Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport
2024 Is a De Facto Constitutional Referendum.
Update: This post became tragically timely yesterday a few minutes after it published, when the MAGA wing of SCOTUS succeeded in postponing Jack Smith’s J6 trial. If you have any doubt that it was strategic, consider that the same MAGA justices who yesterday insisted on taking up the immunity question nearly two months from now rejected Smith when he asked them to decide it two months ago.
Properly understood, the 2024 elections are the only chance Americans will have to cast a ballot against the MAGA agenda, which would be tantamount to a new constitutional order.
Recently, Ezra Klein posted the most compelling, fair-minded, and well-reasoned argument I’ve seen on the question of whether Biden should be the Democratic nominee. It set off a firestorm of debate, mostly ranging from skeptical to critical. Spoiler alert: I’m not weighing in on that question. But I do want to use the controversy to illustrate what is dangerously wrong with the prevailing political discourse.
The conversation right now is much like one you would expect to hear in a bar during the seventh game of the World Series. The home team (Democrats) are the defending champions. But now, it’s tied in the top of the seventh inning. The Democrats’ pitcher, Joe Biden, looks shaky and tired, and just walked the bases loaded. Now, with two outs, Donald Trump is at the plate. Many in the bar scream at the TV, imploring the manager to turn to the team’s very deep but rookie bullpen before it’s too late. Meanwhile, others, including some old-timers, push back by reminding everyone what happened the last time they tried this strategy in the 1968 season. Everyone else in the bar just wants the shouting to stop so they can enjoy their drinks.
What we have here is a category error. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is up to us whether those who reject a MAGA future vote in greater numbers than those who embrace MAGA. By “us,” I mean anyone who understands the consequences of a second Trump Administration. Critically, this includes leaders of civil society who might normally (and properly) stay out of partisan politics – the free press, religious leaders, business leaders, foundations, academia. We are in something of a Niemöller moment. When we depend on the campaign smarts of the Democratic Party to forestall a MAGA future, we abdicate our duties as democratic citizens to do everything we can to keep it from happening.
Now, from Klein’s essay (emphasis added):
The presidency is a performance. You are not just making decisions, you are also acting out the things people want to believe about their president. …
And then there’s the argument you’ve heard on my podcast. … There’s an anti-MAGA majority in this country and they will come out to stop Trump. And I think that might be true. I still think Biden might win against Trump, even with all I’ve said. It’s just that there’s a very good chance he might lose. Maybe even better than even odds. And Trump is dangerous. I want better odds than that.
Let’s be clear: Those eager for Democrats to be running a younger, stronger and charismatic candidate will themselves vote for whomever the Democrats nominate against Trump. They will do this because they know that the next four years will be a disaster if Trump returns to office, but that if any Democrat wins – whether it’s Biden or someone else – the next four years won’t be much different from the last four. In other words, those investing so much intensity in second-guessing the Democrats because they know the stakes for America’s future (“Trump is dangerous”) lack confidence that other voters will be informed or invested enough to come to the same conclusion. (“The presidency is performance.”)
The dangerous mistake here is to take for granted that the ordinary voters who will decide this election will invariably make their decisions based on whether they judge Biden or Trump better able to perform the presidency, rather than on what they and their families have to lose if Trump and MAGA wins. The evidence of voter behavior since 2016 tells us that people will do the latter, as long as these stakes are made clear to them. But if we treat this like a normal election – just another round of single combat between two individuals, Joe Biden and Donald Trump – Trump and MAGA could win.
A De Facto Constitutional Referendum
The 2024 election is not a contest between two politicians, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a de facto constitutional referendum. At first blush, “de facto constitutional referendum” may seem a bit much. But, if implemented, the MAGA agenda as expressed by Trump, and delineated in great detail in documents like the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, would change America as quickly and as fundamentally as the Reconstruction Amendments and the New Deal Order – if not more so.
The Ends
I don’t want to spend a lot of space on the details of Team Trump’s plans in this post, since the topic has been handled well elsewhere. For a comprehensive view, see this regularly updating American Autocracy Threat Tracker on the Just Security website; for the impacts on financial markets and business, see in this Brookings report; and see excellent reporting on the details of plans to deport millions in the New York Times, The Atlantic and The Washington Post.
The Means
As has been the case since he descended the escalator in 2015, Trump has done nothing to hide his intentions, which, instead of being greeted with appropriate alarm, are usually discounted as rhetoric for the base. Again, I don’t want to take too much space here, but there are five important reasons to take everything he says literally. Like in Jurassic Park, we are no longer safe in the kitchen now that he’s mastered door handles.
The Insurrection Act and Emergency Powers
No new laws need be enacted to enable Trump to be a “dictator on day one” if he chooses to be. Trump can easily invoke the Insurrection Act the moment he takes office, which would allow him to deploy military forces to quell civil unrest. Unfortunately, the full import of that has not sunk in, likely because of how few people realize that the Insurrection Act, as well as many other “emergency powers” laws on the books, have no process for challenging presidents claiming those powers, as the authors of those laws never imagined someone like Donald Trump reaching the Oval Office. To the extent you think there will be institutional barriers to his making those moves, remember that those who prevented him deploying the military in response to the George Floyd protests, or stopped him from taking over the Justice department before January 6th, are long gone.1
Transition Planning Is Well Underway
Unlike the disorganization following his surprise 2016 victory, Trump’s plans for a second term have already been developed in great detail by his allies, as seen in Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation and endorsed by just about every major right-wing political organization in the United States. Those plans include “a private red-state army under the president’s command” to round up millions of immigrants and throw them into detention centers, “institutionalizing Trumpism” by firing 50,000 nonpartisan civil servants and replacing them with unqualified Trump loyalists, letting Trump use the FBI and the DOJ to prosecute his personal vendettas, eliminating reproductive freedom and basic protections for LGBTQ people, abandoning NATO allies, starting trade wars with China, and taking a wrecking ball to basic government functions that Americans depend on and take for granted, from public education to weather data.
MAGA Lock on the Senate and Courts
There is no scenario in which Trump is elected and Republicans do not control the Senate. (Remember, the best case scenario for Democrats is 50-50, which isn’t good enough with a Republican Vice President. And the 2026 midterm map offers no apparent pick-up opportunities for Democrats.) That means that not only will Trump have clear sailing for his Cabinet nominations, he will likely fill another 200 or more federal judges, now in the mold of Kacsmaryk. Plus with both Thomas and Alito approaching 80, Trump will have the opportunity to replace them with young, equally MAGA justices.
Red State Support
The danger to America is from the MAGA movement, not Trump as an individual. Much of Trump’s agenda, as well as most of the items in Project 2025 and other preparations for a second administration, have either already been implemented by Red state trifectas, or are Red state trifecta ambitions that have been thwarted by the levers Democrats still control. (See “The Two Nations of America” for more.) In other words, Trump’s agenda is not merely “rhetoric for his base”; its supporters dominate the Republican Party’s congressional caucuses (See “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Sources of MAGA Madness and Congressional Kakistocracy”), the state legislatures and governorships of half the states, and a majority of the Supreme Court.
The singular focus on Trump obscures the extent to which the MAGA movement (née Tea Party) has already metastasized in half the country over the last dozen years. And, as I wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, that half does not fully accept the legitimacy of federal authority.
The Constitutional Coup Is Well Underway
Trump in his first term, and the Federalist Society Supreme Court majority for the last dozen or more years, have shown that with enough minority-rule power and enough shamelessness, they don’t need the support of three-quarters of the states to amend the Constitution; they can just “reinterpret” it beyond recognition, or even ignore it entirely.
As a result, America has already changed in profound ways that are not imaginable through any open or democratic process. For example, can you imagine enacting legislation to allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in campaigns (Citizens United), allow state legislators to pick their voters (Rucho), make owning an AR-15 a constitutionally protected right (Heller, Bruen), prevent consumers from bringing class actions lawsuits against corporations (AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion), overturn the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County, Bronwich), or allow states to ban abortion (Dobbs)? Those radical changes have been the stated intentions of the Republican Party and at least implicitly of Republican presidential nominees all along.2
The (Very Contingent) Anti-MAGA Majority
As I discussed on Klein’s podcast, and have written about extensively, the “anti-MAGA majority” is the most important dynamic in our elections today. When the question is called, most Americans don’t want a MAGA future. Of the 178 million Americans who have voted at least once beginning in 2016, about 94 million have voted against MAGA, and about 84 million have voted for MAGA.3 Post-election polling by Pew (and others) shows that those 70 or so million who could have voted, but didn’t, oppose MAGA by even greater margins.4 Newly engaged voters – those who only entered (or rejoined) the electorate in 2018 or later – have been driving historically high turnout, and have been breaking dramatically, and consistently, for Biden and Democrats when the stakes have been a MAGA future. Even more to the point, MAGA has lost 23 of the 27 statewide elections since 2016 in the five states that gave Trump his Electoral College victory in 2016 (and will decide the 2024 races as well).
But I’ve also been clear that when people don’t recognize those stakes, they stay home. As I explained in “Red Wave, Blue Undertow,” the 2022 midterms were best understood as two different elections – one in the key battlegrounds, where voters understood the stakes and turned out in droves to reject MAGA; the other where voters did not understand the stakes and turned out at low levels more typical of a midterm, allowing the predicted Red Wave to occur. The difference came down to whether a state had a MAGA candidate running in a high-profile, competitive race. This did not include “safe” Blue states like California and New York, where losses ended up costing Democrats the House.
This leads us to the unacknowledged problem with the anti-MAGA majority dynamic for Democrats. Their majorities in the Electoral College battleground states5 depend on sustaining ahistorically high turnout and support from people who were not regular voters in 2016. (See chart below.)
By definition, those voters are alienated from partisan politics and lack confidence in Democrats’ governing ability. That’s why horse race polling now looks so bad for Democrats, as it did before the last midterms. As the party in power, Democrats are also the prime targets for people’s frustrations with this same fundamental, now long-running dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, the “economy,” and nearly every major institution.
At this point, you might be thinking, “But wait a minute … isn’t it the case that Democrats have been winning special elections because in those low-turnout races, engaged Democrats make up a disproportionate share of voters? Won’t greater turnout doom them?” That certainly has become the conventional wisdom.
In a future post, I’ll explain why the “high” and “low” turnout framework as it’s popularly deployed is not useful at all. But, without getting technical, there are two ways to look at the fact that more engaged voters oppose MAGA. Prophesiers of Democratic doom in high turnout elections presume that those currently unengaged will remain so – that their minds are already made up. The other way to look at it is to at least entertain the possibility that when the currently unengaged tune back in, they will have the same anti-MAGA reaction as the currently engaged do now, and that the currently unengaged themselves had four years ago. (By “engaged” I mean engaged enough to be aware of the MAGA agenda; it doesn’t require following politics obsessively.)
Not only are most voters now not paying attention to Trump’s legal troubles, they know next to nothing about what he’s said on the campaign trail about what he will do if elected again, let alone the very specific and chilling agenda his allies have assembled in the event he wins a second term. Moreover, most voters have forgotten how, despite campaigning as a rogue anti-business populist in 2016, the first things Trump did in 2017 were pushing through a hugely unpopular tax cut for the rich and nearly repealing the ACA.6
Perhaps most importantly, to “understand” the stakes is not just to know intellectually that Trump has done this or that, or that he promises to do this or that. It means believing that it will happen. The Dobbs decision, for instance, didn’t so much change how voters felt about abortion rights, or even their importance in the abstract; it changed people’s beliefs about whether Trump and MAGA would actually take abortion rights away. The prevailing belief used to be that anti-abortion rhetoric was just red meat for the base, and that Roe v. Wade would never actually be overturned. Not anymore.
How NOT to Talk About the Election
The anti-MAGA majority will not turn out to defend “democracy,” reject “extremists,” or because Trump is a racist fool. Those lines of attack do not connect with people’s lives. Specifically:
Ad Hominem Attacks on Trump
Every time you see Donald Trump say something that seems obviously disqualifying to be president (which is pretty much all the time), and wonder how anyone not marinated in Fox grievance TV could vote for him, you actually underestimate them. Because they, not you, understand that what the candidates will do is more important than who they are.
It’s obviously frustrating when the media makes more out of Biden’s saying “Mexico” when he meant “Egypt” than Trump saying “Nancy Pelosi” when he meant “Nikki Haley.” But when Democrats and progressives make Trump (the person) and his deranged rants central to their critique, they make counterclaims against Biden fair game. All of this confirms the public’s well-founded belief that all politicians are hypocrites who are more preoccupied with scoring points against each other than improving the lives of everyday Americans.
Consider two 2022 Senate races. In Georgia, Herschel Walker was, shall we say, a flawed candidate, who was exposed as a serial liar with troubling family issues, declared that “I don’t want to be a vampire any more. I want to be a werewolf,” and had no idea whatsoever about any issue of policy. Yet he came within a point and a half of winning. A dozen or more years ago, a candidate with that “baggage” would not have come close. In Pennsylvania, a state Biden won by just 1.2 points, John Fetterman, who was facing midterm headwinds and had difficulty debating as a result of a stroke, won by 5 points. As in Georgia, this would not have been the likely result a dozen or more years ago.
In both instances, voters understood that the differences between a Democratic and Republican Senate were more consequential than the differences between how well the individual candidates would serve the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania, respectively. Regardless of any other outcome, voters in those races knew that Walker would be a vote for a MAGA Senate, and Fetterman would be a vote against one. Nothing else mattered.
Defend “Democracy!”
Remember: It should be self-evident that appeals to save “democracy” will ring hollow to the less engaged anti-MAGA voters who have the least confidence in our institutions and political system, and who are sour on Democrats in surveys right now.
During the Cold War, “democracy” was given credit for unprecedented growth and shared prosperity enjoyed by many, though not all, Americans. Democracy was enormously popular not because the masses appreciated its procedural genius, but because it consistently delivered the goods. But, over the last 50 years, the United States went from being one of the most equal countries in the Western World in terms of wealth and income to the most unequal; the only major nation in the Western world where life expectancy was decreasing for sizable segments of its population even before COVID; and the stingiest nation in the Western world in its provision of basic needs to its populace.
And so, if we understand that for most people the word “democracy” comes down to what it delivers, it should be obvious why so little enthusiasm remains for a system that was once creating hope, distributing shared prosperity, and enacting greater freedoms, but has now reversed itself. This may be difficult to see for those who continue to thrive and prosper.
Reject “Extremism!”
While polls show that no one likes extremists, extremism is very much in the eye of the beholder, as this Reuters poll reconfirms. It is a term that too many voters apply to “both sides.” Thus, the term “extremist” positions Republicans as still co-existing on an acceptable political spectrum with Democrats, instead of what they are: a revanchist movement whose governing agenda is to take away your freedoms and empower corporations at your expense.
Civil Society is AWOL
It’s worth elaborating here what I mean when I say “civil society” or “us.” To sustain liberal democracy, societies require robust civic institutions that speak the truth without partisan fear or favor. That is, after all, the basis for the warrant for a free press and freedom of assembly in the First Amendment. Here, I’m thinking first and foremost of the press, but also major religious institutions, mainstream foundations, think tanks, and large organizations who consider their mission either protecting democracy or marginalized populations, as well as enlightened business organizations. They are societies’ necessary antibodies against antidemocratic pathogens.
The MAGA pathogen has avoided triggering a sufficient immune response by camouflaging itself as healthy cells (Republicans) and by evading the immune system's recognition mechanisms (the media, civil society). But it's actually worse than that – we have an autoimmune disorder on our hands. Over the last dozen years, the most powerful civil society antibodies have been protecting those “healthy cells” (MAGA Republicans) while attacking other antibodies that are outside the mainstream – discrediting those raising alarms as either partisan or exaggerating the danger.
Consider the Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett confirmations. The prerequisite for being considered for those vacancies was that they were on a list provided by Leonard Leo of Federalist Society-approved justices. That was a prerequisite because Trump saw that as a way to assure the religious right that Roe v. Wade would be overturned (among other things) – and now Trump takes credit for overturning Roe. Yet each nominee’s performance as a “healthy cell,” with their incantations of fidelity to stare decisis, were given more credence than those who insisted that each nominee would be a certain vote to overturn Roe.
A similar dynamic is at work internally in the media. There has always been excellent reporting to be found on the dangers of Trump and MAGA, in mainstream and independent outlets alike. But rarely if ever do the insights and warnings from this reporting filter out into mainstream political and elections reporting. Rarely if ever do we see these warnings reach Topic A status, with endless and unmissable wall-to-wall takes, in the same way that Biden’s age has (or that Hillary’s emails did in 2016).
At other times like this in American history, whether it was about abolition, women’s franchise, prohibition, trade unionism, civil rights, the war in Viet Nam, the ERA, environmental protection, health care, or gay rights, civil society institutions stepped up to educate about the issues and facilitate democratic discourse and compromise. Yet, for the last dozen years, those institutions have been muted in performing the same role as, for example, the Federalist Society majority on the Supreme Court “amends” the Constitution in the ways I described earlier.
Or consider Germany and Brazil now. Since the second world war, Germans have understood the importance of protecting its democracy from fascism. Just a few weeks ago, when it leaked out that “high-ranking politicians from Germany’s far-right AfD party, neo-Nazis, and sympathetic business people gathered in a hotel near Potsdam [where the agenda was] nothing less than the fine tuning of a plan for the forced deportations of millions of people currently living in Germany” the response was swift, including hundreds of thousands protesting and a ban on public funding for the AfD. And, with enviable alacrity, in October a Brazilian congressional committee formally asked prosecutors to charge former president Jair Bolsonaro for attempting to overthrow the rule of law, political violence and criminal conspiracy, related to a January 8, 2023 riot by his supporters that he was found to have instigated.
Thus, small-d democrats anxiously hoping for Democrats to nominate better candidates and run a better campaign against Trump must come off the sidelines to make clear that in November, we are not choosing a leader; we are choosing the nation we will become. It is necessary, but not sufficient, for voters to hear this from Democrats; unless the media and other trusted non-partisan civil society institutions are forthright in affirming this fact, voters have no reason to believe that it’s anything more than the usual partisan squabbles.
Conclusion
I hope you can see that being clear about the stakes in this election is not a tactical recommendation; it is a prerequisite for preserving the freedoms we still have.
On his last podcast, responding to questions about his original post, Ezra Klein concluded by confronting his interlocutors with these powerful words (emphasis added):
It’s very easy to see from a perspective of people’s [Democrats’] individual incentives, how it would make more sense to stick with the Biden-Harris ticket, even if you don’t think the Biden-Harris ticket is going to win.
But … that is an abdication of duty. That is an abdication of what a party is supposed to do, and it is much more so an abdication of what a party is supposed to do when the party believes the other candidate is as dangerous as they believe Donald Trump is. … If you think Donald Trump is going to win, you have to do something about it. Otherwise, you’ve kind of just been lying to people and lying to yourself.
… well, then you have to ask yourself, “What are you here for? What is your job in this? What are you going to feel good about having done or not done on the other side of the election?”
Here, Klein asks exactly the right question, but to the wrong audience. If you believe that Trump is the danger we know he is, then not raising the alarm about that “is an abdication” of what a free press, faith leaders, community leaders, and democrats generally, are “supposed to do.” And if, on January 20, 2025, you are at home watching Chief Justice Roberts administer the oath to Donald J. Trump for a second time (an oath he will again ignore), well, then you have to ask yourself, “What are you here for? What is your job in this? What are you going to feel good about having done or not done on the other side of the election?”
January 6th Committee Report.
By “implicitly” I mean promising to appoint Federalist Society judges to the courts.
Based on the Catalist voter file.
In 2020, the share of non-voters who wouldn’t indicate a candidate preference dropped from a full third (33 percent) to just 15 percent. In other words, the experience of the four Trump years more than cut in half the share of non-voters who had no preference between Trump and the Democratic nominee (Biden or Clinton). And that shift very much favored Biden, taking the non-voter margin from Clinton +7 points to Biden +15 points. For more, see “Turns Out, Turnout Matters.”
The Electoral College Battleground states are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. See my “Electoral College Preview” for more. For convenience, shortened to “battleground states” in the rest of the post.
This post is a cold water shower and a very helpful alert. Thank you!
dims have failed to lead, to help build civil society as they have focused mainly on micro-data and fundraising the past 40+ years. shameful. it is up to citizens and small d democrats. we must rebuild civil society and make it better.