In Philadelphia this past weekend, I met a number of people who’d given up on democracy. They railed about politicians who make promises they don’t keep. They spun conspiracy theories about the government. A number of those who answered the door told me that they weren’t going to vote.
Then there were the grim young men who said, hell yeah, they were going to vote for Trump. They spoke of the Republican presidential candidate as if he were Tony Montana, the gangster played by Al Pacino in the film Scarface: violent, lawless, and powerful. Trump elicited respect laced with fear. According to his supporters, he’d stand up to America’s enemies abroad and be tough on crime domestically. Several said to me—with the usual preface of “don’t get me wrong but…”—that a woman president would be too weak or “mixed up by hormones” to do those necessary things.
If you cross celebrity culture with gun culture and add a few dollops of testosterone, you get Donald Trump.
Much has been written about the rise of the global far right (including by me). It’s important to understand that this global trend is not a type of politics. It is an anti-politics. The far right embodied by Vladimir Putin in Russia, Victor Orban in Hungary, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and others is determined to unravel democracy. They have contempt for elections. They revise, bend, or undermine the constitutional order.
And they despise the civic engagement at the heart of thriving democracies. They crack down on dissent. They target protesters. They ruthlessly purge the “enemy within.” This is what Donald Trump has promised to do this time around.
The Republican campaign in 2024 relied on anti-government rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and violent innuendo (against FEMA, against the border patrol, against Republican politicians that didn’t toe the MAGA line) in order to do two things. These strategies drew the disaffected to the polls. And they pushed others not to vote: to give up on politics altogether.
Rage and apathy are the two modes of right-wing politicking. This is a variation on Albert Hirschman’s famous “exit, voice, and loyalty” distinction. The loyalists are voicing their anger, the apathetic are exiting, and the dissidents continue to organize in the hopes of avoiding the Russian scenario: an entire opposition in exile or jail.
Other countries have managed to buck the trend. Even little Moldova was able to successfully beat back the anti-democratic, pro-Russian, billionaire-supported candidate in its presidential election last weekend. Brazil got rid of Bolsonaro. The French teamed up to stop Marine Le Pen at the polls. It can be done.
Rich, prosperous, arrogant America failed to do so.
Let’s face it: American politics, as we know it, is over.
To be sure, it was always possible for American politicians to win with dirty tricks. But then there’d be a course correction of sorts: Nixon followed by Watergate, Trump 2016 followed by impeachment and electoral loss. That loss in 2020 should have been an inoculation against outlandish lies, threats, and manipulations. Instead, the Republican Party doubled down. It abandoned the few remaining guardrails governing the conduct of a campaign, which is a preview of how the next administration will skirt the few remaining guardrails it reluctantly observed in the waning days of its previous term in office.
The political game is now fundamentally different. Forget “ground game.” Forget strategic messaging. Forget polling. In other words, forget about those traditional methods of mobilizing political sentiment in a democracy.
Never bring a knife to a gunfight, the pundits warn. The Democrats brought a computer to a gunfight. Those computer models of how to win an election now lie in ruins.
A funereal pall has descended over half of America, and naturally there is a lot of finger-pointing in the wake of the Democratic Party’s loss of the presidency and the Senate. It was misogyny. It was Black men abandoning the Democratic Party. It was poor whites voting against their economic self-interest. It was the Electoral College, Elon Musk’s money, and Russian disinformation. It was Joe Biden’s decision to run again, and Kamala Harris’s failure to explain her positions clearly.
It was all of that, of course. But it was also the failure of the Democratic Party to understand the rage coursing through the body politic. The Democrats failed to translate the economic gains of the last four years—the infrastructure bill, the watered-down version of the Green New Deal, the CHIPS Act—into populist language. Put another way, the ordinary gains of an ordinary political process did not prove inspiring because this is a post-political moment. And the Democrats were playing by the rules of the old era.
Here’s an instructive story.
A friend confessed to me before the election that he didn’t pay attention to politics. “They’re both bad,” he said “One’s a fascist, the other’s a communist.”
“Harris is a communist?” I said, surprised. “That’s ridiculous. She’s just a run-of-the-mill politician, straddling the center. I could understand if you were criticizing Bernie Sanders as a communist. He, at least, is a self-professed socialist. He’s not a communist, of course, but at least he’s – .”
“Oh, Bernie?” my friend interrupted me. “Oh yeah, I really like Bernie!”
There are several lessons here. Even for the apolitical, the lies of Trump (“she’s a Marxist!”) penetrated the population with the brutal repetitiveness of state propaganda. The level of political understanding in the populace is shockingly low (a fifth grader should be able to put Trump, Harris, and Sanders on a political spectrum). And Bernie’s populism transcends ideology. Like the Vermont senator, a successful political party must be able to channel anger as well as aspiration.
As the opposition regroups, it’s useful to repeat some truisms. Character is forged in adversity. Previous generations have successfully fought fascism to rescue democracy. And democracy is all about learning lessons and moving forward (especially after slipping backward). It’s long been clear that this country needs a new politics. To use a shopworn phrase, let’s build back better—after this third and most devastating hurricane of the season.
In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagined the alternative past of a fascist takeover of the United States. Charles Lindbergh, a pro-Hitler isolationist, wins the 1940 election with his slogan “Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war.” In office, he fulfills his promise by keeping the United States out of World War II. But when Lindbergh’s plane mysteriously goes missing, Roosevelt gets reelected to the presidency in 1942. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and history resumes its well-known course.
It’s a chilling book that resonates with today’s headlines. It was a reminder, well before the political rise of Trump, that it can happen here.
But the current situation is different. This is not just a battle over the soul of America. This is a much larger confrontation. This conflict is being waged against Russia in Ukraine and against Israel in Gaza. It is being fought in polling places in democratic nations around the world. And it is being sustained by anti-authoritarian dissidents in streets, jails, and exile communities.
Even as they wrap themselves in the American flag and the U.S. constitution, the American far right and its enablers are plotting against democracy itself. It didn’t look promising in 1940 either, in Roth’s alternative reality or in the actual history. So, let the finger-pointing end and a new era of creative and savvy political organizing begin.
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