When Donald Trump won the first time, I spoke to a journalist friend in Turkey to commiserate. I told her about all the protests that were planned, and she gently tried to prepare me for disappointment. She and her friends had protested Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he was prime minister, she said. But in time, the protests subsided, and life within a country of diminishing freedoms ground on. This conversation stayed in my mind throughout the Trump presidency as a warning against letting down our guard. When Trump was finally ejected from the White House, I felt patriotic pride in the endurance of the anti-Trump resistance, which had never for a moment accepted his authoritarian grotesquerie as our new normal.
It won’t be that way this time. Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.
So I expect the next few months to be a period of mourning rather than defiance. My own instinct — which conflicts with the demands of my job — is to retreat into my family, to look for solace in time with friends, in theater and in novels, to block out the humiliating truth about what my country has decided to become. This morning I returned to an essay from The New York Review of Books published in 2019 about the Russian term “vnutrennaya emigratsia,” or internal emigration, a deliberate embrace of one’s own alienation. “For many Russian authors and artists for centuries, the idea of ‘turning inward’ and living oblivious of the political concerns of the moment has been a vital skill and even an art form,” wrote Viv Groskop. It’s a skill, I suspect, that many of us will at least temporarily try to cultivate to avoid going completely insane.
But eventually, mourning either starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will differ from what came before. Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us. There’s no point in protesting his inauguration, as millions did in 2017. But hopefully we will take to the streets if his forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away. We will need to strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions, especially if Trump’s Justice Department cracks down on the mailing of abortion pills or his F.D.A. withdraws approval of them. In state and local elections, I’ll want to know how candidates promise to protect us from the MAGA movement’s threats to reshape our public health systems and our schools.
In the longer term, we’ll need liberal politics that are about more than just fending off the right. Trump, after all, is a particularly ghastly manifestation of historical forces that are reshaping politics all over the Western world, elevating nationalist leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and powering the growth of parties like the right-wing Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally. You can blame Kamala Harris for spending too much time courting moderate Republican women, or for the vagueness of her “opportunity economy” rhetoric. But few politicians anywhere have figured out how to hold together a coalition that includes both affluent, educated, cosmopolitan elites and blue-collar voters who prize tradition and social stability. Maybe doing so is no longer possible, but at the very least, it will require a plausible vision of what a thriving progressive society looks like.
Ultimately, Trump’s one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure “some temporary hardship.” We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it. He could even end up discrediting bombastic right-wing nationalism the way George W. Bush — whose re-election also broke my heart — discredited neoconservatism.
The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system will still be standing, and whether Trump’s opponents have built an alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the work of the next four years — saving what we can and trying to imagine a tolerable future. For now, though, all I can do is grieve.
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