Adam Smith: Historian

A version of the following piece appeared in The Sunday Times, December 23, 2023.

It is one minute to midnight for American liberals. For them, the stakes in the 2024 presidential election are no less than the survival of democracy. The Colorado Supreme Court’s bold decision that Donald Trump is ineligible for the presidency because he supported insurrection is very unlikely to stand, but it reflects the view of millions of Americans that the threat posed by the former president poses is both monstrous and unprecedented. “Donald Trump is plotting to overthrow American democracy,” writes Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias, on his website Democracy Docket. “It is not a secret, and he is not subtle. The only question is whether enough people will care enough to stop it.” The Atlantic Monthly devotes its entire January issue to essays outlining the systemic, rolling crises that a second Trump term will generate. In US universities – most of them consumed with anti-Trumpism – political scientists hold conferences about “democratic backsliding” and publish papers warning that the US is on a downward spiral. In their new book, The Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt soberly note that they have “studied violent insurrections and efforts to overturn democracy all over the world… But we never imagined we’re see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the twenty-first century.” A distinguished historian of the Civil War era, Heather Cox Richardson, has become a media sensation with her warnings that the Trumpified Republican Party is re-enacting the authoritarianism of the proslavery Confederacy which tried to destroy the republic in the 1860s. Another historian, Yale’s Timothy Snyder, an expert in twentieth-century totalitarianism, sees an old European fascist playbook at work in the potency of Trump’s “Big Lie” — the straight-faced claim made without a shred of supporting evidence that he won the 2020 election.

Like academics, liberal journalists fret over the findings of multiple surveys indicating that American voters have not only lost confidence in institutions but are openly more sympathetic to authoritarianism than ever before, with, for example, four in ten agreeing with the statement that “things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction.”

And it is not just traditional Democrats who share the fear. In a long essay in the Washington Post, the neoconservative Robert Kagan, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, warns that “we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, wilful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy.” The arch-conservative Liz Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, who, as a congresswoman voted with President Trump 93 percent of the time, according to the calculations on the FiveThirtyEight website, has become an unlikely Liberal hero for breaking with her party to “defend the Constitution” from Trump. “Never Trump” Republican strategists who created the Lincoln Project to “save the Republic” in 2016 have once again ratcheted up their savage, doom-mongering attack ads.

It was Donald Trump’s supporters who coined the sneering phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” to describe the apparent psychic torment suffered by his opponents, incapable of understanding how such an obvious conman could con so many people. But the mental stress is real. In conversations over the last couple of weeks in such satirically liberal venues as the Harvard Club of New York City and a hot new restaurant in Washington DC, I was struck not so much by what people said but how they said it, with genuine anxiety that if Trump wins in 2024 nothing will ever be the same again. It will no longer be possible to imagine that 2016 was a freak result, that despite four exhausting years American democracy survived. No longer could they reassure themselves that “this is not who we are”—that the cruelty and crudity of Trump had awakened, in reaction, the better angels of America’s nature. After all, as Robert Kagan warns in his Washington Post piece, just imagine Tump’s mindset if he wins: “He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him.” Imagine the retribution that will follow, and the inadequacy of the institutional guardrails — Congress, the Courts, the old-fashioned “separation of powers”. In a vengeful second Trump term, there will be no “adults in the room”. No Rex Tillerson (who called Trump a “fucking moron”) as Secretary of State, nor even, as Chief of Staff, John Kelly (who said of his boss, “he’s the most flawed person I’ve ever known”). Stress levels are hardly assuaged by Trump’s characteristic attempt to flip the narrative, claiming that it is Biden who is a threat to democracy for “persecuting” him through the courts.

Every American who gets their politics from the main networks’ late night comedy shows can quote Trump’s seeming endless self-incrimination, such as his promise in an interview with right-wing pundit Sean Hannity to be a “dictator” if “only on day one”, or his Hitlerian vow in a Veterans’ Day speech to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country”. They all know that some of Trump’s supporters have plans to use the military to deport illegal immigrants and crush protests in Democrat-run cities. And they all earnestly recycle a famous quote by Maya Angelou: “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

The anxiety so palpable in liberal America this holiday season is a direct result of Trump’s strong polling. Far ahead of his Republican rivals, it seems as inevitable as anything can be in politics that Trump will have sown up the nomination by the beginning of March. And with no serious internal party opposition, that will mean that the only man standing between Trump and a triumphant return to the White House is President Biden whose political position is, historically speaking, astonishingly weak, not just for an incumbent but for any Democrat at this stage in the race since at least 1984—the Reagan landslide election which is not a happy precedent. Behind Trump in the national polling averages and, critically, in the swing states, Biden is even losing the support among young voters, African Americans and Latinos. Historically, polls this far in advance of an election have no predictive power, yet in an era of intense polarisation rising economic confidence or other extraneous factors seem less likely to sway voters. It seems unavoidably true that insofar as one can predict election outcomes in advance, a Trump win seems more likely than not.

To some degree, Democrats’ “bed-wetting” tendency — to use Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s graphic phrase — is compounded by knowledge of their own self-defeating missteps. Allowing Biden to run again, notwithstanding the historic advantage enjoyed by incumbents, is now widely regarded as a terrible error—yet one that it is now too late to do anything about. Biden’s laidback campaign seems to many to be woefully out of step with the gravity of the political threat. And lawyers’ efforts to defeat Trump in the courtroom rather than at the ballot box, however merited, do nothing but feed Trump’s persecution narrative, as the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling looks set to do.

It is hard to find precedents in modern times for the level of existential anxiety about the survival of democracy. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was worryingly extremist to some on the Left, but not to all. Veteran Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger chided the economist John Kenneth Galbraith for being so “agitated” at the prospect of a Reagan presidency, blithely assuring him that “tottering around in his seventies”, Reagan would be in the “do-nothing Eisenhower mode.” Going back further, many conservatives were terrified of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hugely expanded the power and reach of the Federal government, and the power of the presidency too. Some evangelicals thought him literally the antichrist. Yet Roosevelt’s sunny disposition—like Reagan’s—won him big popular majorities which blunted the charge of authoritarianism.

Go back further into American history and a recurrent pattern emerges: confidence in the greatness of the American promise is, paradoxically, often shot through with anxiety about its apparent fragility. In the 1820s, the rise of Andrew Jackson — a duelling, slaveholding military strongman, bristling with a course frontier masculinity – seemed to his opponents to signal not the end of democracy (for the early Republic was hardly democratic) but of the delicate constitutional order with its protection of liberty. Just as republican Rome had been “enslaved” by Caesar, England by Cromwell, and France by Bonaparte, Jackson would “light the funeral pile of our liberties”. Benjamin Franklin was reported as telling a Philadelphia lady outside the constitutional convention that the framers had made a “republic—if you can keep it.” For George Washington it was a “great experiment”, always teetering on the brink of collapse. To many, Jackson was the republic’s Nemesis. Defeated in a contested election in 1824, he nursed his grievance for four years before winning, triumphantly, in 1828.  After which, many of his opponents’ worst fears came to pass. The new president was an institutional arsonist who destroyed a perfectly functional national bank based on conspiracy charges, encouraged mob violence, and mobilised outsiders against “the swamp” in Washington. Pursuing the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Americans from the Southwest, Jackson ignored court orders and relished the outrage among North-eastern liberals. During Jackson’s tumultuous presidency, many of the survivors of the founding generation became glumly convinced that “our constitution cannot last”.

If Jackson’s opponents, as anxious to defend the old order as today’s liberals, were wrong in their predictions of a complete constitutional collapse, they were right that nothing would ever be the same again. Jackson’s presidency frayed the rule of law, fostered violence against minorities, and made America more demagogic. Trump’s first term also looks likely to have made a lasting imprint, even if only in terms of political style. A second term would surely be vastly more consequential.

Even so, from an ocean away, even with the immediacy of social media, it is easy to see the most extreme liberal anxieties as hyperbolic, even grandiose. (“Protect the Republic, daughter”, former Vice President Dick Cheney apparently told Liz “with steel in his voice” as she returned to Washington last year to defy her party and denounce the January 6^th mob as insurrectionists.) But nothing lasts forever, and one day the forms of the US’s venerable constitutional edifice, with its genuflections to the wisdom of the eighteenth-century ‘founders’ and its dangerously overloaded presidential powers, will somehow come to an end. I have more faith in the vibrancy of American civil society, and even in the workings of the creaking political system, than do the darkest doom-sayers, but there seems no doubt that 2024 will test the resilience of American politics to breaking point—and, too, the mental health of millions.