The author of “On Tyranny”, Yale history professor and expert on democracy, Timothy Snyder writes that he had a dream he was in the Empire State building on 9/11 and knew the building was going to come down but nobody believed him.
Yeah. Not to hard to understand what’s going on there:
I have the Cassandra feeling this spring because it is so obvious where all of this is heading. President Trump tells a big lie that elections are rigged. This authorizes him and others to seek power in extra-democratic ways. The lie is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting, and that gives state legislatures themselves the right to decide how to allocate the electoral vote in presidential elections.
The scenario then goes like this. The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression. The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states. State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote. The House and Senate accept that altered count. The losing candidate becomes the president. We no longer have “democratically elected government.” And people are angry.
No one is seeking to hide that this is the plan. It is right there out in the open. The prospective Republican candidates for 2024, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, are all running on a big lie platform. If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way. The big lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one. Any candidate who tells it is alienating most Americans, and preparing a minority for a scenario where fraud is claimed. This is just what Trump tried in 2020, and it led to a coup attempt in January 2021. It will be worse in January 2025.
9/11 led us to the invasion of Iraq, the foreign policy disaster that marked our century. 1/6 leads us to a catastrophe on that scale, but inside our own country. It is not at all clear that the plan to take power undemocratically will work, but it is clear that it will generate a lot of resistance. African Americans are right now being told the absurd lie that the problem in America is that it is too easy for them to vote. As the scenario plays out, all Americans will face an open denial of everything they have been told about their country.
In such a scenario, it is not clear what the armed forces or civil servants would do. Most likely they would fracture. An oath to defend the Constitution is hard to honor when it is unclear what it means. Both those who were stealing an election and those who were defending votes would claim that the Constitution was on their side.
The Supreme Court would rule, but would anyone pay attention? Those who have decided to overthrow democracy believe that the Court is on their side, which is why they are proceeding as they are. If they were proven wrong in January 2025, it would be too late; they would not change course. Those who are defending voting rights expect the Court to rule against voting, since that is what it generally does. If the Court rules against voting in the setting of antidemocratic regime change, this will seem screamingly illegitimate to a very large number of Americans. No Court, no Constitution. No Constitution, no rule of law. No rule of law, widespread violence. The collapse of the United States follows.
When Trump told his big lie, the airplane hit the building. What unfolds from there has a certain logic. It can be stopped, but only if it is understood. Everything happens fast. It is so easy to look away, to imagine it was all an accident, to think that institutions will save us. They will only save us if we save them first.
The anti-voter laws proposed and passed by Republican state legislatures around the country move the scenario to its next step. Halting them might well be the only way to halt the scenario as a whole. Businesses that want to avoid chaos between now and 2022 and prevent system breakdown in 2024 would be well advised not to donate to politicians who repeat the big lie and suppress the vote.
We have to act now. This is what no one wants to hear. We want to believe in American democracy. We want to take pride in new laws, a growing economy, the end of covid. I get all of that. I want to feel that way too. I have not yet figured out how to tell this story. In waking life I feel as I did in the dream, facing those senior citizens. I couldn’t convince a single one of of them. And so I just stood in the doorway and kept talking. And woke up in the middle of the night and wrote this.
Is this hysterical? I honestly don’t know. But I completely believe that this is a huge threat and that they may very well succeed in fundamentally altering our system in such a way that a real collapse could follow. We are in a crisis and our leaders are either complicit or paralyzed. It’s only a matter of time before large numbers of people see this whole thing as hopeless and check out of political participation allowing the extremists to rig the game for good.
I have one flicker of hope in all this. As I was watching Trump speak in North Carolina last night, seeing him do all his greatest hits and put some new songs in the set list, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if he disappeared? He sort of has already without his social media platforms. But the idea of him is very much alive and well and it’s that promise of him running again, getting revenge, putting the Big Lie right that is fuelling this GOP lunacy at the moment. Maybe it has a life of its own and is transferable to Josh Hawley or Mike Pompeo. But I have my doubts. It’s Trump’s presence hovering over the whole scene like an evil clown that’s keeping them all engaged.
As I watched him last night I realized that he’s aging. His voice is a little thinner. He looks more haggard. He’s put on weight. He’s not the same guy he was.
Donald Trump ageing out may be our best hope to preserve our democracy long enough to plug the holes and then rebuild it from the bottom up.