Guest post: The rewriting of the rule book has already begun
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Drag them and burn them he says.
As Timothy Snyder put it, they are clearly (from memory) preparing the ground for worse things to come. I don’t know to what degree it’s a conscious strategy (as opposed to instinctual, trial and error etc.), but anyway it’s a prime example of the weaponization of cognitive dissonance: Signal your illiberal and authoritarian agenda in advance while making sure there is just enough plausible deniability to give you an alibi (”it’s just trolling”, ”not to be taken literally” etc.). Get your followers into the habit of going along with, excusing or explaining away, even actively applauding increasingly dehumanizing and violent rhetoric, unambiguous, shameless lies, blatant corruption, openly authoritarian and illiberal behaviors etc. until such trangressions have definitely become normalized, legitimate, within the range of acceptable behavior. Then, once the actual violence begins, your followers have no face-saving way of turning back. Claiming ignorance is definitely not an available option at this point, nor, for that matter, has it been since before Trump was first elected back in 2016. The guy is many things, but subtle is not among them.
I take no comfort in the idea that there will be another election in four years, nor in the idea that a president can only serve for two terms. That was under the old rules. The rewriting of the rule book has already begun, and with foxes now in complete control of all the henhouses the way things have always worked in the past is hardly a reliable indicator of what can or cannot happen in the future. The same trends we have seen in the U.S. have already killed democracies elsewhere, and judging by everything we have observed so far I see little to support the American exceptionalist idea that ”it can’t happen here”.
I often worry that I’m becoming a bit of an ”alarmist”, a ”doomsayer”, an ”apocalypticist” etc., but in this case, as it turns out, even my pessimism didn’t go far enough. As I have previously stated, I would have been surprised if Trump didn’t win the election, but I also predicted that he wouldn’t win the popular vote. I stand corrected.
Of course Trump himself is not going to live forever, but Trumpism is going to be with us for the rest of our lives, and with a popular majority now having a stake in defending their choice, just like the other frequently prophesied ”Peak Tr…”, I wouldn’t count on ”Peak Trump” to happen anytime soon.
I fear you are right, but I see a small ray of sunshine: Trump has insulted soldiers so much (calling them losers, not wanting to get his hair wet at a tribute to dead veterans, the recent antics at the Arlington cemetery, etc.) that I wonder hw many generals etc. would fight for him if it ever came to a shooting war. But I’m probably naive.
It’s on the military and geopolitical front that I’m the most uncertain how things will play out with President Trump 2.0. Because the US military, national security, and espionage apparatus is unparalleled in the world, and their top brass absolutely have the receipts on Trump’s corruption. Trump has never had the military or the CIA on his side.
He’s everyone’s boss again now (or will be in January), but the first time around, the defence-intelligence sector worked to limit Trump’s reach in their domains because he posed such an obvious threat to national security. This time around, I imagine the conflict will be even more pronounced.
Trump may have an army of politicians and civilian wonks he can place all over various government posts. But I hold out hope that Langley and the Pentagon aren’t so easy to infiltrate.
With escalating conflicts around the world, I wonder if he’ll even last a whole term. Fingers crossed he doesn’t.
Maybe that’s the plan. Funny how Vance went from a Trump critic to his running mate. Maybe someone whispered in his ear that Trump is unlikely to finish his term* because of mental incapacitation, and that . A little bit of spin and his “weaving” becomes the wanderings of advancing decrepitude. Hell, he’s there already, but he had to win the election first, serving as their puffy, orange Trojan horse.
* If you want to go really dark, Trump’s removal could be more forcible and permanent. His “martyrdom”, conveniently pinned on “leftists”, could be used by the Republicans as their Reichstag Fire moment, harnessing the resulting public grief and anger to launch widespread repression of opponents, to widespread applause. I hope it doesn’t happen, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Can’t cross my fingers there. I don’t see this as having any positive results for America. Trump dies; J. D. Vance becomes president. Yep, frying pans and fires come to mind.
Military removes Trump, taking Vance with him. Military now holds large potential power. I don’t want a military government, but a lot of people do.
Congress impeaches Trump…yeah, right. Not gonna happen. But just for the sake of a hypothetical…Trump gone, J. D. Vance in presidency.
Anyway you look at it, we’re screwed.
During the Q&A after one of her book talks for How to Lose a Country Turkish dissident Ece Temelkuran was asked by a well-meaning Western liberal (from memory) “How can we help you?”. Temelkuran pointed out that Western liberals were not in a position to help anyone else at this point, and that, rather than ask how they could help the Turkish opposition, they should be desperate to know how the Turkish opposition could help them.
I think probably the best
you Americanswe all can do at this point is to forever bury the notion that democratic breakdown can only happen in former communist republics in Eastern Europe as well as “less advanced”/”less enlightened” societies in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, and listen very intently (without any presumption that we are the experts) to opposition leaders in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Iran, India, China, the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela etc. etc.As Timothy Snyder has pointed out, some of the first people to predict the victory of both Trump and the Brexiters back in 2016 were Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Poles etc. who had seen the same game play out before and knew how it ended last time. And as both Steven Levitsky and Anne Applebaum have pointed out, the Brazilian response to their own “Trump” figure, Bolsonaro, as well as their own “January 6th” event was superior in every way to the American response. It’s time to drop the pretense that we have any clue what’s going on, let alone ability to predict the future, and listen to the real experts.
So horribly true about the “can’t possibly happen here” mistake. I think it’s not just vanity, it’s also familiarity. We’ve all grown up in a world where the US had more than its share of crappy under-qualified absurd presidents but not actual neo-Hitlers. My guess is it’s one of our cognitive shortcuts to assume that “it’s been that way for decades”=it will never not be that way.
If Lindbergh had gone for it he could have been a contemporary Hitler-clone. He had an aura of dignity etc, especially after marrying into the Morrow family, but he was bad news.
Levitsky and Ziblatt have also made the point that America has had its share of hungry, ambitious, populist demagogues, and some of them did enjoy levels of public support comparable to Trump. But none of them ever got close to the presidency, because ultimately the party leaders had the final say in nominating a candidate. For all its problems the old system before open primaries (the “smoke-filled back rooms”) did have something going for it.