hopes massively—and bitterly, as it turned out, setting us up for the brutal disappointment of last night, and all the PTSD and de ja vu all over again that came with it. It was a feeling a great many of us had dreaded re-living, but re-live it we did.

It is crushing to watch the bullies and bigots and assholes be rewarded for their hideous behavior and cackle at their triumph, but there is nothing we can do about that. (I remain convinced of the central role of misogyny, but ultimately that is just one tributary in a broader river of toxicity.)

For me, pettily, the worst part is the injustice that Kamala ran such an excellent campaign, under very difficult circumstances, and offered such brightness, hope, inclusion, and substance—in other words, she was the demonstrably better option by any reasonable metric. Meanwhile, Trump‘s campaign could hardly have been more incompetent, crude, vulgar, dishonest, demagogic, and just plain grotesque if its perpetrators had deliberately tried to make it so. (And they might have.)

Yet the American people decided they preferred that. And all of it on the heels of having seen Trump’s horrific performance in his first term, and all the criminality and scandals that have come out since then.

That, of course, is the most depressing and terrifying part of this whole debacle. As Esquire’s Charles Pierce—among others—noted, there’s no more pretending that we’re the victims of anachronistic, antiquated system that is foisting unpopular leaders on us, or of foreign interference (although that is now de rigueur in our politics), or of a “stolen election.” We choose Donald Trump of our own free will, and what that says about us as a people is damning.

Listening to pundits talk this morning, “inside baseball” style, about what this means for the midterms in 2026 or the next presidential election in 2028 is infuriating. Yeah, maybe all that stuff will be in play. But maybe we have just crossed a Rubicon, even if many of us—even (or especially) the political professional class—do not recognize it. American politics would never be the same after November 2016, and November 2024 may wind up marking an even steeper descent into the darkness.

BUCKLE UP

We are in for a painful ride ahead, and a lot of innocent people are going to suffer along the way. Casualty-wise, American democracy itself has already been dealt a grievous and possibly fatal blow. But we cannot give into despair. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols writes:

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.

How long will that work take? Longer than we’d like, for sure. Bill Kristol writes that “there is no guarantee that the American people will turn against Trump and his agenda. They knew fully well who it was they were choosing this time. Their support may well be more stubborn than one would like. It certainly has been over the last four years.”

That is undeniably true. But given how fickle the American people are, it is also true that the public might very quickly get buyers’ remorse once it remembers what it’s like to be ruled by a deranged toddler-king. And we can hasten that process of memory-refreshing as Trumpnesia and fantastical campaign promises give way to the concrete reality of an American autocracy.

But we best be prepared for the long haul, my friends.

I will write more—much more…..probably more than you want—about all aspects of this crisis in the weeks and months ahead. But for now, the most important thing is to put a tourniquet on the hemorrhaging morale that threatens to bleed out and render us incapable of carrying on, at a moment when carrying on is all we can do.

After the 2020 election, but before the insurrection January 6, I posted a blog titled “America Is a Lot Sicker Than We Wanted to Believe.” The point there was that Biden’s win shouldn’t even have been as close as it was. (Good times.) The diagnosis has only gotten worse since then, but the prognosis is a different matter.

More recently, I wrote Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm as a kind of contingency plan for the worst case scenario, always hopeful and even guardedly optimistic that we would be wise enough to avert it. (It was certainly within our power to do so.) Unfortunately, that optimism has proven misplaced. But when I was researching the book, I spoke to people like Zoharah Simmons, an icon of the Civil Rights movement; Jon Else, who worked with SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in that same movement; Alix Kates Shulman, a central figure in Second Wave feminism; and the Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff, Jr., a prominent leader in the NAACP and deacon of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC at the time of the horrific 2015 mass murder there. To a man and woman, all of them echoed some variation of what James Carroll, the esteemed author and a veteran of the Catholic Left and the antiwar and Civil Rights movements, told me for that same book:

Don’t focus on the outcome. Because if you start by doing that, you’ll be too discouraged to keep going. Focus on the importance of standing for the principle, and the truth, that’s at stake in the present moment.

Along those lines, there is a brief essay from Rebecca Solnit rocketing around the Internet this morning, and I have taken solace from it. It begins:

They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

All of my interviewees for Resisting the Right stressed the fact that a pro-democracy movement like the one needed to beat Trumpism does not require a re-invention of the wheel: there are numerous historical models, from the aforementioned Civil Rights Movement in the US, to Solidarity in Poland, to the People Power movement in the Philippines. People across the globe and throughout history have faced down tremendously brutal and entrenched authoritarian movements and prevailed. We can take inspiration and guidance from their examples.

Solnit makes that same point, writing that “People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry.” She goes on:

The Wobblies used to say don’t mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don’t have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who’s upset and check your equipment for going onward….

There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.

In case there was any doubt, last night brought it home: There is a deep sickness in America, deeper even than we knew or feared. It will not be rooted out, let alone eradicated (or even contained), overnight. But we have no choice but to carry on.

Well, dear friends, the election is now just a day away, and it can’t come soon enough. As some wag quipped online, it’s like the whole country is waiting for a biopsy to come back. The problem—as I am quipping, here—is that about a third of the country is rooting for cancer.

Can you believe we’re here again, looking out at a presidential election in which the openly fascist Donald Trump stands a decent chance of spending the next four years (or more) in the White House? After January 6, 2021, one would think he would have been cast out into the political wilderness, excommunicated for violating the most sacrosanct principle of participatory democracy, becoming the first US president ever to balk at the peaceful transfer of power, and to mount a violent coup to overturn the results of a free and fair election. (There are plenty of other reasons why Trump should be a pariah, but that alone ought to do it.)

You’d think that, wouldn’t you?

But nooooooooo…..

Instead, thanks to the cowardice and venality of the GOP, and to Trump’s own chutzpah and skill as a grifter, and the apparent proto-fascism of tens of millions of our countrymen, we are perched on the cusp of something even more dangerous. It is truly astonishing.

That said, bottom line upfront, folks: I believe we will win this thing. I just remain dumbfounded that it’s come down to this once again.

COWARDICE IS ITS OWN PUNISHMENT

Four years ago, my penultimate pre-election piece in 2020 was titled “Scariest Halloween Ever,” in which I reflected the conventional wisdom that Trump would not go quietly, if we managed to eject him at all:

Awaiting at the end of this already fraught process is the very real prospect of Trump refusing to abide by the results of the election (he has openly told us as much) precipitating a constitutional crisis, or even political violence to the point of civil war. He will do so under the veneer of legality, of course, by questioning the validity of the vote should it go against him, and angling to create enough havoc to get the race thrown into the courts, the state legislatures, and eventually Congress, where arcane rules favor his party…..

So the next seven days promise to be intense, and very possibly so do the 78 that follow, before we see who raises his right hand on Inauguration Day 2021 to be sworn in as President of the United States.

That prediction did not require the skills of Nostradamus, or even Kreskin, and it was subsequently borne out. But it all seems rather quaint now.

Of course, not everyone agreed, even at the time—like conservative columnist Ross Douthat of The New York Times, who around that same time confidently published a piece called “There Will Be No Trump Coup.” Naturally, he was fired, and today twirls a sign for a car wash in Encino.

Just kidding! He’s still a columnist for the Times, where he has never truly recanted that shameful prediction, and was last seen (metaphorically) stroking his chin in print about whether Kamala Harris is sufficiently accomplished to earn his vote over a twice-impeached, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and proven seditionist.

In the wake of January 6, the Republican Party had a priceless chance to rid itself and the whole country of Donald Trump, and make it legally impossible for him to hold power ever again. There was every reason to think its mandarins were prepared to do so, as their Faustian bargain with him had always been…..well, Faustian, which is to say uneasy, not on moral grounds but certainly on pragmatic ones. After the Insurrection, Trump was badly damaged politically, and the GOP never had a better opportunity to break it off. Yet the party’s leaders (“leaders”) chose not to do so, out of that same, pure self-interest. The lure of Trump’s rabid fan base was just too great, overwhelming any infinitesimal shred of principle, integrity, or sense of duty to the public that remained in the erstwhile Grand Old Party.

Four years later, we see where that ghastly decision has left us.

“What’s the downside of humoring him?” some anonymous Republican official infamously said after Trump lost in 2020, when he was first trying out the Big Lie. We got our answer of course, on that day in early January. People like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham would have been happy to see Trump cast into the wilderness, but they decided that they didn’t have to take an active hand in making that happen, that he would just drift away on his own and they could have it both ways, avoiding offending MAGA Nation while still ridding themselves of Donny. Instead, like some sort of bitterly ironic O. Henry story, their failure to act only perpetuated and exacerbated the nightmare that has brought us to this pretty pass.

In the podcast We Live Here Now, hosts Hanna Rosin and Lauren Ober remind us that in the immediate wake of January 6, even Trump himself took the conventional, eminently sensible line that the insurrectionists were criminals who deserved to be severely punished. “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy,” he said in a video he posted the next day. “To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

Within a few months, of course, he completely reversed himself once he realized that he could exploit this movement (and in particular the death of Ashli Babbitt) to rewrite history and potentially propel himself back into power. Now he talks of the insurrectionists as “we,” (attention Jack Smith), refers to those convicted and imprisoned for their actions as “hostages” and promises to pardon them—for what his promise is worth—dubbing January 6^th “a day of love.” And the GOP leadership (cough cough) has once again obediently followed his lead and started handing out the cone-shaped paper cups of Kool-Aid.

POLITICS AS PRO WRESTLING

When it comes to our political discourse, it’s worth stopping to consider just how far the Overton window has moved in the last nine years—or, shifting from the horizontal to the vertical, how low we have sunk.

There could be no better display of that than the hatefest at Madison Square Garden last Sunday, pointedly designed to recall the “America First” pro-Nazi rally held there in 1939, on the very eve of World War II. A parade of speakers engaged in some of the most vile rhetoric ever heard in American politics at the national level, including not only the already notorious “island of garbage” remark, but also “jokes” about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween, slurs against both Arabs and Jews, a reference to Kamala’s “pimp handlers,” and a speaker literally waving a crucifix who called her “the devil and the anti-Christ.” A sports talk radio jock dipped into the oldies to label Hillary “some sick bastard” (points deducted for gender fluidity) and railed about homeless vets “sleeping on their own feces on a bench in Central Park, but the fucking illegals, they get whatever they want, don’t they?” And it wasn’t just D-list nobodies and carnival freaks either: no less a right wing media icon than Tucker Carlson—an A-list carnival freak—cackled as he insulted Kamala’s racial identity and intelligence, saying, “She’s just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

Then Trump came onstage and declared with a straight face, “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion.”

Weirdly, it was only the warm-up act that the Trump campaign felt obliged to distance itself from; the rest it was fine with, apparently. But subsequent claims from Team Trump that the comedian’s horrid standup routine did not reflect the views of the candidate or his campaign were laughable (unlike the comic’s set), given that the Trump campaign chose him, approved his material, and loaded it into the teleprompter.

Apropos of Windows by Overton™, it’s become tedious to say, “Look at what Trump gets away with!,” but the heart of the matter is that his fans—millions of our countrymen—thrill to precisely that vulgarity and nihilism, and we should have learned long ago that it is counterproductive to cite it in trying to sway them. The threat he poses goes far beyond insults, of course, but the rhetoric bluntly signals the kind of fascist, racist, misogynistic, and wildly destructive regime he would foist on America in a second term. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote, “as an encapsulation of what Trump stands for as a candidate, and what he would bring to office, the rally was an effective medium for his closing message.”

There’s more to say, but it’s uncomfortable here on my shit-covered bench.

ENABLERS GONNA ENABLE

On the heels of that “scariest Halloween” essay, the final blog entry I posted before Election Day 2020 bore the somewhat highfalutin title “Unto the Breach.” In it, I wrote:

On Election Night, regardless of the results, Trump will publicly declare victory as early as he can plausibly get away with. (And as we know, Trump’s assessment of what he can plausibly get away with is a lot more broad than anyone else’s. And he is usually right.) He will then declare that any subsequent votes, via mail-in ballot or presumably even in-person tallies from late breaking counties, are fraudulent, a lie he has been trying to hammer into the American consciousness for months in preparation for just such a ploy.

Again, it does not require much vanity to say now that I was quite right, because lots of people predicted that—it was bleeding obvious. It is equally obvious that he intends to do so again, and the same remedies apply now as they did then:

It will fall to the much-maligned mainstream media, influential public authority figures, reasonable politicians on both the Democratic and Republican sides (let me know if you find any of the latter), and the general public itself to rise up and say, “Oh no, you don’t.”

Clearcut (Democratic) victories in any of those states—all of which are in play to a greater or lesser degree—will help undercut Trump’s efforts, but not even a clean sweep by the blue team will prevent Donald from trying to claim victory. In fact, the worse his apparent defeat the more desperate he will become, and the less he will have to lose in trying to most shameless and dangerous gambits. (He also informed us that he intends to send his army of lawyers into swing states to challenge the results.) So despite Trump’s best (worst) efforts, we have it within our power to put down this self-coup before it even begins by producing a margin of victory (that) renders all these maneuvers impotent.

We may see this election stolen, despite out best efforts—and let us gird ourselves to do everything we can to fight against that possibility—but the first step, and the one that has the most potential to neuter Trump’s malicious plans, and that will make any subsequent efforts of our own more viable, is to go to the polls in numbers like this country has never seen before. Because if we don’t turn out in this election, and then fight for the integrity of the results, there may never be another one.

All that remains so, and in fact, has only grown more truer in the intervening four years.

Also back in 2020, The New York Times laid the danger out very clearly in a landmark multipart editorial, opining that “Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II,” that Trump was “without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history,” and that he was conducting “an intolerable assault on the very foundations of the American experiment in government by the people.” The editorial concluded:

Mr. Trump is a man of no integrity. He has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States….Now, in this moment of peril, it falls to the American people—even those who would prefer a Republican president—to preserve, protect and defend the United States by voting.

The Gray Lady was 100% right then, and if anything, its assessment has only grown truer than ever since then.

I’ve been hard on the Times, but to its credit, its editorial board issued a similarly powerful indictment of Trump (and endorsement of Harris) this time around, headlined “The Only Patriotic Choice for President.” That was in stark contrast to the behavior of the billionaire oligarch owners of the LA Times and Washington Post, both of whom bent the knee to Donald and violated Yale history professor Tim Snyder’s Rule No. 1 of fighting fascism: Do not obey in advance. As The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols wrote on Twitter (don’t call it ‘X’): “Look, if you want to argue that newspapers should never endorse, that’s fine (if wrong). But to discover that principle a week before an election, against a man who has threatened to destroy the free press, is just cowardice and anticipatory obedience.”

And while Bezos’s craven act may yet succeed in currying favor with our despot-in-waiting, did it do anything to avoid allegations of bias toward the Post? Of course not. Soon after, that human skidmark Stephen Miller was seen crowing (also on Twitter) that Kamala’s campaign was so bad, even the left-wing Washington Post wouldn’t endorse her. So much for appeasing bullies.

Again, from my pre-election blog post four years ago:

Now we stand on the precipice of losing our entire representative democracy full stop, 244 years of flawed but noble dedication to government of the people, by the people, and for the people, brought to the verge of permanent neo-fascist kleptocracy in just a few years by one monstrous game show host, and—and this is the important part—his enablers.

Those enablers—in the GOP, in the media, on Bezos’s superyacht, and Musk’s, throughout public life, and in barrooms and beauty shops and ordinary family homes throughout America—are still enabling, and all of them are living examples of the most famous line from Renoir’s The Rules of the Game: “Everyone has their reasons.”

LAST EXIT BEFORE DYSTOPIA

So we are about to find out just how deep in the Kool-Aid our country is, and whether we are just treading water (er, Kool-Aid), or about to drown.

On that front, I am guardedly optimistic. Tactically speaking, Kamala has run a near-flawless campaign, and under very trying circumstances. The zeitgeist feels like it has subtly shifted in her favor in these closing days, with endorsements from everyone from the Insane Clown Posse (how do magnets work?) to Bret Stephens, a bevy of retired Republican politicians, former four-star generals, and Springsteen and Beyonce and Harrison Ford. (Scoff if you will, but neuroscientists tell us that they make a difference.) The numbers from early voting seem to favor the Democratic ticket, younger people are discovering the Access Hollywood tape via Tik Tok and are even more appalled than we were in 2016, and one highly regarded poll even has Kamala with a thin lead in ruby red Iowa, thanks to women voters.

Meanwhile, the wheels appear to be coming off the Trump train. He’s rambling incoherently at his rallies, miming blowjobs, alienating millions of crucial Puerto Rican voters, pissing off every American woman with a brain, posing in an apron at McDonald’s and in a blaze orange vest in a garbage truck with his name on it, even embracing RFK Jr in a metaphorical bearhug (sorry—phrasing) while going full General Jack D. Ripper over fluoride in the water and our precious bodily fluids. His brazen incitements to violence have become routine now, to include suggesting Liz Cheney face a firing squad. (Let’s be real: The specificity of “nine rifles pointed at her” is clear, but even if you think he just meant she’d never been in combat, was that any better, coming from Cadet Bone Spurs?) You’d almost think that, Producers-like, he’s trying to lose. If you were attempting to engineer a losing presidential campaign, can you think of much else you would do to drive away voters?

But it could still go south for us. We all have PTSD from November 6, 2016, and the right is doing its best to turn that into a sense of apathy and fatalism in order to depress the vote. But the flipside is that it is keeping complacency among the left (ha!) at bay and spurring us all to action.

This past weekend, “Saturday Night Live” had a sketch making fun of folks like me, privileged white people who are apoplectic about the prospect of another Trump term. It was funny, and

reminiscent of a sketch the show ran after the 2016 election that hit the same point. But what’s worth remembering is that SNL wasn’t chiding privileged white people for suddenly caring: it was chiding us because we are so late in waking up and doing so.

If we manage to avoid catastrophe tomorrow (Guy Fawkes Day, as luck would have it), and in the days that follow before a Harris victory is certified, we may be in for a lot of snickering about how we all overreacted. Bring it on, say I. That’s how it goes when you avoid a disaster: no one appreciates just how bad it might have been. In fact, that snickering has already begun, and not only the right wing media, but also from the likes of McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, in a condescending piece called “This Is Not the End of America,” which suggested that all will be fine even if Trump wins. Of course, even in the best case scenario of a Harris victory, snickering will be the least of our problems. To get to Inauguration Day, we will still have to deal with Trump’s attempts to steal the election…..and even if we succeed on that count, there will still be a low-level right wing insurgency to reckon with over the long term, fed by the poison that has long been in the American bloodstream, but that Trump has stirred up to unprecedented post-1865 levels.

So as the saying goes, don’t panic—vote. That is step one, even before we worry about how to combat Trump’s Big Lie 2.0. We can overwhelm Trump with numbers and render his schemes untenable. Of course, he will claim victory regardless, but we can make it harder for him to perpetrate this fraud, and less likely that he will succeed.

It’s a subtle difference, but where Coppins—the author of a recent biography of Mitt Romney—seems to think fears of Trump 2.0 are overblown, the Rev, William Barber II made a more nuanced point in speaking to David Remnick on “The New Yorker Radio Hour” back in 2017, acknowledging the danger while rallying our determination that we can still prevail:

People made it through slavery, people made it through the denial of women’s rights; people made it through the Depression in this country; people made it through apartheid and Jim Crow. It‘s our time to stand up and be the moral dissenters, the moral defibrillators, and the moral dreamers and to make it through this moment and use it to change the course of history, to change America, and—in some ways, if we work together—to change the world.

Regular readers of this column will recognize those words because I’ve quoted them before. They are not meant to minimize the threat of Trump and white Christian nationalism, which will not disappear even if we beat Trump tomorrow. But they remind us that fascism has been defeated before, and will be again. 

IN THE FIELDS BEFORE THE FLOOD

So depending on how things go tomorrow, and in the days and weeks that follow, we will embark on one of two very different agendas.

In the event of a Trump victory, we will have to mount a highly disciplined non-violent program of active resistance if we hope to preserve the battered and tattered remnants of the republic after four more years of kakistocracy, years that promise to make Trump’s first term look like tea time at the Plaza. 

In the happier event that we succeed in beating this motherfucker, we will have to mount an equally disciplined campaign to improve American governance and inoculate our democracy for the long term against the kind of neo-fascist right wing authoritarianism that Donald represents, a movement which obviously has legs, and will carry on even the cheeseburgers and Diet Cokes have done their work with him.

Neither path will be easy, to say the least. But—shameless plug coming—you can read about both of them in my book, Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, available wherever reading material is sold, or direct from the publisher, OR Books, here in New York. In it, I conclude that “Historians will have it easy when it comes to telling the story of the United States in the early 21^st century. It will be one of two tales.”

In one scenario, the US—the first country on Earth to establish a representative democracy—tragically committed a kind of political suicide, carelessly allowing the rise of a ruthless right wing regime that used the very mechanisms of that democracy to destroy it. Terrible as that was, the autocrats succeeded only because too many Americans were not sufficiently bothered by the threat and could not rouse themselves to stop the small minority that were delighted by it; by the time a significant number awoke to the emergency they were in, it was too late. It was an especially bitter fate, given that the country had recently succeeded in removing that autocratic party from office, only to foolishly let it seize power again. 

In the other scenario, that same country, born in outrageous contradiction, stained with original sin of slavery and genocide, somehow managed to halt a homegrown autocratic threat, and in the process, fundamentally began remaking itself to be true to the democratic principles it pioneered.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

People, I am here to tell you: there is a darkness on the edge of town. Whether or not it ultimately overwhelms us remains to be seen. The good news is that, to a great extent, the answer is up to us. So once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English American dead.

Now there is nothing more to talk about—all that remains is to act. So I’ll end this essay the same way I ended that one, with the banal but absolutely correct observation that, one way or another, tomorrow will be a historic day for these United States, an acid test of just how ill—or well—our country really is, and a decisive moment for what shape America’s future will take, with implications for decades to come.

I’ll see you on the other side.

**********

Illustration: Stephanie Villagran