It looks like we’re the rebels now

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How do we make sense of what, to a morally sane person caught up in a fascist movement, is incomprehensible? As my friend Ken said in a long phone call this morning (he lives in Scotland), “There is something fundamentally sick about America.”

I very much agree. And yet, as morally sane people who try to understand the world rather than fall for propaganda, we’ve got to figure out how to deal with this new situation in which we find ourselves.

Before our phone call, we each had made some notes on our first attempts to grapple with the reality of Trump regaining power through the democratic process. Trump didn’t steal this election. It appears that he even won the popular vote this time, as opposed to regaining power because of the anti-democratic quirks of the Electoral College.

Here are the six points with which I started our conversation:

1. Self care is extremely important right now. In the comments on Heather Cox Richardson’s post last night as votes were being counted, someone said that she couldn’t bear to face the morning and that she had decided to “check out.” It’s unlikely that she’s the only person feeling that level of despair.

2. Mutual support is extremely important right now. We must remind ourselves that we’re all in this together, and that we’re not a tiny minority. As the vote stands at the moment, 66,254,540 people voted against Trump. That’s no small number for organized resistance.

3. Our future is now highly unpredictable. We don’t yet know what Trump and the Republican Party will do with the enormous amount of power that they now have. We know what they have said they will do. The chaos variable is much higher now. Our urge for self-care may tempt us to tune out and give up. That’s just what they want.

4. Why did I not expect this? The explanation that is kindest to myself, and no doubt to millions of others, is that such a fundamental sickness on this scale is incomprehensible to those I don’t hesitate to call decent human beings, as opposed to those who just voted away their right to be called decent human beings.

5. Whom can we trust in a sea of propaganda? I already had written off cable as not to be trusted. I already was increasingly distrustful of the two organizations at the apex of our media — the New York Times and the Washington Post. It appears that the Washington Post, for example (or at least the Post’s billionaire owner), pre-capitulated to Trump by deciding not to endorse anyone. Trump hates “the liberal media.” The media are going to be under extreme pressure, and I don’t think they have the power or even the smarts to put up much resistance, even if their billionaire owners would allow it.

6. Whose are the voices that will help lead us out of this? I am thinking of Winston Churchill’s voice on the radio. For any kind of effective resistance, the 66,254,540 people who voted against Trump now need leadership, coordinated action, and — hope.

Here are some of Ken’s thoughts from our conversation this morning. For the record, he is Ken Ilgunas, author of three beautiful books and someone whose articles and commentaries have been published in many places including the New York Times. He has a Substack newsletter, and he recently started a podcast.

Ken’s thoughts

1. We are the rebels now. It is more fun to be part of the rebel alliance rather than the empire.

2. There is a possibility now for democratic reform. Maybe every democracy, like every alcoholic, needs a rock bottom.

3. I can’t comprehend my own country. I despair of the incomprehensibility. (We both used the word incomprehensible to describe our reactions to the news.)

4. There was no democratic process for the Harris/Walz ticket. Harris chose Walz, and Harris was merely the default replacement after Biden withdrew. Voters did not have the choices they would have had, if, say, Biden had decided much earlier not to run again and if there had been a fresh Democratic primary for choosing who would succeed Biden.

5. I am annoyed with progressive culture; for example, for its inability to have a real conversation about immigration.

6. This opens a new pathway to my Liberal Warrior book proposal.

Liberal Warrior

Ken has been shopping a book proposal with the title Liberal Warrior, a book that will criticize the progressive left for its cultural denigration of men (men, he believes, are not “hegemonic,” but have been “annoyed to the right.”) And it calls for liberals to re-embrace aspects of traditional masculinity (think U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and MLK Jr.). In other words: Democrats and progressives need male voters, values, and activists.

The F-word

Ken and I agree (as, I think, do historians of fascism) that Trump is a fascist and that he used fascist methods and fascist rhetoric to gain political power. But it also remains to be seen whether the United States will become a full-on fascist country under Trump. All we can do is pay close attention to what he does as opposed to what he threatens to do. If Trump actually does follow through on Project 2025, and with Elon Musk’s plutocratic agenda, and with the agendas of depraved MAGA heavyweights such as Stephen Miller, that surely would quality as fascism — making the Department of Justice and the FBI agents of Trump’s agenda, drastically cutting corporate taxes and cutting the federal budget by trillions of dollars, attacking social services such as Medicaid and probably attempting to privatize Social Security and Medicare, gutting if not outright eliminating the Education Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, deporting millions of people, using the law to diminish individual freedoms and impose so-called Christian values, using government power to excuse racism and sexism, and keeping the people enraged, drunk on propaganda, and at each other’s throats. Do the American people even understand what they just voted for?

Will the deplorables get the shaft?

Something like 45 million people now benefit from Obamacare and the expansion of Medicaid. Many millions of those people voted for Trump. If they lose those benefits, how will they react? If Trump does indeed impose huge tariffs on Chinese imports, how will Walmart and Amazon shoppers respond? If people see their Social Security and Medicare benefits reduced or threatened, how will they respond? In a full-on fascist scenario with meaningless elections in 2026 and 2028, how would the deplorables register their surprise at being conned and shafted?

Whom will they blame?

MAGA politics — fascist politics — requires scapegoats. With Trump and Republicans in control of all three branches of government, whom will they blame if things go badly wrong? What would be the consequences for whomever they blame? Not only would they use the law against their scapegoats, we have a country full of brownshirts eager for their orders.

The world

Is it over for Ukraine? Will the United States withdraw from NATO? After Ukraine, what would Putin do next? In the July 2024 issue of The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch wrote about how The World Is Realigning. This is extremely important and potentially extremely dangerous. Under Trump, it would appear that the United States has abandoned democracy, both at home and abroad.

What’s the worst case scenario?

This could all end in firing squads and political prisoners and the Putin-style looting of the American economy. Or it could be a harsh reminder of our democratic American values and a blood transfusion that flushes out the sickness infecting American society as a whole, the very same sickness that once led to an American civil war.

It all depends on what Trump and the Republican Party do with power. It also depends on what the rest of us do.