It Can
Happen Here
Everyone who realizes
with proper alarm that Trump’s reëlection is a deeply dangerous moment in
American life must think hard about where we are.
November 9,
2024
On the
morning after Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, in 2016,
the White House was a funereal place. For weeks, Barack Obama and his inner
circle had worried about Hillary Clinton’s campaign—the failure to visit
crucial battleground states with sufficient frequency, the snooty crack about
“deplorables,” James Comey’s last-minute letter to Congress about her e-mails.
But, for all the troubling signs and missteps, they were optimistic that, in a
tighter-than-expected race, America would elect the first woman to the
Presidency. A legacy, a continuity, would prevail.
Trump’s shocking victory shattered those assumptions, and
that day, as many young, stricken staffers crowded into the Oval Office, Obama
tried to raise their morale and convince them that the election of an aspiring
autocrat did not spell the end of America’s long, if profoundly imperfect,
experiment in liberal democracy. History does not move in straight lines, he
told them. Sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. It was a
solemn, pastoral performance, and, on some level, Obama was also engaged in a
form of self-soothing. Two days later, in an interview with The New
Yorker, he again tried to keep despair at bay: “I think nothing is the end
of the world until the end of the world.”
Privately, Obama, the first Black man elected to the White
House, allowed himself to wonder if he had “come along too soon.” A
generational political talent, he had deployed the resonant language and
narrative of the civil-rights movement (“the fierce urgency of now”) to promote
broad-based reforms, particularly the Affordable Care Act. His residence in a
house built by enslaved Black men and women seemed to suggest, if hardly an end
to American racism, then surely a significant advance for the idea of a multiethnic
democracy. But now he was being succeeded by a figure of unmistakable
reaction—a poisonous demagogue, a bigot, who proposed a very different American
story. The system was “rigged,” Trump told his followers. Foreign leaders were
“laughing at us.” The country was a hellscape of ominous “illegal aliens,”
“rapists,” gang members, and psychotics from faraway prisons and asylums.
“American carnage” was his assessment of the country, and only he could set
things right.
Shortly before the end of Obama’s second term, the
President was in Lima, Peru, being driven to an event with some of his aides.
Along the way, he confided that he’d just read an opinion column implying that,
in electing Trump, tens of millions had rejected liberal identity politics.
“What if we were wrong?” Obama said. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he went on,
according to a memoir by one of his advisers, Benjamin Rhodes. “Maybe people
just want to fall back into their tribe.”
In 2016, Trump’s election could be ascribed to many things,
including a failure of the collective imagination. How had a figure who
combined the traits of George Wallace, Hulk Hogan, and Father Charles Coughlin
managed to win the Presidency? Just as Obama struggled to understand the social
and political roots of Trumpism, many Americans failed to grasp fully his
character, the dimensions of his malevolence. It was impossible for them to
absorb just what a threat he posed to international alliances and domestic
institutions, how contemptuous he was of the truth, science, the press, and so
many of his fellow-citizens. Surely, his most extreme rhetoric was an act.
Surely, he would “grow into the office.”
Trump’s reëlection, his victory over Kamala Harris, can no
longer be ascribed to a failure of the collective imagination. He is the least
mysterious public figure alive; he has been announcing his every disquieting
tendency, relentlessly, publicly, for decades. Who is left, supporter or
detractor, who does not acknowledge, at least to some degree, his cynicism and
divisiveness, his disrespect for selfless sacrifice? To him, fallen American
soldiers are “suckers.” Many of his former closest advisers—Vice-President Mike
Pence; his chief of staff John Kelly; Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff—have described him as unfit, unstable, and, in the case of
Kelly and Milley, a fascist. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump went
out of his way to dismiss his consultants’ blandishments to moderate his tone.
Instead, he pretended to fellate a microphone and threatened to direct the
military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing
about himself, as if to say, “Forget the scripted stuff on the teleprompter.
Listen to me when I go off-the-cuff. The conspiracy theories. The fury. The
vengeance. The race-baiting. The embrace of Putin and Orbán and Xi. The wild
stories. This is me, the real me. I’m a genius. I’m weaving!”
In the end, there was nothing Trump would not say, no
invective or insult he would not hurl. At Madison Square Garden, he gave the
platform over to supporters who spoke grotesquely about Puerto Rico, Jews,
trans people—no indecency was impermissible. His most distinctive television ad
was pure cruelty: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” His
disdain for women, which has been in evidence all his adult life, was only
amplified in the last weeks of the campaign, when, in Michigan, he said of
Nancy Pelosi, “She’s an evil, sick, crazy bi— It starts with a ‘B,’ but I won’t
say it. I want to say it.”
Trump was equally brazen about policy. There is no longer
any excuse for failing to see what a second Trump Administration may bring: The
mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A federal government stocked with
mediocrities whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader. A
contempt for climate policy, human rights, and gun control. A weakening
of NATO. An even more
reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary. An assault on the press. These
are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced
from the podium.
The news of Trump’s reëlection did not come with the same
shock as his first victory did. Joe Biden, for all his virtues and legislative
achievements, was a conspicuously unpopular President. At least fifty-five per
cent of voters in the major swing states disapproved of his performance in
office. And, by the time Biden came to terms with age and finally stepped
aside, Harris, despite all her energy and appealing intelligence, had precious
little time to run a campaign that could reasonably outdistance both that
dissatisfaction and her opponent. Trapped between her loyalty to Biden and the
need to separate herself from him, she played it safe and depended on the
electorate’s ability to distinguish between her manifest decency and the dark
chaos represented by Trump.
Despite her thrashing of Trump in their one debate, and his
campaigning at times as a disturbed man wandering from one rally to the next,
the prospects of Harris winning were never more than episodically encouraging.
When her aides were asked how they were feeling about the race, they would say,
“Nauseously optimistic.” In the end, Trump seems not only to have won the
popular vote and all seven battleground states but to have made inroads with
Latino and Black men wide enough to shatter the Democratic Party’s
long-standing and highly complacent understanding of its demographic
advantages.
How you interpret and prioritize the cascade of reasons for
Trump’s reëlection is a kind of Rorschach test. It will require a long
reckoning before anyone can conclude which of the leading factors—economic
anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s decline, Harris’s late
start—was determinative. In no way did Trump win a mandate as commanding as,
say, Ronald Reagan’s victories over Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and Walter Mondale,
in 1984, but, according to an early analysis by the Times, more
than ninety per cent of the counties in the country appear to have shifted
toward him since the last election. Both major political parties are broken.
The Republicans, having given themselves over to a cultish obedience to an
authoritarian, are morally broken. The Democrats, having failed to respond
convincingly to the economic troubles of working people, are politically
broken.
Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that this is a
deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are.
Rueful musings like Obama’s in 2016—What if we were wrong?—hardly did the job
then and will not suffice now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, the
Democrats need to assess how to regain the inclusive kind of coalition that
F.D.R. built in the teeth of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father,
not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.
That is one imperative. There is another. After the tens of
millions of Americans who feared Trump’s return rise from the couch of gloom,
it will be time to consider what must be done, assuming that Trump follows
through on his most draconian pledges. One of the perils of life under
authoritarian rule is that the leader seeks to drain people of their strength.
A defeatism takes hold. There is an urge to pull back from civic life.
An American retreat from liberal democracy—a precious yet
vulnerable inheritance—would be a calamity. Indifference is a form of
surrender. Indifference to mass deportations would signal an abnegation of one
of the nation’s guiding promises. Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s return not
only because it makes his life immeasurably easier in his determination to
subjugate a free and sovereign Ukraine but because it validates his assertion
that American democracy is a sham—that there is no democracy. All that matters
is power and self-interest. The rest is sanctimony and hypocrisy. Putin reminds
us that liberal democracy is not a permanence; it can turn out to be an
episode.
One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech
playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations,” “There is
only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a
good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought
valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and
protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when
Havel was elected President and, in a Kafka tale turned on its head, inhabited
the Castle, in Prague. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy,
he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but
that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here. ♦
