I don’t know for sure how seriously people take Trump as an existential threat, but I know that people facing death or other fateful circumstances often don’t behave every moment like that’s the case. I can’t personally say much about how much of this is people being in denial and how much is some sort of fatalism or whatever. Speaking p…
I don’t know for sure how seriously people take Trump as an existential threat, but I know that people facing death or other fateful circumstances often don’t behave every moment like that’s the case. I can’t personally say much about how much of this is people being in denial and how much is some sort of fatalism or whatever. Speaking purely for myself as a person who thinks that reelecting Trump will be the end of the US as we know it, I just can’t spend all my time freaking out and also I don’t think it would help if I could. I’m no political scientist so my lack of imagination on the topic isn’t very instructive, but it usually seems to me that the best response to Trump’s loony, existential threat politics is basically normal politics, except with much greater penalties for losing. Biden’s, “well, at least I did my best” is pretty tone deaf, but to some extent that’s where I am, too. I mean, it may wreck my livelihood or even my life, but all I can do is my best and then adjust as best I can as the disaster descends.
But I'm curious about the line of reasoning here. How exactly would reelecting Trump be "the end of the US as we know it"? I hear people saying this but I never understand what they actually mean by this claim or what the (plausible) scenario would be where this outcome would come to pass.
They believe that this time round he and those around him are entering the presidency with a clear plan, a desire for retribution and a strategy to put their vision (whether that’s the much-discussed Project 2025 or something else) into action.
They would do that by restructuring institutions to pave the way for the US to head in their chosen direction.
And since this is a matter of ideology and is framed/perceived as existential, they would enact those changes in such a way as to ensure they couldn’t just be discontinued or overturned should their plans fail and the democrats be voted in in 4 years time.
It remains to be seen whether the institutions that stood up to a disorganised first term would be able to resist a coordinated effort this time around.
I think it’s fundamentally hard to predict, but my general thought is escalating withdrawal from shared institutions and understandings. I don’t know if this needs a more detailed example scenario to demonstrate what I mean, but my thought is that if the Trump administration takes actions that “blue state” administrations see as invalid/illegal, then they’re likely to try to find ways to defy or countermand these actions, which then drives Trump to further turn the screws, at which point the blue states likely take yet more dramatic actions, and so on. This also plays out inside various federal agencies, amongst court systems, and so on.
There’s many different paths this can go down, all of which are highly chaotic, and they would have to overcome shared history and interests, not to mention more explicit guardrails in the form of norms and rules, so even if we start down the road there are off-ramps. I don’t think anything is a given, and I think we can be pretty sure that the nation as a whole isn’t going to become fascist or really any single radically different thing, because we’ll come apart before we get there. Yet at the same time, I think if we go more than a short distance down any of these paths, whatever that comes out the other side will have undergone some fairly massive changes. Not only that, the world’s understanding of the US and its geopolitical position will also have changed quite a bit.
I’ll be wrong about this if the Trump administration turns out to have less will to break the “deep state” which is really just the contiguous nature of the nation as shared rules and practice over time and amongst participating individual contributors. But I don’t think the people who stopped Trump et al. in 2017-2021 will be there in 2025-2029, so it seems more likely than not that the cycle of action and reaction this time will have much more energy and fewer buffers.
Obviously I could say more given how long winded my comments have been already, but are you asking because there’s something you’re wondering about or think needs elaboration?
I just don't understand a how a 2nd Trump term will bring the nation to its knees. This time. I'm not a Trump supporter, but I suppose I might need to be since it's the 'other guys' who are changing who/what we are, etc. It seems an odd stance to take that NOT dismantling institutions like the 'deep state' is 'fortifying democracy' and the like. I dunno... I might just be too dumb to make sense out of this current bizarro world we are trying to navigate.
This may not be the best venue to communicate about this, but I’ll try clarifying a couple of items and see if it helps.
First, the “deep state” can have many meanings, but insofar as it has a meaning that refers to something big and powerful, it refers to all the people implementing government policy who are not replaced with each election, and the processes they have built up to do that. Amongst other things, it is where our laws and norms take concrete shape in the world, and in so doing establish their practical meaning. If we don’t like something or want the government to do something else, the particular things the deep state is doing now is the point of reference and provides some kind of stable meaning to the critique. Amongst other things, tearing this down wholesale leads to complete chaos and confusion. But Trump et al. don’t really want to tear it down wholesale so much as break the parts of it that resist the deep state becoming a tool wielded by the specific political group in power. Most of the folks involved want to break this because it prevents the executive from implementing whatever policies and actions it prefers, but of course if you have a very vindictive person at the top then the interest is in using the deep state against that person’s rivals.
A lot of rules about what US intelligence is and is not allowed to do with US persons arose after Watergate, and folks have had good reason to worry about the potential for abuse targeting rivals in the wake of the Patriot Act and so on. Happily, the “deep state” intelligence community of today has grown up in the post-Watergate, post-COINTELPRO era. While the potential for abuse has grown, there’s still a lot of institutional resistance to naked abuse. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been abused, but the scale and nature of that abuse has been limited by laws and norms that have been generally respected by senior figures, which in turn has limited what political appointees can get away with asking the intelligence services to do on behalf of anyone’s political interests.
I mention this because I spent a fair bit of time in the intelligence community and so experienced it directly, but the same dynamic is true across the full breadth of domains where the government is active. Basically, the “deep state” is what gives teeth to Constitutional limits on power. Which isn’t to say that the deep state always follows the Constitution or anything; we have a whole process for determining in what ways it’s not following the Constitution and ordering changes, and that too is a deep state element.
So when we’re talking about making much more of the leadership of the various agencies political appointees or at least subject to replacement at the whim of the president, we’re talking about removing much of what makes the government an entity that respects laws and shared understandings as opposed to the tool of a specific person. That is, it’s what makes the nation a republic rather than a monarchy (elective or not).
Finally, the critical other element is that it wouldn’t be a matter of Trump and allies acting in a norm-breaking way and everyone else trying to hold on to the old norms. That’s largely what 2017-2021 looked like, but there was some reciprocal norm breaking on display as well. If the norm breaking goes much deeper this time, reaching down much further into the federal government, then the reciprocal norm breaking from the left and perhaps even the center will also escalate. Frustration with the limits of constitutional pluralist democracy is common everywhere and left populists would also like to break the deep state where it blocks their policy priorities. I’m not particularly worried about a single “fascist” group taking over the country because I think it would fly apart into different camps long before we got there. But I still think that would be a disaster.
I should add that in the past, norm breaking has been limited by fears of being punished at the ballot box. Though I think Trump has been punished at the ballot box for norm breaking, the punishment has been smaller than most expected. The point at which things really fly out of control, however, is when his opponents start to perceive benefit at the ballot box for their own norm breaking in opposition. We saw a little of that in 2017-2021, but I expect it to be much worse this time around.
I don’t know for sure how seriously people take Trump as an existential threat, but I know that people facing death or other fateful circumstances often don’t behave every moment like that’s the case. I can’t personally say much about how much of this is people being in denial and how much is some sort of fatalism or whatever. Speaking purely for myself as a person who thinks that reelecting Trump will be the end of the US as we know it, I just can’t spend all my time freaking out and also I don’t think it would help if I could. I’m no political scientist so my lack of imagination on the topic isn’t very instructive, but it usually seems to me that the best response to Trump’s loony, existential threat politics is basically normal politics, except with much greater penalties for losing. Biden’s, “well, at least I did my best” is pretty tone deaf, but to some extent that’s where I am, too. I mean, it may wreck my livelihood or even my life, but all I can do is my best and then adjust as best I can as the disaster descends.
But I'm curious about the line of reasoning here. How exactly would reelecting Trump be "the end of the US as we know it"? I hear people saying this but I never understand what they actually mean by this claim or what the (plausible) scenario would be where this outcome would come to pass.
I think it’s quite clear what’s meant by it.
They believe that this time round he and those around him are entering the presidency with a clear plan, a desire for retribution and a strategy to put their vision (whether that’s the much-discussed Project 2025 or something else) into action.
They would do that by restructuring institutions to pave the way for the US to head in their chosen direction.
And since this is a matter of ideology and is framed/perceived as existential, they would enact those changes in such a way as to ensure they couldn’t just be discontinued or overturned should their plans fail and the democrats be voted in in 4 years time.
It remains to be seen whether the institutions that stood up to a disorganised first term would be able to resist a coordinated effort this time around.
I think it’s fundamentally hard to predict, but my general thought is escalating withdrawal from shared institutions and understandings. I don’t know if this needs a more detailed example scenario to demonstrate what I mean, but my thought is that if the Trump administration takes actions that “blue state” administrations see as invalid/illegal, then they’re likely to try to find ways to defy or countermand these actions, which then drives Trump to further turn the screws, at which point the blue states likely take yet more dramatic actions, and so on. This also plays out inside various federal agencies, amongst court systems, and so on.
There’s many different paths this can go down, all of which are highly chaotic, and they would have to overcome shared history and interests, not to mention more explicit guardrails in the form of norms and rules, so even if we start down the road there are off-ramps. I don’t think anything is a given, and I think we can be pretty sure that the nation as a whole isn’t going to become fascist or really any single radically different thing, because we’ll come apart before we get there. Yet at the same time, I think if we go more than a short distance down any of these paths, whatever that comes out the other side will have undergone some fairly massive changes. Not only that, the world’s understanding of the US and its geopolitical position will also have changed quite a bit.
I’ll be wrong about this if the Trump administration turns out to have less will to break the “deep state” which is really just the contiguous nature of the nation as shared rules and practice over time and amongst participating individual contributors. But I don’t think the people who stopped Trump et al. in 2017-2021 will be there in 2025-2029, so it seems more likely than not that the cycle of action and reaction this time will have much more energy and fewer buffers.
This seems to be quite a bit of hand wringing. Can you say more?
Obviously I could say more given how long winded my comments have been already, but are you asking because there’s something you’re wondering about or think needs elaboration?
I just don't understand a how a 2nd Trump term will bring the nation to its knees. This time. I'm not a Trump supporter, but I suppose I might need to be since it's the 'other guys' who are changing who/what we are, etc. It seems an odd stance to take that NOT dismantling institutions like the 'deep state' is 'fortifying democracy' and the like. I dunno... I might just be too dumb to make sense out of this current bizarro world we are trying to navigate.
This may not be the best venue to communicate about this, but I’ll try clarifying a couple of items and see if it helps.
First, the “deep state” can have many meanings, but insofar as it has a meaning that refers to something big and powerful, it refers to all the people implementing government policy who are not replaced with each election, and the processes they have built up to do that. Amongst other things, it is where our laws and norms take concrete shape in the world, and in so doing establish their practical meaning. If we don’t like something or want the government to do something else, the particular things the deep state is doing now is the point of reference and provides some kind of stable meaning to the critique. Amongst other things, tearing this down wholesale leads to complete chaos and confusion. But Trump et al. don’t really want to tear it down wholesale so much as break the parts of it that resist the deep state becoming a tool wielded by the specific political group in power. Most of the folks involved want to break this because it prevents the executive from implementing whatever policies and actions it prefers, but of course if you have a very vindictive person at the top then the interest is in using the deep state against that person’s rivals.
A lot of rules about what US intelligence is and is not allowed to do with US persons arose after Watergate, and folks have had good reason to worry about the potential for abuse targeting rivals in the wake of the Patriot Act and so on. Happily, the “deep state” intelligence community of today has grown up in the post-Watergate, post-COINTELPRO era. While the potential for abuse has grown, there’s still a lot of institutional resistance to naked abuse. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been abused, but the scale and nature of that abuse has been limited by laws and norms that have been generally respected by senior figures, which in turn has limited what political appointees can get away with asking the intelligence services to do on behalf of anyone’s political interests.
I mention this because I spent a fair bit of time in the intelligence community and so experienced it directly, but the same dynamic is true across the full breadth of domains where the government is active. Basically, the “deep state” is what gives teeth to Constitutional limits on power. Which isn’t to say that the deep state always follows the Constitution or anything; we have a whole process for determining in what ways it’s not following the Constitution and ordering changes, and that too is a deep state element.
So when we’re talking about making much more of the leadership of the various agencies political appointees or at least subject to replacement at the whim of the president, we’re talking about removing much of what makes the government an entity that respects laws and shared understandings as opposed to the tool of a specific person. That is, it’s what makes the nation a republic rather than a monarchy (elective or not).
Finally, the critical other element is that it wouldn’t be a matter of Trump and allies acting in a norm-breaking way and everyone else trying to hold on to the old norms. That’s largely what 2017-2021 looked like, but there was some reciprocal norm breaking on display as well. If the norm breaking goes much deeper this time, reaching down much further into the federal government, then the reciprocal norm breaking from the left and perhaps even the center will also escalate. Frustration with the limits of constitutional pluralist democracy is common everywhere and left populists would also like to break the deep state where it blocks their policy priorities. I’m not particularly worried about a single “fascist” group taking over the country because I think it would fly apart into different camps long before we got there. But I still think that would be a disaster.
I should add that in the past, norm breaking has been limited by fears of being punished at the ballot box. Though I think Trump has been punished at the ballot box for norm breaking, the punishment has been smaller than most expected. The point at which things really fly out of control, however, is when his opponents start to perceive benefit at the ballot box for their own norm breaking in opposition. We saw a little of that in 2017-2021, but I expect it to be much worse this time around.