Shortly after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, I spoke to a friend in Istanbul about my boundless horror, and while I don’t remember the exact words she said in response, they amounted to ” Welcome to my world “. I told her about all the protests that had broken out and she gently warned me not to get my hopes up. She had also protested against Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, she said, but those protests eventually died down, and so did ours.
Over the next four years, I was often relieved that his prediction did not come true. The Resistance, as the broad alliance of anti-Trump Americans came to be called, never wavered. One obvious reason for its persistence is that Americans enjoy strong civil rights protections that opponents of regimes in many other countries do not. Despite my friend’s generous empathy, there was actually no real comparison between our situations; while Trump demonized journalists, Erdogan imprisoned them. In the absence of serious state repression, Trump’s critics rarely had to hide their feelings, making it easier to maintain hope that they, and not their bizarre lunatic of a president, represented the future from this country.
I fear that in a second Trump administration it will be much harder to keep the faith. Trump’s first presidency seemed like a grotesque accident, a civic disaster that befell us because we were too blithely arrogant to see it coming. The Trump redux, however, is something we are heading towards with our eyes wide open. If he wins again, it won’t be a shock, and no one will be able to claim, as many have done before, that we are not the way we are.
Right now, the general election polls are blaring like sirens: a recent Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey puts Trump ahead in all seven key states. He has made no secret of his intention to govern: he wants to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and imprison them in a network of new detention camps while awaiting deportation. He will, he says, free many of the January 6 insurgents – he calls them “hostages” – and use the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies. As the Washington Post reported, his associates have drawn up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act as soon as he takes power so he can deploy the military against protesters.
The ex-president’s rhetoric is increasingly Hitlerian; he has repeatedly said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country, language that echoes “Mein Kampf.” This month, he approvingly quoted Vladimir Putin about “the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach democracy to others,” and said he wanted to be a dictator from day one of a second presidency. It must be taken seriously, even if we have all become too numb to maintain the appropriate level of alarm.
Faced with this impending nightmare, the anti-Trump forces seem stunned and dejected. As progressives turn on Joe Biden over the Gaza war, people too young to remember Ralph Nader’s 2000 spoiler campaign, which helped give us the George W. Bush presidency and thus the war in Iraq, threaten to vote for a third or independent party. candidates like Jill Stein and Cornel West. Meanwhile, the flood of money that kept the Resistance afloat during the Trump years has dwindled to a trickle. In November, liberal giant MoveOn became the latest progressive group to face layoffs, a sign, according to the New York Times, of “a slowdown in donations from small donors to left-wing causes and candidates.”
I was alarmed by something the painter Adam Pendleton said in a roundup of trendsetters’ predictions for 2024 published by T, the Times’ style magazine. “We’re going to turn to abstraction,” he says. “I predict that Donald Trump is going to win the election, and when people are looking for some kind of safety valve or a way to move forward, I don’t think they’re going to get that by looking at a bunch of figurative paintings.” I have nothing against abstract art, but I was disturbed both by his resignation and by the idea that a new Trump term might be met not with relentless resistance but with aesthetic evasion.
Before we can fight authoritarianism, we must fight fatalism. My great hope for 2024 is that anti-Trump Americans can transcend exhaustion, burnout, and self-protective pessimism to mobilize again for the most important final election of our lifetimes. It is perfectly understandable that many people galvanized by the horror of Trump would step aside once his immediate threat to the Republic receded. The political obsession that engulfed the country under his administration was neither sustainable nor healthy. But if you don’t want an even uglier and more desperate repeat of those years, now is the time to act.
A good place to start is by donating to local organizations working on voter turnout, which are desperately underfunded. (The Movement Voter Project has a clickable map with links to such groups around the country.) You can also get involved in campaigns to put referendums protecting abortion rights in states on the ballot like Arizona and Florida, efforts that could both undo the country’s cruel abortion ban and boost voter turnout.
It will be especially important next year to give people reasons to vote beyond the presidential election. I didn’t want Biden to run again and I wish there was a competitive Democratic primary race, but it’s now too late for a serious challenge. Faced with an unenthusiastic electorate, Democrats will need few candidates capable of motivating people to go to the polls. Few do more to attract exciting new candidates to the political process than Run for Something, which recruits and trains young progressives to run for office.
“As we look at our strategy for 2024, we want to make sure in particular that we prioritize resources for local candidates whose races can make an impact at the top of the rankings,” said Run co-organizer Amanda Litman. for Something. founder. Young voters, she said, “are not particularly excited about Joe Biden right now. But through years of education and each of these special elections, they deeply understand the need to run locally.
I hope she’s right. Next year is going to be difficult. It’s up to all of us to decide whether this is going to be disastrous.