This blog has been offline for a while, mostly due to technical issues that I think have now been fixed. (Much thanks to Pea Lutz, whose work on the blog has been excellent; if you’re looking for someone to do such work, I highly recommend Pea.) My apologies for the extended silence.

I had been posting a lot on Facebook, so much of my commentary on politics and other matters is there. But I’m going to try to return to being more active here.

One fascinating phenomenon that I’ve been noticing in the last couple of weeks is how, despite Trump’s winning the election, a fair amount of both reporting and commentary in the media, including on the left, has not only fallen silent on the question of his authoritarianism and/or fascism but, more important and more interesting to me, has simply proceeded as if democracy is going to continue as it has in the past.

I want to be careful to stipulate what I am and am not saying here. I’m not making any claim about the actual status and future of democracy in America; I’m talking only about the media discourse about the status and future of democracy in America. And while there are, of course, voices in the media still reporting on or warning about Trump’s various threats to democracy, I’m more interested in how representative articles—whether we’re talking about reporting, analysis, or commentary—seem to posit or assume the opposite.

Often it’s the silence of these assumptions that is most revealing.

Take this article, in the Washington Post, about the Democrats’ plans for the next midterm election, in 2026. Authored by longtime national political correspondent Michael Scherer, the article reports that the Democrats are actively recruiting candidates to contest Republican victories not just in blue states like California but in some of the most charged swing states like Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of which went for Trump.

There’s no sense or mention that Trump or the Republicans are going to use their control of the national political apparatus or intimidation of the media or the courts to shut down or compromise elections in any way. Nor is it a foregone conclusion, according to this article (and other articles), that the Republicans will hold on to their majority in the House. (According to an article in the Times, the Republicans certainly don’t think that they will.) Instead, Scherer offers a straight report on the Democrats’ plan to win back the House using all the traditional tactics and strategies that political parties in a democracy have always used. (And, indeed, according to another article in the Times, up-and-coming Democrats are tripping all over themselves in the contest to lead the party, so eager are they to take on Trump and the Republicans—not usually the response of leaders of a party under siege from a tyrant or autocrat.) As far as I can tell, no one commenting on the article has blinked an eye about this rather remarkable assumption—rather remarkable given all the commentary, prior to now, on what Trump means for democracy.

Axios has a similar take on the Democrats’ plans, and they cite percentage points and all sorts of other numbers to prove it.

But it’s the Washington Post and the Times, you’ll say; it’s the naive or craven mainstream media. You have to read the progressive press to get the truth. Okay, let’s turn to The Nation. Few outlets have issued as many warnings about Trump’s three seconds to the authoritarian midnight. But notice how voices in the magazine—and not the squishes—have been discussing the Democrats’ prospects, post-November.

Writing under the headline “Democrats Are Overdue for New Leadership,” Chris Lehmann, the Nation’s DC Bureau Chief, voices cautious optimism about the movement of younger Democrats in the House to contest the grip of older Democrats. Lehmann sees the efforts of representatives like AOC and Jamie Raskin to take over the ranking leadership positions on various congressional committees as “a salutary recognition of the need to reinvent the party in basic ways.” Both representatives, he writes, are “effective and innovative prophets of party renewal.” He quotes a political scientist that the Democrats have “got the ability, if they act as a team, to make things very hard for Donald Trump and his agenda.” Lehmann concludes on this note:

Of course, new message-savvy leaders in Congress won’t instantly resolve the Democrats’ longer-term electoral woes any more than the party’s self-congratulatory consulting class will. But a more nimble and aggressive body of House leaders can at least bring greater focus on a cohesive agenda for the incoming Congress ahead of the 2026 midterms—and a robust Democratic majority in the 119th Congress is an indispensable first step on the path to renewed political relevance. We can only hope that the broader movement-friendly logic behind this early committee maneuvering will extend to next month’s vote on a new chair for the Democratic National Committee—another key pressure point in the Democrats’ effort to rebuild the party from the ground up.

Note the requisite cautionary note from Lehmann, but also note that there’s not a note, in that note, of foreboding about the closure of democratic possibilities. Whatever authoritarian crosswinds or repressive obstacles the Democrats may come up against in their effort to reinvent themselves go unmentioned. The possibility of Democratic renewal in the coming months, on the path to Democratic victory in 2026, on the path to relevance in the years beyond, is a genuine one.

Jeet Heer, another Nation writer, sounds a similar note in his article, which is supposed to be talking about Trump’s authoritarianism. Much of what Heer says about the right is familiar stuff, laced with references to the alleged novelty of “anti-system politics” controlling the GOP from the very center and top of the party rather than influencing it from the margins and beyond.

It’s Heer’s conclusion that caught my attention:

As Trump returns to power, we can no longer afford the illusions of Joe Biden, who pursued a politics of ancien régime restoration that was doomed to fail. As a lifelong centrist, Biden could never come to terms with the genuine power of right-wing anti-system politics. He thought it was fringe and anti-American, though it has been a deep-running tendency festering throughout modern American history. To fight right-wing anti-system politics, centrist illusions about the essential innocence of American history will have to be abandoned.

…

The overwhelming majority of Americans, hovering between 65 and 70 percent in polls, are unhappy with the direction the country is going in. Given this reality, the only path Democrats had toward victory was to adopt left-wing anti-system politics. Unfortunately, Democrats followed Biden’s preference and cast themselves as a pro-system party. This strategy failed—spectacularly. In the wake of that failure, we now have to turn to the political traditions on the left that never had any illusions about right-wing anti-system politics—or about American innocence.

Heer doesn’t specify what any of this means, concretely, as a strategy for the Democrats or the left. That ambiguity has been a hallmark of much of the fascism and authoritarianism discourse on the media and social media left since 2016. Where centrist and mainstream liberals who spoke of the fascism threat were more than willing to state plainly what countering that threat would mean—namely, alliances with Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney—and Antifa was willing to act plainly on what they meant, progressive voices in the media have never been all that clear about what calling a Trump a fascist actually means for a different politics on the left, aside from supporting more progressive voices in the Democratic Party. Which is what progressives have been saying since I began attention to this stuff in the 1980s.

But, again, that’s not all that interesting. What is interesting is how Heer’s article, like Lehmann’s, simply proceeds as if there is a democratic future in which Democrats and liberals and progressives will have to reckon with the need to dust themselves off, give up Biden-style politics, and opt for whatever Heer means by a “left-wing anti-system politics.” There’s no sense that elections will be over or rigged, that the Democrats will be hobbled or destroyed by Trump’s coercion or intimidation, that the left might have to go underground (which many members of the Communist Party did during the McCarthy period) or tactically retreat into silence while it regroups under the repressive radar of the right. The article simply leaves the reader with the sense that this election was a shellacking that calls for a big rethink and regrouping by the Democrats, i.e., this is an election like every other election we’ve had in this country.

“Democrats will never be able to defeat Trumpism,” says Heer, “unless they realize that…Trump is as American as baseball and apple pie, although far less wholesome than either.” Again, what any of that means concretely is less than clear. But what is clear is that Heer can write of an American future in which Democrats (not the left or some revolutionary or radical formation, but the Democrats) could actually defeat Trumpism. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the Democrats (or, apparently, electoral democracy).

One last example, from Jamelle Bouie. Of all the warnings about Trump’s threat to democracy, Bouie’s has reflected an analysis that is closest to my own position—even though we disagree about what follows from that—so naturally I think his warnings have been the most reasonable and reasoned. But, seriously, Bouie has always grounded his claims in a keen appreciation (and deep reading) of the constitutional and institutional limits of American politics, which has given his analysis of GOP authoritarianism a much more considered and hefty weight than that of many others. He and I have participated in two public conversations about this issue, and each time I’ve come away with issues and challenges to think about and a greater awareness of the limitations of my own position.

In two recent pieces, he’s made moves similar to the direction I’ve described above, moves that seem out of keeping with the diction of warning. In one piece that smartly analyzes the weaknesses of the Republican Party—an analysis Bouie has often made in the past, and which I very much agree with—Bouie concludes thus:

Over on the other side, the Democratic Party is locked in an internal battle over what the party means outside of its opposition to Trump. It is searching for some kind of identity that will help it cohere as a coalition and rebuild its relationship to voters both inside and outside its walls. And insofar as the party’s November defeat was useful, it was because it jump-started this process. The Republican Party is obviously not in the same place. But that is just a matter of happenstance. Its victory means only that it can escape its reckoning for now. There will be a time after Trump, and soon enough, Republicans will have to deal with what that means.

Again, we get the same sense that the Democrats are in a regrouping phase, that the period after the election is an opportunity to reflect and rebuild. There’s little to no sense that that rebuilding or regrouping or reflection will be compromised or stymied by the abridgment or end of democracy.

In an even more important piece, Bouie describes the pattern of American elections going back a century, all the way to the administration of FDR. He rightly points out that many a president get elected or reelected and claim, sometimes with very good reason, a thunderous mandate in their election. They quickly find—as FDR did in 1937, LBJ in 1966, Bill Clinton in 1994, Barack Obama in 2010, and George W. Bush in 2005—that things aren’t so simple or easy. Voters sour on the president’s plans, the opposition throws sand in the president’s gears, and institutions contest the president’s power.

Bouie sees many a similar warning sign for Trump (the piece is called “Trump Has Little Room for Error”). There’s Trump’s shambolic performance in his first term:

Not only were his most expansive plans met with swift opposition, but also it is fair to say that he failed, flailed and faltered through the first two years of his administration, culminating in a disastrous midterm defeat.

There’s also the fact that Trump is already backing off some of his more extravagant promises from the election campaign.

But, more important, Bouie cites the patterns of politics past, of democratic politics past: “There is no evidence that Donald Trump is immune to this dynamic [that stymied FDR, LBJ, and so on]. Just the opposite.” The same dynamics that have characterized democratic elections and their consequences in the past constrain Trump’s plans in the present.

Bouie also cites the power of public opinion and an aroused electorate:

The American public is exceptionally fickle and prone to sharp reactions against whoever occupies the White House. It wants change but continuity, for things to go in a new direction but to stay mostly the same. It does not always reward good policy, but it usually punishes broken promises and perceived radicalism from either party.

Presumably that combination of fickleness and reaction and punishment will be expressed in the same way it was expressed under FDR, LBJ, and so on: through democratic elections.

Of all these writers, Bouie is the only one to reckon with what he’s saying and the alternative scenario that has been posited by the authoritarianism discourse. He writes, as a caveat at the end of his article:

I can’t end this without conceding the real possibility that the basic feedback mechanisms of American politics are broken. It is possible that none of this matters and that voters will reward Trump — or at least not punish him — regardless of what he does. It’s a reasonable view, given the reality of the present situation.

And yet the 2024 presidential election was a close contest. The voting public is almost equally divided between the two parties, so Trump has little room for error if he hopes to impose his will on the federal government and make his plans reality.

If Americans are as fickle as they’ve been, then Trump’s second honeymoon might be over even before it really begins.

It could be, Bouie says, that the “feedback mechanisms” of democracy no longer work as they once did. (Though his description of their not working doesn’t exactly mean democracy is broken so much as it means that the voters aren’t working, or at least not working as Bouie claims they once did. Those voters did not, after all, punish FDR in 1940 or Obama in 2012; they rewarded these politicians, despite their misgivings. But democracy, she persisted.)

The important point is: Bouie is reckoning. He understands the implications of what he’s saying in these articles about Trump, the Republicans, and the Democrats. He recognizes that he must situate those implications in the context of other claims about democratic peril and render some sort of balanced judgments.

These other writers and articles take a different tack. They’ve moved on from the election and its shock to a different style of engagement. The mood, as I’ve said, seems to be: the Dems lost, now they have to regroup and regain power. The alarmism is just not there. There’s not even a nod, which we saw after 2016, to the vast literature on competitive authoritarianism around the world, which posits the continuation of some forms of democratic contestation under highly repressive regimes.

The question is why. In some cases, it may be the pressure of deadlines and columns and all the rest. Or it may be a case of not keeping track of what one says from one day to the next. And behind all that is the obvious fact that we’re in this interim—ironists might call it the Phoney War—when the battle hasn’t yet been joined. Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated, after all.

But maybe there’s more than individual foible and institutional failure at play here. Maybe there’s simply a recognition, however unconscious or implicit, that, having been elected through ordinary democratic means (rather than alleged support from Russia or the contrivance of the Electoral College), Trump must be fought and defeated through ordinary democratic means. Extraordinary rhetoric didn’t and doesn’t work, particularly when it is not attached to any extraordinary change in political behavior (and, no, supporting AOC and the Squad does not count as an extraordinary change in political behavior). That was always, I thought, the secret hiding in plain sight behind the rhetoric of fascism. It never called for any change in political behavior. Maybe now the rhetoric will change to match the behavior.

Or it may be that once Trump starts acting that that rhetoric of fascism will return and/or turn into concrete, extraordinary action on the left. We’ll have to see. But as of now, it seems, most of the media discourse is assuming otherwise.