Donald Trump’s plans to remake American society is not incremental or gradual. Trump, his advisors and agents are attempting to impose a revolutionary project on the whole of American life that will, in various ways, likely impact every person in the country.
Trump, however, is not a political ideologue. He is obsessed with expanding the realm of his own self-interest and getting and exercising more corrupt power; “politics,” however defined and understood, is just a means to an end for Trump. By comparison, the people (and organizations) in Trump’s closest orbit such as JD Vance, Stephen Miller, the Heritage Foundation and the many White Christian nationalists and gangster capitalists (to the degree they are distinct from one another) are actual ideologues who possess a coherent theory of society (and human nature) and how to advance and achieve their desired outcomes. Because they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the threat and struggle, the combination of these forces will be very difficult if not impossible for the “institutionalists” and mainstream members of the political class, news media and other elites to stop.
On this, historian Timothy Snyder warns:
It was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.
Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate — a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean?....
A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it.
That requires presence, which Trump has always had. His charisma need not resonate with you: probably, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s would not have reached you, either. But it is nevertheless a talent. To be a fascist and to call someone else a fascist requires a cunning that is natural to Trump. And in that naming of the enemy, absurd as it is, we see the second major element of fascism.
A Leader (“Duce” and “Führer” mean just that) initiates politics by choosing an enemy. As the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt maintained, the choice is arbitrary. It has little or no basis in reality. It takes its force from the decisive will of the Leader. The people who watched Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color. The magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part of an overwhelming conspiracy.
The one thing that is not arbitrary about the choice of an enemy is that it must exploit vulnerabilities.
Throughout the Age of Trump and the democracy crisis, Masha Gessen has repeatedly counseled that we should take his threats seriously. In a new essay at the Times, Gessen continues with their warnings — which are now even more critical given Trump’s imminent return to power:
For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”
Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. …
Trump and his supporters have shown tremendous hostility to civic institutions — the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits, some religious groups — that seek to define and enforce our obligations to one another.
On Monday, Trump confirmed that he will declare a state of national emergency as part of his plans to use the military and other forces as part of his mass deportation program targeting nonwhite migrants, refugees and other “illegal aliens.” This could potentially lead to the forced removal of more than 10 million people from the country – including American citizens who are caught up in the dragnet. Beyond the collective psychic, physical and emotional trauma, economists and other experts are warning that Trump’s deportation plan will also cause great financial and economic harm to the American people. On this, historian Heather Cox Richardson notes in her newsletter that, "While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere."
In all, to navigate (and survive) the next four years of Trump’s MAGA America, the American people and their leaders will need to internalize and act upon the wisdom of Snyder, Gessen, Richardson and other leading pro-democracy voices. M. Steven Fish is one such voice. He is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has appeared on BBC, CNN and other major networks and has published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy and elsewhere. His new book is “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nationand Restoring Democracy's Edge.”
In this conversation, Fish explains that it was not racism nor sexism that doomed Harris’ political campaign (and by extension dealt a severe blow to American democracy) but instead a combination of failed messaging, virtue signaling and purity tests that pushed away potential voters from the metaphorical and literal big tent that the Democrats should have been creating.
Fish counsels that the Democrats and other pro-democracy Americans need to quickly get past the mourning stage and learned helplessness and other forms of inaction to shift towards an action phase of planning how best to protect and resuscitate American democracy from the assaults of Trump and his MAGA movement. To that end, Fish outlines how the Democratic Party needs to engage in a very critical self-assessment to recalibrate itself accordingly around a high-dominance and combative style of leadership and politics that directly confronts Trumpism and its allied forces.
This is the second part of a two-part conversation.
Considering the realpolitik — and what many people are likely thinking — do you believe that if the Democrats had nominated a white man instead of Kamala Harris, would they have had a better chance of victory?
Of course, there’s no shortage of racists and sexists and Trump’s campaign emboldened them. But in the bigger picture, the data show a steady decline in prejudice and intolerance. Furthermore, you can’t look at the numbers on Trump’s spectacular gains with Hispanics and milder but still appreciable gains with Blacks and Asian Americans and then blame Harris’s defeat on racism. Harris actually outperformed Biden among whites — both those with and without college degrees. If we’re look at voting by racial demographics, Trump won entirely on the strength of gains among nonwhites. And it’s hard to examine voting by gender and blame Harris’s performance on sexism since she lost more support among women than men compared to Biden in 2020. The gender gap was smaller this time than it was in 2020 and smaller still than it was in 2016. If Harris had done as well as Biden with women and Hispanics, she might be on her way to the White House.
Trump made a big play for young men, especially in the closing stages of the campaign. In our last conversation, you said she should blunt his offensive by going on Joe Rogan and other podcasts with large male audiences and the “manosphere” more broadly. Harris didn’t end up doing that and Rogan endorsed Trump. She seemed to cede that whole realm to Trump.
Absolutely and it’s time to have a more serious conversation about how the Democrats’ messaging lands with men. Let’s take abortion. Why were her supporters pro-choice, Harris asked in her stock speech? Because she roared, “We trust women!” Fair enough, but did the Democrats “trust” the other half of the electorate, too? Most men, like most women, are pro-choice. So instead of treating them as bystanders or even would-be adversaries on this issue, why not include them in the project by treating abortion as a freedom issue that was vital to all Americans? During the DNC, the Harris campaign seemed interested in shifting to a freedom frame that could appeal to all Americans. Unfortunately, that didn’t last and the Democrats ran the latter stages of their campaign as if girl power alone would win the day. They openly admitted as much. The results suggest that approach didn’t work, even with women.
Some leaders tried to make sure the Democrats aggressively included men. Pete Buttigieg pressed the point that men are also freer in a country where women have the right to choose. Walrus NYC, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki and Greencard Pictures teamed up to make engaging videos for social media that used comedy to get young men to appreciate the stake they have in policies on reproductive rights.
Ross Morales Rocketto, the guy who founded “White Dudes for Harris,” warned: “What we are really trying to do is engage a group of people that the left has ignored...There’s a silent majority of white men who aren’t MAGA Republicans." We haven’t done anything to try to capture those votes.
For voices like those, however, it was an uphill climb. In the closing weeks of the campaign and in her only major statement after the DNC, here’s how Michelle Obama addressed men: “Your rage does not exist in a vacuum. If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother — we as women — will become collateral damage to your rage.” Now there’s a way to bring the guys around: Tell them that the reason they might hesitate to support Harris is their “rage.” Then let them know that you care more about their wives, daughters and mothers than they do and that you’re stepping in to shield them from all that rage.
I have other concerns as well. During Barack Obama’s presidency, he often argued that girls should not be expected to act a certain way, look a certain way and be a certain way. That’s of course true and a very important message. But I’ve also heard young men who wholeheartedly embrace gender equality and despise the likes of Andrew Tate say they think liberals are telling them that they should act in a certain way, look a certain way and be a certain way. These guys aren’t filled with rage. Instead, they’re filled with irritation at being told that embracing any traditional notions of masculinity and femininity marks them as insecure, infuriated misogynists. It’s also important to recognize that many women are also turned off by the “protection” from their men’s “rage” that well-heeled progressives like the Obamas claim to offer. Many such women also don’t appreciate being “educated” by progressive elites on the supposed benightedness of traditional gender identities and roles. If we’re to have a shot at the hearts and votes of these men and women, it’s important that we try to understand what so many of them hear in progressive messaging.
Men as protectors? That’s just patronizing. Chivalry? That’s dead and it’s a good thing it is. Guys who spend time at the gym bulking up? They must want to look like a fascist street thug and they fail to understand that modern women value sensitivity, not pecs. Men as primary breadwinners? They must just want to keep women down and out of the workplace. Women who want to stay at home with the kids while their men bring home the bacon? Well, isn’t that quaint. Arguing that athletes who were born male should not compete with women and girls? That’s just transphobia.
If we can’t make the “silent majority of white men who aren’t MAGA” and traditionally-minded non-MAGA women feel welcome and respected in the Democratic Party, we are not only blowing it politically, but we are dishonoring the liberal values we are fighting for.
Trump is filling out his Cabinet and other high-ranking positions. He is following the autocrat’s playbook by instituting personalist rule where loyalty to him is more important than loyalty to the Constitution, the rule of law, or the American people and the nation. How is this related to Trump's version of high-dominance leadership?
Trump’s appointments are definitely manifestations of his own warped version of high-dominance leadership. Responsible high-dominance leaders such as FDR, JFK and LBJ filled positions in their administrations with highly competent figures whose primary loyalty was to the Constitution and the country. Trump not only places personal loyalty first but demands adoration and self-abasement from his subordinates. Beyond that, however, Trump’s appointments are designed to force congressional Republicans to engage in groveling rituals. Trump’s choice of Matt Gaetz as attorney general is Exhibit A. Gaetz isn’t just utterly unqualified but also appears to be grossly morally compromised, which is why Democrats hate him. He is also despised by most Republicans on Capitol Hill for his single-minded devotion to turning the Republican-controlled House into an ungovernable, pitiable food fight for his own amusement and self-gratification. He’s also the subject of a House investigation into his use of illegal drugs and his sexual activities with underage girls.
Now consider what Trump is doing by nominating Gaetz. First, Trump has forced Speaker Mike Johnson either to defy him by releasing the findings of the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into Gaetz’s illegal behavior or to serve him (Trump) by blocking their release. Johnson has already passed Trump’s test: This paragon of pseudo-Christian prudery and self-righteousness is now suppressing a report on the sexual and drug offenses of Trump’s pick to be the country’s chief law enforcement officer. This episode shows beyond all doubt that Johnson’s moral posing is a joke and that his loyalty to Trump outweighs all else — precisely the spectacle Trump intended.
Now to the Senate Republicans, who must confirm Gaetz’s appointment. Gaetz has publicly derided more of them than I can count and the mainstays of their donor base must be alarmed at Gaetz’s nomination. The same corporate executives who are licking their chops at the prospects of a fat tax cut and environmental deregulation still rely on a rule-of-law state to ensure a smoothly functioning market system and they know that Gaetz wants to burn it all down. Now Trump is telling Republican senators: either stand up to the miscreant who has ridiculed you and endangers your own and the country’s vital interests or confirm him and show the world that you bow down to my every whim and lack even a shred of self-respect. If Trump wins this one, he will have the show of total congressional Republican self-abasement he seeks.
To borrow from Masha Gessen when an autocrat-authoritarian speaks, believe him. They are not kidding. In that vein, Trump is one of the most honest politicians in American history. He tells you what he thinks and is going to do. Why then, as I watch certain cable news networks and their guests, do they seem so shocked and surprised by what Trump has announced and is already putting in motion? Trump's plans are public. Where was the urgency earlier?
I agree with you on Trump and what matters most now is whether we effectively leverage his actions for political advantage. If we remain stuck in shocked-and-awed mode and critique Trump’s appointments strictly along progressive ideological lines, we will be taking Trump’s bait. Let’s return to the Gaetz appointment. Some of the focus in the liberal media has been on Gaetz’s praise of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele for his hard-edged approach to law enforcement. Horrified descriptions of mass incarceration and harsh prison conditions in El Salvador abound. What often gets less attention is that prior to Bukele’s presidency, El Salvador was effectively owned by gangs of narcoterrorists who brutalized and extorted the civilian population and generated the world’s highest murder rate. Bukele’s measures have drastically reduced homicide and other crime rates and enabled people to resume normal lives. His approval rating runs at 90 percent, making him the world’s most popular chief executive. If liberals want to leverage Gaetz’s appointment for political gain, they’ll stress his criminality and threat to law and order rather than attacking his endorsement of hard-on-crime tactics.
On this score, there’s a broader point that we need to internalize as we brace ourselves to resist Trump’s attacks on the law. Voters in Oakland, one of the country’s most progressive cities, just voted by ridiculous margins to recall (that is expel from office) the mayor and the DA, who treated abiding crime as some kind of social justice imperative. Of course, liberals must always work to ensure that the rights of the accused are respected and that undocumented migrants are not subjected to inhumane treatment. But if Trump comes out as looking like the scourge of the lawless and we as their defenders, we might as well start preparing for a JD Vance presidency starting in 2029 — if not a Trump third term.
Let’s keep asking ourselves how we can take political advantage of Trump’s abominable appointments. If the Senate approves Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, we will know for sure that the Republicans have become the party of treason. Unfortunately, the Democrats have never even begun to leverage Trump’s apparent and slavering loyalty to America’s greatest sworn enemy for political advantage. There have been exceptions, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Eric Swalwell, but for the most part the party seems to have been characteristically driven by inane issue polls — which, after all, show that “foreign policy” doesn’t top voters’ concerns. As Trump plots selling out Ukraine and undertaking a bevy of other measures that will please his Kremlin idol, now is the time to attack Trump’s appointment of Gabbard as what it is and to call Republicans who intend to confirm her as what they are. For the sake of eliminating the Republicans’ absurd edge in public perceptions of which party is more patriotic, not to mention guarding America’s armed forces, spies and nuclear secrets from betrayal, the Democrats have got to act.
If you were to build a Democrat or other pro-democracy candidate in a laboratory who could defeat Trump and the MAGA movement and his successors, what attributes would he or she have?
Above all, she or he would own the flag and be very confident and bold in how they present themselves and live. They would project sincerity and confidence in their beliefs and values. Everything grows from there. If you can’t even offer straight answers to straightforward questions — and Harris, as it turned out, refused to do so — many voters will perceive you as a poll-driven, craven, conniving politician who isn’t up to the job of protecting them and their interests. And most people also gravitate toward leaders who seem to love the country best and associate themselves with its exceptional attributes and boundless promise.
Democrats should also embrace charisma and search for a leader who’s got it. Liberals dislike personalism, preferring to place policies before personalities. To some extent, that’s healthy. But we’ve got to recognize that Obama had a lot more to do with Obama’s election and reelection than Obamacare did.
In fact, even liberals like having a main man or woman — most people naturally seek the person in charge. His or her personal appeal and mode of messaging has an enormous bearing on the morale of the party and shapes how the party and its causes are perceived by the electorate. That decidedly does not mean turning the party into a personality cult. That’s what the Republicans have done with Trump and what India’s Hindu-chauvinist BJP party has done with Narendra Modi. Nor does it mean that the leader has to be intolerant of differences within the party. FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton had enormous authority in the party and in America as a whole, but they didn’t seek to monopolize power and glory and their party wouldn’t have stood for it if they did. The same is true for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, as it was for Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s and Jawaharlal Nehru in India during the 1940s-1960s.
What do you want to prepare the American people for in the upcoming months and then during Trump’s regime?
Let’s move, right away, from mourning Trump’s return to gearing up for the next election. To that end, we need to understand why the Democrats lost and that starts with putting aside all the bogus explanations for the debacle. It wasn’t “the economy, stupid!” The dunces who ran the party’s messaging on the economy were the problem. Nor did the Democrats abandon the working person in favor of greedy corporate interests. That’s what Trump did and will do again; Biden did just the opposite. Nor is the electorate raring to revive patriarchal domination and racial oligarchy. Americans have grown more, not less, tolerant over time and the raging bigots we see on social media are mostly a despised fringe. Structural conditions, cultural conditions, and our policy record don’t account for our failure; the Democrats’ amateurish messaging does. That means that everything that sabotaged us this time and has held us back for so long, we can fix.
To do so, we’ve got to adopt a new messaging strategy that reestablishes our reputations as strong leaders, fearless fighters, and hardcore patriots. It also means addressing people as individuals and as Americans, not as members of identity groups. How much more evidence do we need that women and people of color want to be treated like makers, not casualties, of the American story? Treating them like oppressed groups in need of rescue has bombed. Running our campaigns on the assumption that we can win with their votes alone has failed as well. Finally, for the sake of keeping our spirits up and landing punches against our political foes, let’s remember the power of humor and ridicule. Andy Borowitz’s post today, “Don’t Say Gaetz: Law Protects Florida’s Kids from Matt Gaetz,” is a great example of what I have in mind.
When I despair, I think of Ukrainian fighters down in the trenches, American soldiers mowed down on the beaches of Normandy, and Freedom Riders risking it all on back roads across the South — all fighting for freedom under conditions far more dire than what we face today. Defeating authoritarianism is the political combat task of our time, and we all owe our magnificent country everything we’ve got to put into the fight. We can do this, starting now.
