Michael Schaffer has a piece in Politico entitled, “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.” He collects indicators of low engagement, such as declining audiences for MSNBC and the number of people who are projected to attend a January protest march in DC: 50,000, instead of the 500,000 who showed up in January 2017.
I don’t think Schaffer is wrong about the present moment. In 2016, the election surprised many liberal, centrist, and principled conservative Americans and jolted them into action. This year, most anti-Trump voters dreaded the outcome and now feel resigned. The various contingent explanations for Trump’s 2016 election (Comey, Russian interference, an Electoral College fluke) can’t apply in 2024, so it’s common to blame the American people, the media landscape, or the American left–none of which appear alterable in the near future. Certain scenarios, such as Trump’s overriding the 22nd Amendment, are causing fearful paralysis and resignation.
But there is a tide in the affairs of men–as Brutus said, when he advocated a battle that proved disastrous for his own cause. The tide had turned against Brutus well before that moment (at Caesar’s funeral). As Shakespeare’s dramatic irony implies, momentum is easy to misread, especially when it seems to be with you. Today, Trump thinks everything is flowing his way, and that is when leaders make fatal errors.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump’s momentum carries him to early victories, such as ramming his whole cabinet through the Senate on 50-50 votes (with J.D. Vance as the tiebreaker). But I’m also confident that this lame-duck, second-term, cognitively impaired president who surrounds himself with sycophantic fools will lose momentum as his popularity tanks.
Although the threat of primaries will keep incumbent Republicans in line, they will face tough reelection races against Democrats and will scramble to contain the damage. The Democratic Party is only one element of the resistance–and electoral politics is only one avenue–but Democrats will gain momentum in inverse proportion to Republicans’ approval ratings. The military, the legal and medical professions, the intelligence agencies, and big companies that have liberal consumers all have considerable capacity.
Seasoned organizers (both leftists and those who are trans-partisan advocates of democracy) may be dispirited right now, but we will rally. New people will join as a result of Trump’s provocations or encouraged when he stumbles.
Leaders will emerge. Some may be contenders for 2026 statewide races or the 2028 presidential election, but some will be celebrities, clergy, or organizational leaders who attract broad support without seeking public office. While I certainly hope that no one dies as the direct result of conflict about Trump, tragedies can reverse public opinion. Political prosecutions will also create heroes.
Some us are in a position to act right now. We have the security, resources, and space to work in defense of democracy. We may feel tired and dispirited, but we are obligated to step up.
For now, I don’t think our message should be that everyone else must rush out and join us. Many people have good reasons to be afraid, or at least confused and demoralized. Now is not the time to mobilize but to work quietly to build the skills, networks, and organizational muscle for popular resistance in 2025 or 2026. Short-term indicators of passivity are largely irrelevant. Our job is to prepare for a riper moment.
(I’ll be posting regularly about concrete actions and strategies.)
In July, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” His statement reflected some bluster and hype, and Trump distanced himself from Heritage. Nevertheless, Roberts expressed a mood that will be shared by many–perhaps more than 1,000–new White House staff, senior federal appointees, allied members of Congress and staff, and ideological lobbyists. They will all be thinking hard about what to do to advance their “revolution.”
To plan a response, we should imagine what such people will do. Here is a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) assessment of the situation from the perspective of the second Trump Administration:
Strengths: Ability to make appointments, issue executive orders, negotiate with foreign governments, and command attention. Immunity from prosecution for all official acts and the power to pardon people who follow illegal orders. A compliant congressional GOP, a friendly Supreme Court, and some fawning media platforms. A claimed mandate from the election, and tens of millions of actual supporters.
Weaknesses: At this moment, the House remains in play. Democratic control would mean no laws or budgets without Democratic support. Even if Democrats lose the House, they will be able to filibuster legislation in the Senate. The economy looks healthy right now, but Trump’s tariffs and other economic proposals would cause inflation and/or contraction. MAGA true-believers will be tempted to introduce bills that are clearly unpopular.
Opportunities: Picking fights to establish dominance, discourage opposition, motivate supporters, and dare opponents to promote positions that many voters consider radical. If the opposition looks radical, many voters will perceive that politics is polarized, not that the president is extreme, and they may accept authoritarianism to “restore order.”
Threats: Trump voters include substantial subgroups who don’t really share his ideology but who believe that he is competent to deliver prosperity and order. (According to the exit polls, 31% of voters chose the economy as their top issue, and of those, 78% voted for Trump.) If he causes chaos and controversy, and many voters abandon him, he will become toxic for GOP candidates looking toward 2026. If a small group of GOP defectors in Congress join the Democrats, they can block Trump. If he loses the appearance of influence and momentum, he could quickly become a lame-duck (especially if he continues to display cognitive decline). If momentum swings strongly to the opposition, there will be opportunities to make the Supreme Court and other institutions more democratic, rather than less so.
Next, we might brainstorm specific moves that Trump may make in the early stages of his administration and think about counter-moves.
Their most pragmatic option would be to avoid prominent controversies while turning the quieter processes of the executive branch against immigrants and environmental programs. If Trump took that path, he might be able to avoid an energetic resistance and claim credit for the positive economy that he will inherit. He could play golf and retire in four years. But he and his people will be tempted to take riskier actions:
Appoint numerous radical supporters to senior positions. Perhaps give them all “acting” titles and not even request Senate confirmation, thus defeating the norm that political appointees require approval. They will cancel grants and contracts, slow-walk appropriations, fire civil servants, and direct funds to friendly groups and legislative districts. Much of this activity will be unreported, since the executive branch gets little coverage.
Negotiate privately with Putin, without a readout or meaningful public declaration. Offer Russia free scope in Ukraine and promise to block or sabotage US aid. Likewise, communicate privately with Netanyahu and encourage Israel to operate without limits in both the West Bank and Gaza.
Pardon all the January 6th insurrectionists. Convene them on the White House lawn. Possibly deputize them as federal agents or at least encourage them to organize as a private militia. If any of them commit violent crimes against protesters, journalists, or residents, immediately pardon them again. Deploy them to break up marches and demonstrations and to patrol the capital.
Order federal law enforcement and perhaps state national guards to detain immigrants in large numbers, hold them, and physically move them across the southern border.
Some counter-moves:
Large, regular, orderly marches that, as Bayard Rustin would recommend, are aimed at winning mass public support. At first, the main message should not be that Trump is illegitimate, since he won the election. Nor is this an opportunity to advance progressive policies, including those that I passionately support. Rather, the message should be opposition to specific things that Trump does that are both unpopular and illegal. The aim is to establish a legitimate counter-force in support of the Constitution and the rule-of-law. The priority is to preserve a system within which progressives (and others) are able to advocate their goals, not to accomplish those goals immediately. The larger and more diverse the protests, the better.
A mass walkout like the one that defeated the Kapp Putsch in Berlin in 1920 and preserved German democracy for more than a decade. That story makes important reading right now. I could envision Trump provoking a self-coup, much like the Kapp Putsch, even if he doesn’t really plan to do so. This could begin to happen if armed MAGA supporters exercise violent control in DC, perhaps in reaction to peaceful marches. However, a similar attempt failed in 1920 when Berliners refused to work in the face of a coup, the city shut down, and civilian resistance spread to regular military units. The Berlin work-stoppage did not begin with a formal strike but happened organically when frightened Berliners just stayed home.
Building organizations that allow many Americans to take concrete steps to protect democracy in a coordinated fashion.
Finally, some points about the movements that should form:
There should be no expectation that the opposition will coalesce into one big organization. For one thing, the Democratic Party will constitute part of the opposition, but not everyone will want to–or be able to–coordinate with any party. Besides, diversity and choice are valuable. We should expect opponents of Trump to hold diverse beliefs, from radical leftist ideals to genuinely conservative or libertarian values. It is important for people to be able to find groups in which they can feel reasonably comfortable.
On the other hand, the opposition will be weak if it consists of lots of evanescent, hyper-local, voluntary groups that have loose and shifting memberships. Such groups simply cannot accomplish much. In turn, a grassroots opposition will quickly lose momentum and confidence unless it enlists many Americans in tangible work that accomplishes victories.
The middle ground between one big organization and lots of ad hoc meetings is a widespread commitment to organize at medium scales. People need templates for forming small organizations that function and survive, including processes for selecting accountable leaders, making concrete decisions, and recruiting new members. Leaders of small groups should then seek each other out and form coalitions that, in turn, make decisions and elect accountable leaders for larger scales.
A healthy, broad-based nonviolent resistance movement will have leaders, but not just one or a few. It will be “leaderful,” and its best-known representatives will demonstrate some diversity.
I am in the camp that says that Kamala Harris ran a nearly flawless campaign, and she will make a plausible case to be renominated in 2028. But she cannot be the leader of a whole broad-based movement, if only because she is a potential presidential candidate. I would not be surprised to see a range of people from various sectors and walks of life gain prominence as part of a civil resistance. There is no need for them to agree in detail, but we will benefit if they communicate and come together at key moments.
As I have argued, successful movements need scale (lots of people), unity (the ability to coalesce), depth (some activists who develop impressive skills and networks), and pluralism (disagreement and dissent about many issues).
SPUD is hard to attain because combining unity with pluralism requires tolerance and patience within the movement; and combining scale with depth means finding ways for committed activists and peripheral supporters to collaborate. Nevertheless, good movements build SPUD.
One pitfall to avoid right now is debating whether Kamala Harris lost because she didn’t stand for what you believe–whatever that may be. Maybe you’re right (although it is always hard to prove such counterfactuals). If you’re planning a partisan political campaign for 2026 and 2028, you should think about why Trump won this time. But retrospective arguments will not help to build a citizens’ pro-democracy movement that includes people who both agreed and disagreed with Harris on key points.
To put it more bluntly: it’s alienating to be told that Trump won because Harris took a stance that one agrees with, and why alienate people whom we need? This was an election season of shifting “vibes,” and now we need the vibe to shift to unified resistance.
When brainstorming concrete actions for people to take, one option that is always worth considering is to send everyone out to conduct one-to-one meetings. In the tradition of relational organizing, these are not mainly about persuading individuals to endorse, support, or join the group. They are about genuine listening: learning what a range of people believe, experience, and care about. That said, whenever anyone demonstrates enthusiasm for the organization’s current vision, that person should be recruited to join.
I posted the graphic that accompanies this post immediately after the 2016 election, and it went a bit viral. (Thanks to my colleague Alberto Medina for improving its appearance.) Although the name “Obama” should be changed to “Biden,” and some other minor tweaks might apply, I think the diagram remains pertinent and is perhaps even more urgent today.
In Forbes yesterday, Meg Little Reilly paraphrases and quotes me:
American students are generally taught that the U.S. Constitution is unbreakable — which has been true, thus far—but this narrative reinforces the notion that if the Constitution were to fall, so too would the nation. For many Americans, everything that comes after political unrest is a “blank page,” according to [Peter] Levine. It’s a paradoxically fragile characterization of a country.
But this isn’t how civilizations or humans respond to political chaos. In reality, an existential challenge to the U.S. Constitution would trigger the next chapter, not the end. Preparing students with this more comprehensive understanding of human history could be constructive in November and long into the future.
Reilly also quotes my friend Emma Humphries from iCivics, who says, “Teachers are going to be a safe and steady presence for their students” in the aftermath of next week’s election, regardless of who wins and whether the outcome is resolved immediately.
I’d elaborate my comment as follows: Love it or hate it, the US Constitution is the oldest in the world. It suffered a catastrophic crisis in 1860, but the people who sought to preserve it won the ensuing Civil War. Although explicit amendments and subtler reinterpretations have changed the Constitution significantly, its stability has been evident. As a result, Americans are taught to assume that the document will always govern us–for the rest of our lives. We learn to equate the Constitution with the nation, as if it had constituted us as a people. Given this civic religion, a constitutional rupture sounds like the end of our history.
The prospect of a possible second Trump administration (which is, of course, very far from guaranteed) is causing people to mutter phrases like “Game over,” as if there would be no future for the republic if Trump wins and overrides constitutional limits.
I do fear a constitutional rupture or a period of deep constitutional instability, especially if the cause is an authoritarian presidency (no matter how competent). We could be much worse off than we are now, and the rest of the world is at risk as well. I do not want our system to break down.
However, it is an idiosyncratic US trait to view the Constitution as both fixed and fragile and to equate that document with the people and the nation. France has had five republics, two monarchies, two empires, a nascent commune, and a Quisling dictatorship during the period that our Constitution has stood.
French history is not enviable. More people were executed during the suppression of the Commune in 1871 than during the Terror of 1793-4, to name just two cruel episodes. Yet the French nation and people have demonstrated deep continuities, even when their formal system has changed.
Between the Second and Third Republics, Napoleon III ruled as a quasi-dictator. This was a betrayal of democratic rights and values, yet the republic in a deeper sense persisted. French history continued, and the French continued to influence their own state–as well, tragically, as the subjected peoples of their colonies. When Napoleon III won his rigged 1851 referendum, I doubt that many French people thought that the game was over. In fact, there were three more republics to come. And their history is far more typical than ours.
We Americans must be ready in case we have to use vocabulary and concepts that are familiar around the world: coups and auto-coups, oligarchs and juntas, Bonapartism, unrest and disorder, state media and oppositional media, states of emergency, security forces (and security-force defections), popular fronts, civil service strikes, general strikes, electoral boycotts, mass civil resistance, and constitutional restorations and re-foundings.
I devoutly that hope we experience none of these things, but if we do, it will be up to us to determine how they turn out. In that sense, the republic will still be ours, whether we can keep it consistently or not.
Last Thursday to Saturday was the Frontiers of Democracy conference, the thirteenth of these annual gatherings at Tisch College. Our theme was nonviolence, because I believe that we are entering a new phase of political violence, with a real possibility that the presidency will be an instigator in 2025. I argue that we must develop skills, strategies, coalitions, organizations, and plans for large-scale, broad-based nonviolent resistance.
Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., had died the previous week at age 95. I’ll re-share a video of an interview that I was privileged to conduct with him and Ken Wong in 2022. His name will be a blessing.
This interview reinforces some points that I would emphasize today.
Nonviolence is not the absence of violence–not a decision to refrain from using violent methods. It is a powerful alternative, with a record of success. One of our panelists at Frontiers was Maria Stephan, who has worked with Erica Chenoweth to show that nonviolent civil resistance movements often win.
Protest is not the essence of nonviolent resistance. Protest actions can be helpful for announcing the presence of an organized movement, but most of a movement’s impact comes from boycotts, strikes, get-out-the-vote, popular education, work inside institutions, and so on. In the interview, Rev. Lawson says, “The march may the weakest tactic, not the strongest.”
Americans have by no means forgotten nonviolent strategies. It is interesting that neither proponents nor critics of Black Lives Matter are prone to label it a nonviolent movement, but it has been that. I don’t only mean that the vast majority of BLM actions have been nonviolent but also that BLM leaders have trained and planned for nonviolence. In fact, BLM has been the largest nonviolent movement in US history and has been associated with a lower amount of collateral violence than the classic Civil Rights Movement. (Then again, it is impossible to prevent all violence, which is an unreasonable expectation.) BLM is just one of several recent or current nonviolent movements.
I would add some points that may not be as explicit in that interview.
First, nonviolence is the only way that most people are willing to engage, particularly in a society that offers some civil and political rights and where political violence is below epidemic levels. The only way to build really broad-based movements (at least outside of dictatorships and civil wars) is to be nonviolent.
Second, at large scales, nonviolence requires organization. One thing we learned from the #Resistance in 2016 is that Americans have good skills for expressing their views and finding allies, but underdeveloped skills for building large and accountable organizations and coalitions.
Particularly if Donald Trump wins in November, the opposition will have no obvious leader. There is a lot of talent in the Democratic Party, but it will not be clear who carries the party’s mantle. Besides, many active opponents of the Trump Administration will not be committed Democrats. Much of the opposition will arise in civil society, in faith communities, perhaps in labor, in media and culture, on the far left, among some conservatives, and perhaps among some businesses. Only some opponents will appreciate the Democratic Party or want to use strategies that involve legislation and elections. Leaders will arise in various sectors and constituencies, and they may or may not cohere.
The role of apex leaders is easily exaggerated. Usually, they are symbols rather than actual causes of change (or of stability). Still, people like you and me will have to decide what to do in the absence of a widely recognized leader, unless one surprises us by emerging quickly. That situation creates specific kinds of challenges for coordinating large-scale action. Who will invite representatives of the aligned small organizations in a given state to a statewide convention? How will that convention make decisions? If there is a big march in Washington, who will determine the speaker list? How can you influence those decision-makers?
If Trump wins, I forecast bitter recriminations and divisions among people who are against him. Regular Democrats will be furious that radicals and others voted for third-party candidates, stayed home or (at best) failed to make the case for the Democratic ticket. Many others will be equally angry at the Democratic Party, for a variety of reasons.
Debate and ideological diversity are good. But intense intramural hostility could be problematic, especially if it soaks up energy or encourages factions to compete for attention by doing things that also alienate key constituencies.
I just finished reading Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (recommended) and David Cannadine’s Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 (medium-good). Gross generalizations from any chapters of history are risky, but I would venture these claims:
Large public majorities have a decent chance of getting their way, even when the political system is highly unequal.
Elite minorities have a good chance of dominating, if they control the levers of power.
Activated minorities that lack power may attract attention and leave their mark on history, but they will fail unless they grow into majorities.
If Trump wins, he will represent a minority with his hands of the levers of power. Such a faction can be defeated by a broad majority (particularly since this leader is undisciplined, lazy, and chaotic). But to build a majority requires a specific set of skills and values, including a genuine desire to listen across differences, a willingness to choose winnable battles, and a nuts-and-bolts understanding of nonviolent organizing.
We believe there are potential threats to U.S. democracy posed by the choices voters make in this election. But the benefits of American democracy have for centuries been unequally available, and any discussion of the current threats needs to happen against that background. …
For us, Biden’s talk of democracy is a useful starting point for a broader conversation about U.S. democracy and the 2024 election. …
I make no predictions about the 2024 election. It is still far away, and all kinds of dramatic shifts could occur between now and then. But there is a clear chance that Donald Trump will win. One of several paths to that outcome leads through a recession during the next six months.
I am also reluctant to predict what Trump will do if elected; I suspect he doesn’t know himself. But we should take seriously the possibility that he would do what he has been talking about lately, including directly ordering the prosecution of political opponents, invoking the Insurrection Act, building mass camps for immigrants, purging the civil service, and even attacking Mexico.
I disagree with Hillary Clinton that these events “would be the end of our country as we know it.” On the contrary, they would mark the beginning of a new phase with highly uncertain outcomes. Much would depend on how opponents respond. Now is the time to prepare for this contingency.
Trump would have significant support, including a popular base. Certain organizations and institutions would take his side, perhaps including at least one house of Congress.
But he would also face mass resistance from segments of the population and from important organizations and institutions–notably, from some state and local governments. He would quickly encounter roadblocks, which would frustrate him and his supporters. Some of his efforts might go forward, at least temporarily, which would enrage his opponents.
The result would be intense conflict, not only in Congress and courts but also potentially on the streets. I don’t think a literal civil war is likely, if only because the US military and security services would refuse to be drawn in, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to create an army from scratch. But it is common around the world to see periods of political conflict, typically labeled “unrest,” “instability,” or “disorder.” We might expect:
constant debates about whether various institutions should make statements about recent incidents, with repercussions for members of these institutions who disagree;
frequent crises that are permitted by existing laws, such as government shutdowns and even a debt default;
politically motivated pardons, amnesties, and blocked prosecutions;
prominent dismissals and resignations;
bans and purges of ideological minorities within institutions such as universities, corporations, and publications;
overt refusals to follow constitutionally permissible directives (e.g., state governors might resist federal mandates);
temporary closures of schools and colleges that are political hotbeds;
attempts to declare martial law and states of emergency at various levels;
arrests of questionable legality;
illegal orders that are either accepted or refused;
Increasingly flagrant displays of weapons;
paramilitary and revolutionary organizations, with training programs, uniforms, insignias and the like;
large and frequent protests, some of which may involve clashes with counter-protesters or the police;
frequent threats of violence;
politically motivated assaults and homicides of various kinds (not only assassinations, but also quasi-accidental deaths).
I’d expect similarities to periods like the Years of Lead in Italy or The Troubles in Northern Ireland–among many other examples. In fact, we may already have entered a period like that.
I would anticipate passionate and fraught disagreements within the potential resistance to Trump. For example:
Should the objective be to restore and protect the constitutional system as it has been, or was that system already flawed (and responsible for the present crisis) so that it needs to be changed? If it requires change, how basic and radical must that be?
Is the Democratic Party a worthy vehicle of resistance, or even the main opposition, or is it part of the problem? This debate will be especially fraught if it looks as if Biden would have won without third party presidential candidates in 2024.
How broad should the coalition be? It’s easy to say “As broad as possible,” but the hard questions arise when activists must consider whether to defer causes that they consider important in order to collaborate with people who are ideologically dissimilar. For instance, imagine that it is possible to draw businesses into a pro-democracy movement, but at the cost of delaying strong action on climate. Many people would balk at that tradeoff. But what if strong federal environmental action seems impossible, anyway? Would it then be worth submerging environmental goals to expand the pro-democracy movement?
What means are appropriate–or necessary–to combat authoritarian tendencies and street-level violence?
I think the response should be massively nonviolent, and we should eschew concrete, physical violence even in the face of institutionalized injustice. Nonviolent direct action is a powerful strategy with a strong record of success. It is particularly likely to draw broad participation and to yield a stable democracy as its outcome.*
There may be times when violence is appropriate: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt all commanded armies that fought for freedom. And sometimes it is a mistake to criticize acts of violence even if you wouldn’t endorse them. In response to the Detroit riots of 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walked a careful line. He said that crimes committed during the riots were “deplorable” but also “derivative.” He explained, “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.” Nevertheless, King continued to defend nonviolence because he believed that it was the most powerful option, with the greatest chance of creating a better society. That argument will be even stronger under conditions of social unrest and escalating, tit-for-tat violence. Apart from anything else, as Bayard Rustin argued, political success requires the support of a substantial majority, and violence alienates people.
Nonviolence takes skill, discipline, and values, all of which that can be taught and practiced in advance of a crisis. Now is the time for practice and training.
I am discussing a threat that comes from the extreme right. This threat is not symmetrical. However, intimidation and violence may be reciprocated, and ugly behavior may spread across the spectrum; this common pattern must be resisted.
It will be crucial to promote dialogue and listening. People will need ways to exit extremist movements and be reintegrated. And we need to hear about legitimate grievances from all quarters so that they can be addressed.
Anyone who is knowingly involved in violating civil rights should ultimately be held accountable. But tens of millions of people will vote for each major party’s nominee in the 2024 election, and voters on both sides are members of our national community. As the risk of violent conflict rises, so does the need for empathy and curiosity across partisan differences.
If—very hypothetically—Donald J. Trump were to be convicted and even incarcerated, but also elected president in 2024, could he pardon himself? Since a president’s pardoning power is unlimited, the constitutional question might turn on whether the act of pardoning can be reflexive. Is it a correct use of the word “pardon” to say that someone pardoned himself?
The caption with above photo reads: “The only Man on Record who is known to have Pardoned himself out of Prison. He began life as a School Teacher, Clerk in a Law Office, full fledged Lawyer and Treasurer of a Political organization in New England, with whose funds he decamped. He has been in Prison a dozen times under as many aliases, where he has spent twenty-five years. When he pardoned himself out of prison he was in Nashville, Tenn. under the name of Henry B. Davis. He is now supposed to be dead.”
Leaving aside the Trumpian capitalization in this passage, the man who called himself Henry B. Davis did not actually pardon himself. He confessed that he “forged a petition bearing upward of 150 signatures, writing differing in each, the names of the leading citizens of Tipton, Tenn., the county in which I was sentenced. I then forged a letter bearing the signature of the firm of attorneys that defended me, one of whom was a friend of the Governor … I then forged another letter purporting to have been written by the aforesaid attorney to John Tipton, representative in the Legislature in Nashville, in which he was asked to see Governor Buchanan, and to urge him to pardon Henry B. Davis (my alias). All this was done in March, 1891. On the third day of April, 1891, the pardon reached the warden at Tracy City.”
In any case, this was not the only person to have pardoned himself. A Google search led me to a book by my friend Cynthia Levinson and Sanford Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution, which mentions the case of Isaac Stephens. While governor of the Territory of Washington, Stephens was convicted and fined for abusing his power. He was fighting a terrible war against Native people but was fined for offenses against white settlers. He actually pardoned himself and got away with it, although just six years later he died heroically on the Union side of the Civil War.
Neither example is very honorable, and I haven’t been able to find other cases of successful self-pardoning … so far.
Sources: John Josiah Munro, The New York Tombs, Inside and Out!: Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present.–A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America’s Most Famous Prison (1909) and Cynthia Levinson and Sanford Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today.
The image that accompanies this post is my graph of US counties.* The y-axis is Trump’s share of the vote in 2016. The x-axis is the percentage of each county’s population that consisted of veterans under the age of 45 in 2020. I chose that statistic as a rough proxy for direct involvement with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The correlation is modestly positive and statistically significant.
When I ran a regression to predict Trump’s 2016 vote in each county based on 1) the proportion of young veterans, 2) the degree to which the county is rural, 3) the proportion of the county that is non-Hispanic white, and 4) the proportion of the population that was born overseas, all of those variables except the last one were statistically significant and positive. That means that, after controlling for race and community type, the proportion of young veterans still predicts the Trump vote.
This is merely a cross-sectional relationship, and it would be worth introducing a temporal dimension by investigating whether and how votes changed as the post-9/11 wars unfolded.
The pattern that I show here is compatible with several hypotheses. For example, maybe some communities’ cultures and demographics inclined them both to military service and to supporting Trump, or maybe deep disillusionment with the wars turned some people toward Trump in 2016 because he purported that he had opposed US involvement.
I will not claim that the basic relationship shown here is very strong, and I share it mainly for full disclosure rather than to support an argumentative position. (I wouldn’t try to use the regression as the basis of a professional article.) Yet I continue to suspect that blowback from two protracted military disasters is one cause of our current political discontents.
Americans’ assessments of these wars are filtered through ideology and probably fall into at least three categories:
The invasion of Iraq was imperialistic and intended to favor multinational corporations; thus it was unjust from the start.
The invasions were altruistic, aimed at exporting human rights and democracy; and as such, they wasted US lives and resources. OR
The defeats represent corruption or decadence that must be addressed by making the USA “stronger.”
Any of those views is compatible with deep distrust of US elites, and perhaps above all of Democratic Party leaders who supported the wars. Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans benefit from both 2 and 3.
YouGov reports: “One in five voters – including 45% of Republicans – approve of the storming of the Capitol building.” This is important and bad news. I do not want to minimize it, but I would put it in context.
A bit under half of Republicans support the riot in DC. Republicans represent about 29% of registered voters. Registered voters represent about two-thirds of adults. Adults represent about three-quarters of Americans. By the time you isolate Republican registered voters who support the riot, it’s down to about 6.6% of the population.
To be sure, some of the people in the other pie slices are also part of the problem. For instance, within the “other” slice are 2% of the registered Democrats and 21% of the registered Independents who support the riot. (A total of 10.1% of all Americans support the storming.) Most of that slice consists of people who don’t have an opinion, which is a problem in itself. And among the under-18s and the non-registered people, some probably hold views aligned with Trump.
Still, it is worth putting the hard-core problem in some degree of perspective. My guess is that the images from yesterday will basically become the capsule summary of the Trump years, except for a smallish and dwindling proportion of Americans.
(Survey data from YouGov. Registration percentages from Pew, 2018. Age distribution from Census, 2010.)
[It] seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1
The answer may be “accident and force.” This graph, derived from Christopher Achen, shows an almost perfect correlation between presidential election results and economic growth during two quarters before the election, adjusted for how many years the incumbent party has held office. It implies that who wins the White House in November will depend almost entirely on what the COVID-19 virus does to GDP during this quarter and next. If the US economy manages 1.5% positive growth despite COVID-19, Trump should win. If it declines, he will probably be done, regardless of the Democratic nominee.
One should always be careful about correlation graphs with relatively small numbers of data points and carefully contrived axes. You can fish for combinations of variables that generate uncannily neat pictures. However, this graph shows the result that you would predict if you hold a theory of electoral politics that goes back at least to Joseph Schumpeter in 1942:
People have better things to do than follow politics closely, let alone form and test careful hypotheses about the impact of political positions on outcomes (holding other factors constant). Voters are not going to be rigorous social scientists.
Instead, voters will assess the most prominent political leaders of the moment by evaluating their own circumstances. They won’t only think about economics, and certainly not only about the nation’s GDP. However, GDP growth is a decent proxy for how well a whole population is faring in their everyday lives compared to last year.
People will judge politicians using other heuristics, such as partisanship, demographics, and ideological labels. These factors also determine what we hear or read about the world beyond our doors. (Watching the Fox News homepage during the COVID-19 crisis, as I have done, is an object lesson in ideological framing.) However, in a system like ours, two closely equal voting blocs with their own media networks will emerge as an equilibrium. Who actually wins any given election depends on the main variable that changes from month to month: GDP growth.
This is bad news for any theory of democracy that envisions millions of people deliberating about ideas and making choices. With Schumpeter, we might at least hope that a national election functions as a test of performance, rotating failures out of office. We would expect Trump to lose in November because things will go badly between now and then, and that will serve as a vivid test of his fitness for office, his allies in the media and Congress, and his ideology (nationalism), which has guided his response to the epidemic. The voters would demonstrate collective rationality by throwing him out.
The problem with that theory is the massive element of randomness. The signal can easily be lost in noise. If COVID-19 hadn’t hit now, Trump wouldn’t be seriously tested. If Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were president now, the government’s public health policy would be better than Trump’s, but we would still face a global pandemic and probable recession. Then the signal would convey that neoliberalism or democratic socialism–not nationalism–was the failed ideology.
To make matters worse, politicians are systematically rewarded for the wrong things. Andrew Healy and Neil Malhorta show that spending (or not spending) money on prevention has no effect on electoral outcomes. However, relief spending is a big boost to an incumbent. This means that Trump may benefit from COVID-19 if things play out fortuitously for him. If we are in recovery by November and Trump is handing out stimulus relief, the crisis may carry him to reelection. In that case, not only would the public receive a false signal about his competence and ideology, but his policy of doing nothing to prevent a crisis would have been rewarded.
Should we therefore give up on democracy? I definitely think not, for these reasons (and I leave aside the tired argument that it is better than the alternatives):
First, all the models discussed above are based on political leaders who are plausibly competent and whose stances and worldviews put them in sync with close to 50% of voters. Trump has always risked not quite meeting those criteria. Up to now, his approval ratings have been well below what you would expect for an incumbent presiding over historically low unemployment. If he were to lose because his statements and policy choices have alienated a significant minority of voters who would have voted for him otherwise, then we’ll learn that national elections at least serve to weed out true losers. Four years too late, but better now than never.
Second, it matters which groups coalesce into the two large blocs of active voters. Those groups are better served when their side wins. Therefore, it matters which citizens we engage and motivate to vote.
Third, a national election, although important, is an outlier among all forms of politics. It is episodic and short-term. Millions of people participate, each having a microscopic impact. It is entirely mediated, since only a tiny proportion of us actually know the candidates. Given our electoral system, it is filtered through a party duopoly.
Local politics can be much better. So can national politics, over a longer time-span. Consider the improvement in mainstream attitudes toward sexual minorities in the US, which affects the stances of presidential candidates as well as many other aspects of our society. That, too, is politics: the result of advocacy, organizing, discussion, and learning. Our expectations for self-governance should be much higher than our expectations for presidential elections, where we must hope that Alexander Hamilton’s “accident” is benign.
