Member Newsletter
In the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos became the target of widespread and deserved disgust for nixing The Washington Post’s policy of endorsing presidential candidates to avoid antagonizing Trump. As I wrote at the time, it’s not that there’s anything magical or even necessary about newspaper endorsements. The whole concept strikes me as a bit dated. The issue was why they were being dropped. Bezos wasn’t being paranoid. There is abundant and persuasive evidence that Trump used the levers of government to punish Bezos through Amazon and his Blue Origin space delivery company during his first term. The phrase many people used to describe this behavior is “anticipatory obedience.” (I’ve been told the phrase might originate with Timothy Snyder. I don’t know if he coined it or simply brought it to wider use.) But there’s another kind of anticipatory obedience I’ve seen like a torrent in the days since Trump won the election, and it’s more paradoxical because it comes from people who feel they are the most intense of opposers.
During harrowing times some people become overwhelmed and even lose hope. It’s not a one-way progress. Almost everyone has their moments. But there’s a particular kind of militant doomerism afoot at the moment. Any discussions of next steps in the battle against Trumpism or the preservation of civic democracy, any suggestions or strategies, are met with a chorus of, “don’t you get how it worked under Hitler and Stalin!!?!” Or “don’t you know rules don’t matter to Donald Trump!?!?!”
In a sense, it’s a dialog genetically related to what I called “competitive hyperbole” two days ago. Strategies for the future or even the assumption that there will be a future get shouted down as a hopeless naiveté. And at least within that stream of conversation — which I’m certainly not saying is dominant, but it is there — it leads to the same escalating declarations of dystopia and totalism.
Is it possible that Donald Trump could push the American Republic into dictatorship or more plausibly the kind of soft autocracy or broken democracy we know today in places like Russia or Hungary or Turkey? Sure. Is it likely? I don’t know any way of putting odds to such a thing. But what I know is that it’s not easy. There’s Congress and the courts and even when they’re compliant the process is still difficult, time-consuming and hard to pull off. There’s also the double-level government of federalism, in which a great deal of the machinery of government remains in other hands. That’s more difficulty and time-consuming obstacles. And it’s the work of an opposition to make it as hard and time-consuming as possible, to make the consequences as visible as possible.
Even the history isn’t as simple as you may think. It’s actually very hard to convert a democracy into an autocracy. And the great majority of states where it’s happened are ones that only had a functioning civic democracy for a couple decades at most. Consider some of those other countries I noted above: Russia? Perhaps a decade of extremely tenuous democratic rule. Hungary? Maybe two decades, depending on how you choose to count. Weimar? At most a decade and really no more than half a dozen years of nominal stability before the onset of the Great Depression and the slide into electoral autocracy which preceded the Nazi seizure of power by about three years. The case of Turkey is more complicated but it’s features of electoral democracy were always highly, highly circumscribed. Every example is one where democracy had thin and recent roots, very different from the quarter millennium in which an evolving form of civic democracy has existed in the United States.
Let me make the point crystal clear: This isn’t “It can’t happen here.” It’s that it’s hard everywhere. And it will be even harder here, for the reasons I’ve noted, than it has been in other countries where we’ve seen it happen.
Deciding this has already happened here is not only pathetic but self-defeating. What we have amounts to a declaration of intent from Donald Trump. Perilously, the American people, albeit in many cases not knowing the consequences, have issued Trump a warrant to try.
Certain people, growing out of trauma and exhaustion which I fully understand, believe there’s some power or badassery or even a species of courage in saying, “yeah, since when does Donald Trump follow the law!?!?” or “Just admit that we have no power!!!” But it’s actually precisely the opposite. That’s the most pernicious form of anticipatory obedience. Deciding that all of this stuff has already happened is not only inaccurate but self-defeating. It’s amplifying threats Trump hasn’t been able or willing to make good on. A better answer, both more effective and more dignified, is to say, “Okay, let’s see you try.” It’s not easy. There are lots of road blocks. It requires maintaining a lot of public support. It requires patience.
You may think there’s some kind of psychic or moral merit in jumping into every conversation and saying “No, it’s over! He said he was going to be a dictator! He said who he was! Believe him! Don’t be so naive!” But really that’s just rolling out a red carpet, the ultimate capitulation in advance. At the very least, put him to the task. Make him execute on what he’s trying to do. It won’t be easy and there are a lot of ways to make it even less easy. That’s the first role of a political opposition.
A lot of me wants to say this attitude is simply pathetic. But I also know that people feel beaten down, exhausted and scared. I fully understand where it comes from. And while a certain toughness, resolution and sang-froid is necessary in difficult times like these, so too is empathy, the presence and willingness to buck up those feeling tired, defeated and hopeless.