Notes for next time

I’ve been thinking a lot about Dan’s post about the end of the republic, as well as Stephen Taylor’s followup.

I’m casting a third vote for “return to the pre-Trump political status quo is impossible, and in any case probably not even desirable at this point.” I acknowledge that both the first and second position are highly contestable, and that there are many commenters who would have good reasons for rejecting one or both of them. (Of course if you accept the first, the second position becomes irrelevant as a practical matter).

As to the other options laid out in the posts, some further thoughts:

The option of a competitive authoritarianism. in which the Democratic party becomes a mirror image of the Republican, and we trade off back and forth between essentially anti-democratic authoritarian regimes with radically different policy goals, strikes me as wildly improbable. This would require a Democratic party that would bear essentially no resemblance to that which now exists. That could happen, I suppose, in a context of very rapid radicalization, but such radicalization could in turn only happen, I think, under conditions that would include the triumph of the fake competitive authoritarian model in which the ruling party holds elections but has no intention of honoring the results if they lose. This is the Russian and Chinese models, and calling this competitive authoritarianism is confusing since it does not feature actual competition. Nor, of course, would an American version of such political “competition.”

If that’s correct, the options become open dictatorship, crypto-dictatorship, revolutionary reconstitution via the destruction of the old regime and its replacement with a new one, complete national dissolution post-civil war, or national partition, which is also probably only possible in the context of post-revolutionary violence.

What I don’t think is possible is that the American polity simply votes its way to one of these options, via the current political system. As Jexpat pointed out in the comments to one of the posts, there is literally no instance of a fascist or crypto or semi-fascist regime allowing itself to be voted out of power. The closest thing to a counter-example is Spain post-Franco, but the Franco regime quickly morphed from a nominally fascist regime into a traditional military dictatorship, with really no fascist features, unless you define any modern military dictatorship as fascist. And in any event Franco was never voted out of power: he died, and is still dead, after 36 years of dictatorship, although as noted it was a relatively “soft” dictatorship after the first few years.

Here it’s important to note that, given their ideological priors, anti-democratic parties would consider the idea that they should surrender power because they lose an election oxymoronic on its face, and that this is where the Republican party has now arrived. The idea that the Trumpist party is going to cede power because of a detail like losing an election or two is, in my view, nearly as fantastic at this point as the idea that the Leninists or the Maoists or the Nazis, or the Italian fascists, or Vladimir Putin, or the PRC, would allow themselves to be voted out of power. More precisely in terms of circumstances in America in 2025, it’s as fantastic as the idea that a fundamentalist religious congregation would allow a vote to transform itself into a commune of vegan atheists.

Religious fundamentalists have no more commitment to democracy than Nazis or Communists, and again, given their priors, there’s no reason they should have any. The exact same thing can be said of plutocrats, for if anything even more obvious reasons (no genuinely democratic system would allow the existence of Musk, Bezos, Ellison, etc.).

At this point, prescribing electoral politics under the current pseudo-legal regime as the cure for what ails America is tantamount to prescribing a glass of water to a patient with metastatic cancer.

That is, in my view, which I realize may well be wrong, where we are right now. Another thing that follows from this is that the days of open political dissent in America without violent pseudo-legal consequences are probably numbered.

Where to go from here is a question that has no obvious answer, but the first step — a step which in my view the Democratic party will, for fundamental institutional and psychological reasons, remain fundamentally incapable of ever taking — is to recognize where “here” actually is.