I want to circle back to a point I made in my last piece, but may have gotten a bit lost in the larger argument. I urged the Democrats to do much more to energize ordinary citizens to do what they can to counter the growing authoritarian threat from the right, and for Americans to get mad, not rattled, about the gang of MAGA radicals, Christian nationalists, and white supremacists who are coming for our freedoms and our peace. Luckily, over at The Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent offers a fully-articulated piece calling on people to not get overly spooked by the recent talk of a Trump dictatorship (while also acknowledging the reality of the danger we face). The whole post is well worth a read, and I wanted to call out a few particularly valuable points.
First, while I’ve been talking a lot about the need for the Democrats to do more to “rouse and rile” the public, Sargent reminds us that in the past few election cycles, pro-democracy activists have indeed been furiously and effectively organizing; moreover, the anti-MAGA coalition has had demonstrable success in pressing back against Trumpist politics in 2018, 2020, and 2022. These are heartening points — we are hardly starting from a dead stop when contemplating the efforts needed to win in 2024.
Another not-as-straightforwardly-heartening point Sargent makes is that the likeliest route to victory for Trump is not through winning a majority of the electorate, but essentially through the distortions of the Electoral College, remarking that, “In short, if Trump has a path to autocracy in United States, it probably would run through the counter-majoritarian features of our system at least as much as through alleged voter apathy about democracy. Yet all the hand-wringing about the autocratic threat rarely involves discussions of majoritarian reform.” His last point hits a favorite theme of mine — why on earth the Democrats and others aren’t fighting harder, right now, to move pro-democracy reforms to the top of the national agenda (check out this Jamelle Bouie piece about how structural issues of American government strengthen the MAGA minority)?
Finally, he makes the essential observation that not only is it inherently demoralizing to exaggerate Trump’s threat into one of inevitability, but also that projecting such an aura of inevitability is an established fascistic tactic of which Trump’s campaign appears well aware. Sargent tells us that, “The aim is to hypnotize voters into forgetting the power and numbers that they possess, persuading them that politics is a hopelessly sordid and disappointing exercise. But that is not the story of the Trump years.” We need to be wise to Trump’s head games; god knows we have no excuse not to be at this point.
I’ll end with pointing you to similar points made equally well by Brian Beutler at his new-ish Substack site Off Message, where he reminds us of the necessity of keeping our wits about us:
[T]here’s a perverse logic to it; if he’s promising to be “retribution” and liberals respond by quaking in their boots, it’s not unreasonable for passing observers to wonder whether Trump has valid scores to settle.
What I’d emphasize instead is that his designs are profoundly unpatriotic. They are the sadistic fantasies of a petty tyrant who genuinely believes that people who oppose him are vermin and need to be rooted out—also, deeply unpatriotic [. . .] But I think the anti-Trump movement will be likelier to succeed approaching that challenge in a dignified, unflinching way—confident that a large majority of Americans recognize a vindictive, unscrupulous degenerate like Trump should never have been president in the first place, and must never be president again.