I Urge you, Mr. President
In the most imaginative world of make-believe — Alice’s Wonderland — it would still be hard to picture what we, as a people, have done. We have made one of the worst human beings in the world President of the United States.
As Walt Kelly’s Pogo once so wisely said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
The Growing Threat of Authoritarianism
The polls bring good news. But with it comes a dangerous comfort. That we can relax. That we can stop working. That we no longer need to confront what is likely coming.
And what is likely coming is this.
Trump wields tremendous emergency powers, foolishly handed to presidents by Congress. And the Supreme Court, unbelievably, has handed him sweeping immunity for what he does in office.
He will use them — in some powerful authoritarian action — to keep a Congress and a judiciary that comply. No guardrails; no resistance.
Given what he has already done, it is hard to believe he will now simply accept guardrails — and a substantial loss of power.
That’s not what authoritarians do. It’s not who they are. A Trump cornered under the old rules is dangerously likely to bust through them. Much as we’d like to forget that — don’t.
A Potentially Historic Turning Point
I doubt any of us expected to live through a moment as historically significant as the fall of Rome. The defeat of Napoleon. The downfall of Hitler. The end of our Civil War, and the assassination of Lincoln that followed. Hinges of history, every one. And a hinge can swing either way.
Ten days from now, we may be exactly there — part of an indelibly historic moment.
The Stakes: Democracy or Rule by the Powerful
If this country’s inspired project in democratic governance — handed down to us, and painfully defended in wartime — collapses, the true human toll will be beyond counting. The rising arc of history we hoped for will reverse itself. We are drifting back toward the older arrangement. Rule by the most powerful. Monarchy, or oligarchy.
That arrangement held for nearly the whole of recorded history. Like Sauron in Tolkien’s trilogy, it is never finally destroyed. It lurks. It recovers. It returns. It is returning now. Trump is our Sauron, and the Elon Musks are his Sarumans.
Why Is American Democracy Breaking Down?
So, why is our system breaking down? The Founders held two assumptions about proper governance. First, that decision-making could be aimed at the public interest rather than private ones. Second, that many decision-makers, deliberating together, would reach better outcomes than one issuing orders.
The Importance of Deliberation and Effective Lawmaking
Both still hold. But so does the lazy temptation, exploited by powerful opportunists, to trade deliberation — deliberative decision making —for decisions that are clearer, swifter — and worse.
A democratic system is sustained only partly by the good intentions of its institutions. It is sustained far more by its outcomes. The art of lawmaking is the art of producing results — especially results that people approve of — often lost in the sea of hostility toward politics. Paralysis is democracy’s fatal poison; a system that occasionally produces bad answers — innocent wrongheadedness — will survive, perhaps with diminished respect. A system that is stymied will not be defended. Sooner or later it comes to a sorry end. Which will ours be?
Deliberation pays one more dividend: it makes better citizens of the people who do the contesting. It also threatens the powerful. Socrates knew that. His dialogue worked so well that the Athenians it unsettled took his life. Galileo was dragged before the Inquisition by an offended Church for his contested dialogue on whether the earth or the sun sits at the center.
The Warning Against Demagogues and Tyrants
Hamilton warned that of the men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number began by paying court to the people — beginning as clever demagogues, and ending as corrupt tyrants. Sarcastically I ask, aren’t we lucky we are around watching it happen?
How Technology and the Decline of Institutions Changed Politics
The politics of yesterday — candidates and ideas — moved first through institutions, and the institutions filtered the politics. Labor unions. Political parties. Civic groups. Town halls. Religious associations. Familiar newspapers. Radio and television you felt you could trust.
Those mediating institutions absorbed shocks that might have broken us. The Great Depression. Two world wars. September 11th. Arguably Covid.
And we changed, too. First we read a lot. Then we heard more than we read. Then we watched more than we heard. Now there’s something else.
The Internet, Algorithms, and Political Division
The internet, the apps, the algorithms — recipes engineered to produce a result. And the recipes that captured your attention, like the old soap operas, were the ones that triggered your emotions. Empathy. Anger. Hatred.
So the information bombarding us stopped passing through familiar institutions. It was not neutral. It was designed to cause discontent, and tuned to arouse far more than anything before it. And attention is a commodity of enormous value, in both money and power.
It untethered our political culture. Faith in institutions drained away. What replaced it was simpler, more satisfying, and quite deliberate.
Find the dangerously wicked “other.” Label them. Blame them. Deport them.
That groundlessness may be why politics feels so far beyond our reach right now. A mudslide without any foothold.
Liberal Democracy Versus Authoritarianism
Whether authoritarianism’s rise caused those changes or followed from them is arguable. What is observable is a global contest between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. Red against blue here in America. Western Europe against Russia and China abroad.
Liberal democracy’s twofold advantage, again, is public purpose — and a deliberative way of getting there.
The Weaknesses of Democratic Governance
Its downside is that the same painstaking process invites exploitable discontent, piles up negatives, and settles into stalemate. No is always easier than yes. Too much risk. Too much uncertainty. Or: yes, we need it — but not in my backyard.
Authoritarianism’s visible advantage is swift, unquestioned decisiveness. Face it: Democracy divides — productively or not. Authoritarianism suppresses division. No complaints allowed. It substitutes the leader’s selfish desires of the moment, extra-legal as needed. Oligarchs do as they wish. Concentrated power governs. As it does now — shamefully — here at home. Today. Possibly tomorrow. Maybe forever.
Why Effective Governance Is Essential to Democracy
So, democracy is the apparent underdog. This underdog’s survival depends — absolutely — on productive lawmaking. Laws imagined, enacted, and enforced, that channel conflict and contain it. In short, a rule of law widely accepted — and powerful — why? Because a popular consensus stands behind it
To sustain a democracy, effective governance is not a preference. It is existential. We must curb our tendency to avoid deliberative controversy, conflict; and compromise. We must, as citizens, do our job — and insist our representatives do theirs.
For an excruciatingly painful example: our failure to make government work — visibly, satisfyingly — for an ambitious and demanding part of this country created a vacuum. Housing. Health care. The cost of college. Border bills that died. And that vacuum drew in a consummate demagogue, Donald J. Trump, and the swarm of self-seeking oligarchs around him
Can American Democracy Survive the Trump Era?
So. Does liberal democracy’s survival still depend on the classic American vision — a constitution that produces effective deliberative lawmaking, and lawmaking that in turn produces a respected rule of law? And if it does, how do we excise Trump and MAGA?
The First Obstacle: Denial of the Threat
The first obstacle to their good riddance is denial. Enough of our fellow citizens must recognize that our institutions could collapse before the midterms — or immediately after.
Even the most politically engaged people I know are applauding the polls while suppressing the thought that the polls may not matter at all if the elections are effectively negated.
We have a comfortable feeling that after the election, things will return to normal. Possibly. Hopefully. But which normal? The old one — or the new one?
The legal commentator Joyce Vance asks a question worth taking home. “What is happening in our country today that would have shocked you a few years ago — but that you now take for granted? Even treat as normal?”
The Second Obstacle: Mobilizing Resistance
The second obstacle is mobilizing resistance substantial enough to prevent a collapse. I do not mean placards, marches and letter-writing, useful and satisfying as those have been. I mean boycotts. Street blockades. Civil disobedience, with the real prospect of jail. Is it beyond imagination that our fate — though certainly not our choice — may be another bloody civil war?
Now notice something. Those options — last-ditch, every one of them — feel almost too dangerous to discuss openly. Even in this room. Among friends. Ask yourself why. Is that reluctance — discomfort — already a casualty of the First Amendment suppression we are living through?
Preparing for the Future of American Democracy
Suppose we are lucky, and get past Trump’s effort to sideline our democratic institutions. We will still have to repair the long-understood deficiencies underneath them. And we will still have to live with artificial intelligence —unbridled, courtesy of Trump — that defies any reliable judgment about whom, and what, to trust
What Could Happen Next?
A number of you have asked what happens between now and the election. Do you mean electorally? Or seismically?
Electorally, I join those who foresee an overwhelming blue wave. Seismically, let me be clear: I fully expect a further Trump effort at authoritarian takeover.
Will it be large and direct, like January 6th? A temporary dictatorship declared under a manufactured emergency? Military seizure of the ballot boxes to guard against alleged fraud? Elections monitored by his uniformed people? Refusal to seat winning legislators? Many roads lead to an authoritarian outcome.
No one knows. But we soon will.
This is a man who unleashed a violent mob on the Capitol after the election he lost. And then he set them free — even those convicted of seditious conspiracy. He’s armed with the Insurrection Act. He is dangerously unscrupulous. He recognizes no limits
And, I reluctantly remind you again, we empowered him anyway.
So batten down your hatches, and pray our ship of state is not the Titanic.
We were raised to believe the center always holds. I am no longer sure that it does.
Submitted by Barry Keene, former majority leader of the California State Senate