By now, it’s hard to deny that Trump has a narrow but plausible path to authoritarian rule in the United States. Polls show he could well win next year’s election. Trump allies are openly developing an elaborate blueprint to transform a second term into full-blown autocracy. Prominent columnists have demonstrated in great detail how it might succeed.
But certain versions of this argument have grown seriously problematic. It’s sometimes said that our institutions and civic culture have withered so much that resistance to Trumpian tyranny would be incapacitated, rendering its onset all but inevitable.
Such a reading of the moment risks leading us astray.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
He and his allies are vowing to stock the government with loyalists who would trample legal constraints, arrest political opponents without cause and persecute the “vermin” voters who resist him.
A year later, historians Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol documented an unexpected groundswell of painstaking political organizing among formerly apathetic middle-aged women to defend democracy, fueling Democrats’ 2018 midterm blowout.
During the 2020 election season, despite outbreaks of street violence, most voters saw protests against police brutality as peaceful, legitimate political activity, rejecting Trump’s effort to smear them in threatening terms.
Trump’s incitement of a violent coup attempt inspired the Democrat-led hearings investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, the most riveting public case mounted by a governing body in at least a generation.
Yes, Trump can win, but polls likely reflect voter disengagement long before Election Day, and alarmist obsessing over them risks distracting us from a deeper cause of our crisis.
But it’s also possible to take this too far, and here it’s worth registering an irony: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of strongman rule, has noted that a time-tested tactic of authoritarian leaders is to disarm the electorate by suggesting their glorious triumph is inevitable.
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