Can You Imagine? Democracy’s Enemies Can.

On democracy, its opponents, and the limits of our vision

Last week, Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last made a bleak argument (even by his admittedly dark standards). In “If Trump Wins, He’ll Run for a Third Term. And the Republican Party and Supreme Court Will Let Him,” Last highlights an essay in The American Conservative calling for a third Trump term, and explains why supporters of U.S. Constitutional democracy should be alarmed:

“If Trump wins this election, he will attempt to run again in 2028. You can take that to the bank. Likewise, it’s a mortal lock that Conservatism Inc. will come up with various rationalizations for why Trump should be permitted a third term…And the Republican party, too, will acquiesce to this desire, as they have not only at every turn, but with increasing alacrity. At which point the Supreme Court will be asked to step in and enforce the Twenty-second Amendment. And everything we’ve seen to date suggests that they will be loath to take any action that might be interpreted as thwarting the democratically expressed will of (some of) the people.”

The piece caused an uproar on both the pro- and anti-anti-Trump right. Dave Reaboi declared it fantasy. National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin compared Last to the partisan conspiracy theorists of The Gateway Pundit.

And yet, what Last is asking of us is what so many have failed to do in the near-decade since Trump’s ascent: imagine things we’ve told ourselves are so unprecedented, so outlandish, as to be impossible. Then imagine they could happen. 

An attempted coup. Alternate Electors loyal to Trump. Armed partisans fighting law enforcement on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. All of this happened. I was among those in 2020 whose imagination was too limited to correctly assess the danger. Trump would reject defeat, I assumed. But what tools did he really have to prosecute that case? He had, as ever, the tools of the strongman: corrupt officials willing to distort the system from within and paramilitary loyalists ready to assault it from without. And so January 6 came. 

Excessive faith in normalcy keeps many Americans from considering the darkest scenarios.

“He won’t do that.” (Why not?)

“Even if he does, they’ll stop him.” (Who’s “they”?) 

For anti-anti-Trump, denialism and partisanship are the blinders. They don’t want to confront what the Republican Party has become, so they tell themselves that liberals and Never Trumpers are overreacting. 

But while some look the other way, America’s new anti-liberals are actively imagining an authoritarian future, and developing the means to bring it about.

Dark Futures

Trumpism requires that we think fantastically. This is not so easy. Even for many pessimists, it is difficult to truly contemplate disastrous outcomes. Humans tend toward status quo thinking, and it’s emotionally strenuous to worry about a plausible but avoidable plunge into a darker, more uncertain future. Many authoritarian-minded actors, however, are happy to theorize scenarios anathema to the liberal democratic life we now live. And they are mobilizing in service of Trump’s bid for the White House—and what will come after. 

Calling for a third Trump term, Peter Tonguette argues that if, “by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?”

Calling to smash not only precedent but Constitutional constraints is becoming more common on the “New Right.” In November 2021, Adrian Vermeule, one of the leading lights of Catholic integralism and its “postliberal” politics, wrote a long piece of invective against the status quo pessimism of the traditional right, asserting: 

“In my own lifetime, the hard-headed realists are precisely the people who have been most repeatedly and flagrantly wrong about the rigidity of current political arrangements, coalitions and constraints; they have been systematically blind to the fluidity of politics. The realists never imagined that the Soviet Union could fall, until it did. They were confident that same-sex marriage would never become the law of the land, while today the Supreme Court, having gone far beyond same-sex marriage, reads federal law to protect rights of gender identity. They were absolutely certain that Donald Trump  could never be elected, until he was.”

Gladden Pappin, another integralist, urges the right to look past frail liberal ideas about legitimacy. “With liberal democracy failing and alternatives needed, who is to say a king wouldn’t be a necessary reformer?” Pappin asks. 

Others share Pappin’s appetite for power, and determination to apply it against the enemies of the right. In a 2022 essay for The Federalist entitled “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives,” John Daniel Davidson excoriated traditional conservatism as a “failed project” and echoed Pappin’s call for a new direction:

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. 

Davidson’s grisly vision calls for total abortion bans across the country, without compromise, likening the post-Dobbs moment to Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery. He rebukes conservative columnist David French for supporting the free speech principles that allow Drag Queen Story Hour, and says such events should be outlawed. As for gender-affirming care, Davidson has a harsher remedy in mind: “doctors who perform so-called ‘gender-affirming’ interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked.”

But we don’t have to restrict ourselves to integralists like Vermeule and Pappin or culture war mavens like Davidson. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a prime example of what the new right-wing establishment envisions for a second Trump era. In the Project 2025 playbook, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, hardliners like Paul Dans and Ken Cuccinelli lay out a map for entrenching Trumpian power. In the foreword, Heritage president Kevin D. Roberts writes:

“Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgender-ism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries…This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.”

The plan, and the paranoid, agitated mindset behind it, line up with Davidson’s arguments, not with a conservatism inside the boundaries of normal liberal democratic politics. But it is a vision.

The Trumpian right is brimming with designs for a less free, more inward looking America. 

Individual policy entrepreneurs for authoritarianism abound. Last week, South Carolina congressional candidate Pastor Mark Burns said he wants to create a HUAC-style committee to go after those engaging in “LGBTQ indoctrination.” Donald Trump has endorsed him. 

Absurdity Is An Asset

Authoritarianism in America is not wanting for either inspiration or zeal. But that often manifests as clownishness to the outside observer, leading them to underestimate the danger.

It is not just our inability to contemplate the continued destruction of the status quo that limits us. It’s our innate tendency to mock the absurd rather than meet it. But because absurdity is integral to many authoritarian projects, this distracts us from the malevolence. 

As scholar of fascism and strongmen Ruth Ben-Ghiat told Tim Miller last week on The Bulwark Podcast, Silvio Berlusconi—possibly still the best analogue for Trump—deployed his buffoonery as a shield: “He never gets taken seriously because being a clown was part of his distraction from his corruption.”

As Ben-Ghiat and other scholars note, the absurdity and pomp of aspiring authoritarians works to restrict our thinking. It makes us less likely to really consider the worst possibilities, and keeps us focused on the churn of crackbrained, but often engrossing stories, as well as the seductive glow and clownish charm that belie the malice underneath.

In many cases, that malice is directed at LGBTQ+ individuals. Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came up through the ranks of the post-fascist National Alliance and was appointed to her first ministerial post as part of the fourth Berlusconi government after the 2008 election. So a campaign soundtracked by the ridiculous tune of “Thank Goodness for Silvio” helped position Italy’s current far-right leader to reach the heights she now enjoys.

Meloni’s government has been hostile to same-sex couples, attacking adoption rights and undermining surrogacy access. Ben-Ghiat emphasizes strongmen’s common tendency to persecute LGBTQ+ people: “For a century, the gender politics of authoritarianism has relied on the toxic triad of hypermasculinity, misogyny, and homophobia, which have worked together to devastating effect.”

Constraining these freedoms is part of constraining society’s ability to imagine for itself. Anti-pluralism is a shackle on our sense of what we can do and who we can be.

Little surprise, then, that attacks on supposedly degenerate art and design are also common among authoritarians, with some even fetishizing “traditional” architecture. 

Anti-liberals are on the march in Ron DeSantis’s Florida and other red states, banning books and cracking down on speech, pursuing a more closed society. We need to imagine what those forces will do if they gain national power with a lawless president at the head, and not get distracted by the buffoonery. Consider, even now, how many Americans dismiss the threat of a national abortion ban by pointing to the tabloid-quality ludicrousness of Trump’s sex life. 

We cannot be caught unawares because we were unwilling to take the enemies of liberal democracy seriously and literally. We must face the potentially disastrous consequences of failing in the struggle for a free, fair, and open society. Because it can be lost.