A few days ago, on my Facebook page, I shared a funny meme that was going around that was started by Paul Overbite on Twitter. It went, “And you may find yourself across the street from a crematorium; And you may find yourself next door to a dildo store; And you may find yourself at a press conference; And you may find yourself in front of a landscaping business; And you may ask yourself, ‘Well…how did I get here?’”
Yes, it is funny to mangle Talking Heads lyrics in order to laugh at the spectacle of former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani standing in front of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping storefront, sandwiched between a funeral parlor and a sex shop, trying to make a case for his buddy President Trump. (Some wag suggested that this was a push for the Lawn and Order vote, who want to Make America Rake Again…I’ll be here all night.) But if you are scratching your head and try to understand what’s going on in America at this moment, you aren’t alone. The question isn’t so much how did we get here, but first, where are we exactly?
On the broad Democratic center-left, there is a quasi-official posture, which is obvious: The people have spoken, the votes were fairly counted, and it’s time to move forward. This is quite understandably aimed at winning over public opinion—including that of millions of Trump voters—to the view that Joe Biden has won. And, buttressed by the clear statements of state election officials, it’s working. Something like three-quarters of the country now says Biden is the next president (assuming you trust polls, which, after last week, ought to be seen as only quasi-useful tools).
From the standpoint of removing Trump from office, this strategy makes a lot of sense. By keeping the spotlight on the future, it robs Trump of his main source of power—his ability to drive the public narrative around his instigations. His legal challenges to the vote are roundly understood as not worth taking seriously. And Biden’s lead in both the national vote and the Electoral College fortunately makes any discussion of recounts changing the result equally futile.
But there remains a lot of confusion and unease among grassroots Democrats, because we also see something dangerous developing, and the quasi-official posture of the Democratic ecosystem doesn’t do a very good job of addressing that. Many of our most perceptive observers—journalists and academics alike, who are not beholden in direct ways to the Democratic party ecosystem—are raising warnings. It’s not that Trump is carrying out some kind of “coup” to stop Biden from taking office. That’s the wrong word for what we’re sensing. It’s something else, more like a cleaving.
I can’t seem to face up to the facts; I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax
Let’s start with the worst scenario. If there’s going to be a violent response to Biden’s election, tomorrow’s demonstrations in Washington, DC will be telling. As this story in the Washington Post details, there are three overlapping rallies afoot—a Million MAGA March, a Stop the Steal demonstration and a Women for Trump event. “The pro-Trump rallies have garnered support from Fox News host Sean Hannity as well as more fringe figures, including Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the Proud Boys; self-described ‘American Nationalist’ and social media agitator Nicholas Fuentes; conservative provocateur Jack Posobiec, who promoted the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory tied to the 2016 shooting at D.C. pizzeria Comet Ping Pong; Scott Presler, a pro-Trump activist who works with anti-Muslim group ACT for America; and Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.” The Million MAGA March has a website that claims that 125,323 people have registered to go, but no one knows if that’s an accurate number. Kids on TikTok have swarmed to it (the same way they falsely registered for a Trump rally last summer), and the site’s registration feature doesn’t appear to be working now.
DC is a heavily Democratic city and there are organized local groups there who may counter-demonstrate. Hopefully, things will remain peaceful. But if pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators clash, events could provide a spark for Trump’s allies in the Justice Department and in the various federal police forces most loyal to him, like ICE and the Customs and Border Patrol, to do something dramatic and foolish. Let’s hope not. There are a lot of Americans who have armed themselves because they imagine that the “other side” is about to do something horrible to them. While I have little doubt that both the FBI and most state and local law enforcement will clamp down hard on any organized militia-type activity aimed at stopping the election process from reaching its culmination, all the noise about the supposed “steal” and the parade of horribles that Biden is supposedly about to impose on Americans can lead to self-radicalization and random acts of terror. Again, let’s hope not.
What does seem to be happening now, and will likely continue even without any violent confrontations, is a virtual secession movement. It’s not like the secession movement that led to the Civil War; no Red states are about to pull out of the Union. But several million Americans appear to be completely leaving the shared public sphere. That’s how I interpret the surge of sign-ups on explicitly conservative social media platforms like Parler, Rumble, Gab and Newsmax. Parler (think Twitter without factchecking and with many of the far-right personalities that Twitter has banned, like Alex Jones and David Duke) says it’s up to 8 million members, nearly double from a week ago and triple where it was in July. Gab, which has been around longer and is equally vile, says its traffic in the first week of November nearly matched its October total of 7.7 million visits.
Some of our most prominent historians, like Sean Wilentz and Timothy Snyder, have written pieces in the last few days warning that Trump’s refusal to concede, and the choice by many Republican elected officials to either echo him or humor him, is leading us in a very corrosive direction. While I think Snyder is wrong to argue that Trump and his defenders are carrying out a quiet coup, I do think he has crystallized what is still so dangerous about the current moment. He writes:
It is always tempting to blame defeat on others. Yet for a national leader to do so and to inject a big lie into the system puts democracy at great risk. Excluding others from the national community makes democracy impossible in principle, and refusing to accept defeat makes it impossible in practice. What we face now in the United States is a new, American incarnation of the old falsehood: that Donald Trump’s defeat was not what it seems, that votes were stolen from him by internal enemies — by a left-wing party….
Snyder, who is an expert on Europe, adds:
History shows where this can go. If people believe an election has been stolen, that makes the new president a usurper. In Poland in 1922, a close election brought a centrist candidate to the presidency. Decried by the right in the press as an agent of the Jews, he was assassinated after two weeks in office. Even if the effect is not so immediate, the lingering effect of a myth of victimhood, of the idea of a stab in the back, can be profound. The German myth of a stab in the back did not doom German democracy immediately. But the conspiracy theory did help Nazis make their case that some Germans were not truly members of the nation and that a truly national government could not be democratic.
Wilentz, in comments reported by Thomas Edsall of the New York Times, sketches a dark scenario that could be the end result of Trump’s current stance:
“It would be a brutal renunciation of American democracy. It would create not simply a fissure but a chasm in the nation’s politics and government, telling his tens of millions of supporters as well as his congressional backers to reject Biden’s presidency. It would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the southern secession in 1860-61, the ultimate example of Americans refusing to respect the outcome of a presidential election….Trump would be trying to establish a center of power distinct from and antagonistic to the legitimately elected national government — not formally a separate government like the Confederacy but a virtual one, operating not just out in the country but inside the government, above all in Congress.”
Wilentz suggested it could be “a counter-government, administered by tweets, propped up by Fox News or whatever alternative outlet Trump might construct for himself — a kind of Trumpian government in exile, run from Mar a Lago or maybe from wherever else Trump selects to reside in, in order to avoid prosecution by the State of New York.”
I don’t think Donald Trump is that serious about power to form anything like a counter-government; he has always preferred the performance to the actual administrative follow-through. But right now the cancer that lives inside America (or maybe the cancerous growth that is old America), which we have to recognize as a white Christian nationalism that believes itself under demographic and cultural siege, is getting a heavy dose of the kind of toxic fuel that makes it grow worse.
And this is where the quasi-official messaging of the Democratic ecosystem is falling short right now. Talking past the monster in the basement doesn’t make it disappear. Some unknown portion of Democratic voters and activists may even have imagined that by defeating Trump at the ballot box we’d be killing the monster. I’m especially appalled at the silence from the leaders of Protect the Results, whose self-appointed leaders positioned themselves alongside several other pop-up efforts like ChooseDemocracy, Hold the Line, the Frontline and Shutdown DC, as the people who had experience navigating wannabe authoritarians and who would help Americans manage the Trump post-election threat. Since calling on its network to stand down a week ago, PTR has gone dark.
ChooseDemocracy, by contrast, sent an email to its list two days ago, explaining that it was keeping its powder dry because the coup scenario it had been preparing for wasn’t happening. “What we have seen has been slow, poorly rolled out, and has none of the surprise elements associated with a traditional coup.” Then, after repeating the current Democratic catechism about celebrating the “people’s will” and so on, the email adds this: “Yes, Trump and his collaborators are appealing to a frustrated and angry base. Yes, it’s traitorous to our Democracy. Yes, it’s vile. Yes, it’s stirring up forces of distrust and dissension. Yes, it can be scary. And… Trump isn’t winning the fight for legitimacy. His efforts are being slapped down and do not have the power to change the outcome of the election. It’s the move of a losing team that’s trying hail mary plays after the game is over.”
Unfortunately, the game isn’t over. The game never ends. And what the current moment suggests is that we need more options in our playbook beyond a) mass protest or b) happy talk. For while it’s true that in an election campaign, it makes little sense to try to engage your opponent’s supporters since factual arguments don’t beat emotional attachments, in the larger arena if a big chunk of Americans go into 2021 believing that the political system itself has been hijacked and thus deserves no legitimacy, our social contract is broken. Rebuilding it is a much harder task than winning an election.
As I mentioned at the end of Tuesday’s Connector, if you know of groups or projects that are trying to address this problem, hit reply and let me know.
Odds and Ends
–Next Thursday at 10am ET, I’ll be speaking on a panel of the Collective Wisdom Online Summit, which is being convened by Civic Hall Brussels, Liberte Living Lab and the Brussels Policy Lab. Registration is free.
–After reading Tuesday’s Connector about the Stop the Steal movement, researcher Marc Smith of Connected Action ran a sophisticated visualization of the Twitter network for people who have recently used the hashtag through NodeXL. The results are here. If you follow that link, be prepared for trip down the rabbit hole. It’s just a snapshot of the mob in action, but if you page through Smith’s deck you’ll find lots of intriguing pointers to tributaries in the Stop the Steal swamp.
–Life in Facebookia: Stephen Bannon thinks FBI Director Christopher Wray and infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees that that statement wasn’t a big enough violation of the platform’s policies against hate speech for his account to be deactivated. Lovely.
–I have to save my fury for another time for how Trump-led denialism has fueled our abysmal response to the Covid crisis; this recent Twitter thread by Andy Slavitt, former head of HHS under Obama, says what unfortunately needs to be said.