Is there a workable exit strategy?
Brian Beutler and JV Last had a conversation you really should attend to. Is Rebuilding Even Possible? considers what happens to whatever is left of the country after Donald Trump.
Trump could drop dead tomorrow. He will inevitably, leaving in his wake the ashes of what was, for better or worse, the world’s democratic hegemon. It at least helped put fascism in its grave for roughly 70 years. Fascism was undead in that grave and sleeping on the damp earth of its homeland, but buried.
I see no way for MAGA not to wither and die once Trump is gone from office. (How and when is in question.) No one on the GOP side is going to cower before JD Vance should he become president under Article II and/or the 25th Amendment. The men behind Project 2025 will do their best to make Vance dance to their tune, one he already knows.
Trump has taught the GOP how to game the system permanenely in their favor without legal consequence. He and his close allies identified the weak points in our system of government and exploited them to the point of breakage. They won’t need his encouragement to dismantle it further. But without Dear Leader as enforcer, it’s not clear if the momentum for it will die with him once the people realize how much worse their lives are becoming.
But what comes next? Are there any signs those still committed to a democratic republic have a vision and, critically, a plan for rebuilding a liberal democratic state better and more robust than this failing one? Or will they just try to make do, to attempt to restore the old and familiar under the illusion that what wasn’t working and what spawned Trumpism is what Americans actually want restored?
Beutler and Last spitball the possible and less possible of what lies ahead. We already know what lies beneath.
“The base assumption,” Last believes, “is that you get like an overwhelming rejection of the the world we live in. And I think that a reasonably large percentage of the people like this [Trumpism], they voted for it. They want this. And it’s not a majority. It’s not a plurality, but it’s enough. It’s enough to make liberalism untenable.”
Beutler is less pessimistic, but not dramatcially so. Does that group of people begin shifting now that Trump is murdering people in boats in the Caribbean? Now that farmers are under stress and people lose jobs under the stress of Trump’s tariffs?
Me? I feel as if I’m raging to too little effect against the dying of the light.
* * * * *
Have you fought dicktatorship today?
50501
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense