The work ahead
If damage is the strategy, then the cracks are our guide to the work our democracy needs from us, win or lose.
We are nearing the end of an election cycle that many Americans have been dreading and/or trying to avoid despite its near-omnipresence. In the intro to my book, I told the story of how differently different communities in this country experienced President Obama’s victory back in 2008. In the 16 years since, our country has evolved from different communities experiencing a largely shared experience differently to largely independent communities that only share geography living through fundamentally disconnected experiences shaped by fundamentally different facts, principles, and outcomes. Another victory for President Trump will be seen by some as a return to strength and a recommitment to defending traditional American values and to others as an existential threat to American democracy. A victory for Vice President Harris will be seen as further evidence of the elitist, liberal collapse of Western culture or as a triumph of multiracial, multiclass democracy over the global, right-wing populist shift toward strongman authoritarianism.
The problem with this either-or framing is that it suggests different interpretation of shared experience rather than a conflict between disparate, concurrent experiences in disconnected communities. And in the aftermath of these largely non-intersecting realities experiencing fundamentally different outcomes, we will then be left to sort out which reality ends up getting attached to the levers of power — not based on a shared commitment to values, principles, and practices of a shared democracy, but as the victory of one narrative over another in a cultural conflict disconnected from clear outputs of clear processes from shared systems.
While a second President Trump term would endanger many Americans and people across the world and while his handlers and enablers would likely use his administration to strengthen and harden the anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian elements of our republic in service of their desperate efforts to maintain their ever-weakening grasp for power and likely attempt to further untether our republic from democratic principles, Trump’s continued presence and his active and intentional erosion of democratic culture and norms has already profoundly damaged American democracy. The current state of the election as a whole and the disconnect between our experiences of our civic lives and the government we rely on to build and sustain our capacity to live in community in this country suggest that we are already living in a deeply damaged democracy. Much of the damage we fear from Trump has already been rendered. But rather than dispiriting, that recognition also means we already have a roadmap to the work we need to do after tomorrow regardless of who wins.
Completely independent of partisanship or policy, a healthy, vibrant democratic culture — one animated by a deep commitment to self-determination, self-government, pluralism, and civic duty — would reject Trump as a candidate much less select him as its leader.
The intentional undermining of democratic culture justifies questioning and weakening democratic norms, which makes undermining democratic process and institutions easier for leaders who cannot win majoritarian support on their own. Leaders who can only rule in a tyranny of the minority (see more detail in Tyranny of the Minority from Levitsky and Ziblatt) must rely on restricting citizenship and leveraging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian features of the republic to access and retain power. This process is a feature (not a bug) of Trump’s entire rise to power, and the operatives and influencers who swirl in his chaotic wake do so in order to amass and retain power that they cannot access any other way because history has moved past them. The only path to power for these craven, mean-spirited enablers is to make the country meaner and smaller and less ambitious. These same enablers act as the high priests of the Trumpist religion in order to convince folks that Trumpism offers a path forward, a path to a lost prosperity and sense of control. They reinforce a small-minded, zero-sum view of society by convincing people that anyone other than them is responsible for the economic inequalities and weakened social systems and mutual aid networks that they have actively undermined and destroyed — and blame the very people trying to care for people and heal the country for the damage they are causing.
People's feelings of uncertainty and precarity are profound and real and need to be addressed in genuine, palpable ways. Modern life can feel alienating and isolating as healthy, familiar social connectivity is weakened. Our information systems promote extreme opposition and narrow our worldviews and perspectives, which gives us a comforting sense of certainty but also an inflamed sense of grievance while failing to provide deeper context for our realities or clues to our shared experiences. Combined with narratives that encourage a posture of threat, people can be drawn onto paths that feel responsive and tuned to their fears and needs but are incapable of delivering on their promises. This is how culture and systems that prioritize declaration over delivery become dangerous.
Our declaration culture incentivizes extremism; deempahizes, undermines, and confuses expertise; optimizes our public discourse around absolutist opposition; and institutionalizes the illusory truth effects of mis- and disinformation by constantly repeating falsehoods into credible critique and even into the illusion of truth. All of these features make damaging democracy easier and more effective as a strategy to access and acquire power at the expense of democratic culture and norms.
Telling people the answer to the uncertainty and uneven precarity of modern life is to go back to some unavailable, nostalgic view of a nation inconsistent with our own experience, tinted by euphoric recall and mythology is an appeal to our simplest, worst instincts. It's all a grift and a desperate grasp for relevance and power by an increasingly desperate minority. And it is all intentional. The reason that disinformation is so central to the strategy is that reality does not back up their narrative or the failure of their approach to governing or the weakness of their ideas or the immorality of their conclusions or validate their stated beliefs much less the actual consequences of their plans.
Damage is the strategy.
Therefore, regardless of the outcomes tomorrow, there is work to do the day after. A second Trump Presidency is likely to be greeted by another wave of resistance, organizing and directing action and support for people under threat, but we cannot let that work crowd out the longer-horizon work we need to put into our democratic culture and practices. A Harris victory will be greeted by some as a victory over authoritarianism, but that cannot be interpreted as anything more than a temporary salve for the damage already done to our democracy of a long-term disenchantment of American civic life. When Harris wins, we cannot miss the imperative to do the reweaving of our frayed social fabric and democratic culture, redesigning our political processes, and rebuilding the civic rituals that are needed for our democracy to thrive under an administration eager to support and implement that work rather than one actively working to undermine it.
In a democracy, elections are just the mechanism by which we choose leadership and share power. The real work of serving each other, of ensuring justice, of working to share our resources and ensure everyone thrives happens after election day. And in the case of the work we must do to reshape and strengthen our democracy, never has that been more true. Defeating Trump isn't the end of the work of defending democracy: it is the necessary beginning. We must breathe new life into the foundational democratic cultural principles instead of indulging in confirmation bias and declaration culture. We must recommit to and prioritize these damaged norms in our political processes over our need to win and our obsession with our opponents’ losing. We must redesign our institutions to focus on service and delivery over performative posturing and maintaining rather than using power. We must make our democracy democratic and joyous. This work is the path toward a real, broad, vibrant, creative democracy capable of adaptive, future-oriented ideas and meeting the challenges and opportunities in front of us. And this work must be done — win or lose.