President Trump’s dog-whistling to armed supporters could provoke violence on or after Election Day. But that’s not our biggest problem.
By Wade Roush
Based on a two-part podcast series from Soonish. Listen to Part 1 and Part 2
Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them
Let’s start by going back to the year 1797, to a critical turning point in American history. Or at least, Lin Manuel Miranda’s version of history. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you King George III:
They say
George Washington’s yielding his power and stepping away.
Is that true?
I wasn’t aware that was something a person could do.
I’m perplexed.
Are they going to keep on replacing whoever’s in charge?
If so, who’s next?
There’s nobody else in their country who looms quite as large…
John Adams?!
That’s true — John Adams doesn’t loom as large as Washington in American history. But I want to make a case that March 4, 1797, the day the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court administered the oath of office to Adams in Philadelphia, was the first day America could truly call itself a republic.
Washington didn’t have to yield power and step away. The Constitution was only eight years old at that point and it said nothing, as yet, about presidential term limits. If Washington had wanted to stay in office for life, his countrymen would have been glad to let him. But when the old general decided to retire, he bequeathed to us the idea that presidents are constrained and should voluntarily and peacefully hand power to their successors.
Four years later Adams sealed the deal, when his bid for re-election failed and he duly vacated the executive mansion to make room for his bitter rival, Thomas Jefferson. By doing that, Adams cemented an additional norm: the one that says even a sitting president who loses an election should leave office without a fuss.
And that norm is the latest one Donald Trump is trying to disrupt. We’re still a few weeks away from the 2020 election, but Trump has already said multiple times that he’ll contest the results and try to continue in office no matter how the vote turns out.
You don’t know until you see. It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do…I have to see. I’m not going to say yes, I’m not going to say no. And I didn’t last time either. — to Chris Wallace, Fox News, July 19, 2020
We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster. Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation. — White House press conference, September 23, 2020
As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster. They’re sending millions of ballots all over the country. There’s fraud. They’re finding them in creeks. This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen. — First presidential debate, September 29, 2020
And the president’s supporters are listening. Large numbers of them say they believe that the only way Trump can fail to be re-elected is through rampant abuse of the mail-in voting process by Democrats.
Of course, Trump says crazy shit every day. But his claim about election fraud is unusually dangerous. In effect, the president is holding a gun to the nation’s head and saying either he wins, or he’s going to use every tool at his disposal to de-legitimize the election.
“We know that Trump is lying on a daily basis about voter fraud and vote by mail,” says Sean Eldridge, the founder of the progressive activist group Stand Up America, which recently helped to form an offshoot group called Protect The Results. “And it’s pretty clear what he’s doing. He is laying the groundwork to contest the valid results of the election. So my view is we can’t bury our heads in the sand. We can’t pretend this isn’t happening. Certainly, we can hope for the best case scenario, but we have to plan for the worst.”
Eldridge continues: “He’s behind in the polls. He’s desperate. He’s proven himself to be a bully. And I think he believes the only way he can win at this point is by cheating and bullying his way through the election. And so we’re going to respond by ensuring that the American people mobilize to protect our democracy.”
We’ll come back to Eldridge and his group’s plans for how that mobilization might work. But it’s worth observing, as we begin, what a vast moral gap has opened up over the last couple of centuries between our first and second presidents and our 45th. If Trump follows through on his threats — and there’s no reason to think he won’t — then November 3, 2020, might be the last day America can call itself a republic.
Over at my podcast about technology and the future, Soonish, we’ve spent all of Season 4 venturing into “political futurism.” We’ve talked with experts about how we ended up with an aspiring strongman like Trump as president, why our election system is so vulnerable to someone like him, and how, when you add a global pandemic into the mix, it becomes very difficult to comprehend what’s even going on in 2020.
In the week before I wrote this, we learned, to no one’s surprise, that the president is in debt up to his toupee and makes so little money from his failed businesses that he basically doesn’t pay federal income tax. Then we witnessed a so-called debate where Trump spent the whole time playing a high school bully who couldn’t stop disrupting the class. Then we learned that the president himself had become infected with the coronavirus. I certainly joined with all of those who wished him a speedy recovery — but I also joined with those who shook their heads over the White House’s lax approach to mask-wearing and social distancing.
As the election grew nearer, I realized that for my own sanity, I needed to try to make sense of it all. This essay and the podcast episodes on which it’s based bring together ideas from a bunch of conversations I’ve been having with smart people who think about the future of democracy. And my first agenda item is to explain why the danger to the republic is so deep right now.
Underneath all the chaos of 2020, there’s a far deeper problem, which is that we’re more divided in our goals and our beliefs than at any time since the Civil War.
The days and weeks right after the election will be the window of maximum peril. There are ways we can make it through that window without violence, and I’ll go into them below. But when you look at all the forces afflicting our democratic institutions right now, it’s not a sure thing — and a peaceful outcome won’t happen automatically. Everyone who cares about democracy needs to have a plan for how they’re going to do their part.
A public service announcement: that plan should start with voting. Vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person in Election Day, but please, vote. The clearer the outcome of the election, the safer we’ll be afterward. Depending on your politics, your plan could also include preparing for possibility of nonviolent mass mobilization, if it turns out that that’s what’s needed to ensure the integrity of the election.
But here’s the thing: in the end, the election will only settle one issue, namely, which party controls the House and the Senate and who gets sworn in as president in January. It won’t resolve the underlying tensions that brought us to this crazy moment.
It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump isn’t the disease, he’s the symptom. But it’s true. Underneath all the chaos of 2020, there’s a far deeper problem, which is that we’re more divided in our goals and our beliefs than at any time since the Civil War. And our political system has decayed to the point that it’s just not able to resolve these deep ideological differences, or the anger and resentment that’s festering between political parties and between different regions of the country.
The longer we try to deny that reality or put off a real reckoning, the worse the divisions will get. So my second agenda item, which we’ll get to in Part 2 below, is to sketch out four or five scenarios for the long-term future of the United States. Because the question isn’t just how we’re going to get through the next few weeks or months without a violent meltdown — it’s how we’re going to get through the next decade and the next century.
Different candidates may have different ideas about how to bring the country together, but I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect Donald Trump or Joe Biden or anyone else to bridge the deepest chasms. One way through might be to let go of the idea that national politics is a zero-sum game where the only way one party can win is at the expense of the other. If we’re open to some new experiments with the structure of government, we might just be able to keep democracy alive.
Maybe you haven’t spent the last few months immersed in the literature on polarization. Maybe you haven’t been interviewing historians and political scientists about the weak points in our election system and how populism and fascism get a foothold in democratic countries. Maybe you haven’t been reading everything you can find about domestic extremist movements or tracking the emergence of the Trump campaign’s core reelection strategy, which is to persuade the base that the election can have only one legitimate outcome.
But I have. And I want to put this in a measured way, but… it’s worse than you think. There are guardrails in the Constitution, our laws, and our political traditions that are meant to help us resolve disagreements peacefully. But one by one, those guardrails been removed or allowed to rust away.
To really understand this, we’ve got to start with some demographic realities and how they translate into electoral politics.
First off: we’re becoming one of the most diverse and multiethnic nations on Earth. In 2020 roughly 60 percent of Americans are white, 18.5 percent are Latino or Hispanic, 12.5 percent are Black, 6 percent are Asian American, and 1 percent are Indigenous. The Census Bureau projects that by 2045 whites will drop below 50 percent of the population for the first time, transforming the US into a nation where no single ethnic group has a majority.
White supremacist and anti-immigrant groups know this perfectly well, and when Donald Trump was elected they gained a sympathetic ear in the White House. Since Trump took office, the number of white nationalist groups active in the US has jumped by 55 percent, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. Trump has catered to their concerns through measures like crackdowns on immigration, building his border wall, and interfering the census to limit the counting of immigrants.
The other big demographic reality is that rural areas are emptying out and people are clumping up in cities. Already 86 percent of people live in urban or suburban areas, and only 14 percent live in rural areas. By 2040, fully half of the population will be concentrated in the eight states that are home to our largest cities. The next seven states will contain another 20 percent of the population, and the remaining 30 percent of the population will be spread out across 35 states.
Unfortunately, the Constitution wasn’t designed for a situation like this. Article I gives each state two senators, regardless of population. This means that by 2040, the rural 30 percent of the country will be electing 70 senators. Meanwhile the urban 70 percent will have just 30 senators.
Minority rule is a strategy born of desperation, and if and when it finally fails, you can bet there’s going to be a backlash.
Another ridiculously undemocratic provision of the Constitution is the Electoral College. That body also gives disproportionate power to the least populous states, since it’s tied to the number of representatives plus senators in each state. California has about 40 million people and gets 55 electoral votes, or one vote for every 720,000 people. Wyoming has 600,000 people and gets three electoral votes, or one for every 200,000 people.
If you were designing a constitution from scratch, you probably wouldn’t give somebody in Wyoming 3.6 times more power to choose a president than somebody in California.
Now, take all of those geographic and social realities, and lay across them the fact that rural voters are predominantly Republican and urban voters are predominantly Democratic. You get a Senate and an Electoral College that are shockingly unrepresentative of the population. Nate Silver at the politics website FiveThirtyEight calculates that the makeup of the Senate is 6 to 7 percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole. That’s how Democrats lost two Senate seats in 2018, even though Democratic Senate candidates won 54 percent of the popular vote.
For the same basic reason, the Electoral College tends to throw close elections to Republican candidates. Nate Silver’s math shows that if Joe Biden were to win the popular vote by 1 percent, there would still be a 94 percent chance that he’d lose in the Electoral College. If Biden were to have a 3 percent lead in the popular vote there would still a 50 percent chance of Trump victory.
Norman Ornstein, a researcher at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, believes that if Trump were to win again with a minority of the popular vote, it could fatally erode Americans’ faith in free and fair elections. Ornstein wrote this year in the New York Times, “At some point, the fundamental legitimacy of the system will be challenged.”
All of the imbalances I’ve been talking about so far come from pure demographic change, plus the structural flaws built into the Constitution. You can’t blame any of that on either of today’s parties. But Republicans know they’re on the losing side of demographic change. And what makes the situation much more volatile is that they’ve responded by engineering clever ways to hold on to power at the federal level, even though they have fewer voters behind them.
Republicans have used their majority in the Senate to block the Democratic presidents from placing judges on the Supreme Court and lower courts and they’ve rammed through the judges nominated by Republican presidents, as they’re doing right now with Amy Coney Barrett in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s untimely death.
They’ve weaponized the filibuster to block legislative action. The cloture rule to end debate on the Senate floor was used only 385 times between 1917 and 1989. It was used 500 times during the Obama years alone.
They’ve mastered the black art of gerrymandering Congressional districts to create reliably Republican districts with few minority voters. (To be fair, Democrats do the same thing, but they’re not as good at it.)
And since 2013, when a conservative majority in the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, Republicans in state legislatures have developed a devilish new array of voter suppression techniques like photo ID requirements and voter-roll purges.
The term for all of this minority rule. It’s a strategy born of desperation. And if and when it finally fails — say, if it looks like the presidential and Senate races are tipping toward Democrats next month — you can bet there’s going to be a backlash.
One excellent summary of all this is from Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor for politics at The Atlantic. Here’s how he put it in 2019:
The president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has — whatever the cost.
Those are the big trends that promise to make the divisions in politics even deeper. Now let’s zoom in and look at some more specific developments that could cause mere disagreement to descend into something much darker.
For one thing, it’s not just that Americans are divided up by race and region; obviously, we’re also divided up by party and ideology. And the distance between us is growing ever larger and more baked into our psychology as individuals.
These days you don’t just vote Democratic or Republican; you are a Democrat or a Republican. It’s part of your identity. There’s no such thing anymore as a split ticket, where you might support a candidate from one party in a Congressional race and somebody from the other party in the presidential race. Today people vote a straight party ticket 97 percent of the time.
And more and more, party politics defines who we’re friends with and even who we love. Mixed-party marriages are a thing of the past. Only 6 percent of married Republicans have Democratic spouses and only 6 percent of married Democrats have Republican spouses.
What’s even more disturbing is that people in one party are prone to dehumanize people in the other party and question their patriotism. Here’s what one 68 year old gentleman attending a Trump rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, told a reporter from The Atlantic in early September:
Democrats have sealed their own fate. They’ve proven that they’re not true Americans. They’re not for this country and they’re not for our freedom. We’re just not going to take it anymore.
In a recent survey, a group of political scientists asked Democrats if they thought Republicans were “less evolved” than they were, and an astonishing 77 percent said yes. And just as many Republicans were willing to say Democrats are less evolved.
That’s chilling, because we also know from social science that when voters are willing to dehumanize people from the other party, they’re more likely to tolerate or even support partisan violence.
There’s nothing inevitable about even low-scale, low-intensity conflict in the United States. Those who claim the inevitability of this are totally misguided and probably have some pretty cynical agendas. — Erica Chenoweth
The Voter Study Group at the Democracy Fund surveyed almost 6,000 Americans in late 2019. Among people who described themselves as Democratic or Republican partisans, one in five said if the other party won the 2020 presidential election, violence would be “at least a little” justified. One in 10 said there would be “a lot or a great deal” of justification for violence.
There’s nothing wrong with being ready to resist an election outcome that is plainly illegitimate; far from it. The danger is that partisan feelings going into this election are already at a fever pitch. Nerves are raw after a summer of nonstop trauma and tension, from the pandemic and its horrific death toll to the protests over the police killings of Daniel Prude and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and so many others. And don’t forget the catastrophic wildfires in the West, ongoing disinformation campaigns on Facebook and other social media sites, and the crazy twists and turns of the presidential campaign itself.
On top of all that, there’s the fact that in America there are 120 guns for every 100 people. That’s far more guns per capita than any other country on Earth. And as if we couldn’t already kill each other many times over, there’s been a huge additional spike in gun purchases this year, by both conservatives and liberals.
When you add all that up, it gets pretty difficult to ignore the possibility of violence. Miles Taylor, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security, told The Atlantic:
This is beyond a powder keg. This is the Titanic with powder kegs filled all the way to the hull.
Many of the guns flooding our nation are owned by members of paramilitary groups like Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the Boogaloo movement. Some of these groups are made up of anti-government extremists, and others are mainly white supremacists. But they all “want to tear the nation apart,” according to J.J. MacNab, an extremism researcher at George Washington University. Here’s a snippet of some oral testimony MacNab gave in July to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism. (MacNab’s written testimony is here.)
Like any large movement, this group goes through cycles, and in the months following the 2016 election alt-right and white supremacy groups experienced a meteoric rise and militant extremists either joined these movements or went relatively quiet. In general, they approve of the current administration and so their anti-government rage abated for a time. However, renewed conversations about gun control laws, stress from the covid-19 pandemic, the mainstreaming of deep state and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, high unemployment rates, civil unrest in major U.S. cities, and the extreme divisiveness plaguing the upcoming election have triggered a recent rebirth in the militant groups…How they react to current events and to each other raises many red flags. For example, I am worried that any attempt to pass gun control legislation would trigger one or more significant violent events…I am also concerned that the upcoming election will spark one or more violent events if the president loses his re-election bid. The risk that worries me most right now, though, I am concerned that there will be a shootout at one or more of the Black Lives Matter protests. There are too many guns at these events, held by too many groups with conflicting goals.
According to MacNab and other researchers, extremist groups often don’t have elaborate plans or strategies. They just have a vague goal of fomenting disorder, in the hope of setting off a chain reaction that could lead to a full-scale race war or a revolution against the US government.
But the fact that extremists don’t have a plan doesn’t stop conservative politicians or conservative media from exploiting their actions as part of a national scare campaign. When a teenager from Illinois named Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August, the right instantly elevated him to hero status. Rittenhouse’s own lawbreaking became part of their twisted argument that Democrats are promoting rioting and lawlessness. Speaking on Fox News, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway made this strategy very clear:
The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.
The president himself has an odious wink-wink, nod-nod relationship with violent extremist groups. Reporters have given him numerous opportunities to denounce violent white supremacists, and he has declined. In the first presidential debate he did just the opposite, hinting that these groups should be ready to swing into action.
Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by.
The pretext Trump would use to call in these supporters is clear. Thanks to the pandemic, Americans will vote by mail in record numbers. More Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, and it might take days or weeks to count all those ballots. Trump has therefore spent months priming his supporters with the false idea that mail-in ballots are untrustworthy. In any scenario where the election is close enough for the mail-in ballots to matter, the president and his party operatives could try to cut short the vote counting — and he is apparently hoping his supporters would ride to his aid and add to the chaos and uncertainty.
Ironically, Trump has been so good at signaling his intentions that progressive groups have had plenty of time to plan a potential response. In late September, I interviewed Sean Eldridge, husband of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and founder of Stand Up America, which has joined up with the progressive group Indivisible to form an effort called Protect The Results. Here are a few outtakes from that interview:
Sean Eldridge: I think what’s important to keep in mind is that in any of the scary scenarios around the ways in which Trump might try to undermine the election, the role of mass mobilization is really key. The importance of people taking to the streets, making their voice heard, I think could be incredibly important in shaping public narrative in that moment. One scenario that I think is top of mind for for a lot of people right now is what could happen on Election Night and the possibility that Trump would try to prematurely declare victory before millions and millions of votes would be counted. As many of your listeners might know, vote by mail has existed for decades and decades in the United States of America. And it’s proven to be a safe and secure way for folks to cast their ballot. But this year, we’re going to see a much larger influx of voters using vote by mail. And so there’s this one scenario that seems possible where there could be a Red Mirage, as it’s been called by some, where before millions of absentee ballots are counted, it could look like Trump is ahead on Election Night, before we know where those millions of the rest of the ballots go. And in that kind of scenario, if Trump were to say “I won” when we don’t in fact know who has won in a number of key states, then I think it would be really important for there to be mass mobilization and for there to be pressure on state election officials to ignore any corrupt influence from Trump, and to count every single vote to move forward with a process, even if it takes days, even if it takes weeks, to make sure that every single vote is safely counted. So we need to be ready at every step along the way and in many different scenarios.
Wade Roush: Okay, let’s hypothetically imagine a scenario where it is necessary for people to take to the streets. I want to ask you: what are the conversations like behind the scenes about how to keep people safe in those circumstances and how to avoid falling down a slippery slope toward violent conflict, given that President Trump and a lot of his supporters have expressed a willingness to bring violence into the picture?
Sean Eldridge: We are certainly committed to non-violence. And at Protect The Results, we are planning non-violent mobilization if needed across the country. I am concerned about violence. I’m concerned about violence from this White House. Right. I mean, we have we have seen this White House gas peaceful protests to make the way for Trump to have a photo op outside the White House. We have seen Trump threatened to mobilize the United States military against the American people. So I think there’s reason to be concerned. I believe if you look at the history of of movements in the United States of America and across the world, nonviolent protests and actions and mobilization have a real impact. We live in a democracy and that is the way to make change, right? The most important thing to do is cast your ballot. That is your voice. And then also to mobilize and protest to protect our democracy. So we are we are focused on nonviolent mobilization, but certainly can’t control the other side and recognize both the violent rhetoric we’ve seen from the White House and actual violence we’ve seen and things like gassing peaceful protests. But our goal is to the best of our ability, to equip activists and protest leaders with resources to de-escalate and to try to mobilize nonviolently and as peacefully as we can.
Eldridge told me that Protect The Results has signed up more than 1,500 veteran activists across the country to organize demonstrations after the election if needed. The theory behind the planning is that large and sustained protests and other tactics would put pressure on decision makers to decide how far they really want to go to enable a Trump victory. Here’s Eldridge again:
Trump might be screaming from the rafters and saying that he won, even if he hasn’t. But everyone else from Mitch McConnell on down all the way down to state legislatures and state and local election officials will have to decide whether or not they would go along with Trump in that kind of scenario. And I think they will be looking around and reading the room, so to speak, and reading the nation and see how the American people respond. And even certainly somebody like Mitch McConnell could — even though I have very little faith in him and his record of protecting our democracy, we did see him say, when Trump made comments about changing Election Day, which is not something he has the power to do, we saw Mitch McConnell say, “That’s not going to happen. The election is moving forward.” So I do I do think the power of Americans taking to the streets, potentially staying in the streets and if needed, making phone calls or other grassroots advocacy actions to state local election officials, I think it matters. I think it can make a difference all the way up to the Supreme Court. No one lives in a vacuum. And it’s really important that every decision maker see it as the American people respond.
After talking with Eldridge, I wanted to learn more about how we can find a peaceful way through such a combustible situation. And I was curious about whether the kinds of techniques Eldridge outlines have proven effective in past conflicts.
So I reached out to Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Chenoweth is best known for their 2012 book, co-authored with Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Here are key sections of the transcript from our interview.
Wade Roush: So you’ve done a lot of work comparing the effectiveness of nonviolent mass mobilization campaigns around the world over the past century or more to the effectiveness of campaigns that do involve violence. I know that’s a lifetime’s worth of work for you, but what’s what’s your high-level takeaway from that research?
Erica Chenoweth: The main takeaway is that among revolutionary campaigns, which are those that are trying to either overthrow an incumbent government or create an independent territory, nonviolent campaigns were about twice as likely to succeed than their armed counterparts. And when I talk about nonviolent campaigns, what I mean is a coordinated series of methods where unarmed civilians are using protest strikes, boycotts and lots of different forms of non-cooperation in order to achieve this outcome. And when I talk about success, what I mean is basically that they were able to achieve either the removal of the incumbent national leader within a year of the peak of the campaign and that they had a decisive effect on that outcome.
Wade Roush: I’m curious about how transferable you think those findings are to other kinds of situations. So those are maximalist kinds of conflicts that you’re talking about, where the outcome would be a transfer of territory or the overthrow of a government. But I’m curious, for obvious reasons right now, about situations where, for example, activists are trying to assure a fair election outcome or a smooth transition of power. In those kinds of situations, is there evidence that there are tactics for mass nonviolent civil resistance that actually work?
Erica Chenoweth: That’s a great question. George Lakey has recently undertaken a series of studies to try to understand what happens when people are rising up in so-called social defense, which is trying to prevent against a coup or a power grab. And he often refers to four keys that prevent this from happening. The first is that there is large scale mobilization by the population. And we do know from research that the only way to get large scale mobilization genuinely is usually through some kind of commitment to nonviolent action, because people just mobilize in much smaller numbers if the campaign is violent. The second key is being able to create shifts in the loyalties of of the pillars of support or basically getting new alliances. And so in this case, it looks like getting politicians to publicly commit to counting every vote or getting police to commit to protect peaceful protesters or those calling for democratic processes to be followed, etc. And then in terms of the third key, I think he argues that discipline is very important, meaning that even if repression escalates, that the movement doesn’t succumb to kind of chaos or demobilize. And then the final one is refusing to cooperate with those who are engaging in unlawful actions. So, in other words, not just street demonstrations, but a mass withdrawal of cooperation.
Wade Roush: You were kind enough to to kind of give me a sneak peek of your upcoming book that’s all about civil resistance and how it works. And there’s a chapter of the book, Chapter 4, where you deal with this question about how civil resistance campaigns deal with violence. We’re talking about this issue because it feels like there is the prospect of post-election violence here in the US. And while it’s hard to imagine that devolving into a full sort of Tiananmen Square-style scenario where the government is crushing a rebellion, it does feel more likely that there could be a series of conflicts with, say, armed paramilitaries who are perhaps acting with the implicit, if not the explicit approval of government or at least of the Trump campaign. How do these movements prepare to deal with this kind of violence?
Erica Chenoweth: That’s a great question. And there are lots of things that historically movements have done to navigate this. The first is many key organizers or community leaders will train in conflict de-escalation methods so that they know that when they are engaging publicly in some kind of manifest public action or direct action, that they feel personally equipped with skills of de-escalation. The second thing is that often campaigns that are well organized well when when things become very risky, for example, in the streets, they will shift to methods of stay-in-home and non-cooperation strikes paired with stay at home, and they’ll continue their protest from home if they have a home and if they don’t go find a way to find refuge in other public spaces that are open. So there are lots of different techniques of kind of maneuvering in the context of the repeated violence. And a lot of this is situational awareness. It’s preparing people to understand that violence is a possibility and that if a protest is is taking place, then here are the things to do in the event that it breaks out. And there are lots of different training manuals; Training for Change has a handbook on nonviolent campaigns. There are websites like Beautiful Trouble and websites maintained by groups like the BlackOUT Collective that talk about tactical and political ways of securing resilience for a community and sort of preparing for and then responding to violence should it break out.
Wade Roush: One last question for you. You have an article on the website Political Violence at a Glance called “Preparing for a November Surprise.” And in that piece, you say that if mass violence erupts after the election, the outcome could be a civil war. So I wanted to ask you about that term and ask you what you think civil war really looks like today, because I think there’s a risk of maybe sliding into that situation without recognizing it. Especially here in the US, where when you say the words “civil war,” people have this picture in their mind that obviously is about the secessionist movement of the 1860s with rival geographic blocs and these well-funded armies and well-organized armies. But that’s not really what you’re talking about, right?
Erica Chenoweth: First, I’ll just say that I think it is fairly dangerous to raise false alarms or even exaggerate the risk of civil war in this country, because a lot of times the ways that these things start is people talking themselves into them by convincing themselves that they’re inevitable. There’s nothing inevitable about even low scale, low intensity conflict in the United States. Those who claim inevitability of this are totally misguided and probably have some pretty cynical agendas behind that. And so I just want to make clear that I’m not a person that thinks that this is inevitable. And I do think that there are many different things that we in our communities at the state and national level can do to prevent violence from escalating any further than it already has.
That said, I think that that basically we do have a situation where, in the scholarly sense anyway, there are sort of two different categories of civil war there, conventional civil wars and an unconventional civil wars. And conventional civil wars are those where you do have basically two two armies that are warring against one another using similar techniques, methods and materials. And so the US Civil War is arguably more of a conventional civil war because you had these these secessionist armies with the same types of weapons, at least that the North had. And in contemporary settings, but also in some historical settings, we have unconventional civil wars, which are where there’s kind of an asymmetry in terms of the that capacities of the two different sides or the multiple sides of the conflict. Say the state has access to more conventional military materiel and weapons and training, and then opponents of the state might have more kind of guerrilla operations or that sort of thing.
There is also the category of political violence called communal violence, which is basically where you have different factions that aren’t the state. Some may be roughly aligned with the state, but others they are actually totally autonomous. And in that context, usually the state does kind of pick a side, but it’s not necessarily engaging directly in the operations. Instead it’s sort of paramilitaries versus communities.
I don’t want to say which scenario I think is most likely, because, like I said, I don’t think it’s helpful to speculate, lest people start to talk themselves into a certain scenario. But I do think that that the violence that I’m most worried about in the United States right now is violence by those that are policing protests and those that are actively preparing for and talking themselves into a civil war. There’s an important article that came out in the The Atlantic today about just how sophisticated and organized far right groups are right now and how kind of integrated they are with this kind of narrative about the inevitability of the coming civil war and sort of waiting for the penny to drop on that. And I think that that actually is is where we need to be focusing a lot of significant containment and de-escalation efforts as a country.
That Atlantic article Chenoweth referenced was about the Oath Keepers. The founder of that group, Stewart Rhodes, is indeed one of those people J.J. MacNab described who are looking for opportunities to spark violent unrest. Rhodes has said in public that Black Lives Matter protestors are insurrectionists, and that
We have to suppress that insurrection. Eventually they’re going to be using IEDs. Us old vets and younger ones are going to end up having to kill these young kids.
Rhetoric like this has raised the political temperature in this country to a level that feels unprecedented.
But maybe it only feels that way because we’ve forgotten our own history. The actual Civil War has passed out of living memory, and most people who are alive today don’t have direct experience of periods like the Depression or the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Political violence is not a sign of the strength of the people who deal it out. It’s an admission of their weakness.
To bring back some of that context, I called up historian Robert McElvaine. He teaches at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and he’s the author of The Great Depression: America 1929–1941, one of the best-known single-volume histories of the Great Depression. Here’s an extended outtake from our conversation.
Wade Roush:I want to ask you do a little comparative history here. So obviously, the 1930s were a time of great suffering, much greater suffering than we have any comprehension of right now, I think, and a lot of political unrest and a lot of political disunion and disagreement. And also it was a time when a lot of people were being drawn to alternative political views, such as the populism of Father Coughlin, and communism and the attractions of what was going on in Soviet Russia, and even fascism to some extent. And it’s not hard to imagine how, with a good firm push, democracy could have unraveled in the United States in the ’30s. And it feels like ultimately it took World War II to bring the nation back together. So I wonder how you would compare the level of division and polarization and disunion we’re experiencing right now to what was going on in the ’30s.
Robert McElvaine: I think it’s much worse now. It certainly had the potential — Sinclair Lewis wrote, I think it was in 1935, “It Can’t Happen Here.” But the whole point of that was it can happen here. And the prospect of falling into a dictatorship of democracy being overturned in the United States was there. If I had to give a single reason why that didn’t come close to happening, it would be Roosevelt. Roosevelt was able, although he was never willing to embrace Keynesian economics and really large scale deficit spending enough to actually get the economy going again, he was willing to go into deficit spending enough to ease the problems to keep people from starving. But he also was able to communicate with people, the fireside chats and everything in the way that people felt like he was talking directly to them, that he understood their problems. He was on their side. So Roosevelt had all sorts of things wrong with him, but he played a very large role in saving both democracy and a modified capitalism.
Wade Roush: So do you see any one or anything that could bring us back together, maybe the way FDR kept us together in the ’30s?
Robert McElvaine: I’m afraid I have to say no. I had some notion that the pandemic might do that. I foolishly, it turns out, thought that that might lead people to say “We’re all in the same boat.” But it turns out that the division, particularly, in how people get their information in this country is just so deep that even the pandemic is seen as a red-blue issue. And mask wearing. “Is it fake? Is it real? Are they making it all up?” And it’s just it is very hard to see how anybody can overcome that, at least in the short run.
Wade Roush: Back in April of 2011, to help mark the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Sumter and the outbreak of the Civil War, you wrote a piece in Politico where you observed that Americans in 2011 seemed just as bitterly divided as Americans had been in 1861. So I wondered, what made you feel that way?
Robert McElvaine: Well, obviously, I was wrong as far as that being as divided as we could get, because we’ve gotten a lot more now. I think some people have largely correctly traced it back to Newt Gingrich in the ’90s, deciding that the Republicans shouldn’t cooperate at all, and the growing division politically in the country. In some ways, with the election of Barack Obama, it seemed like that sort of thing was in the past. But we can now see even more clearly than we could in 2011 that one of the effects of that was just really scaring the people who have nothing going for them other than “We are white. And there’s a floor below which we can’t fall.” And they now saw the future of the country going in that direction and were more and more outraged by it. And that became kind of the increasingly dry stuff that I guess, in Trump’s terms, was not being raked up enough from the forest floors and could catch fire very easily, as it did in 2016.
Wade Roush: It just feels like we’re in a situation analogous to 1861 where whichever side wins in this election, the losing side is going to find the outcome unacceptable. I just wonder whether any of that accords with what you’re seeing. Do you feel like we’re on the edge of of something rather unprecedented in our lifetimes?
Robert McElvaine: I wish I could say no, but I very much do think that that’s where we are. I think we need to be careful — while neither side seems willing to accept the other side winning — to avoid a sort of moral equivalence, because the one side has just openly, as Trump has done recently said, “Well, we’re just going to throw away ballots. If I win the election, then it’s OK. If I don’t, it’s not and I’m not leaving.” He talks about rioting in the streets, and how we have to have law and order and everything. But he’s the one encouraging rioting in the streets. He’s the one who’s telling his supporters to take up arms, even to go to the polls on Election Day and intimidate minority people and try to stop people from voting. He’s gone so far as to say that “We have the police and the military and the motorcycle gangs on our side. You know, we have the armed people on our side.”
And so it’s very clear that if he loses — and the way things look now, unless they can really suppress the vote, if you have a fair count in the vote, he’s going to lose, and probably by a fairly substantial margin — at that point — and the margin will matter; if it’s really big, it’ll be more difficult to do that — but his people are just going to believe, because he keeps driving home, ‘It’s fake, it’s fake, they’re stealing the election,’ that no matter how big the margin is, they will think that he lost unfairly, that it was stolen from him. And it’s hard to see how some substantial number of them aren’t going out with their semi-automatic weapons in the streets. So, I am a congenital optimist, but I’m not too optimistic on that point.
This is all scary stuff. And while we should take Trump’s threats seriously, we should also avoid the trap Erica Chenoweth described of raising a false alarm or exaggerating the risk of civil war.
So, in the interest of de-escalation, let me say this. Peaceful conflict and disagreement are the life’s blood of a free country, and they’re nothing to be afraid of. The problem starts when disagreement corrodes into cynicism and despair. That’s why it’s important to keep to the high road. Political violence is not a sign of the strength of the people who deal it out. It’s an admission of their weakness. And we know from history that nonviolent approaches to conflict are not only safer than violence; they’re also more effective.
One completely safe way to engage in civil resistance is simply to stay inside at home, do no work, and buy nothing. It’s called economic non-cooperation.
When I was speaking with Robert McElvaine, he described the civil rights movement of the 1960s as a “nonviolent civil war.” What he meant was that organizers captured the moral high ground and ultimately won huge political victories by responding to violence with nonviolent forms of civil resistance.
So, going into this fall and winter, it’s going to be important for progressive and pro-democracy movements to keep things peaceful, just as they’ve already been doing, for the most part, in the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality.
Chenoweth points out that it’s almost inevitable for social change movements to encounter repression. But if they respond with violence themselves, they forfeit much of their own power.
And there are plenty of ways to ensure that nonviolent mobilizations succeed. One way is to make them very large. Chenoweth has found in their comparisons across time and across many countries that civil resistance campaigns succeed when they can get at least 3.5 percent of the population involved.
Here in the United States that translates into about 12 million people. For comparison, that’s two to three times the size of the Women’s March in 2017, which was the largest single-day protest in American history. It sounds like a lot — but in a scenario where Trump is attempting a coup, it’s not impossible to imagine a million people gathering in each of the country’s 12 largest cities to oppose him.
But numbers alone aren’t enough. Mobilizations also need to be sustained. They need the kind of preparation and logistical support that would allow them to continue for weeks or months if necessary. Chenoweth and other researchers say it also helps when these movements build alliances across many different groups and win the support of elites, which could include people like governors, mayors, national guard commanders, and police chiefs. And finally, protestors can’t just protest. They may need to use many different methods, from lawsuits and litigation to work slowdowns or general strikes.
One completely safe way to engage in civil resistance is simply to stay inside at home, do no work, and buy nothing. It’s called economic non-cooperation. Staying at home does require some stockpiling of food and supplies (something we’ve all had recent practice at), but it can be very effective. If you think about it, CEOs and bankers and Wall Street types and their allies in Congress might be far less likely to allow Trump to cling to power if the economy were collapsing beneath their feet.
There’s much more information about tactics for civil resistance at the website Waging Nonviolence. Here’s part of an essay they published in August by George Lakey, the nonviolence researcher Chenoweth mentioned earlier:
The choice is in our hands: We can choose direct action tactics that strongly contrast with Trump’s likely call for armed members of his base to rise up to defend him. Through our own behavior we can take the moral high ground. Would-be dictators hate this. That’s why Trump tried to minimize the difference between nonviolent demonstrators at Charlottesville and violent white supremacists. “Fine people on both sides,” he said. Authoritarians fear the increased power that people have when they choose nonviolence.
If Trump wins reelection fair and square, fine. We’ve already survived four years of chaos, cruelty, and decline. We can figure out how to survive another four. But if he tries to steal the election, he may find people rising up against him in unprecedented numbers. Who knows how that would turn out, but at least Americans would rediscover their voices. You’ve heard the famous Margaret Mead quote:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Well, in this case, we’re not talking about a small group of citizens. At least half of the country sees Trump for what he really is: a con man who cares nothing about democracy and craves only fame and power.
And together, we can take it away from him.
Listen to the original audio version of American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them
Part 2: A New Kind of Nation
The first half of this essay tried to answer the same basic question a few different ways. That question was: how can we get through the 2020 presidential election without descending into violence and without losing our democracy?
But surviving the election is really just the beginning. No matter how the election turns out, we have an even bigger job ahead of us. Of course, we have to end the pandemic and get the economy back on its feet. But what I’m talking about is fixing the way we govern ourselves, so that politics doesn’t feel so awful all the time and normal people can go back to leading their normal lives.
Back in September of 2016, a Republican commentator named Michael Anton published a now-notorious essay in the Claremont Review of Books. It started out this way:
2016 is the Flight 93 Election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.
It was a tasteless metaphor, given that 40 passengers and crew members died when hijackers took over the actual Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. But it turns out it was prescient in one way. In 2016 the leader of Anton’s party did make it into the cockpit, and he did not know how to fly or land the plane.
I have a better comparison to offer. I think of 2020 as the Apollo 13 Election.
Apollo 13, of course, was the 1970 moon mission in which one of the command module’s liquid oxygen tanks exploded halfway to the moon. The oxygen sprayed out into space and pushed the ship around so much that the astronauts could barely stay on course. The oxygen leak also meant they had to shut down the command module’s fuel cells and use the lunar module as a lifeboat. But the lunar module was made for two astronauts, not three, so pretty soon, toxic levels of carbon dioxide built up in the cabin.
Ron Howard made a film about the whole crisis that’s one of my favorite movies. One of the best lines is delivered by actor Ed Harris, playing the harried but quick-thinking Apollo flight director Gene Krantz:
Can we review our status here, Sy? Let’s look at this thing from the standpoint of status. What have we got on that spacecraft that’s good?
That’s the moment in the film when everyone realizes there’s not going to be a moon landing, and the new mission objective is to work with the tools they have and improvise a way to get the crew home in one piece.
And that’s the kind of emergency I feel like we’re living in right now. Donald Trump is the explosion, and the damaged and rickety spacecraft we’re all flying on is called the United States Constitution.
If you have two groups of people who live in separate regions and separate ideological bubbles, and each one is convinced that the other intends to bulldoze away their culture, can you really have a country?
Some parts of our ship are still working, and others seem ruined beyond repair. To get home safely, we might want to identify precisely what’s broken about our Constitutional system and what a better design would look like.
But first I think we need to review all the givens. These are the factors we listed in Part 1 that are helping to make the election so tense — and for the most part they’re things we can’t change.
For instance, it’s a given that the country is becoming more ethnically diverse. It’s a given that far more people live in cities than in rural areas. It’s a given that Americans have widely varying views, in fact often diametrically opposing views, on questions like racial equality, gun rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and the importance of individual liberty versus communitarian values and cooperation. It’s a given that we’ve thoroughly sorted ourselves, both ideologically into parties or tribes and geographically into red and blue regions.
One additional fact that is not a given, but is more like an open wound that we’ve allowed to fester, is that the economy isn’t working for everyone. The forces of technological change and globalization have benefited people in cities much more than people in rural areas. Add in a long history of generous tax breaks for the rich, and you get outrageous levels of inequality. 52 percent of all US income goes to the richest 20 percent of households.
These divides between the old economy and the new economy — between the rich and everyone else — make our political polarization far worse. They create an opening for authoritarian populist candidates who blame it all on immigrants and promise that they alone can fix it. And the message works. In the 2016 election, 18 of the 20 poorest states, measured by median household income, voted for Trump. Nine of the 10 richest states voted for Clinton. And over the last four years, the divides have only grown deeper.
Tara Westover is the author of the 2018 memoir Educated, about growing up in a family of Mormon survivalists in Idaho. She said in a recent Atlantic interview that she thinks these levels of polarization lead to a kind of mutual incomprehension and lack of empathy:
That, I think, is the biggest threat to our country, more than any single issue or politician. It’s the fact that the left and the right, the elite and the non-elite, the urban and the rural — however you want to slice it up — they no longer see themselves reflected in the other person. They no longer interpret each other as having charitable intent.
A people without empathy or charity for one another is a people primed for conflict.
Here’s another data point on the red-blue divide from David A. French, a journalist and author with a background in civil liberties law. A former Republican who now calls himself a man without a party, French is the author of Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. He recently described the ideas behind the book to Vox’s Ezra Klein on Klein’s eponymous podcast:
I’m writing and podcasting from a very, very red part of Tennessee. If I had to identify what is the number one fear, or what is a central fear, of conservatives in the United States, it is a fear of majoritarian tyranny — that Democrats will take control, powered mainly by the hyper urban clusters on the coasts, and they will use that majority to bulldoze through the Bill of Rights and to bulldoze away our life in our culture. And so there’s a fear of majoritarian tyranny. But when I talk to my friends on the coasts, they say, “Well, wait a minute, I’m living under a minoritarian government right now — the way the American federal constitutional system is set up, a minority of Americans can dictate how I live.”
If you have two groups of people who live in separate regions and separate ideological bubbles, and each one is convinced that the other intends to bulldoze away their culture, can you really have a country? I’m not so sure, and French isn’t either:
We are not just sort of drifting apart as a people. In many ways, we’re almost sprinting apart as a people…And my simple proposition is you can’t do that indefinitely. You cannot continue to move apart indefinitely and stay together as a country. There’s not some sort of magic elixir that keeps America united.
So what could keep America united? Or how can we at least put away the bulldozers?
Here’s my list of requirements for a government that works better. Actually, it’s not even a list — there’s only one thing on it. But it’s kind of a doozie.
I think the number-one thing Americans want is a government that’s effective — not caught up in constant partisan gridlock. A government like this would simply need some runway to experiment with new ways to provide the things everybody wants and needs, like better education and jobs programs, healthcare, and maybe even a universal income, so that nobody feels economically left behind.
If everyone could operate at a more equal level, or at least start out with a more equal shot, it might take away one of the sources of class resentment that leaders like Trump have been able to exploit. And it might finally allow us to come together to tackle the pressing problems our lawmakers have been hiding from all this time, like systemic racism and climate change.
But here’s the thing about effective government: it’s impossible as long as there’s a minority party that believes it can only get ahead by exercising blocking power.
I talked in Part 1 about how conservative politicians have tried to stave off the effects of demographic change by perfecting the art of minority rule. They’ve used loopholes in the Constitution, Congressional procedure, and our legal framework to repeatedly elect presidents the majority of voters don’t want and to pursue anti-democratic strategies like voter suppression, gerrymandering, and loading up the courts with conservative judges.
That’s not just unfair, it’s also unwise, because it threatens to leave liberals so frustrated that the next time they’re in power, they’ll be strongly tempted to reach for the same responses — like packing the courts in the other direction.
So, how do you create political conditions where Republicans don’t feel like they have to be the anti-government party? How do you open up room for Democrats to enact some of the social reforms they want without making Republicans feel like their way of life is under siege?
It may all come down to one idea, first captured in the 1990s by the Polish-born political scientist Adam Przeworski, who teaches at New York University and studies the theory of democratic reform. The key to building a working democracy, Przeworski has written, is creating a situation where everyone believes that
their future will be better if they continue to follow the rules of the democratic game: Either they must have a fair chance to win or they must believe that losing will not be that bad.
To put it in Apollo 13 terms: People don’t have to agree all the time on which direction the spacecraft should go. But they do have to believe that they’ll get their turn in the pilot seat, and that it’s better to keep the ship intact than to blow it up.
In the remainder of this essay I’ll outline four plausible post-election scenarios, plus one additional scenario that’s less likely but would be very interesting. These aren’t predictions; they’re just possibilities. The point of the exercise is to see if there’s a realistic path toward a “Przeworski World” where everyone has a fair chance to win and everyone feels like the game is still worth playing. If so, then maybe we should try going down that path.
The first scenario is one that I have to mention for the sake of completeness, though I can’t bear to dwell on it at any length. I’m calling Trumpocracy. This is the case where Donald Trump gets a second term in office.
He probably can’t do that by winning the popular vote in November. But he could still manage a clean win in the Electoral College. If you think that’s impossible given that Joe Biden seems to be way ahead in the polls, well, let me remind you that Hillary Clinton had an even bigger lead at this point in the race in 2016.
And there’s always the possibility that Trump’s threats to stop the counting of mail-in ballots will work, that hundreds of thousands of ballots will be disqualified, and that Congress or the Supreme Court will once again hand a close election to the loser of the popular vote.
Of course, in this case, mass protests would spring up in November and would probably persist into January. Angry progressives would mobilize at every step to try to register their opposition. But we’ve seen over and over lately, from the Kavanaugh hearings to the impeachment, how little that anger amounts to in the face of a Republican political machine that’s dead set on pushing through its agenda.
After the inauguration the protests would probably settle down into a long-term civil resistance movement focused on checking Trump’s excesses. The goal would be to keep democracy on life support while the president and his enablers double down on all their previous efforts, from dismantling the regulatory state to closing down immigration to restricting women’s rights to control their own bodies to strengthening a police state that protects white privilege.
There are ways for resistance factions to be effective in these dire situations, and researchers like Erica Chenoweth spell out many of them in their writings. But they require a great deal of planning, discipline, and stamina.
Scenario Two is much less grim, but it’s still not all that thrilling. I’m calling it Biden Our Time.
This is a future where Joe Biden wins the White House, but not by much, and where Republicans keep control of the Senate. In a case like this the nation would be tired out from all of the chaos of 2020, Biden wouldn’t have a big mandate or a lot of political capital to spend, and all of his instincts would guide him toward modest attempts at compromise. But in a divided government with Mitch McConnell still in power, and with a 6 to 3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Biden would accomplish very little.
He’d be lucky just to end the pandemic and bring back the economy. All of our real problems would just get kicked down the road to 2024, when we might in essence have a reply of the 2020 election, just with different names on the ballot. Say, Kamala Harris versus Tom Cotton or Tucker Carlson or Ted Cruz.
Scenario Two is a little sad, but it might actually be the most likely, so we should probably be prepared for it.
Scenario Three is much more enticing, but it also has some built-in dangers. I’m calling it The New New Deal.
In this scenario, voters repudiate Trump and give Biden a clear majority in the popular vote and Electoral College. Democrats hold on to the House and also win enough Senate seats to make Chuck Schumer the new majority leader.
In this scenario at least two big things could happen. First, Democrats would have a mandate not just to end the pandemic, and not just to rebuild all the agencies and restore all the international alliances that Trump has tried to shred, but also to create some ambitious programs for getting people back to work and tackling real problems like climate change. Biden has said he doesn’t support the Green New Deal, but his plan to create manufacturing jobs in the green energy sector could accomplish a lot of the same things.
Second, if Trump were out of the picture and Republicans found themselves banished from power, the party might finally have an incentive to rethink its goals and strategies.
Here I’m going to bring in some thoughts from University of Chicago political scientist William Howell. He’s the co-author of a new book called Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, and I interviewed him for a recent episode of Soonish called After Trump, What Comes Next? Here’s part of our conversation that didn’t make it into that show:
Wade Roush: It seems to me like an essential part of the work of restoring democracy is going to be for folks on the right to find some way of resurrecting the Republican Party in a healthier form such that Republicans don’t have to rely on populist appeals to get elected. It’s hard to see who’s going to come along and reinvent the Republican Party, but we need a strong center-right party and reinventing it is going to be part of the work here.
Will Howell: I agree, yes, that we need a strong center-right party. What I mean by that is that is a party that is willing to negotiate and to bargain and to compromise; that is perfectly willing to articulate different views, both about the purposes of government and about what kinds of policies that government ought to support, but that is not intent at every turn at de-legitimizing government, not at every turn intent upon just blocking and undermining and minimizing government. And so this is a profound challenge. What will it take to resurrect the Republican Party into a more constructive, engaging kind of force in American politics? Well, that’s the work that the never-Trumpers are undertaking. This is precisely what they see as the kind of the imperative of kind of partisan rejuvenation for their camp. But there aren’t, right now, signs that they’re succeeding.
My own guess is that the moment Trump leaves the stage, a healthy battle between conservatives and moderates over the future of the party will begin. (Which makes it all the more important that Trump suffer such a decisive defeat that he’s not in position to run again in 2024.)
If you’re a Democrat, there’s a lot to like about the New New Deal scenario. Under a unified government, a President Biden would have at least two years before the midterm elections to prove that government can be effective. And he’d like nothing more than to have some real partners to work with across the aisle.
But there’s one big thing I worry about in this scenario. In a word: temptation. There are some structural reforms that Democrats absolutely should undertake, like abolishing the filibuster, restoring the Voting Rights Act, overturning Citizens United, and working with states to fix the Congressional redistricting process to reduce gerrymandering. But there are other reforms that would likely cause unacceptable blowback.
For example, after the trauma of losing the Supreme Court seat that Barack Obama would have given to Merrick Garland, and after watching Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and now Amy Coney Barrett ascend to the court, Democrats would naturally be tempted to pack the court with a few more liberal justices, just to rebalance things. To reinforce the new blue-state advantage in the Senate, they might also be tempted to invite the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to join the Union.
All things being equal, some of those changes might be good for the country. After all, there are places like California where single-party rule by Democrats is working pretty well. But as much as I might personally enjoy this fantasy scenario, it could very easily devolve into the same kind of drive-to-domination that I’m so angry about when I see it happening on the Republican side in Washington.
Republicans would cry foul, and they’d be right, because adding states and packing the court could take away their fair chance to win. A maximalist Democratic strategy wouldn’t address the root causes of polarization; it would just make them worse. In the end, it would probably just give far-right Republicans the ammunition they’d need to come roaring back in 2022 or 2024 — the same way they did in 1938, after Americans grew disillusioned with the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own court-packing plan.
That brings us to Scenario Four. I’m calling this one The Bonds of our Disaffection. It’s a little scary, but it doesn’t have to be terrifying.
It’s a future where Americans decide that this long and rancorous marriage between the red states and the blue states, between the coasts and the heartland, between the cities and the countryside, just isn’t working, and that for everyone’s sanity we need to try something like a separation or even a divorce.
Stronger federalism would help satisfy the condition Przeworski laid out that everyone in a democracy should feel like they have a fair chance to win.
That doesn’t necessarily mean secession. There’s a “soft” version of this scenario where we return to a more federalist structure that gives much more power to the states. Under a system like that, we’d all still be bound to a basic set of commitments like the Bill of Rights. But beyond that, each state would be able to set its own social and economic policy agenda, free of interference from the national government. Here’s David A. French again, talking with Ezra Klein:
We’ve got to find a way for California to be California and Tennessee to be Tennessee…I think a healthy federalism is one that allows different states to govern according to their values, on economic policy, on welfare policy, on, in many ways climate policy…but we’re all in the same boat and have the same benefits of the Bill of Rights, this fundamental social compact.
To use an example French and Klein debated, this kind of federalism would open up room for California to set up a single-payer healthcare plan and then ask for a waiver from the federal government so the state could keep the money that Californians would normally pay into the federal Medicare program. In our current moment of Republican domination in Washington, there’s no way California would actually get such a waiver, since conservatives would see the creation of a single-payer plan as a big win for progressives. But French says that’s exactly the kind of local issue where American’s different political and regional tribes should stop trying to impose their will on each other. And if they could just stop, he thinks it would de-escalate national politics and dial back the pervasive fear of tyranny by the majority or the minority.
Stronger federalism would help satisfy the condition Przeworski laid out, that everyone in a democracy should feel like they have a fair chance to win. But I’m not so sure that we can get there from here. That’s partly because we don’t even agree on the fundamental social compact — that is, the universal rights every state would be obliged to respect.
We pay a lot of lip service to the Bill of Rights, but there’s at least one amendment hiding in there, the Second, that a lot of folks would love to see repealed. If you’re going to let California lawmakers govern according to California values, does that mean they should be allowed to ban guns? Or are they forever hostage to Tennessee when it comes to gun laws? What about issues that cut the other way, like abortion? You can see the problems.
That’s why there’s another version of Scenario Four that looks more like outright secession, or a breakup of the US into two or more separate nations.
You don’t have to look very far these days for people advocating a breakup. Here’s a passage written in 2018 by Bernard Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University.
There comes a time when mature adults must decide to govern themselves and not others….After more than 200 years of productive experimentation, the country today is fundamentally divided over foundational human values and basic visions for society. Those divisions have become too profound to ignore or to reconcile…It is time for the citizens of the United States to sort themselves into two or more sovereign states based on popular referenda. The new sovereign states could include…New England, the Republic of Texas, the Republic of California, the Southern Confederated States, the American Heartland, Native Lands, among other sovereignties.
Then there’s Colin Woodard, a journalist based in Maine, who’s famous for his 2011 book American Nations. Woodard believes the political borders of the continental United States are underlain by a patchwork of at least 11 rival regional cultures, or what he calls “nations,” that trace their origins back to the way Europeans settled the continent in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Woodard speculates in American Nations that perhaps these nations will
come to agree that the status quo isn’t serving anyone well. A time might come when the only issue on which the nations find common ground is the need to free themselves from one another’s veto power.
And it’s not just scholars and writers talking about breakup. There are small but active secessionist groups in states such as Vermont Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii.
What would secession look like in modern times? It could start any number of ways, but it’s important to note that nobody’s saying it should be accomplished through a second civil war. At least, nobody’s saying that outside of the extremist movements we talked about in Part 1. Instead, a peaceful breakup might look a lot like Brexit in the UK, where the main challenge is figuring out what the post-Brexit borders and business relationships between Britain and the EU will look like.
Here’s something from a piece in Tablet Magazine by Duncan Moench, a journalist who teaches at Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership:
We need to end the ‘United States’ and start an American Union — a coalition of independent nation-states with close trade ties, freedom of movement and employment across borders, and provisions for common defense, but independence outside that. Californians should no more seek to control the social policies of Georgia than they should those of Indonesia.
In a breakup scenario, it might take a while to figure out tricky stuff like how to apportion the $27 trillion US national debt, and who should control the nation’s arsenal of 5,800 nuclear warheads. But at least California and Tennessee could stop having to pretend they get along.
So those are the four scenarios I can see playing out over the next decade. Number One, a Trump win that turns into a battle to forestall the complete collapse of democracy. Number Two, a weak Biden win that turns into four more years of gridlock. Number Three, a big Biden win that’s energizing for Democrats but so alarming for Republicans that there’s a backlash in the next election and we stay stuck in our doom loop. And Number four, a secession or breakup scenario that would mean the end of the United States as we know it but would, on the bright side, de-escalate politics by bringing it down to the state or regional level.
Now maybe at this point you’re saying, “Wait a minute, Wade, where are the optimistic scenarios? Aren’t you the guy who keeps saying you’re a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist?”
Well, I’m sorry, but those are the optimistic scenarios. The really horrible futures are the ones where the election spirals downward into bloodshed and civil war. But I spent all of Part 1 explaining how we can avoid that. I’m trying to be realistic about what might happen after the election, and I’m sorry, but 2020 has made it a little difficult to stay cheerful.
That said, I do have one more scenario up my sleeve. You didn’t think I was going to leave you in complete despair, did you?
Why couldn’t we have a blue United States and a red United States, and they could live cheek by jowl and just have different policies that are implemented in their territories? — Malka Older
Scenario Five is called Micro-democracy. And it may sound a little bit science-fictional. But that’s because the idea comes from Malka Older, who’s the leading writer today using speculative fiction to investigate problems in political science and governance.
We first met Malka back in Season 3 of Soonish, in an episode about election security and the idea of voting from our smartphones. She’s a sociologist and a humanitarian aid worker, and most importantly for our purposes she’s the author of a well known trilogy of science fiction novels that she launched in 2014 called Infomocracy, Null States, and State Tectonics. (Full disclosure: she also wrote a story for a hard science fiction anthology I edited in 2018 called Twelve Tomorrows.)
Together the trilogy is known as the Centenal Cycle. It’s a word that Malka coined to help describe the political units that people inhabit in a world of micro-democracies. She explains:
It’s science fiction, so it’s set about 60 years in the future. And I talk about a future in which the whole world order has shifted. It’s no longer nation-states, with a few exceptions. It’s these jurisdictions called centenals, which are made up of 100,000 people, roughly. And so they can be geographically quite large or very small, and each of those can vote for any government that they want out of all the governments that exist in the world at that time, which is about 2,000. So you’re kind of tied to this geography of those 100,000 people, but beyond that, you can vote for a government that is headquartered on the other side of the world, or for which all your core constituents will be in other places. It kind of takes away the geographic link with politics. And the other key factor of this is this big international bureaucracy, which you can think of as sort of a combination of the U.N. and Google, which is entirely dedicated to information management and exists basically on the principle that you can not have a functioning democracy, a properly functioning democracy, without access to good information.
All the action in Infomocracy and the other books is about how life actually works, or doesn’t work, in a world where governments are digitally distributed and every local jurisdiction can vote every so often on which one they want to belong to. So, for example, if the people of future East Harlem in New York City decide they’re tired of being represented by the government called LaRaza, they can vote to join ElNuevaPRI.
The average congressional district in today’s United States has about 750,000 people. Malka’s centenals are much smaller than that, which means governments have to work harder to keep every constituent happy, or they risk losing that district in the next election. And there’s open immigration between centenals, so if people don’t like their centenal, they can easily move to a different one — a process that Malka calls “mandergerrying.”
One big advantage of micro-democracy is that it meets the Przeworski test. Everybody has a fair chance to win, and no group can end up feeling permanently oppressed by some other group.
Cool, right? But could it really happen? Malka says she wrote the books partly because she wanted to get people thinking about why we have the political arrangements that we do.
It’s so easy for us to become complacent and it’s so easy for us to believe that things are the way they are because that’s how they have to be, and there’s no other way to do it. So I really wanted to put up this alternative that, despite occurring in the future and despite some cool technology that’s in there, the systems that I talk about are entirely possible now. The thing that stands in our way is political will and the difficulty of change. And so, you know, I want people to look at, why don’t we have polities that are separated geographically? Because actually, we already do. You know, we have Alaska not too far away. And that works perfectly well not being geographically attached. Why couldn’t we have a blue United States and a red United States, and they could live cheek by jowl and just have different policies that are implemented in their territories, for example? You know, I just want people to really think about how important the processes that we choose for our governments are. It’s not just the people, it’s it’s about the process.
The passages above are from an interview I did with Malka back in 2019. This month I called her up again to ask whether she had any thoughts about whether the message of the Centenal books has grown even more relevant this year, and about how we might transition from our current system to something like micro-democracy. Here’s a bit of that conversation:
Malka Older: So much can happen. And I had about 60 years of a window there. So much can happen in that time that we do not expect. 60 years ago, who would have imagined the Internet and its impact on the world today, just to take one example? We can even say eight months ago, who would have imagined [the pandemic]? Now at this point, I feel like with some of the things that have happened and some of those big economic and geopolitical shocks, some of those have happened. And it’s not quite enough yet. We’re not quite there yet. But to me, it looks much more plausible that in the next 50 years or less that we could do some some of these radical changes.
Wade Roush: Yeah, I feel like there are all sorts of structural flaws that we’re becoming more acutely aware of right now in the way, for example, we run elections. But it’s really much deeper than that. It has to do with how you respect the rights of a majority and a minority, and how you make sure that everyone feels safe in a democracy, where it’s acceptable for one side or the other to be on the losing side and it doesn’t feel like an existential threat.
Malka Older: Yeah, I think thoughts on a lot of these and more. I think that in addition to making sure the minority doesn’t take over, we have to make sure that the majority does not oppress minorities using their democratic power. And there are a lot of others as well. Democracy has so much potential that we are not touching.
Wade Roush: Yeah. So let’s talk about that. So do you have some ideas about ways we could begin experimenting?
Malka Older: Yeah, and there’s actually a lot of experimentation going on now, both around the world in different places and even in the United States, but mostly at a local level. So one example that’s kind of a simple thing and clear, and that seems to be happening, I think, relatively fast, is the shift in voting to ranked-choice voting. So we’re seeing a lot of places, and it started with like municipalities, and it’s moved up to some state-level races. And I believe there are some states that are doing ranked-choice voting in this coming presidential election. And that’s a huge difference and it makes a lot more sense for a lot of reasons, and is maybe one of the simpler, easier to understand shifts that we could make.
Just a quick explanation: Ranked-choice voting is a system where voters list their favorite candidates in order of preference. Basically it means that if your first-choice candidate doesn’t win, your vote can get redistributed to your second-choice candidate. One advantage is that you can express a preference for somebody who’s unlikely to win — say, a third-party candidate in a Presidential election — without necessarily hurting the mainstream candidate who would be your second choice. (Here in my home state of Massachusetts, there’s a referendum on the November ballot to move to ranked-choice voting starting in 2022. I will certainly give it my vote.)
Malka Older: So allowing people to express the one they really want, but letting them put a second choice so that people aren’t playing these games with strategic voting, that’s pretty clearly more democratic.
Wade Roush: Like, if all the people who voted for the Green Party candidate in 2016 had said they wanted Hillary Clinton as their second choice, maybe she would have gotten over the top in a couple of places.
Malka Older: It would have made a pretty big difference, I think.
Wade Roush: I’m sure you’re also aware of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. So in that system, states would wait to see what was the outcome of the popular vote nationwide and then in Nevada or Maine or Michigan or wherever, you would just say, “OK, we’re we’re delegating all of our electors to that person” And if enough states decided that they’re going to do it this way, that would be the equivalent of abolishing the Electoral College. So that’s a kludge, right? But it’s maybe a way forward.
Malka Older: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think all of this kind of points to the other question you had, which is how do we get to something like micro-democracy, or how do we have some of the more radical changes? And one of the ways that we can see that is the fact that localities, particularly cities, but also sometimes smaller localities, are taking the lead on a lot of really interesting stuff, both on the policy level and on the process level. That is what federalism was designed to do, and micro-democracy is in a way a kind of extreme form of federalism. And we see that people from localities are taking the lead on some of these things. And there are things like ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability, which is the organization of mayors and local leaders which develops policies and try to try to push things like responding to climate change. You know, it may come to a point where the nation-state level, the central-government level is just not so relevant anymore.
Wade Roush: Any last words that can leave us in a more hopeful place?
Malka Older: I think that there are reasons that we chose democracy and those reasons are still good. And I think that we have the potential to make our democracy better in a lot of different ways, from experimenting with the processes to improving education, and also figuring out our media environment so that it’s not dominated by certain large companies that have an interest in pushing things in certain ways. And I think that there are a lot of different possibilities. It is not a straight path, and it hasn’t been, getting to where we are now. But we have a lot of things that we can try, and we should be trying them.
It was uplifting to talk with Malka, because she really is a long-term optimist about our ability to keep experimenting with democracy. For her, optimism doesn’t mean downplaying the hard realities. It’s just that she doesn’t think pessimism is very useful. It doesn’t build anything.
For me — well, to be honest, the harder I’ve tried to understand how our political landscape is changing, the more my own optimism has been tested. The truth is, we’re living through a time like none of us have ever experienced. A blogger I like named Adam Elkus described it as “the omni-crisis,” when we have an unpopular and incompetent president, a raging pandemic, an escalating series of climate disasters like fires and floods, protests against racism and police brutality that only seem to provoke more brutality, and now the threat of a contested election — all at once.
My guest in our Season 4 opening episode, futurist Jamais Cascio, had to come up with a new term just to describe the moment. He called it BANI, for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible.
I started the American Reckoning project thinking that if I could just get my head around the origins of the omni-crisis, maybe it would soothe my own anxiety. And I guess it has, in the sense that I now have a better understanding of the forces that are pulling us apart as a country. If those forces eventually succeed, at least I won’t be surprised.
Abraham Lincoln was right when he said in 1858 that a house divided against itself cannot stand. In that same speech he said, “I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.”
The problem now is that there’s no obvious way to put our house back together. Especially when there’s an arsonist lurking in the basement.
On election night we’ll see if Trump follows through on his threats to ignore the election results. As I spelled out in Part 1, I think there are ways for all of us to get through that kind of crisis without violence. But let’s say we do get to the other side. I still don’t see candidates from either party talking about the things we would need to do to change the rules of national politics, so that everybody has a fair chance to win and everyone wants to keep playing.
That’s why I agree with Malka Older that the real solutions are probably going to have to come from the bottom up. From mayors and local leaders. From the people in offices and factories and farms and schools who actually make the economy go and who have a pretty good idea of what they’d like government to do for them.
And also from inventive people like the NASA engineers in Houston who used duct tape, towels, index cards, and spacesuit parts to fashion a plan for an air scrubber that saved the Apollo 13 crew from carbon dioxide poisoning.
The amazing thing about the Apollo 13 mission was not just that the astronauts got back to Earth safely. It’s that NASA did a thorough accident investigation, fixed the wiring problem that led to the oxygen tank explosion, and sent Apollo 14 back to the Moon — all in just 10 months. That’s why historians today call the Apollo 13 mission a “successful failure.”
We’re still the same country that did that. To turn our own failures into successes, I think we just need to look around and figure out what we’ve got on the spacecraft that’s good.
Listen below to the original audio version of American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation, and subscribe to Soonish wherever you get your podcasts.
