It CAN Happen Here, But We Can Reject Negation and Despair

Sorry, Sinclair Lewis, we failed to heed your warning: it can happen here, and it is happening here. The Trump administration is destroying democracy and civil society and erecting an authoritarian state faster and more aggressively than your worst 1930s nightmares.

Consider Trump’s targets: federal government agencies and civil servants, the armed forces and senior military officers, federal and state courts and judges, state and local governments and their officials, law firms and lawyers, universities and their students and professors, news organizations and journalists, libraries and their librarians and readers, liberal political organizations and activists, pro-immigrant churches and sanctuary seekers, other immigrants (both undocumented and documented), foreign tourists and scholars trying to visit the United States . . . Have I missed anyone? If so, be sure that the administration won’t miss them.

Many of Trump’s targets are defenseless in the face of his attacks. Notably, these attacks and the concentration of all governmental power in one man’s hands are partly lawful. Trump is stretching and sometimes breaking the law, but he could do much of what he is doing just by using his lawful powers to their maximum extent, and especially by wielding the government’s ability to give or withhold money. Big for-profit and not-for-profit entities depend heavily on federal contracts, grants, and tax breaks and are poorly positioned to resist federal pressure.

Consider the seemingly powerful institutions that have already capitulated to Trump: Congress (which has surrendered its power of the purse), the Paul Weiss law firm, Columbia University . . . And consider the silence of most other big law firms and universities that have failed to publicly defend Paul Weiss, Columbia, and other law firms and universities targeted by the administration.

Remarkably, the federal government’s assault on Columbia and the rest of the academy is not limited to the humanities and social sciences (other than economics) and climate science, which were obvious targets for Trump and Project 2025. No, the Trumpist assault seeks to destroy all American academic research, even in medicine and the natural sciences. Who cares about scientific research’s benefits for public health and the economy?

This destructive, vindictive Trumpism is not conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke, Dwight Eisenhower, or Ronald Reagan. Traditional conservatives seek to preserve existing institutions, unless there is a good reason for change, and they support moderate reform when there is a good reason for change. Trumpism instead seeks to destroy existing institutions and replace them with the rule of one man. This is nihilistic monarchism, not conservatism.

Who can save us? Judges and lawyers alone can’t save democracy and the rule of law, even if they try—and many of them might not even try. The only salvation for our constitutional system will be a broad movement of all segments of the population, like what happened in Israel in 2023, when a mass movement blocked an elected government’s attempt to destroy judicial independence.

But the threat to democracy here is even worse than it was in Israel. Here in America, the threat is not only political or legal—it is violent. Trump hasn’t officially organized any Brown Shirts, but he doesn’t have to. In today’s online world, Trump and his henchmen’s vehement denunciations of judges and other perceived foes are enough to provoke violent threats by passionate Trumpists who recognize no limits to their zealotry. These threats of violence come implicitly from the top. By pardoning the violent January 6, 2021 insurrectionists who invaded the U.S. Capitol and assaulted police officers there, Trump has shown that if he wants to use violence against his opponents, he will empower and protect his violent supporters by wielding his pardon power and the immunity from criminal charges that the Supreme Court has given him. Already, judges and members of Congress are terrified of Trump’s implicit threat of violence.

Who benefits from the destruction of liberal democracy? Not the poor, the working class, or the middle class. They will all suffer from the Trumpist evisceration of social programs, labor rights, and environmental protection. And while rich people and big companies like tax cuts and deregulation, they won’t much like crony capitalism and selective law enforcement, if they find their competitors in favor with the king and themselves out of favor.

There is a sad irony here. The “Make America Great Again” movement is making the United States resemble corrupt, authoritarian countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that U.S. super-patriots despise. (I won’t even mention Russia.)

Is there hope? Yes. On September 1, 1939, the day Hitler began World War Two by invading Poland, W. H. Auden sat writing in a “dive” on Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, a few blocks from where I am writing today. Auden found hope even on that terrible day:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.