Wake Us Up When November Ends?

The election won’t offer an escape from our democratic nightmare

Soon, America will decide to elect Kamala Harris or Donald Trump to the White House. A vast catalog of excellent reporting and commentary outlines the danger of putting Trump back in office. But even a resounding Trump defeat will not pull us safely back from the precipice. 

We have been standing on the edge for too long, inching toward the abyss. To elect Donald Trump would be to dangle a foot out and tempt fate. But rejecting him now, after almost ten years of Trump and Trumpism, only buys us time. 

Experts in democratization and civil conflict have been sounding the alarm for years now. January 6, as horrible as it was, is nearly four years in the past. There will be new voters this year who could not yet drive when the mob stormed the Capitol and chanted “hang Mike Pence.”

I am, in the long run, an optimist. But the rot of the Trump years is deep, and it’s important to understand how it has transformed our political landscape. The problem can be broken down to three groups: Republican elites, the voters, and the various communities in which we all live. 

The Elites: The Best Lack All Conviction 

Should Trump lose and actually step aside, there will be quite the scrum for his crown. But the winner is almost certain to be someone who has, at minimum, given cover to Trump’s assault on our democracy—if not having actively participated in it. 

Even if the party nominates a person like Nikki Haley in 2028, that means nominating someone who supported Trump after the January 6 insurrection and who exhorted voters to back him in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, even as reporting emerged of Trump’s own former staffers plainly calling him a unique threat to the republic. 

In a late-October post meant to rally wavering voters to Trump and the GOP, Haley elaborated, “I know it’s not about personality or style. It’s about substance.” Of course, it’s precisely the substance of Donald Trump and the party he’s remade in his image that poses a danger. 

Haley’s submission shows a total reversal on a man she swore would have to earn her support. Worse can be said for other Republican party elites like Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Ron DeSantis, and more, all of whom have supported Trump’s anti-democratic efforts since 2020. This month, Glenn Youngkin went on Jake Tapper’s show to repeatedly and flatly deny the reality that Donald Trump had said the military should be used against left-wing American citizens, even after he saw it on video. 

More recently, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) has come out in support of an outlandish proposal to award North Carolina’s electoral votes to Donald Trump before the count is even finished. It’s a farcical idea, but the impulse is obviously, cartoonishly anti-democratic. It’s Putinesque.

Many donors and advisors, too, have chosen to stick with Trump rather than deny him their money or services. Trump’s own campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, once condemned January 6 as “sickening and heartbreaking.” Now, he is working tirelessly to deliver Donald Trump back to the presidency. In his free time, he reposts odd memes fetishizing Trump’s masculinity and denigrates people like Jeff Flake for speaking out against Trump’s threat. 

On January 7, 2021,mega donor Nathan Peltz apologized for voting for Trump. This cycle, after funding primary challengers like Tim Scott, Peltz has declared the need to go all in to re-elect Trump, lest the Democrats retain the White House. 

All of this is sustained by the media content pumped out by influential pundits and thought leaders like Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and The Daily Wire’s reactionary hosts. Moreover, the last decade has seen the nerve centers of Fox News and National Review replaced with a more diffuse and decidedly more extreme network of YouTubers, podcasters, and right-wing influencers. When traditional commentators like Laura Ingraham have retained a glimmer of the spotlight it has been through a willingness to sound more like Trump and his most loyal sycophants. 

Even in the final weeks of the campaign, as explicit warnings have emerged from Generals Milley and Kelly that Trump is, in Milley’s words, “a fascist to the core,” GOP elites have instead opted to denigrate two men with decades of service to the country as bitter careerists. 

When Kelly’s account of Trump wishing he was surrounded by “the kind of generals Hitler had” emerged, the new right media ecosystem went into defense mode. On X, Mollie Hemingway echoed Trump’s concerns about disloyal officers, suggesting Kelly had rejected “the Constitutional order” and calling people like him “quite evil.” At the Blaze, Peter Navarro labeled Kelly a “bully” and “the dumbest guy in the room.” On Fox, Brian Kilemade explained that Trump’s wistful fascism was merely an expression of his businessman’s impatience with red tape: “He obviously has frustration, and I could absolutely see him going out, ‘You know what? It would be great to have German generals [that] actually do what we asked them to do,’” 

What emerges is a party that has been utterly compromised. In some cases, the capture is a real conversion. In others, it’s a mix of tribalism, greed, and cowardice.

But we are left with the same problem in the end. None of these individuals can be trusted to lead the country moving forward. And any future contest for Republican leadership will be refereed by a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by new, more extreme voices, and the few legacy pundits who have transformed themselves effectively enough to survive.

Trump is not the head of the snake. We are facing a hydra, and the last three election cycles have made it clear that success in today’s Republican Party is fueled by anger, disinformation, extremism, and vice.

The Voters: Give The People What They Want 

Elite misbehavior is tied to what voters want, or at least accept, in political candidates. The Republican Party has been remade, and its voting base not only rejects mainstream conservatives, but affirmatively supports anti-democratic demagoguery.

After nearly ten years of MAGA political socialization—from rallies, school board meetings, religious institutions, social media, right-wing infotainment, etc.—people who have stayed with the party are not deterred by Trumpian politics. And new voters who have come to the GOP are apparently attracted to it.

In the primaries, Trump dominated with first-time voters. And a bevy of under-eighteen aspiring politicos are ready to swell the ranks of the MAGA base when their time comes. When NPR interviewed young Trump supporters back in March, one fifteen year-old in Ohio declared that, in a future leader, “I would want a presidential candidate with a lot of nationalism.” That teen had founded a young Republican club at their high school alongside a fellow freshman. It’s the kind of precocious civic engagement that would usually inspire hope and pride. But when we consider the sort of politics into which they’re aging, those feelings turn to despair. 

As Election Day approaches, Trump has continued to make inroads with young men of all backgrounds. Harris holds a 67% to 28% lead with young women according to data from the New York Times. But with Gen Z men, Trump leads 58% to 37%. 

Parties have been chastened before by November drubbings. But this election remains excruciatingly close-run. In Arizona, Trump appears to hold a thin edge in the state that provided one of Biden’s key flips in 2020. In Wisconsin, 538 rates the contest as evenly matched. Trump’s national ceiling still appears to be high-40s, but that is not prohibitive if he can manage pluralities in enough battleground states. 

As Jonathan V. Last has argued, the fact that around 47% of voters will choose a twice-impeached, convicted felon former president who incited an insurrection is astonishing. It is a grim reflection of what the American electorate will not only tolerate but actively support. 

The Communities: With Neighbors Like These

Democracy is more than an electorate. It is also the formal and informal institutions of civic life in our neighborhoods, towns, counties, and states. 

In a July New York Times interview, Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam, America’s preeminent scholar and Cassandra of social capital, stressed the relationship between political participation and societal problems like loneliness and trust. It cuts in multiple directions, affecting our communities and the individuals that constitute them. According to a 2024 American Psychiatric Association study, nearly one-in-three Americans report feeling lonely once a week, with one-in-ten reporting daily loneliness.  

Yet, even as we need to reconnect with our communities, we are developing less sociable attitudes. Interpersonal trust has been declining for decades. Pew Research data from 2018 showed 58% of respondents agreeing that people “would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance” and 62% agreeing that people “just look out for themselves.” In that survey, 79% said Americans have either “too little” or “far too little” confidence in each other. 

As Putnam explains, MAGA political activism operates on these dynamics, excluding others and bonding members more tightly together, claiming “that they alone have the truth.”

At the most rudimentary levels of participation, our system is under siege. School board meetings have become combustible, frequented by the loudest and angriest denizens—sometimes taken over by individuals from outside the district entirely. Parents rail against curriculum on slavery and desegregation, object to library books with LGBTQ content as “pornographic,” and baselessly attack teachers as “groomers.” The displays can border on the farcical, but the agitation is real. 

People typically run for school board to give back a little and maybe to dip their toes into politics before trying for a more ambitious office. That helps cultivate new generations of political talent—talent that now might never come forward for fear of the shocking new levels of vitriol present in every level of politics.

Volunteer election workers, the unsung heroes of American democracy, face an army of MAGA extremists trying to staff the nation’s polling places with loyal Trumpists, and intimate the rest. The macro threat of another Trump attempt to overturn an election is clear. But there is also the longer term problem of hollowing out our electoral infrastructure and filling it with inexperience and malice. These people will still be around if Kamala Harris is president in 2025. 

Mundane institutions becoming sites of severe conflict reflects the wider strain on many of our communities, riven by declining civic participation, distrust, loneliness, and the viral maladies of online radicalization.

Conclusion: Republic of Vice 

Most Americans never experienced a country where an aspiring national leader threatens  violence against a scapegoated “enemy from within” before. Now they know what a country of fraying social bonds feels like, where the most rudimentary forms of public participation have become fraught with conspiracism and resentment. This a nation whose youth have known a full decade of outright demagoguery and disinformation in the political arena. The youngest voters don’t remember anything else. 

If republics are, in the words of Judge Joseph Story, “created by virtue,” America appears ready to ask what one born of vice might hold. 

I do not think most Americans are foolish, wicked, or fond of cruelty. But many of our institutions, communities, and citizens have been warped by Trump’s sustained assault on liberal democratic principles, his revulsion of the open society. So even in the optimistic post-election scenario, this November will not answer the question of where America is headed, or what kind of country we will be over the next decade or two. 

Restoring our democracy and revitalizing the principles of an open, liberal society is about far more than election cycles. It will require time and attention to people and places across the country within whose hearts the ideals of freedom, fairness, and mutual toleration have faltered. And in that work I am hopeful. It won’t be easy or quick, but it will be rewarding, and I have every intention of seeing it through.