Tag: trump

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.

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