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Make Contempt for Democracy Uncool Again

February 2, 2024February 9, 2024 bklinger

For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other. -Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Trump is marching towards the Rubicon with his army of followers, and it is up to us to stop him.

Some believe that a Trump triumph is inevitable.  They have seen too many already, first a cartoon character taking over the Republican Party, then a hated figure winning the White House, and now a former president cruising towards a second nomination 3 years after the nation watched his mob’s televised attack on Congress.

But remember, we also saw him marching towards re-election in 2020, still loved by those of his supporters who had not been killed off by the coronavirus, facing a Democratic Party that was picking its candidate by a process of elimination.  He loudly marched straight into defeat.

An unnerving thing about Trump’s popularity is how steady it seems. The graph is from FiveThirtyEight, which averages many public opinion polls. After a very brief honeymoon at the beginning of his first term, when his approval-disapproval was 45-42, polls have been putting him at roughly 40-55; through tearing kids from their mother’s arms, shaking down the president of Ukraine, presiding over half a million covid deaths, trying to leverage a mob attack to overturn the election, and hiding secret documents in his bathroom.

Perhaps once you have trained yourself to believe Trump about the size of his inauguration crowd instead of all those pesky cameras, you will believe anything Trump says.  Was the Trump-endorsed, Trump-supporting Georgia Secretary of State lying when he said that the claims of massive election fraud were definitely false? “Of course he was, he must be one of THEM.”

But if we look a little closer at the numbers, they are not as rock solid as  they  first appear.  His net popularity (percent people voicing approval minus percent disapproving) plunged to -15% by summer 2017, bottomed out at about -18%, rose to -12% by 2019 and nudged up a bit to almost -10% in 2020.  At that point he lost to Joe Biden by 4.5% of the popular vote and 74 electoral college votes.

Then came January 6.  As I watched his followers swarm over the Capitol steps, I thought “at least this is finally the end of Trump,” and indeed his net popularity instantly dropped to -20.   The shock was that it was almost back to -12 by summer. It dropped again during 2022, and then rose during the last months of 2023 to -10.5, about where it was in 2020.

A lot of Trump supporters and Trump opponents are unmoveable, but someone has been changing their mind about him.

The Trump polls don’t tell us who will win the election, because Biden’s poll numbers are also bad, and it’s not clear how the election will be affected by turnout or by the intricacies of the electoral college. However, we can see that Trump’s “constant” [un] popularity has had swings of 5 or 10 points.  If the election catches Trump on a downswing and Biden on an upswing, Trump will probably lose.

What can we do to help?

Push the Overton Window Back

The Overton window describes the range of ideas that are acceptable to enough of the population to be embraced by a significant number of politicians.  Starting a riot because you lost an election used to be firmly outside the window, but now… not so much. We need to push the window back.

Why did the Overton window for political behavior move so radically? As mentioned in my previous post, I think at least part of the reason is the growing hostility of big parts of the country – overlapping groups of rural, conservative, White working class, and xenophobic Americans – to liberals, various minorities, and credentialed experts telling them what to do. If you believe the other side is willing to lie and cheat in pursuit of policies that are destroying the country, then you may be more amenable to lying and cheating to save it. 

The anger that the Trump base feels towards the rest of America is fanned by conservative media which has been working diligently to neutralize the horror that even many who voted for Trump felt after January 6.  They have had some success. But that does not mean that we should resign ourselves to America not caring about democracy.  Even those supporting Trump after his obvious attempts to steal the election say they believe in it. Democracy is stitched into the DNA of our country, and I believe it is still something that more than 50% of the electorate believe in. So if there’s anything that we need to move the Overton window on, it’s the centrality of what Trump did:

Donald Trump is Unfit to Be President Because He Tried to Overthrow the Government.

A dangerous feedback loop has been helping anti-democratic forces. The Trump base threatens to depose any Republican politicians who stand up to Trump. Therefore Republican politicians are afraid to call out Trump’s actions. This normalizes Trump’s attempted election steal. If people are treating him like a normal politician, then using a mob to try to reverse an election you lost is just another issue, like inflation or tariffs. 

Tactics

Democrats have tried to counter this normalization with the January 6 Hearings in Congress, the occasional Biden speech, and other efforts.  Much of the media, including some conservative media, are also raising the issue.  But we need to reach people who aren’t necessarily watching the news.  This is such a central issue that we need a mass movement to take a stand.  We need ordinary people standing on every corner, as well as on the internet equivalent, reminding people that Trump violated standards that we all say we agree on. 

That won’t convince many who have sworn allegiance to their leader, but it will affect some. More importantly, it could change the tape playing in many people’s heads from “They’re both bad, Trump is outrageous but Biden is kind of old” to “Biden is kind of old, but Trump tried to overthrow the government.”

A mass movement has to have actions to organize around.  “Don’t vote for Trump in November” does not involve any immediate ask. I suggest calling the movement the Pledge for Democracy and a goal of it should be to get people to sign the following pledge:

The immediate goal is to get as many people as possible to sign the pledge.  It gives people something to ask of others.  The pledge is easy to understand and emphasizes a simple message. Asking people to sign it allows a conversation about the facts of the 2020 election and more generally about Trump’s sociopathic corruption and contempt for truth. It gives media an opportunity to present this viewpoint as news (“Group Pledges to Not Vote for Trump Supporters”). The specific purpose of the Pledge is to pressure Republican politicians to renounce Trump.

The Pledge has the benefit of moving the Overton window without staking out a radical position.  If Trump tried to overturn an election, it is not radical to say no one should support him.  But the embrace of Trump by Republican voters means that Republican candidates mostly face pressure to kowtow to Trump. Even Nikki Haley, who is partially campaigning as the anti-Trump, can’t bring herself to say she would not vote for Trump – even a Trump convicted of crimes! The Pledge is a way to focus more attention on the Party-wide betrayal of democracy. Of course, if a candidate for US Senate, mayor, or state legislature should be shunned for backing Trump, obviously ordinary people should not vote for him either.

In 2020, Biden won 60% of the vote from 18 to 29 year olds. Turnout among this group, over 50% according to polls, was around 10 points higher than in 2016. Recent polling also shows an astonishing shift from Biden to Trump, perhaps in part because people on the left are frustrated by Biden’s unwavering support for Israel and perceived lack of progress on other issues. These voters are probably least emotionally attached to Trump and most persuadable. Of course, Trump is even worse on many issues that would drive parts of the left away from Biden. However, it’s simpler to make the case against Trump based on his threat to democracy than to have a discussion about Middle East Policy.

Fundamentals

Nothing in my proposal precludes other approaches to the election. If there are specific strategies that are likely to work better in one or more swing-states, I hope that people implement them. I will contribute to groups that will work in different ways to arrive at a better election outcome.

In addition to the tactical reasons for organizing around a Pledge for Democracy, there are more fundamental ones.  If Americans are willing to follow a lying demagogue who tries to stay in power after losing elections, we really are lost as a nation.  Unlike other countries with a tribal or imperial genesis, the United States was founded on the ideals of the Enlightenment – rationality, freedom of thought, and the rights of humanity. If there is one thing that can spark a feeling of shared patriotism, it’s our belief in those ideals. America often fell short of those ideals, but over the years, we have improved.  Electing someone with a demonstrated contempt for democracy would be a giant step backwards. 

While it is imperative that an opponent of Trump get 270 electoral college votes in November, it is also important that his attack on democracy is rejected by as large a majority of the electorate as possible.

As discussed in my earlier post, a wide range of frightening scenarios could emerge from blind trust in Trump and its underlying disaffection. We don’t know which, if any, will actually occur, or what new demagogues the dictator-curious will support next. For all the scenarios I mentioned earlier, the more Americans reject Trump on principle, the better.  Whether we are talking about the ballot box, opinion polls, fundraising, or more dire necessities, it is important to shore up the opposition to the Trumpists and reduce the potential number of Trump’s passive collaborators. As Timothy Snyder presciently wrote (in 2017), “in abnormal times, when the political system as they understand it is shaken and transformed, they can express consent to these changes without being aware that they are doing so.” We need to reduce consent to the possibility of dictatorship.

Some Details

Graphs based on Fivethirtyeight data:

• During Trump administration: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
• Post-administration https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

Portrait at top of page: Thomas Paine, advocate for basing government on Enlightenment ideals, whose pamphlet Common Sense helped inspire the Declaration of Independence.