Since Donald Trump entered the American political fray, his opponents have been debating what kind of threat he poses to democracy, and what to do about it. In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg declared that debate over in a column headlined “The Resistance Libs Were Right.”
The obvious question is: About what?
Were they right to label him a fascist? That depends on what you mean by the term. As the Justice Department prosecutes Trump’s enemies, the military stages smash-and-grab raids on foreign countries and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents storm through U.S. cities, it’s hard to deny that the resistance libs were correct about some important things: Trump’s authoritarian instincts, bellicose contempt for norms and fundamental disrespect for America’s democratic traditions. Those character flaws have been given much freer rein in his second term, making the fears of an emerging dictatorship look somewhat more reasonable.
But when ordinary people hear “Trump is a fascist,” they aren’t primed for an academic debate over when right-wing populism shades over into fascism; they hear you saying that Trump is either an adherent of the political ideology known as fascism or a dictator whose practices are fascist, even if he eschews the name. Those stronger claims are less convincing. In the first case, because Trumpism looks more like a personal grift than a coherent ideology, and in the second, because for all Trump’s assaults on American institutions, he is not a dictator and is running out of time to become one.
It has been almost 10 years since Trump won his first election. By that point in their careers, Benito Mussolini had consolidated total power, while Adolf Hitler was deep into World War II and the Holocaust. Trump, by contrast, is pleading with the Supreme Court to let him remove Federal Reserve governors, which seems unlikely to succeed. Given another decade, could he build a power base in the judiciary or military that would enable him to seize a dictator’s power? I don’t know, but Trump is nearly 80 years old, and he doesn’t have another decade.
That’s not to say Trump isn’t damaging our politics, our government and our standing in the world. America looks less like a liberal democracy than it did a decade ago — much less than I would have believed possible before 2016. But it still has a long way to go, a point Goldberg concedes toward the end of her column, writing that “for now, we are trapped in the space between the liberal democracy most Americans grew up in and the dark, belligerent authoritarian state that our government seeks to impose.”
That point matters, because while the resistance libs were right that Trump is a dangerous president, they were wrong about the best way to oppose him.
“The important thing isn’t really the name we give to this political development,” writes Goldberg, “but our ability to see what’s happening clearly and make sense of its likely trajectory.” That has long been the animating belief of many in the resistance: American democracy could be preserved if only the chattering classes properly identified the outrages, drew the parallels, plotted the trendlines and then, having seen what was coming, issued the dark prophecies.
If you believe this, you need to reckon with the fact that this was all done in the years following Trump’s first election. No group could have worked harder to constrain and defeat Trump with petitions and protests, white papers and op-eds, cable hits and Twitter memes, hearings and prosecutions. The result of this effort is that … Trump is president again and worse than ever. At this late date, it’s insane to believe that we’ll get a different result by doing it all over again, only louder and clearer.
If American democracy is to be saved, it will have to be saved democratically, not by recalibrating the intellectual thermostats of a small group of educated elites, nor even by taking to the streets. If you think Trump is herding us toward a fascist dictatorship, your most important job is not analyzing the damage Trump has done to our system but persuading the American public to vote for someone who can undo that damage.
Saying “He’s a fascist” (or an authoritarian, or a caudillo) will not do the trick. It’s more likely to be counterproductive, as people look up from our scribblings and observe that elections are still happening, courts are still demanding due process and the press is still free to complain about Dear Leader. You can point to Trump’s efforts to co-opt the justice system, muzzle unfriendly media outlets and undermine the integrity of our election system, while trying to convince some Americans that these things are one short step from going Full Franco. But it will be much easier to convince them that he’s just a bad president who should be replaced by someone who has different policies. So establishing who was most right about Trump in 2016 matters less than figuring out who has the best ideas for right now.
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