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Are you afraid of a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> dictatorship? Well, know this: The only thing you have to fear is fear of Tyrannus Trumpus itself.

By now, it’s hard to deny that Trump has a narrow but plausible path to authoritarian rule in the United States. Polls show he could well win next year’s election. Trump allies are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/" target=_blank>openly developing an elaborate blueprint</a> to transform a second term into full-blown autocracy. Prominent columnists <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/" target=_blank>have demonstrated in great detail</a> how it might succeed.

But certain versions of this argument have grown seriously problematic. It’s sometimes said that our institutions and civic culture have withered so much that resistance to Trumpian tyranny would be incapacitated, rendering its onset all but inevitable.

Such a reading of the moment risks leading us astray. It fails to account for much of the good that transpired during the Trump years, from which there is plenty to learn. Undue fatalism could even prove counterproductive, de-energizing voter opposition exactly when Trump is brazenly projecting his dictatorial intentions.

No question, extreme pessimism is understandable. Trump faces <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2023/trump-investigations-indictments/" target=_blank>multiple criminal indictments</a>, including for allegedly attempting to destroy free and fair elections in the United States. He and his allies are vowing to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/opinion/trump-deep-state-schedule-f.html" target=_blank>stock the government with loyalists</a> who would trample legal constraints, arrest political opponents without cause and persecute the “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/" target=_blank>vermin</a>” voters who resist him.

Yet even as all this unfolds in plain sight, Trump’s grip on GOP primary voters has tightened, and he <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/" target=_blank>continues to run strong</a> against <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">President Biden</a>. Surely this means, as some have argued, that the great mass of voters are prepared to roll over and succumb to despotism, right?

No, it doesn’t. The polls certainly are disconcerting, but let’s not draw premature conclusions from them about the electorate’s civic health or its attunement to the threat to democracy Trump poses.

This might be easy to overlook amid Trump’s daily degradations, but the Trump years offer at least some cause for optimism. When Trump executed his 2017 ban on many Muslims entering the country, crowds <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-gives-no-sign-of-backing-down-from-travel-ban/2017/01/29/4ffe900a-e620-11e6-b82f-687d6e6a3e7c_story.html" target="_blank">descended on airports</a> in a surprising outpouring of support. A year later, historians Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol <a href="https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/middle-america-reboots-democracy/" target="_blank">documented an unexpected groundswell</a> of painstaking political organizing among formerly apathetic middle-aged women to defend democracy, fueling Democrats’ 2018 midterm blowout.

During the 2020 election season, despite outbreaks of street violence, most voters saw protests against police brutality <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/09/white-voters-are-turning-trump-new-data-shows-why-now/" target="_blank">as peaceful, legitimate political activity</a>, rejecting Trump’s effort to smear them in threatening terms. In the 2022 midterms, many prominent GOP election deniers lost, and fears for democracy <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/upshot/midterm-election-abortion-democracy.html" target="_blank">were a key motivator for voters</a>.

It remains underappreciated, but our national response to the antidemocratic menace of the Trump years has in some respects been surprisingly good — not just electorally but also institutionally. Trump’s gaming of the judicial system to overturn his 2020 loss hit a wall in the courts. By a wide bipartisan margin, Congress <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/19/electoral-count-reform-omnibus/" target=_blank>passed reforms</a> to Trump-proof the system by which we count electoral votes.

Trump’s incitement of a violent coup attempt inspired the Democrat-led hearings investigating <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/jan-6-insurrection-capitol/" target=_blank>the Jan. 6, 2021, attack</a>, the most riveting public case mounted by a governing body in at least a generation. Election officials, Republican lawmakers and even former advisers to Trump testified with extraordinary courage, surely turning many voters against election deniers in 2022. Fears that the Justice Department would refrain from prosecuting Trump and his co-conspirators amid <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/us/politics/trump-bragg-indictment-protests.html" target=_blank>more intimations of mob violence</a> proved unfounded.

Please don’t read this as naive. Yes, Trump can win, but polls likely reflect voter disengagement long before Election Day, and alarmist obsessing over them risks distracting us from a deeper cause of our crisis. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/opinion/biden-trump-election-democracy.html" target=_blank>Jamelle Bouie details for the New York Times</a>, a Trump restoration might be facilitated by the electoral college and the Supreme Court’s gutting of voting rights, which help electoral minorities hostile to democracy — such as the MAGA movement — seize power beyond their numbers.

In short, if Trump has a path to autocracy in United States, it probably would run through the counter-majoritarian features of our system at least as much as through alleged voter apathy about democracy. Yet all the hand-wringing about the autocratic threat rarely involves discussions of majoritarian reform.

The case for panic also rests on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/us/politics/trump-2025-overview.html" target=_blank>reports that Trump allies are aggressively preparing</a> to purge the government of the sort of weak-kneed officials who internally resisted Trump’s designs last time. In a second term, some worry, Trump and his consiglieri would not be held back by legal limitations or even court rulings.

All that scheming does demand vigilance. But its prospects depend on the prosecutions of Trump and his coup co-conspirators not succeeding. If they do succeed, all the Trumpian bluster about staffing up with lawyers to execute an illegal second-term agenda might quickly evaporate. That success <a href="https://www.offmessage.net/p/judges-terrified-trump-law" target=_blank>is far from guaranteed</a>, but, so far, the prosecutions have demonstrated unexpected institutional fortitude. Let’s not write them out of the story just yet.

The impulse to sound alarms — to break voters out of their “it can’t happen here” doldrums — is understandable. But it’s also possible to take this too far, and here it’s worth registering an irony: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of strongman rule, <a href="https://lucid.substack.com/p/lock-them-up-in-camps-jails-and-psychiatric" target=_blank>has noted</a> that a time-tested tactic of authoritarian leaders is to disarm the electorate by suggesting their glorious triumph is inevitable.

“Authoritarians create a climate where they seem unstoppable,” Ben-Ghiat told me. “Creating an aura of destiny around the leader galvanizes his supporters by making his movement seem much stronger than it actually is. The manipulation of perception is everything.”

The aim is to hypnotize voters into forgetting the power and numbers that they possess, persuading them that politics is a hopelessly sordid and disappointing exercise. But that is <i>not</i> the story of the Trump years.

The purpose of this isn’t to downplay the gravity of the moment; it’s to channel anxieties about it in a constructive direction. As <a href="https://www.offmessage.net/p/donald-trumps-dictatorial-plans" target=_blank>Brian Beutler writes on Substack</a>, excessive public worries about Trump’s supposed inevitability bury the all-important truth that popular majorities have regularly, emphatically rejected Trump and all he represents, potentially making the convictions of the anti-Trump movement look feeble in the eyes of swing voters.

No more indulging in paralyzing fatalistic nightmares. We need a spirit of guarded and vigilant confidence — one that is fully aware of what’s at stake while drawing inspiration from the cognizance that this country has thwarted Trump in the past — and will likely do so again.

An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics

Hunter College, BA in English

Greg Sargent was a columnist. He joined The Washington Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.

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