“Most of them were lovely—not hardliners. They didn’t even seem that interested in Trump. They came to the rally for the community. These are the kinds of people who will stop supporting him as soon as they see that he is hurting the country.” We were sitting in my living room eating the Halloween candy that the expected children had not stopped by to collect. The man speaking was an Israeli journalist sent by his paper to cover the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden a few days earlier. It was the end of October and the election hadn’t happened yet. We were in the suspension stage of anxiety. I asked: “But when will it become clear to any of those people that Trump is hurting the country?”
“What do you mean?” He was nonplussed. From every point of the centre-to-left American political spectrum we had heard ad nauseam that Trump threatens democracy; that our democracy is on the ballot; that a Trump victory would pry America away from the American promise of liberalism and freedom for all. What would it mean to not notice that the foreseen assault was actually already taking place?
So I asked: “What would have to happen, what would Trump have to do, for the people who don’t already consider the threat real and terrible to be forced to notice?”
It seemed as if I was asking whether or not Trump’s presidency would really be so terrible. But my point was not so obtuse or naïve. I had been silently struggling with the barbed awareness that the two democracies whose inviolability had been mythological to me since childhood had already manifested shocking disinterest in basic democratic principles. Aside from the US, Israel was the other state on my mind that evening. Israelis still believe that they live in the only democracy in the Middle East. This is despite the obliteration of Gaza, plus the facts that the government penalises government officials for condemning Israeli actions, imprisons academics and students for expressing anti-war sentiment, beats and rounds up protesters who sway Palestinian flags and routinely strips Palestinians of the rights it grants to Jewish Israelis both inside the borders of Israel and in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
As developments in Israel (and Russia and China, etc) demonstrate, patriots who feel in their marrow that condemning their country is an act of treason will be hard-pressed to fight for the democratic values enshrined in their declarations of independence if the threat to those values comes from the government. When a fascistic governing power has swept the country so thoroughly that no politically powerful opposition exists, what is morally demanded is resistance rather than political agitation, and that starts to feel revolutionary. Self-defined patriots don’t like to ask themselves whether or not it is moral to obey their country’s laws. This is true no matter the language those laws are written in. There is no red line, no Morgan Freeman voiceover announcing the end of democracy. It merely trickles away.
The electorate of the American democratic project has legally and overwhelmingly elected an official who has promised to destroy the structures that safeguard our democracy. He is already doing that and we are already finding it difficult to notice. At what point does the poison set in? When do we start noticing? What if the answer is never?
For most Americans it will be possible to live for the next four years as if America has not changed in any essential way. The transformations that have already occurred, and those that are forthcoming, will seem benign to those who want to see them that way—by which I mean most people. I include most of the left, which has spent the days since the election bloviating on every outlet and in person about the reasons why Kamala Harris lost. Someone should tell them it does not matter now. It does not matter that she didn’t promise enough, it does not matter that she promised too much, it does not matter that Bernie would have won. All that matters now is how to staunch the bleeding of our democracy, before the weakest members of society suffer irreparably.
What matters now, and it matters great deal, is tracking the damage and doing whatever we can to resist. And for the many who are new to this work, resistance must begin by supporting the resisters already on the ground in states in which the most vulnerable will bear the brunt of our terrible failure. There are vigilante militias in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona who have spent the last four years praying for this new age. They are armed to the teeth and already emboldened by Trump’s victory. When their man was out of the Oval Office, they planned in step with many other of their allies on the right. We must do the same. Reporters who have been covering the border for years know that this Trump term will be even worse than the last. As one recently wrote, “This time, with Trump and his allies believing that they have a mandate from the American people, it will be much worse.”
But we should have already known that. Did we need them to tell us? Do we need the feminist organisations smuggling mifepristone past drug dogs, and trans people living in fear and hoarding oestrogen and similar drugs in red states to tell us that our America has suddenly become a terrifying place for them to live? That what they need from us is concrete planning, funding, and emphatic support?
Most of Trump’s policies won’t hurt most Americans. The way most Americans will suffer will be the constant barrage of Trump’s trademark, idiotic ejaculations and indecencies which are distasteful but not actually harmful to them. But Trump’s bromides, which various media outlets cover like bloodhounds, distract from the very real consequences of Trump’s politics and the empowerment of his base, which are altering people's lives in this country on the ground. It is still possible for people to say that the first Trump term wasn’t that bad, that it was unpleasant only because he was odious. That is because the press failed. Unless the press organises itself in such a way that the average American is forced to look at the deterioration of our democracy, and recognise in it conditions much like other countries which are manifestly undemocratic, liberal Americans will sleep through our undoing.
I believe my friend who attended the Trump rally—I’m sure most of the people there were shockingly agreeable. I assume that most of the people who voted for Trump did not do it because he will embolden the worst actors in our country to strip non-white, non-cis, non-male, non-Christian people of their rights. I’m sure if most of the American electorate (centrists included!) read the previous sentence they would roll their eyes and call it fearmongering, and I must insist that their incredulity does not matter in the least. It is not our job to convince people that their gut-deep respect for an evil, blood-pure thug is symptomatic of some basic ugliness. We already lost the election. Too many Americans either went out to vote for him or stayed home because the election didn’t seem to matter so much. The court of public opinion has been unmasked. Now we must deal with the consequences.
