John Horgan is a widely published science writer. In this article, he expresses his sorrow that Scientific American bowed to pressure to oust its outstanding Chief Editor Laura Helmuth. Right wingers love to attack Democrats for “censorship,” but it is Republicans who forced Helmuth’s ouster and Republicans who ban books.
On election night, Sci Am editor Laura Helmuth called Trump voters “racist and sexist” and “fucking fascists” on the social media platform BlueSky, a haven for Twitter/X refugees. Yeah, she lost her cool, but Helmuth’s labels apply to Trump if not to all who voted for him.
Trump spews insults and wins the election. Helmuth loses her job. Critics of cancel culture cheered Helmuth’s cancellation. I’m guessing we’ll see more of this sickening double standard in coming months and years.
I’m writing this column, first, to express my admiration for Helmuth. She is not only a fearless, intrepid editor, who is passionate about science (she has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience). She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand–a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age.
I’d also like to address the complaint that Helmuth’s approach to science was too political and partisan. Yes, under Helmuth, Scientific American has had a clear progressive outlook, ordinarily associated with the Democratic party. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden four years ago, shortly after Helmuth took over, and Kamala Harris this year.
Sci Am presented scientific analyses of and took stands on racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, climate change, gun violence and covid vaccines. Critics deplored the magazine’s “transformation into another progressive mouthpiece,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Biologist Jerry Coyne says a science magazine should remain “neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology.”
What??!! As Coyne knows, science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism. Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.
I became a staff writer at Scientific American in 1986, when Jonathan Piel was editor. The magazine bashed the Reagan administration’s plan to build a space-based shield against nuclear weapons. I wrote articles linking behavioral genetics to eugenics and evolutionary psychology to social Darwinism. I got letters that began: “Dear Unscientific Unamerican.” My point: the magazine has never been “neutral,” it has always had a political edge.
Under Piel, as well as successors John Rennie, Mariette DiChristina and Helmuth, the magazine published plenty of articles with no political ramifications. But if you just stick to uncontroversial science, and you decline to take a position on topics like climate change or reproductive rights, you aren’t “neutral.” You are just looking the other way.
Meanwhile, Trump is vowing to cut federal aid to schools “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.” And The Guardian reports that Trump is filing lawsuits against The New York Times and other media “that have been critical of him.”
Using your power to silence your opposition sounds pretty fascist to me. Will the next editor of Scientific American have the guts to challenge Trump and his minions? Will anyone?
Greg Olear is a novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. He has a long memory and thinks clearly. When I read his work, I hear echoes of what I’m thinking.
We are a few days removed from an orange guillotine slicing through the neck of American democracy. The chicken that is our body politic, already dead but in denial, is running around with its head cut off, and will continue to do so until January 20, when Donald the Conqueror picks up that severed head with his tiny hands and holds it up for all the bewildered world to behold, in triumph. Trump and triumph have the same Latin root word, the English major in me is compelled to point out.
(JD Vance—who I’ve been warning for months is an actual fascist—is among the numerous Dark Enlightenment thought leaders who use the word “regime” to mean the Deep State, so it is not without irony that these same Nazis will be replacing the bureaucracy that is the lifeblood of our country with an actual regime—regime, from rex, for king.)
Already the Trump Reich is licking its chops (literally as well as figuratively, one imagines), preparing to implement its ugly mass deportation program. That this idea polled well with Americans, and was supported enthusiastically by Latino men in particular, boggles the mind. Mass deportation is a quaint euphemism for genocide. If the new regime has its way, this will be more of a pogrom than a program. The suffering will be unimaginable; the effect on the economy Trump voters claim to care so much about, devastating.
And the new regime will seek vengeance upon its enemies. The loyalists who will actually be running the country after the professional civil servants are purged—angry, sadistic men like Mike Davis and Stephen Miller and Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon and Kash Patel—have been promising this for months. Trump’s perceived enemies, everyone from Jack Smith to Adam Schiff to Taylor Swift, are potentially in real danger. The generals who tried to warn us about him, the leaders of the intelligence community who know what he really is, his political rivals—these stalwarts of democracy may well end up at the wrong end of a firing squad. I am not exaggerating. Ivan Raiklin, Flynn’s Renfield, fancies himself the Minister of Retribution. Vengeance, more than anything, is what the new king wants, and vengeance he will have.
President Biden, for all the good he’s done, has failed for four years to fully grasp the dire threat we face from the despotic MAGA forces and their allies in Moscow, Beijing, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and legacy and social media. Putin has been openly waging war on the West since 2014, when he invaded and occupied the Crimea—a violation of the international order President Obama essentially chose to ignore. Like Neville Chamberlain, Obama did not want a war, and like Neville Chamberlain, he did not understand the nature of the psychopath he was up against; unlike Neville Chamberlain, he was not leading a country recently removed from four years of brutal war, and unlike Neville Chamberlain, he had the precedent of Neville Chamberlain to learn from. It’s only gotten worse from there.
The real tragedy is: We didn’t need to send in troops to beat the Russians. All we needed to do was treat the information war Moscow was waging on us as an actual front in an actual war, and give Ukraine as many weapons as it needed to do the dirty work for us. Biden did neither, and his entire legacy, all the good work he’s done, may wind up meaningless because of these failures.
Unless he’s working behind the scenes with the DOJ to clean up the mess—and nothing the somnambulant Merrick Garland has done, or rather not done, these past four years gives me any confidence that he is—Biden has already waved the white flag.
“Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory,” Biden said yesterday. “And I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That’s what the American people deserve.” That’s what we deserve, you see—our elected officials to lead us into the abattoir while assuring us, as Biden also did, that “[t]he American experiment endures, and we’re going to be okay” as long as we “keep going” and “keep the faith.”
Even worse is this: “Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable. We all get knocked down, but the measure of our character, as my dad would say, is how quickly we get back up. Remember, a defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle.” A transition to permanent Nazi rule looms, and Biden wants us to jam to “Tubthumping.”
Jim Stewartson, who has been shouting from the rooftops about the threat of Trump’s muscle for years now—and who is certainly in the crosshairs of Flynn and Raiklin—articulated this perfectly, in his open letter to Biden:
You had the power to fix this. You should have had the information to understand the threat that we were facing. Instead you treated it like just another Democratic presidency, hoping that if the economy were good enough it would fix the problem with all the “MAGA extremists.”
You were wrong. You didn’t listen to those of us who told you who tried to steal the election from you in 2020. You let your DOJ and FBI drag their feet with the perfect timing to let Donald Trump and his co-conspirators go free. You prosecuted all the foot soldiers and never went after the “generals.” You prioritized “norms” and the “independence” of the DOJ over us. You failed to lead, to demand accountability — from Merrick Garland, Chris Wray and the others who let this happen on your watch.
I hear you talking now about “all that we accomplished” in your “historic administration” as if that will have any impact on the psychopaths who will destroy everything that you have done. You could have been the inflection point to preserve our world and make it better, instead you presided over a transition into an authoritarian global nightmare.
Sadly, Biden did not, as Stewartson laments, understand the threat we were, and are, facing—even though he is old enough that he was alive during World War II, and thus should be able to recognize Nazis when he sees them. What was done to counter Russian propaganda? To stop Elon Musk, Putin’s buddy and an enemy of democracy, from buying and destroying Twitter? From eradicating the cancer that is Fox News from its position of journalistic authority?
The historian Heather Cox Richardson had this to say about the election in her own post-partem piece:
But my own conclusion is that both of those things [inflation and racism/sexism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Trump admires Hitler, but he’s not Hitler—not even America’s Hitler, as the VP-Elect once called him. He is more Marshal Pétain or Vidkun Quisling: the nominal head of a Nazi puppet regime. As I explained a month before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin is Hitler. Trump’s return to the White House is, among other things, the end of American exceptionalism, the end of American hegemony, the end of the Pax Americana. You know—setbacks.
Cue up the “U-S-A” chants, we are soon to become a Kremlin vassal state! Maybe the idea that the United States is better than everyone else, that the moral arc of the American universe always bends towards justice, is an obvious myth we choose to believe in despite ample evidence to the contrary—kind of like how the media doesn’t dispute that the woman who went to the polls with Trump on Election Day wearing dark oversized sunglasses was the real Melania.
Are Americans inherently good, freedom-loving, devoted to free speech and free worship, committed to all people being created equal? That’s our founding myth, and isn’t it pretty to think so? But a glance at history shows it’s not true. Bodies in graves and jails across America disprove it. We’re freedom-loving when times are easy, devoted to speech and worship we like with lip service to the rest, and divided about our differences since our inception. That doesn’t make us worse than any other nation. It’s all very human. But faith in the inherent goodness of Americans has failed us. Too many people saw it as a self-evident truth that the despicable rhetoric and policy of Trump and his acolytes was un-American. But to win elections you still have to talk people out of evil things. You can’t just trust them to reject evil. You must persuade. You must work. You have to keep making the same arguments about the same values over and over again, defend the same ground every time. Sometimes, when people are afraid or suffering and more vulnerable to lies, it’s very hard. Trump came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (upside down, but still) and too many people assumed their fellow Americans would see how hollow that was. That assumption was fatal.
Not a setback, you see. Fatal. Fatal. Nazis are destroyers, and the new regime is here to destroy, just like their Uncle Ted wanted:
It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of society of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in destroying the old society.
That’s Ted as in Ted Kaczynski. These people worship at the altar of the Unabomber!
The best time to defeat Nazis is before they gain any power, as any cursory glance at the history of 20th century Europe makes clear. From Warsaw, in a country that was ravaged by the Third Reich like no other, Dustin Du Cane points out an awful truth in his piece today, “Four Wasted Years”: “Hitler wasn’t defeated by voting, ground roots campaigning, sanctions or sending Poland a tank a week,” he writes. “He was defeated by propaganda, curtailing the free speech of Nazis, by a war machine and by millions of men in boots with rifles, tanks and bombers.”
And as I’m not the first to point out—someone else tweeted this, and I can’t remember who—the Germans at least had the good sense to put Hitler in jail after his failed coup attempt, before handing him the keys to the kingdom. Us? We threw the book at some Proud Boys and let Trump, Flynn, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the rest of the coup plotters continue to strut around broadcasting their hate, rubbing our noses in their stinky MAGA shit. As documented indefatigably by Stewartson, my friend Gal Suburban, and very few members of the legacy media, the coup plotters spent four years telling us what they planned to do, like the bad Bond villains they are, while the DOJ basically ignored them. But hey, at least Merrick Garland went after Ticketmaster.
In terms of analyzing why Kamala Harris lost, Noah Berlatsky wrote the best post-mortem piece I came across, for Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice. There was a lot in his piece to be optimistic about—if not for the fact that we are capitulating to a vengeful sexual predator who has been granted full immunity by his fellow fascists on the Supreme Court for any “official act,” up to and including siccing the military on civilians and executing his perceived enemies. Berlatsky says:
Democrats hoped to stave off fascism in the Trump era by never losing elections. That was never feasible, and now that it has failed, we are all facing the miserable consequences of not prosecuting Trump immediately, and vigorously, after January 6.
Those consequences will be real, devastating, and long lasting. But it’s important to realize that the Republicans have not established a permanent or even solid mandate for all of Trump’s ugly orange dreams. As they won, so they can lose — which is why one of MAGA’s core goals going forward will be to subvert free and fair elections. Fighting for democracy, as well as helping each other survive the coming fascist assault, will be key in the years ahead.
To have a free election, candidates have to be free to run without fear of reprisal from the ruling party. Even if the Orange Grover Cleveland vouchsafes us midterm elections in 2026—and we cannot assume that he will—how comfortable will the opposition party be in exercising its free speech as it campaigns against him?
If we continue on this path, and Biden sits back and watches as Trump dismantles the federal regulatory agencies, and the FBI, and the CIA, we do have a few things working in our favor:
First, unlike Russia and other states where dictatorships have arisen, the United States has a long history of democratic rule (aspirational democratic rule, but still). We have that to fall back on.
Second, Trump is old and uninterested in governance and unlikely to last long in office, because of retirement, death, or the 25th Amendment. Vance is worse, because he’s younger and smarter and more ideological, but he lacks the political “rizz” necessary to maintain a cult of personality. This is a guy who plausibly fucks couches. Even when enabled by Peter Thiel and Musk, can he really hold onto power?
Third, most Americans—not many; most—will hate the stuff the new regime will roll out, including the mass deportations they once cheered on. As my friend Nina Burleigh, whom no one ever accused of peddling “hopium,” wrote on Wednesday, we Americans
are also fickle. After four more years of the right running amok, when Trump 2.0 kleptocrats have not delivered the fantasies Orange has peddled of prosperity for all, it will dawn on enough Americans that this regime will never fill the deep and endless yearning for our birthright—HAPPINESS. Because: Who can? And then, angry again, we will give this claque of oafs, orcs, rapists, misogynists, fake Christians, racists, neo-Nazis, and liars the boot they deserved last night.
The question is whether enough Americans will rise up to do so, or if they will just blame all the failures on Biden, as Fox News and Facebook will instruct them to do, and go back to watching football. Me, I like to think even the gun-toting MAGA won’t like it when the jackboots come for their friends and family members.
For me, the real glimmer of hope is that the leaders of the Blue States seem prepared for the fight ahead, and, unlike Biden, willing to take it on. Kathy Hochul and Leticia James, the governor and attorney general of my state of New York, were particularly reassuring about this. The latter, no fan of Trump, said this:
As Attorney General, I will always stand up to protect New Yorkers and fight for our rights and values. My office has been preparing for a potential second Trump Administration, and I am ready to do everything in my power to ensure our state and nation do not go backwards. During his first term, we stood up for the rule of law and defended against abuses of power and federal efforts to harm New Yorkers. Together with Governor Hochul, our partners in state and local government, and my colleague attorneys general from throughout the nation, we will work each and every day to defend Americans, no matter what this new administration throws at us. We are ready to fight back again.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called lawmakers on Thursday into a legislative special session next month “to safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.”
In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker said on Thursday he would ask his state’s legislators, possibly as soon as next week, to address potential threats from a second Trump term. “You come for my people,” Mr. Pritzker said at a news conference, “you come through me.”
That is the kind of leadership we need—not platitudes about setbacks and “we’ll get ‘em next time.”
The time to take on the Kremlin was four years ago. Unless Biden does something unexpected in the next 70-whatever days—a Jayden Daniels “Hail Maryland” completion to save democracy—that moment has passed. Putin will soon have his puppet back in the White House, this time with the backing of the Supreme Court, the Senate, probably the House, and a staff of bloodthirsty fascist true believers; that is a far bigger victory for Moscow than the U.S. making like the USSR and disbanding. Sorry, Abe Lincoln, but I would rather live in a smaller democracy than a Trump dictatorship.
And as much as I’d like to think otherwise—and I assure you, I’ve spent the last few days trying—it’s foolhardy to believe that the immediate future will be anything but a Trump-branded sneaker stomping on a human face. Nazis don’t stop being Nazis because you show them decency and respect, as Biden and Harris have both stupidly chosen to do. We cannot expect that Trump or anyone in his regime will be anything other than what they are, or will do anything other than what they’ve told us they plan to do.
Again this week, I quote the German poet Kurt Tucholsky: “My life is too precious to put myself under an apple tree and ask it to produce pears.”
Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump, and host of “The Focus Group” podcast.
In this article, she appeals to fellow Republicans to stand up and speak out about Trump. I hope her article is read by George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Lamar Alexander. They know how dangerous Trump is. They know he is destroying the Republican Party.
She writes:
I HAVE A QUESTION FOR FORMER Trump administration officials, Republican electeds (and former electeds), business leaders, and conservative writers and pundits who recognize Donald Trump for the threat he is. Actually, it’s a question for anyone on the right who knows what Trump’s re-election could mean for the country, for liberal democracy, and for the world—and, who, in the face of this threat, has decided to maintain either a posture of silence or both-sides-are-bad neutrality.
My question is this:
How are you going to feel if Trump wins on Tuesday by an extremely narrow margin?
I suspect you’ll spend the next four years holding your breath.
Because if Donald Trump does a tenth of what he has promised—pulls the United States out of NATO, abandons Ukraine and sides with Vladimir Putin, puts RFK Jr. and Elon Musk in charge of serious parts of the American government, rounds up 15 million undocumented immigrants into camps and deports them, seeks political retribution against those who opposed his candidacy—I suspect you’ll come to regret your silence when you could have made a difference.
I can see you holding up your hands to show us how clean they are. Saying, “But I said Donald Trump was a threat! I said I wouldn’t vote for him! What more do you want from me?”
And I get that. I do. The problem is that this moment demands more from all of us.
It demands clarity. And it demands your leadership.
Over the course of your career you’ve asked people to trust you. Either by voting for you, or listening to your advice, or relying on your judgment and analysis.
So why is it suddenly a bridge too far for you to tell everyone what you really believe?
I understand that this moment is hard. Trump could win. Even if he doesn’t win, coming off the sidelines could alienate you from career networks, business opportunities, or even friends and family.
But being a leader means standing up and telling the truth even when it’s hard, or costly, or scary. Especially when it’s hard, or costly, or scary.
It’s still not too late. Every day, more people are speaking out—people with reputations, and reservations, but whose consciences won’t let them sit this one out.
You shouldn’t sit this one out, either. You should not decide, after a career in leadership, that this time you’d rather just be a spectator.
Maybe you think that adding your voice wouldn’t matter to voters. After all, so few things seem to move the needle. Well, I’m here to tell you that it matters. It all matters. Every little bit. You do not know who’s listening as the moment approaches to cast their vote. You do not know who you might persuade at the eleventh hour. And you do not know what the margin will be. If this election is decided by 9,000 votes in Pennsylvania—which is absolutely a real thing that could happen—then every single input could be the tipping point.
We’re almost there. Stay with us! The Bulwark is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I can’t see the future. I don’t know if your endorsement would be the difference maker. Just like I don’t know what price you would pay for speaking out more clearly.
What I do know is this: If you abdicate the obligations of leadership in this moment and the thing you fear comes to pass, you will regret having stood down when the country needed you to stand up. You will regret it for all of your days.
MAYBE YOU ARE A RETIRED FOUR-STAR GENERAL, or cabinet secretary, or someone who took a job as a political appointee in the Trump administration and saw things that shocked your conscience. And maybe you’ve told reporters about what you saw, or written about it in a book. That’s not enough because books have a relatively small reach, and your words are mediated through paper. What’s needed is for you to look voters in the eye and give them a direct warning about what a second Trump term might mean. Especially now that you won’t be on the inside to try to protect the country from him.
Maybe you’re a former Republican president or presidential nominee. Maybe you were once the leader of the party Donald Trump has destroyed. I am sorry, but the unpleasant fact is that you cannot preserve your influence for some future GOP. This is actually the last moment in which you have a chance to influence it. Your party, every bit as much as your country, needs you. Right now.
Maybe you’ve led venerable conservative publications. You’ve acted as a thought leader. Someone shaping our political culture. But today you want to keep your hands clean by writing in Edmund Burke on your ballot or some other nonsense protest candidate—as a sign that youkept your purity. I understand this impulse. But it’s wrong. You know that if yours was the single deciding vote, you’d vote for Harris. So just say so. This isn’t an academic exercise, and it’s not about you.
Maybe you’re a billionaire to whom this country has given everything. Your wealth insulates you from the consequences of the worst-case Trump scenarios. And yet, you see Trump’s transactional nature, his willingness to provide favor if you provide obedience, and instead of standing up to Trump, you cower. This might seem like wisdom, but it’s not actual safety. There will be more demands. The only way to actually protect your business is for the rule of law to be victorious and democracy to be stable.
FOR MONTHS, YOUR COUNTRYMEN have been waiting for you to tell them the full, unvarnished truth about the danger you believe Donald Trump presents. To tell everyday Americans the same words you say in green rooms, at dinners, and in off-the-record conversations. You haven’t gotten there yet, but you still can. Before you make your final decision, think about Liz Cheney’s warning that some day Donald Trump will be gone, but the choices we make today will be with us forever.
Choose honor. It’s the choice you’ve made again and again in your professional lives. It would be a sin to stop choosing it because of a mountebank like Donald Trump.
I want to tell you about some Republicans who are already putting themselves on the line for democracy. They don’t have security details, or staff, or budgets. They’re just regular people who voted for Trump before, but refuse to support him again. They joined Republican Voters Against Trump to get the word out to their friends and neighbors. A few of them have lost jobs. Some of them have lost family. All of them have lost friends. None of them regrets it.
They’ve put their faces on billboards across the country. They’ve appeared in millions of dollars’ worth of paid ads running in their own communities. They’ve taken part in text campaigns, spoken to the media, knocked on doors, and traveled to swing states in the hopes of making a difference.
THE REASON I BELIEVE THAT every little bit counts is because conservative-leaning voters say that to me all the time.
In Republican focus groups, one thing I hear again and again is that voters are open to hearing from the leaders who served under Trump, who were in the room with him. The messenger is as important as the message, and these people are ready to believe the words of a lifelong Republican or flag officer much more readily than they’ll believe a Democrat telling them the same things.
So if you’re one of the small number of people who can make a difference in this moment, the question is: What are you going to do?
Courage is contagious. And I have one last piece of advice: No one ever regrets doing the right thing.
You won’t regret it, either. So stand up and join us. It’s our last chance.
I have been puzzling over this question since the Democratic National Convention.
Like most people, I didn’t know much about Kamala Harris when she became Vice President. Now that I have seen her speak, now that I saw her debate Trump, I feel very energized to support her campaign for the Presidency.
She is smart, well informed, experienced, committed to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. She is thoughtful and composed. She laughs, she smiles, she seems like a kind and thoughtful person. She is well prepared for the presidency, having won election as the District Attorney of San Francisco, as Attorney General of the State of California, as U.S. Senator from California, and as Vice-President of the United States since Joe Biden and she were elected in 2020.
Her opponent is a bundle of equal parts narcissism and hatred. He likes men. He likes white men. He likes to play tough guy. He looks on women as sex objects and feather heads. He doesn’t respect women.
He is crude, vulgar, without a shred of the dignity we expect from a president. The language he uses to ridicule and insult others is vile.
He is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and a Christian nationalist (without being a practicing Christian).
He is a sexual predator. He is known for not paying people to whom he owes money for services rendered. He has gone through six bankruptcies.
He is ignorant. His former aides say he has never read the Constitution. He is driven by his massive ego. He wants everyone to say he’s the best, the greatest, and there’s never been anyone as great as him.
He is a convicted felon, convicted on 34 counts of business fraud in New York. He was found guilty by a jury in New York of defaming E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually assaulting her many years ago. He was ordered to pay her more than $90 million for continuing to defame her. That judgment is on appeal.
Other trials are pending.
When he lost the 2020 election, he refused to accept his defeat. He schemed to overturn the election by various ploys. He summoned a mob of his fans to Washington on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress gathered for the ceremonial certification of the election. Trump encouraged them to march on the U.S. Capitol, “peaceably….(but) fight like hell.” They did fight like hell. They battered their way into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors, beating law officers, vandalizing the building and its offices, while hunting for Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The outnumbered law officers held them off to protect the members of Congress. Many of them were brutally beaten. Some later died. What if the mob had reached the members of Congress? What if they had captured Pence and Pelosi?
It was the most shameful day of our national history. A President encouraging a mob to sack the Capitol and overturn the Constitution.
Ever since that disgraceful day, Trump has reiterated that the election was stolen from him, even though it wasn’t close. He has undermined faith in the electoral process, faith in the judiciary, faith in the law.
These are the two candidates: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Last night, I read the hundreds of letters to the editor of the Washington Post about Bezos’ decision not to endorse. By now, there are probably thousands. Almost all of them said: I have canceled my subscription.”
Good for them.
I am NOT canceling my subscription.
I enjoy reading Dana Milbank, Jennifer Rubin, Eugene Robinson, Alexander Petri, and other columnists.
I applaud them for dissenting from Bezos’ mandate.
They will vent their rage for the next 10 days. At Bezos and especially at Trump.
And of course there will continue to be hard-hitting investigations.
In an opinion piece in Scientific American, Cecilia Menjívar of UCLA and Deisy Del Real of the University of Southern California contend that the United States and other nations are sliding toward autocracy. They believe we can learn from the experience of other nations.
They write:
An autocratic wave has crept up on us in the U.S. and over the world in the last decade. Democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distant worlds with little in common, and that the triumph of one weakened the other. Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within.
With the upcoming U.S. presidential election in November, questions about the future of American democracy take on urgency. As the American public seems increasingly receptive to autocratic tactics, these questions become even more pressing. Will the U.S. slide into autocracy, faced with a presidential candidate in Donald Trump who promises to be a dictator on his first day in office? Can lessons from autocracies elsewhere help us detect democratic backsliding in the U.S.?
To answer these questions, we first need to identify how the new breed of autocrats attains and retains power: their hallmark strategy is deception. How does a roll call of modern autocrats, and wannabe autocrats, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro implement this modus operandi for the latest model of autocracy? They twist information and create confusion within a façade of democracy as they seize power. They do not overthrow democracy through military coups d’état but by undoing core democratic principles, weakening the rule of law, and eliminating checks and balances between branches of government.
Rather than eradicating democratic institutions as leaders like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko did in the past, today’s established and emergent autocrats (as is the case of Maduro or Orbán, for instance) corrupt the courts, sabotage elections and distort information to attain and remain in power. They are elected through ostensibly free elections and connect with a public already primed to be fearful of a fabricated enemy. Critically, they use these democratic tools to attain power; once there, they dismantle those processes. Autocratic tactics creep into the political life of a country slowly and embed themselves deeply in the democratic apparatus they corrupt. Modern autocracy, one may say, is a tyranny of gaslighting.
We gathered a group of scholars who have looked at successful and failed autocracies worldwide in a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, to identify common denominators of autocratic rulers worldwide. This research shows that modern autocrats uniformly apply key building blocks to cement their illiberal agenda and undermine democracies before taking them over. Those include manipulating the legal system, rewriting electoral laws and constitutions, and dividing the population into “us” versus “them” blocs. Autocrats routinely present themselves as the only presumed savior of the country while silencing, criminalizing and disparaging critics or any oppositional voice. They distort information and fabricate “facts” through the media, claim fraud if they lose an election, persuade the population that they can “cleanse” the country of crime and, finally, empower a repressive nationalistic diaspora and fund satellite political movements and hate groups that amplify the autocrats’ illiberal agenda to distort democracy.
In February, Bukele, the popular Salvadoran autocrat and self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” spoke at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual convention for U.S. right-wing elected officials and activists. There he received a standing ovation after he flaunted his crackdown on crime in his country and suggested the U.S. should follow his tactics. His speech demonstrates how, regardless of political history and ideology, or their nation’s wealth and place on the global stage, autocrats today deploy a similar “toolbox of tricks” aimed at legalizing their rule. That’s because they copy from one another and learn from one another’s successes and failures. Vast interconnected networks enable autocrats to cooperate, share strategies and know-how, and visit one another in public shows of friendship and solidarity to create an international united front. Just ask Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and autocrat, who received a warm reception when he spoke at the CPAC in 2022, reminding the crowd of the reason for his visit: “I’m here to tell you that we should unite our forces.”
Global networks of autocratic regimes also provide economic resources to other autocrats and invest in their economies, share security services to squash popular dissent, and sometimes interfere in each other’s elections.
Modern autocrats do not act alone; their connections with one another are complemented and sustained by a varied cadre of legal specialists, political strategists and academics who tend to be economically secure, well-educated and cosmopolitan. These individuals, like Michael Anton and those tied to the Trump-defending Claremont Institute, the over 400 scholars and policy experts who collaborated on Project 2025— the extreme-right game plan for a Trump presidency—and Stephen K. Bannon, who called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” by filling government jobs with partisans and loyalists, move in and out of government positions and the limelight. They are nimble and, moreover, fundamental to the autocrats’ strategies, as they create videos and podcasts and write books to fabricate good images of the autocrats, write detailed blueprints for an autocratic form of government, and consult aspiring autocrats on best practices.
Evidence indicates that we are in a critical moment in U.S. democracy. Will the U.S. inevitably descend into autocracy? No, not with an alert and well-informed electorate. Recognizing the strategies that autocrats use and share, veiled behind a façade of democratic elections and wrapped in fearmongering, equips us to understand the harmful consequences of these strategies for democracy, and perhaps to stop the wave in time.
Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a Nicaraguan opposition politician and prospective presidential candidate, was accused of treason, arrested and banished simply for running as an opposition candidate by the regime of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo (who is also first lady). In exile, Chamorro has described a danger countries face: autocrats who come to power through democratic systems are “like a silent disease—the early symptoms of this silent disease are usually dismissed, but once it begins to consume the body, it is usually too late to stop it.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Media Matters has done a thorough review of the contents of Project 2025, which was written as a playbook for the next Trump administration. It was released and posted on the web in 2023, without fanfare. As more people read it and expressed their indignation, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it. Ever heard of it. Didn’t know who wrote it.
But the authors of the plan included 140 people who had worked in the Trump administration. The plan was developed by the rightwing Heriage Foundation, whose president is Kevin Roberts, a friend of Trump’s.
He knew.
It’s the roadmap for the second Trump term in office.
For education, the main feature of Project 2025 is its strong support for school choice, especially vouchers. It is a formula for directing federal funds to public funding of private and religious schools, as well as home schooling. It’s the Betsy DeVos model. Its purpose is to end public schools.
We need to be talking more, not less, about the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy. The former president and his understudy, JD Vance, have been trying to convince voters, with no evidence and a head-spinning level of hypocrisy, that violence against the former president was caused by rhetoric from Democrats.
Trump has upended the political script, saying, “[The Democrats’] rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country.” Followed closely by JD Vance’s incendiary quip: “The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence. The left needs to tone down the rhetoric. It needs to cut this crap out.”
And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Among the media and the campaigns, the “threat to democracy” line has apparently become old hat. When he was running for reelection, President Joe Biden often used it in an effort to differentiate himself. Unfortunately, this idea apparently doesn’t poll all that well. While it is true and terrifying, it is also a bit abstract — and for some, hard to believe. Lowering the price of milk is concrete and plausible.
So the Harris campaign hasn’t been talking about democracy much, instead concentrating on tangible policies to help the middle class. While this makes sense politically — and I hope it works — I’m here to say we cannot lose sight of the fact that a second Trump presidency would threaten our way of government and our way of life.
Trump’s term as president was just a precursor to what we can expect the second time around, but it bears repeating to remind us what he is capable of. In case anyone has forgotten, here is a partial list of how he has jeopardized democracy:
Attempted to overturn a free and fair election, a number of times in a number of ways.
Tried to block the peaceful transfer of power by inciting a mob to attack the United States Capitol.
Undermined the independence of the Justice Department, while claiming our legal system was rigged.
Botched the federal government’s response to the pandemic, resulting in a massive loss of life, because he doesn’t believe in inconvenient truths.
Cozied up to dictators and autocrats, even asking one to investigate a baseless claim against his political rival.
Selected Supreme Court justices who curtailed reproductive rights, to the point where women are being denied care and dying.
Lied. All the time. The leader of the free world must be credible.
Is sowing seeds of doubt that the 2024 election will be legitimate.
There is every indication that a second Trump trip to the White House would be even more harmful than the first.
This time around he is angrier and thirstier for vengeful retribution. He has said he will weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Full stop.
His loyal cronies have had more time to plan. We know they are vetting and training a legion of sycophants to displace career bureaucrats across the executive branch. The guardrails we had last time, whistleblowers and “adults in the room,” will be gone.
After nine years of Trump at the top of the Republican Party, his cult-like reach has created an army of MAGA-elected officials at the state and local levels who are more than happy to do his bidding, even if it’s illegal.
He is more gullible than ever — wanting, needing to believe his own hype. Believing his own bluster has had dangerous consequences. See: January 6, 2021. He spends his time searching social media for confirmation of his over-inflated self-importance. He surrounds himself with yes-men and women falling all over themselves to prove their fealty. No one will tell him the truth, for fear of retribution. It is a modern spin on the children’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — only this horror story would be titled, “The Politician’s Stupefying Greatness.”
The coup de grace is that Trump has carte blanche to do whatever he wants. That terrifying reality is brought to you by none other than the Supreme Court with its ruling in Trump v. United States. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee following that decision, representatives from 75 legal organizations said it “poses a significant threat to our democracy by effectively providing the president with sweeping legal immunity for criminal acts.”
We tend to memorialize significant dates in our nation’s history. In my lifetime, there was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. More recently, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021, have been etched into our psyche. But I would argue November 5, 2024, could be as or even more significant. It will test the strength of our country’s democratic infrastructure. That infrastructure and the American voter can save democracy by sending Kamala Harris to the Oval Office.
Eighteen months ago, I described the case of law professor Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania. She had made statements that were deemed bigoted. I defended her speech, even though it was vile. That post began:
The question I posed to readers was whether they thought that her statements were protected speech or should be sanctioned. A lively discussion ensued.
The University of Pennsylvania just announced sanctions against Professor Wax but did not fire her or strip her of tenure. The student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported the decision:
Penn has upheld sanctions against University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Amy Wax following her history of discriminatory remarks and two years of disciplinary proceedings with little precedent.
“These findings are now final, following a determination by the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility that the proper process was followed,” a University spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian.
The new ruling, first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer, comes after the Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility upheld sanctions that were initially recommended by a Faculty Senate hearing board on June 21, 2023 and strikes down an appeal filed by Wax and her lawyer, David Shapiro, this past February.
The sanctions mark the first time in recent history that a tenured University professor has been sanctioned through Faculty Senate procedures. Neither Wax nor her lawyer responded to requests for comment in time for the publishing of this article.
The DP previously reported that the recommended sanctions against Wax included a one-year suspension at half pay, the removal of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement for Wax to note in public appearances that she is not speaking on behalf or as a member of Penn Carey Law.
Penn will announce the decision in Tuesday’s edition of the Penn Almanac. The decision will include a letter of reprimand from Provost John Jackson Jr.
“Academic freedom is and should be very broad. Teachers, however, must conduct themselves in a manner that conveys a willingness to assess all students fairly,” Jackson wrote in a copy of the letter obtained by the DP. “They may not engage in unprofessional conduct that creates an unequal educational environment.”
Interim Penn President Larry Jameson added that Wax must refrain from “flagrantly unprofessional and targeted disparagement of any individual or group in the University community … for so long as [she is] a member of the University’s standing faculty.”
In a June 2023 letter to former Penn President Liz Magill, the hearing board noted that they “do not dispute the protection” that Wax holds over her views, but said that the way she presents these views violate widely acknowledged “behavioral professional norms” when presented as “uncontroverted.”
The hearing board “unanimously” found that the facts presented throughout the hearing “constitute serious violations of University norms and policies,” according to the letter. The hearing board also concluded that Wax’s behavior “has created a hostile campus environment and a hostile learning atmosphere.”
When determining sanctions, the hearing board decided that the University should issue a public reprimand, but it did not suggest that Wax should be fired or stripped of tenure. Separate from the sanctions, the hearing board suggested that the University and Penn Carey Law should consider having Wax co-teach her classes with another faculty member, and that Wax teach her classes outside of Penn Carey Law buildings.
The board wrote that it found Wax “in dereliction of her scholarly responsibilities, especially as a teacher” in part due to her “reliance on misleading and partial information,” which results in her drawing “sweeping and unreliable conclusions.”
But the sanctions, which reportedly take effect for the 2025-26 school year, won’t have an impact on her teaching plans this semester — which, according to a course syllabus obtained by the DP, include an invite of American Renaissance magazine editor Jared Taylor to deliver a guest lecture at Dec. 3 meeting of LAW 9560: “Conservative and Political Legal Thought.” The invitation would mark at least the third appearance by Taylor at Wax’s class in four years, after his visit last fall sparked a protest outside Wax’s classroom and a rare schoolwide emailfrom Penn Carey Law Dean Sophia Lee addressing the “bounds of academic freedom.”
Weeks before Taylor comes to campus, Wax is scheduled to speak at a conference in Tennessee alongside multiple people who have reportedly espoused white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and racist views.
Tuesday’s Almanac will also include an Aug. 11, 2023 letter from Magill in which she accepted the sanctions initially recommended by the hearing board.
Jameson provided an introduction for Magill’s letter, summarizing the disciplinary process against Wax and confirming he was implementing Magill’s decision.
Magill wrote in her letter that the board considered arguments such as the “critical point” regarding academic freedom and used a “well-developed” factual record to make its decision.
While she said she was “mindful of the limit of my authority as established by our policy,” Magill accepted the major sanctions suggested from the board’s report.
The letter from Magill prompted Wax to file a Aug. 29, 2023 appeal to SCAFR, in which Wax’s lawyer argued that there were “several procedural defects” which gave the respondent the right to appeal.
Shapiro wrote that that the most significant “defect” was that the hearing board made the decision “about the breadth and extent of a tenured professor’s contractually guaranteed right to academic freedom,” rather than SCAFR.
The appeal also alleged that Magill and the hearing board applied an unfair speech standard. Shapiro wrote that Wax was punished under an “incoherent standard, never before articulated, or applied to any Penn faculty member.”
The standard used to punish Wax has drawn scrutiny from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a national civil liberties group which said on Monday that Penn had mustered “zero evidence” that Wax discriminated against her students.
“Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn’s willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor,” FIRE Vice President Alex Morey wrote in a statement. “After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook.”
Wax’s history of discriminatory statements has included her claiming that Black students never graduate at the top of the Penn Carey Law class and that “non-Western groups” are resentful towards “Western people.” Wax has also faced criticism for hosting white nationalist Jared Taylor for a guest lecture and allegedly telling a Penn Carey Law student that she was only accepted into the Ivy League “because of affirmative action.”
In June 2022, former Penn Carey Law Dean Ted Ruger filed a complaint to the Faculty Senate recommending a “major sanction” against Wax. At the time, he cited numerous student and faculty accounts of Wax’s conduct that he believed warranted disciplinary action. Ruger asked the Faculty Senate to appoint a hearing board of five professors from across the University to evaluate his complaint, conduct a full review of Wax’s conduct, and impose sanctions in line with the University’s policy for punishing tenured faculty members.
“Academic freedom for a tenured scholar is, and always has been, premised on a faculty member remaining fit to perform the minimal requirements of the job,” Ruger wrote in his report to the Faculty Senate. “However, Wax’s conduct demonstrates a ‘flagrant disregard of the standards, rules, or mission of the University.’”
The last week or two’s felt like a lifetime. It’s been body blow after body blow for democracy in America.
The Supreme Court ruled Trump was effectively already something like a dictator, enjoying “presumptive immunity.” A lunatic tried to assassinate Trump, and the far right promptly blamed it on the center and left, despite the assassin being a Republican. Meanwhile, Trump announced Vance as Vice Presidential pick. And all that came on the heels of the media carrying water for Trump, while trying their very best, it seemed, to take down Joe Biden, time and again, this time with character assassination of every stripe and form.
A lifetime.
So what does all this add up to?
Code red.
If this moment feel severe, historic, let me assure that it is.
Democracies rarely and barely face as much and as many troubles as all this.
Let’s now simplify some of the above. The range of forces arrayed against democracy by now includes: billionaires, a supine press, lunatics, crackpots, pundits, the judiciary. And even that’s an incomplete list. That is a long and powerful list of forces inimical to democracy.
And on the other side awaits what we can all now openly call fascism.
Are These the Final Stages of American Collapse?
It’s been a decade or so since I began predicting American collapse. And we went through a familiar cycle, many of you right along with me. I’d bet that even many of you who are long time readers might have been skeptical, then grudgingly accepting, and by now, your hair’s on fire.
By now, it’s hard to deny.
My prediction, in other words, was all too prescient, and I take no comfort from that. I warned precisely because I didn’t want this to happen.
But you might wonder: what happens next? Where are we, precisely?
America’s now in a very bad place.
Let’s now put some of the above even more formally.
The Supreme Court’s mounting what amounts to a rolling judicial coup, assigning the Presidency unassailable powers.
The press appears uninterested in providing people facts, information, or basic knowledge with which to make informed decisions, focusing on personal attacks on Biden and other forms of tabloid journalism.
The GOP’s effectively been transformed into an instrument of Trumpism.
Project 2025 is its agenda, and it involves essentially creating a totalitarian state, or at least the beginnings of one. Who’s going to check, after all, that people are obeying all these new rules which cause them to lose their basic freedoms?
I could go on, but the point should already be clear.
All these are forms of institutional collapse. Pretty advanced and severe institutional collapse. Democracy’s a fragile thing, and each of its institutions must work in tandem to provide it the sustenance and support it needs. Those institutions, at their most basic level, are the rule of law, the press, political “sides” not being against openly authoritarian, their bases accepting basic democratic norms of peace and consent and the transfer of power and so forth, aka civil society, and of course, leaders not openly aspiring to dictatorship.
You can think of all that as kind of a checklist for the basic health of a democracy.
And the frightening thing in America right now is that almost none of that checklist can be ticked off anymore. Almost none of democracy’s institutions work anymore. Some work partially, some barely, and many, not at all.
Worse, you can see the sort of degeneration before your eyes. Take the example of the press. A few weeks or months ago, even, its behavior today would have been unthinkable to many. Hundreds of articles attacking Biden, while portraying Trump as a hero, a martyr, a glorious and noble figure? Today, as we’ve discussed, the media’s enabling the strongman myth before our eyes, perhaps “obeying in advance,” as Timothy Snyder, the scholar, calls it.
The point is that the rate, scale, and pace of collapse is increasing swiftly. Institutions which are fundamental to democracy’s functioning are simply ceasing to function before our very eyes.
Democracy’s Last institution, and Why It’s the One Which Matters Most
All of that leaves us with one remaining institution. Have you guessed it yet?
The people.
This isn’t some kind of idealistic paean. I’m just going to tell it like it is, as a scholar and survivor of social collapse.
When the people are united, all those other institutions can fail, and democracy, in the end, can still survive. We’ve seen recent examples of just such a thing, in Poland, for example, and arguably, a very close call in other parts of Europe.
All of that brings us to Biden. Should he drop out? Shouldn’t he? This is politics as sport. Don’t fall for it. The truth is that it doesn’t matter very much. Whomever comes next? They’ll face precisely the same brutal abuse and hazing by media as Biden has, and most likely, even worse, since they’ve done it to everyone from Carter to Hillary to Al Gore and beyond.
The point isn’t the candidate. It’s the people.
Right now, America’s in a very perilous—and very singular—place. If those who are sane, and thoughtful, and on the side of democracy unite in its defense, then they will win. They’ll win decisively, in fact. At 60% turnout, it’s an easy victory, at 70%, it’s a landslide. The numbers are clear.
The questions are unity, and motivation. In that sense, you might say, the candidate counts, but that’s an evasion. Like I said, whomever the candidate is—they’ll be portrayed as weak by a media that’s now dismally attached to the strongman myth. Weak, feminine, incompetent, inexperienced (never mind Trump being a reality TV star), shallow, inept, not an orator to rival Cicero, not as fearless as Alexander the Great, not as wise as Sun Tzu, and so on.
The candidate counts, but only in a weak sense. And that weak sense is: are Americans willing to grit their teeth, roll up their sleeves, and unify, whomever the candidate is? Enough of them, on the side of democracy and sanity? If they’re not, then it’ll be always and altogether too easy to divide them—there’ll always be some kind of foolish myth, some kind of fatal flaw, that the press, pundits, and the enemies of democracy will cook up, and spit out, over and over again.
So are Americans on the side of democracy willing to stop playing this game of fatal flaws? And say enough is enough: whomever the candidate is, we back them? In European politics, we call this, simply, voting for your party. The GOP, by the way, excels at it, too. The Democrats, never having built a party of great solidarity, or a modern party organization, rich in networks and communities, are poor at it. So people in America, on the center and left, don’t vote for the party. They look down on it, in fact. But there is nothing to be contemptuous of here: this is precisely how Europe and Canada built social democracies to begin with.
The Myth of the Fatal Flaw, or Democracy’s Greatest Test
In other words, this is democracy’s greatest test.
It goes like this.
When the chips are down—this down—and every institution has failed, welcoming fascism with open arms, every institution save one, will the people themselves remember they are that crucial institution?
You see, this is what fascism hopes to terrorize people away from realizing. To give up on their power, and instead succumb to fatalism—that’s why it’s so loud, explosive, violent, threatening, always intimidating, never shutting up, always promising the worst. Because it’s trying to terrorize the people into submission, giving up on their own unity and togetherness, and thus ceding it all in advance. We’ll discuss all that more tomorrow.
This is democracy’s greatest test. On the one side, fascism. Now behind it, every institution that should be preserving democracy. Save one, the people. And the people, in situations like this, find themselves easily divided, because all this is frightening, upsetting, destabilizing, even terrifying. Finding themselves demoralized, the people give up, focusing on the very Fatal Flaws that a failed media and those in league with the fascists trumpet over and over again.
But in truth none of these are Fatal Flaws. Sure, Biden’s old. Would you rather have an old guy or a dictator? Easy choice—if you’re thinking rationally and sanely. But if you’re scared out of your wits, then maybe, suddenly, all that clear thinking goes foggy.
The next Fatal Flaw? Let’s rewind, so you really understand this. Al Gore wasn’t “likable.” Hillary was “difficult.” Carter wasn’t manly enough. Howard Dean was a “weirdo.” Doesn’t matter—do you get the point yet? There’ll always—always—be a fatal flaw.
In fact, I can point out plenty in advance, and you should be able to, too, now that I’ve taught you how to think about all this. Kamala will probably be “unlikable,” too, like “Al Gore,” or “distant,” or even more “difficult” than Hillary. Gavin Newsom will be “slick” or too “polished” or not enough a “man of the people.” Anyone remotely to their left will be a socialist, etcetera. See how simple this is once you get the hang of it?
So this test of democracy, the greatest one of all? It’s never really about the candidates. Because nobody is perfect. Least of all politicians. This test is about the people, who must be willing to brook some degree of imperfection, and come to their senses, instead of being frightened into searching for an unattainable degree of perfection because…
That’s The Only Thing That Can Win.
That’s the reason we’re told to search for Unattainable Perfection, isn’t it? Anything less is Doomed to Lose. And yet the fact—the fact—is that united, the people can’t be defeated. That sounds trite, but let me remind you, we’re talking about statistical realities. Even in the most extreme social collapses, the majority never support the extremists, which is why they are extremists. Hitler had to seize power, the Bolsheviks had to revolt, Mao had to “re-educate” a society, and so on. The people united cannot be defeated.
But that unity is hard—incredibly hard—to come by. Because the more destabilized a society gets, the less of it it has. And so a kind of vicious cycle sets in, what in complexity theory we call an dynamic system: destabilization destroys unity, which intensifies destabilization.
That is how extreme minorities collapse societies. And it’s why despite the majority not backing the fanatics and lunatics even in the most extreme social collapses, we see social collapses. Because the unity of the majority in the thinking, sane center doesn’t hold.
So. This is democracy’s greatest test of all. When the chips are this down, so far they’re in the abyss, can the people remember that united, they can’t be defeated? That through unity, the preservation of democracy is assured—but in its absence, all history’s horrors and follies recur, like a waking nightmare?
Understand my words, my friends. I say none of this lightly. I predicted American collapse. I can tell you what happens next. But that’s not the part you need to know. It’s that you still have the power to change it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 