It’s hard to know exactly what kind of historical moment your in when you’re at the center of the maelstrom. I feel strongly that this is a crucible in America like very few in our history and I struggle daily to tamp down the rising panic. But not everyone sees it that way to, which I find very weird. Whether because of propaganda or self-preservation or just plain different worldviews, we are not all on the same page.
This piece by Jedediah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen in the Boston Review does an excellent job of analyzing three distinct views of our current situation:
One view, dominant at this point among mainstream liberals and centrists, is that the United States has entered a dangerous new era of authoritarian crisis. Following a playbook used in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, and other illiberal regimes, the Trump administration is attacking independent institutions such as the media and universities, turning the Justice Department and other government agencies into instruments of extortion and retaliation, manipulating official data, pardoning violent allies, dehumanizing marginalized communities, declaring endless emergencies, and preparing the military to suppress “the enemy from within.” The emerging authoritarian crisis is also a constitutional crisis, as an ever more emboldened and presidentialized executive branch sidelines Congress and the civil service, deploys troops domestically over the objections of state and local officials, and flirts with ignoring judicial rulings. Variously framing the threat as one of autocracy, kleptocracy, fascism, patrimonialism, gangsterism, or another cousin of authoritarianism, this view insists that things have ceased to be “normal.” American democracy is beginning to fall apart.
A second view, espoused by prominent voices on the left as well as some libertarians, asserts that Trump has not ushered in a new order so much as highlighted and exacerbated preexisting pathologies. It’s mainly more of the same. Following a standard Republican playbook, his administration has embraced sweeping tax cuts, a selective gutting of economic and environmental regulations, and hostility to abortion and affirmative action. With some coarsening of the discourse and hardening of anti-immigrant policies, we could be in Ronald Reagan’s America. This through line is no cause for comfort. Whether styled as homegrown fascism, racial fascism, or simply the unreconstructed core of American political ideology, more of the same means more harsh immigration enforcement (as in Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” or Obama’s record-setting deportation program), more vilification of dissidents (as in the Red Scares or Nixon’s “Enemies List”), more expansion of the national security state, and more runaway deficits that fail to address runaway inequality. The real constitutional scandal is not the sudden arrival of “executive lawlessness”—the War on Terror had that in spades—but a long-festering rot that has eaten away at our system’s ability to produce responsive governance and thereby created the conditions for Trump 2.0.
According to a third view, embraced by many of Trump’s advisors and supporters, U.S. politics are indeed undergoing transformation but in a familiar or at least not unprecedented way, as part of a process of constitutional regime change. Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory in 2024, after a campaign with more sharply defined stakes than in 2016, put a popular (if not quite majoritarian) imprimatur on such change. Following a playbook developed during the New Deal and refined in the civil rights era, Trump’s team is employing all the tools at its disposal to reshape the balance of power across state and society in line with campaign pledges to curb illegal immigration, shrink the federal workforce, restore religion in the public sphere, and advance a “colorblind” conception of racial equality. To be sure, some of these shifts may be alarming to those socialized in the prior regime. But that’s what happens in a constitutional democracy when voters choose the other side. And if there has been some overreach or misadventure, well, the same could be said of any regime change. This revolution in law and governance, moreover, is at heart a “counterrevolution”—not so much a turn toward any foreign model as a return to principles that prevailed before the assaults of wokeism and Warren Court liberalism, the rise of the administrative state, and the proliferation of identitarian rights.
Yeah, I’ll pick door number one for $10 billion, Alex. As they say:
The stakes of this disagreement are high, the shape of it disorienting. From within each script, people in the others tend to look either dangerously complacent or risibly hysterical. Americans are deeply divided not just over partisan preferences or “alternative facts” but over the basic direction and meaning of our politics.
The piece goes on to flesh all this out in some very interesting ways. There are not a lot of solutions to offer except for one big one. Door number one and door number two can, and must, find common ground because together they constitute the majority. So far, it’s an uphill task.
I saw “One Battle After Another” the other day and was struck by the message which was both clarifying and daunting: saving our country is going to be, as the title suggests, one battle after another. I think we just have to gird ourselves for the fight.