Keep Calm and Protect Democracy

Instead of "catastrophizing" ourselves into despair, pay attention to the regime's weaknesses, including among the MAGA base.

It’s the last week of August so I’m going to keep this post fairly short.

Yes, it’s been a worrisome week. As Bill Kristol summed things up yesterday, in the last week:

“Military leaders and intelligence professionals were purged. A prominent Trump critic’s home was raided. The Epstein coverup proceeded apace. A major corporation was extorted. Universities and the media remained under assault. A national museum was ordered to rewrite our history. The attempt at mid-decade redistricting in order to keep Republican control of the House of Representatives moved ahead. Mass deportation and civic intimidation continued across the nation. Presidential control of law enforcement in the nation’s capital intensified, with the promise that it will expand to other places. And vanishingly few Republican elected officials objected to any of this.”

Our side is very good at cataloging how terrible things are and then projecting our fears forward into complete darkness. I call this catastrophizing. Remember how sure people were that martial law was going to be declared on April 20? Now the new version of that catastrophizing is all the people sharing a Substack article titled “I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%.” In fact, that’s a very arguable claim, in part because of how the author actually defines success: removing a fascist regime from power via elections.

Here are some examples of successful movements that stopped fascism: the 2019 Smile Revolution in Algeria, the 2018 Revolution in Armenia, the July Revolution in Bangladesh in 2024, the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, the various movements that overthrew Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s including Solidarity in Poland and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the People Power campaign against Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship in the Philippines in 1986—the list goes on.

(That post is doing very well for its author; it has gotten nearly 9,500 likes and 3,600 restacks so far—most of his other posts get 1/100^th of that level of engagement.)

Past is not prologue. We have a ton of knowledge and capacity to organize ourselves. Plus, let’s not forget that Trump himself is quite malleable and often backs down in the face of strong opposition.

Try a Different Point of View

Another problem with catastrophizing is that it works when we behave like an echo chamber. There’s a reason why it’s dangerous to be in a big crowd when scary rumors start to spread; the lizard part of our brains takes over and stampedes happen. So, I find it useful to seek out other points of view, because there’s no way my little bubble is seeing everything. Here’s a fresh example.

What if, despite all the ugly actions emanating from the White House, Trump is actually in decline? And not just physically, but politically, with his own base? Professional futurist Cassidy Steele Dale made a very interesting argument on his Substack Think Future last Thursday. Here it is in summary form.

The entire Trump-Miller-Vought project rests on the loyalty of his MAGA base. That’s what has kept him polling with at least a 40% approval rating. And now that support level is showing signs of dipping, slowly but perceptively, below 40%. If you assume that 20% of the population are hardcore racist, fascist, authoritarians (something Dale says is true for most countries), then there’s another substantial group that is wedded to Trump because they buy into four core narratives that are the heart of his aura. Dale argues that maybe those narratives are weakening, or will begin to weaken soon. Those are:

1) Trump is strong. In a world that has ignored “us” and “put us down,” Trump is “our bully.” (You’ll recall this meta-theme from Arlie Hochschild’s recent book Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right.) As Dale writes, the MAGA movement sees him “as the only one strong enough and tough-minded enough to do what needs to be to protect good people against thugs, civil rights, immigrants, HR, liberals, non-Christians, Actual Jesus, gay people, and women.” Dale thinks this narrative is holding but vulnerable to being undermined either by Trump’s deportation crusade overreaching (as it already has in some conservative towns where the people arrested are beloved community members, not “dangerous criminals”), or by others successfully creating doubts about his strongman image.

Hence Dale says California Governor Gavin Newsom should be applauded for how he’s mocking Trump, rather than being intimidated by him. So let’s do more mocking, please! Same with Illinois Governor J.D. Pritzker’s decision to speak out forcefully, with a phalanx of other state political, business and civic leaders behind him, against Trump’s threat to send troops to Chicago. Pritzker backed that up with a threat of his own, to pursue any federal agent that harms “my people” – “we are watching and we are taking names,” he said. “If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure you face justice under our constitutional rule of law,” he declared. Trump is now hedging on whether he will follow through on his threat.

2) Trump is good on the economy. Here Dale thinks that all the chaos being generated by Orangeman’s tariffs and deportations, etc., will “self-disprove this narrative” at which point liberal efforts to point out all the stupid and corrupt things he is doing will gain more traction. Patience, then? Or more efforts to reach out to affected businesses?

3) Trump will free us from Democratic rules and bureaucrats. Dale thinks DOGE’s chainsaw destruction of federal agencies was at least partially unpopular for a lot of MAGA because some of the mass firings touched them or services they rely on. And he argues that what could hurt Trump more here would be if he seemed to not care about this anymore. But he and his minions are still firing lots of government employees and going after people seen as politically suspect, so it’s hard to see how this narrative leg will weaken much. But our side can definitely do more to elevate public servants who do good work and whose firings go against common sense.

4) Trump will go after the Democratic pedophilia cabal that has been conspiring in the dark to destroy America. In Dale’s view, this leg of MAGA’s support has collapsed ever since it became clear that the White House rapist-in-chief was burying the Epstein files. The only thing that could be worse, he argues, is if Trump is indeed all over those files. And the good news here is that this issue isn’t going away; with Congress returning soon from recess, it will be back in the headlines.

Some people burned their MAGA hats after the Epstein cover-up became obvious

From Dale’s point of view, almost nothing that we liberal pro-democracy types are doing is helping undermine these narratives. He says, with much justice, that we “make rational arguments whereas [Trump] only makes emotional ones” centered on fear, that usually win. Same with Trump’s devotion to stunts that prop up his image. “Liberals don’t respect illusion; they respect facts. So they don’t speak to fear-motivated, fear-ful, fear-filled MAGA people at all and makes MAGA conclude liberals are clueless about the real dangers of the present day and thus aren’t trustworthy to listen to or elect.”

That’s an important insight. One thing I think about a lot is whether some of the things we are doing right now to organize opposition to Trump and fascism are also having the effect of organizing the other side too. This is why, for example, I argued months ago that it would be smart (in addition to being morally right) to elevate federal workers who provide essential services – scientists, people who fight diseases, veterans, air traffic controllers – as faces of the Defiance. But so far, other than a few of the heroes of January 6, like former US Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, the frontline victims of DOGE haven’t been turned into household names. Federal workers are largely on their own—though activists in at least six agencies (NIH, NSF, EPA, CDC, FEMA and NASA) have now released “letters of dissent” from hundreds of current and former staff.

The current theory of change operative among many in the Defiance, which calls for trying to undermine or shift key institutions and leaders among the regime’s “pillars of support,” doesn’t put much emphasis on figuring out how to weaken MAGA’s beliefs in Trump. But maybe it should, too.

Dale thinks that all four of Trump’s core narratives are going to be pushed to their breaking points in the next six months, largely due to Trump’s own actions. It would be great if he were right.

Duly Noted

—“Nothing pisses me off more than getting a fundraising text from Democrats talking about how they’re fighting fascism,” Maine U.S. Senate candidate said on X on last week. “Because it’s such bullshit. We’re not idiots. Everyone knows most of them aren’t doing jack shit right now to fight back. People are being kidnapped into unmarked vans by masked police. There is a genocide happening in Palestine. Literal billionaires have taken over our government. And all Democratic leadership can do is send us another fundraising text?”

—Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison uploaded his 2020 Senate campaign email list to Substack, a violation of the site’s anti-spam rules, prompting lots of users to complain. He told Politico, “For me, knowing email stuff and all that other stuff, I don’t follow this stuff.” Go back to being a corporate lobbyist!

End Times

For a really different and intriguing point of view on our times, check this out. (Hey, Marc Maron recommended it on Pod Save America!)