As Threats To our Democracy Become More Tangible, Stay Grounded in the Present

Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. I am traveling this week so there is no Q&A on Friday. We’ll meet on Sunday, Nov. 17, 8-9pmET.

Paying subscribers will receive a link to register for the Zoom call at 5pmET on Sunday. If you can’t attend, or the gathering does not work for your time zone, no worries: I send out a video of the first half of the conversation a few days later (exceptionally, I am not circulating the video of the Nov. 8 meeting. My light broke just before the Zoom and it is too dark. A version of my remarks follows below).

Our guest on Sunday will be Michael E. Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth & Environmental Science, and Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, and Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy and Action. His most recent book is Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from the Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.

If you’d like to join these informative weekly conversations, you can sign up as a paying subscriber or upgrade to paying here:

Today I am participating in a workshop at the University of California San Diego on political violence. It is organized by Barbara Walter, author of the bestselling book How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them. On Friday, I will be in Los Angeles, speaking at the Impact Guild forum on Democracy and Media.

In the weeks to come, we will discuss the nominees for Donald Trump’s cabinet, and what they tell us about the values, priorities, and intentions of the next administration. Here I will just mention the nomination of Fox News host Pete Hegseth to head the Department of Defense.

This choice to lead America’s armed forces has been received with dismay by many retired military leaders. Yet if the aspiration is to politicize the military, and sell a new domestic role for the military to the American people, who better than a smooth-talking weekend host of a network that is trusted by Trump’s base?

I am not assuming that the military would go along with this politicization. As always, though, I consider the decisions Trump & Company make through an authoritarian framework. What seems ludicrous from the standpoint of democratic values and norms makes more sense when viewed with authoritarian goals in mind.

On that note, I refer those seeking to understand the aims behind the dystopian “Department of Government Efficiency” co-helmed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to my very first essay for Lucid, “Drain the Swamp,” which I published in March 2021. It examines two myths that have propped up autocrats and aspiring despots for a century, focusing on their use by Benito Mussolini (the creator of the “drain the swamp” slogan), Vladimir Putin, and Trump.

The first is the idea of authoritarianism as an efficient form of government, and the second is the marketing of autocrats as reformers who will clean up corruption and crack down on crime. Far from cleaning up the country, “drain the swamp” campaigns have abetted corruption and have been used as an excuse to act against those who call out the lawlessness of the leader, his party, and the government.

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And now to the reflections I had in the days following the election. The central points are still valid, even as we learn more about this election. For example, it was closer than we initially thought, and the millions of Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but did not vote in 2024 were decisive in that outcome. “The story of the 2024 election may turn out to be the changes in who didn’t vote rather than those who did,” write Philip Bump and Lenny Bronner in the Washington Post.

Whatever those analyses end up telling us, I agree with democracy activist Eric Liu: "Not voting is voting—to hand power to others, whose interests may be inimical to your own," Liu contends in his book You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen.

A week out from the election, many are facing backward, focused on what went wrong, and on who or what is to blame for what happened. Many ruminate, incredulous, over the choices voters made. There were immigrants who voted for Trump, despite his threats of mass deportation, because they believed that if they had not personally committed crimes they would be excluded from the roundups.

There was also a robust Latino vote for Trump –journalist Paola Ramos has an excellent book on “the rise of the Latino far right”—a development that many non-Latinos struggle to fathom. And there were white women who voted for other women to have fewer rights and less bodily autonomy. How we got to this place, and how that fits within our national histories, is the subject of anguished reflection and inquiry.

Some of you have asked me if we ever really had a chance to win. And it’s true that an astonishing array of domestic and foreign forces were gunning for our democracy, and whenever I thought about the scale and scope of these attacks I felt a sense of dread.

The election also reflected powerful anti-democratic domestic developments: years of grievance politics, a concerted effort to delegitimize all of our trusted institutions and authorities, the strength of racism and misogyny, and a massive investment by Rupert Murdoch, Musk and many others in disinformation strategies designed to create an ignorant, misinformed, and easily manipulated populace. All of these elements will be institutionalized in the administration’s policies.

And that brings us to those who are consumed by the future. They are focused on what will happen in America and the world after Trump takes office, and what will happen to them as individuals. Will I be deported? Will I be beaten in the street? Will my social security and other benefits be taken from me? Some people are already making inquiries about leaving the country, or looking at how to protect themselves at home if they are a member of a targeted group, including LGBTQ people. It is pragmatic to be prepared, as long as fear of the future does not prove paralyzing to activities in the present.

Living fully in the present, embedding yourself more into your communities and living more fully the realities around us, is so important. So many of us want to do something, now, to lessen the coming blows at the local, state, national, and international level. One present-oriented action we can take is to support those officials who are standing up for the rule of law and preparing to contest and obstruct malfeasance and lawlessness in the future.

The Governors of Illinois and Colorado, JB Pritzker and Jared Polis, have just formed Governors to Safeguard Democracy, a nonpartisan alliance “to coordinate resources across state lines to protect state courts, elections and laws against encroachment from what they expect to be a hostile federal government,” as a New York Times article stated.

We can speak out in support of these and other initiatives, and elevate individuals such as Pritzker and Polis who are bravely stepping up to defend our rights. We can contact their offices and let them know we are cheering them on. They are our democratic heroes.

JB Pritzker, co-chair of Governors to Safeguard Democracy. Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times