Saying True Things Out Loud

The decline of US democracy has major implications for America and the world. It's beyond time for the holdouts to accept that we're in serious and literal trouble.

What, me worry? Source: Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

The other day I joined

Steve Schmidt

on his podcast to talk about what happens if Donald Trump wins in November — and what that might mean for Canada. I talked about a January 2017 piece I wrote for Maclean’s talking about what I saw at the time as America’s flirtation with authoritarianism.

I was also thinking about a 2020 piece I wrote asking whether Trump, well into his presidency, was a fascist. I touched on all of this again in the fall of 2023, looking ahead to another potential Trump administration with all that might entail, including political violence, jailing of opponents, perhaps even suspended elections.

By the time I took a deep dive into all of this again last month, I was convinced not only that I was right about my concerns stretching back to 2016-2017, but that one of the major roadblocks to confronting Trump and what he represents — the decay of American democracy, always deeply flawed and hopelessly incomplete, but something worse now — was getting over the idea that someone, some thing, like Trump was even possible.

The myth of American exceptionalism, the story of the shining city on a hill, the jingoism, the West-Wingification of political discourse, and all that underpins these phenomena makes believing the rise of explicit U.S. authoritarianism, even outright fascism, difficult to process for many. When you’ve been raised on a narrative that preaches the gospel of “the world’s greatest democracy,” then the idea that things could crumble to dust all at once (though not really, the crumbling has been going on since the beginning) is hard to take.

Looking back to 2015-2016, the path of Trump denial is clear. It goes something like this: First, Trump is a joke candidate who can’t possibly win the nomination. He wins it. Then we get the notion that while Trump is the nominee, he can’t possibly win the general election. He wins it. Next comes the cope that while he’s won, he can’t possibly be that bad. He’ll be restrained by the institutions and para-institutions of state: Congress, the courts, the states, the civil service, global allies, people around him, etc. Maybe he’ll even mature into the job. Checks and balances and our better angels and all of that.

Very little restrained Trump. He did his damage and lost the next election. While the belief he couldn’t possibly win again proved true, barely, it was attended by the claim that he’d lose move along. There was no way he’d try to pull off a coup, nor that anyone would go along with it if he did. Remember the ‘take him seriously but not literally’ discourse?

Today, people are a little more credulous, a little more open to the idea that Trump is a serious and atypical threat, but there’s still plenty of resistance to the idea that the worst could come to pass. Plenty of people — observers, media commentators, voters, politicians — refuse to believe that Trump could win, try to steal the election, refuse to concede to defeat, lock up his opponents if he’s victorious, or go all-in on authoritarianism or fascism.

The idea of political refugees from the U.S., including Trump’s mainstream political opponents like Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden, is something people talk about in hushed tones, if at all. All of that is stuff that happens somewhere else. You know, in the global south. Over there. The denial persists.

It’s psychologically difficult to overcome this refusal to believe. It requires that one sheds beliefs inculcated in them from a young age. Doing that upsets comforting constructions of the US and the world, a belief in a necessary stability that helps one get up in the morning and get to bed at night. We don’t like believing troubling things. It makes us anxious and uncomfortable, so we try to rationalize our way out of committing to seeing what’s in front of our eyes. Same as it ever was.

But when the stakes are high, confronting reality is the best way through. That’s not to say that simply believing the worst will forestall its arrival, but it certainly raises the chances that one can prepare and join with others to deal with the problem as best as can be managed.

It’s such an old, clichéd, self-help truism, but it’s nonetheless true: denial doesn’t do you any good in the long run. You’ve got to accept reality and confront your problems head on. And that begins with believing what’s true.