Welcome to the party, pals
The Atlantic this morning delivers a full spread of articles announcing the imminent demise of the Late Great United States of America, all part of its “If Trump Wins” series. There is growing alarm about another Trump presidency and reason for it. But it’s not as if Robert Kagan’s, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” just last week did not give many of us sleepless nights already.
Conventional wisdom has finally caught up with what Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) and Timothy Snyder (“On Tyranny“) have warned about for years. This Trump guy whom sane people treated as an ignorant, loudmouth jerk, and his red-hatted band of equally loudmouth sycophants and Beltway collaborators, are a genuine threat to the country’s existence. Have you heard? They ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There’s video.
Trump is out for revenge, writes David Frum. He will dump NATO, warns Anne Applebaum. His second term will be all loyalists, lapdogs and cronies, explains McKay Coppins. And with control of the Department of Justice, he’ll get away with it, predicts Barton Gellman.
Frum sounds the alarm:
A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.
It is satisfying that major outlets have finally discovered that “Trump and Trumpism [are] a direct existential threat to the future of U.S. democracy.” But a person can only take so much gloom and doom. I almost did not click on any of them.
An acquaintance I encountered last night could not take the stress 18 months ago and had checked out. She was resigned last night to doomsday arriving posthaste. While it’s nice that CW has figured out it is time to call fascism fascism and raise democracy’s DEFCON status, we must be careful not to overdo it.
Dr. Helen Caldicott of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the anti-nuclear group, once tried in her talks to shock listeners into action about the threat of nuclear weapons. By blasting her audiences with a flood of frightening statistics (I attended one of those speeches in person) the crusader sometimes accomplished the opposite:
PSR Executive Director Jane Wales, while acknowledging a huge debt to Caldicott, said in 1984 that the time for the “bombing runs” (as insiders call the speech) was past. “We knew it was past when someone interrupted the speech one evening, actually interrupted it, and said, ‘We know all that, but what can we do?’”
So, don’t panic. The antidote to despair is not less engagement, but more. Get busy. Celebrate little victories.
I’m assembling mailing lists for the 5th Ed of For The Win right now. Two years ago 40% of Idaho’s counties either had no functioning Democratic committees (or no sign of them on the Net). Today all do. Two years ago an even higher percentage of Iowa’s counties were MIA. Today only 5 are. Sure, it’s red Idaho and Iowa, but it’s dramatic progress in two short years. Nobody knows about that. Now you do.