If I had one wish for my Democratic friends this holiday season, it would be this: stop being afraid. Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated into fear, and from there into supporting demagogues who pop up to take advantage of your fears.
Politics today can sound like a thriller novel in which democratic institutions collapse spectacularly in Chapter 1. Every headline not supporting your own beliefs becomes evidence that “democracy is in danger.” Watch especially for the ones that use the word “existential.” Every deployment becomes an “occupation,” and every move, including something as unimportant as building a new wing on the White House, is read as confirmation of a hardening dictatorship. Every decision becomes something that harks back to the Weimar Republic’s fall.
The Democratic Party and the media that orbit it learned that powerful narratives get attention and motivate voters and donors. They had some early help; the “Obama is a Muslim” meme and kerfuffle over his birth certificate were crude forerunners of this style of politics, emotional overstatement masquerading as vigilance. Those early efforts failed because they had no throughline; each crazy idea has to be quickly topped with something crazier.
So a celebrity cancellation or social media scandal has to be quickly replaced with desecration of the People’s House; if the news cycle did not produce something fast enough after that, then it was OK to fall back on the old tropes of Trump being a Russian intelligence asset or an actual pedophile, because what cannot be confirmed can at least be repeated. Fear-based narratives exist across the spectrum; the left’s authoritarian panic and the right’s worries about replacement theory are mirror images of a sort. All that is necessary is to ignore or distill complex developments into emotionally charged slogans. This is a terrible way to live: Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate scaled up to the 24/7 news cycle.
Overstimulated lab rats will eat themselves to death. Living as if the worst possible outcome is always inevitable is unhealthy for you and bad for the very democracy that fear is eroding. There are reasons to dial back the panic and allow America to get healthy again.
Forget what late-night TV says for a moment. Remember that the United States still has robust legal and institutional checks that make authoritarian takeover difficult to impossible. The American system was built with multiple layers of constraint, including an independent judiciary, a legislature with law-making power, a free press, state governments with their own authority, and a civil service embedded in administrative law. These things are robust enough to have withstood the chaos of founding the nation, a brutal civil war that tore the country apart, and the rise in Europe and Japan of real fascism backed by what were then the most powerful armies in human history.
The structures that sustained the United States are not theatrical props. They have proven difficult to dismantle, certainly not via an executive order. The system works; last month saw a string of Democratic election victories, and the midterms next year are expected to be tightly contested. The Congress many fear has stopped being a check and balance can on Election Day change into a vibrant opposition. It has happened many times before and if it does not happen this round, it is because the People did not vote for it. Our system allows for change to the right or left, some of which you may not like or support but which comes about righteously. Those warning of dictatorship too easily forget that Trump was twice elected through the same system that produced Obama, Biden, and every other president.
Aside from Congress, the courts and existing laws are active brakes on power and always have been. The Posse Comitatus Act, the Insurrection Act, and subsequent case law place very real limits on how the federal government can use the military at home. When administrations have pushed these boundaries, judges and state officials have pushed back and in each instance the feds backed down. The Rule of Law held. The friction has not been noiseless recently, as both the administration and Democrats have their own reasons for trying to make it look like the system is failing (looking tough on crime and installing fear of authoritarianism). But these things are not theoretical. They show the system working.
While the precise percentage of the time Trump lost in the lower courts depends on which subset of cases you look at (regulatory challenges, injunctions, district court decisions, major rulings), the consistent finding is that the Trump administration lost in court a large majority of the time, somewhere between 60 to 90 percent. Recent analysis at Stanford shows lower court judges across the ideological spectrum are ruling against Trump at similar rates. He’s lost in 72 percent of rulings issued by Republican-appointed judges and 80 percent of rulings by Democratic-appointed judges.
An analysis by the Court Accountability Project found that among 23 Supreme Court rulings and temporary orders related to Trump‐administration actions, the administration secured favorable outcomes in about 90 percent of those cases. The Court has ruled for Trump 17 out of 23 times in emergency appeals in his second term. That’s notable, but hardly proof of institutional collapse and that a whole branch of government has been disarmed. The muscle-tussle between the Supreme Court and lower courts is baked into the fabric of our democracy; just look at the struggle to enact civil rights and end slavery, or to drive home equality in the 1960s.
For that matter, a cyclical shift toward a more powerful executive does not lead to kings. The Supreme Court itself shifts based on who happens to be sitting on the bench when a given case arises; that group of justices is itself based on who the people voted into the Oval Office. Future courts can overturn earlier decisions—remember the Dred Scott decision. Sometimes this fits one’s preferences (for example, the Court recently refusing to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage and allowing that to stand as the law of the land) or not (the Court overturning an earlier decision assuring the right to abortion under the same rules across 50 states). It is not erosion, just change.
Stop being afraid, but do not become complacent. Polling data show worrying trends in collapsing public trust, which weakens democratic resilience and paves the way for demagogues. A sizable share of Americans express concern about the health of democracy and increasingly question whether opponents play by the rules. That is not to be ignored. But fear that equates every aggressive political act with the end of the republic is marketing to immobilize people instead of motivating legitimate action.
When the public constantly sees disaster, it trains people to expect the worst, amplifies fear-based fundraising and media cycles, and ultimately corrodes civic stamina. Energy is diverted into alarmism rather than into voting, reform, and participation. Democracy’s real defense is faith, to gently paraphrase President Obama, not in politicians, but in the institutions and fellow citizens who, time and again, have proven stronger than their own fears.
The post Liberals: This Christmas, Stop Being Afraid appeared first on The American Conservative.
