By Eve Fairbanks / Special To The Washington Post
Over the past few months, warnings have appeared in major newspapers and magazines that Democrats need to prepare themselves, physically and psychologically, for election doomsday scenarios in which President Trump refuses to leave office if he loses.
Salon: “Trump will never voluntarily stand aside.” The Atlantic: This election “could break America.” The Washington Post: “We might put on a display of democratic dysfunction that would rival any banana republic on the planet.” Fivethirtyeight.com floated the notion that Trump could call on the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to keep former vice president Joe Biden from prying him out of the Oval Office, while Bill Maher calls Trump’s potential to violently hold on to power after an electoral loss “the theme that has obsessed me.”
Many ordinary Democrats I know also worry about the potential for a Trump-led coup or civil war. One told me he was seriously considering buying a gun specifically for the election’s aftermath. Another imagined a scene in which tremendous numbers of “MAGAstans” gather in a tent village on the Mall and then roam Washington with semiautomatic weapons.
These seem like fearsome warnings. We need to ask ourselves, though, whether fixating on doomsday scenarios doesn’t — paradoxically — reveal a kind of desperate optimism and idealism lurking behind what presents itself as responsible pessimism.
“Every fear hides a wish,” David Mamet wrote. Many Democrats I know recognize that conservatives see a value in stoking terror about a left-wing “socialist” threat; it justifies and forgives a range of their own acts and mistakes. Imagining your enemy as powerful, canny and utterly bent on destruction lets you cast yourself as the protagonist in a heroic journey whose critical climax is also — importantly — still to come. That’s why I call dwelling on apocalyptic post-election scenarios “optimistic.”
In a dark but cinematic way, a mighty, totalitarian post-election stand by Trump — one in which he doesn’t just loosely resemble Mussolini or hint that he admires dictators but undeniably becomes one — could feel like a relief. Such an event would validate the harshest possible anti-Trump rhetoric, blowing away all those tiresome Twitter arguments over whether he is literally a fascist. It would make the most dire warnings from the American left — ones the right has mocked, like the 2016 claim that Trump’s presidency would be “an extinction-level event” — look perceptive and wise. Perhaps more importantly, it would confirm that Democrats weren’t also to blame for America’s horrible last four years because they picked the wrong 2016 candidate or misunderstood polls. The truth was, they faced only the beginning of a demonic assault waged by a calculating and unflinching enemy.
The dire scenarios also propose that Democrats still hold tremendous power, more than they might actually possess. A consistent feature of left-wing post-election nightmare scenarios is the implication that, if something extreme like an armed uprising or a Supreme Court fight can be prevented, Democrats will have won a decisive battle. Understanding the stakes in such terms, though, sets the bar for victory and redemption comfortingly and artificially low. To do our part and to win the fight for democracy, all we have to do is forestall the onset of a literal, movie-style junta. And then there’s a happy ending, of a sort.
Such anxious fantasies soothe by deferring the worst, encouraging us to worry about what’s coming rather than what’s happening. The Atlantic declared that democracy is “at meaningful risk of breaking [after November]” and our “norms” may “turn out to be fragile,” as though they haven’t been revealed to be fragile already. If Trump doesn’t leave office, the writer Neil Buchanan reckons, only then we will have to realize “we are living in what we might as well call a ‘dead democracy walking’ [and that] our constitutional system might … have been fatally wounded.” In late July, Noam Chomsky called a post-election Trump coup the “major catastrophe looming.” But, he added, fortunately, “we have some time to deal with it.”
But it seems to me we have met with catastrophe already. It seems to me we are broken already.
It might not have looked as dramatic as an old-school fascist coup. Yet even the comparatively banal past four years have been deadly. The apparently sunniest scenario — a straightforward Biden win — conceals the bitter reality that Trump has already totally denigrated the voting process and degraded the office he holds. America’s reputation and role overseas have already been transformed. He has already engendered the most bitter cynicism about and contempt for his country in both his adversaries and his supporters. He’s already rendered both Republicans and Democrats far more conspiratorial and suspicious of the media. He’s already shattered the competence and genuineness of the executive branch.
It will take a long, long time to undo all this, even under a Biden presidency. We may be trying to avoid contemplating this heavy truth by pretending that the big fight for democracy is still on the calendar.
Gaming out unprecedented post-election possibilities certainly feels responsible. Trump has insinuated many times that he doesn’t want to leave office, even if he’s declared the loser. Democrats want to avoid the blithe confidence that left them reeling four years ago. Nobody wants to be the dupe this time around.
But Trump’s defeat and his exit from the White House in January remains, all things considered, the likeliest possibility. It’s typical of Trump not to do the most shocking and unusual things he claims he’ll do, like to make Mexico pay for a border wall or to “lock up” Hillary Clinton. He’s more effective at moving the ball on less flashy but consequential aims like imperiling the Affordable Care Act or Roe v. Wade, which is why many otherwise normal conservative elites tolerate him. His supporters don’t seem to discredit him for failing to follow through on his most vicious ideas, and this pattern may hold for his boastful hints that he won’t accept an electoral defeat. When he fails at or loses interest in one of his more outlandish proposals, his M.O. is just to claim he has done it while not doing it. (He’s still insisting Mexico is paying for a border wall.)
It’s quite possible that, in the event of a loss, Trump exits the White House on schedule and simultaneously insists on Twitter and on TV that he didn’t lose. That, too, would badly damage Americans’ trust in politics. It would be a singularly cruel act toward his own voters, dumping the burden of deciding whether they’re living under an illegitimate president onto them. But it’s also a much harder maneuver to oppose than a physical refusal to leave office. In this way, a violent last stand — so totally outrageous and ahistoric that most Americans would rise up against it — is a more appealing chess move to consider because it’s so much less covert.
While it wouldn’t be easy to take to the streets to fight in a civil war in which one party has outright declared its intention to destroy America, it would feel like a morally clear act. And thus post-election civil war may constitute a powerful fantasy and not just a fear. If that’s so, then it’s a fantasy worth quashing for now. It might be nice to find ourselves on a hero’s journey, a quintessential good-vs.-evil battle, but it’s better to confront frankly where we are already; stumbling over the cracked pieces of our politics in the dark, unsure where to find the light switch.
Eve Fairbanks, a writer from Virginia, is at work on a book about South Africa.
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