AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/dispatches/how-trump-victory-in-2024-differs-from-2016
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2016 and 2024
We will be a fundamentally different country by the end of the next Administration. Indeed, we already are.
by Jelani Cobb
November 7, 2024
The New Yorker
Photographs by Natalie Keyssar for The New Yorker
This article is part of a series of reflections responding to the 2024 election. Read more »
Eight years ago on Election Night, as the returns came in from North Carolina, where I was reporting, I made a panicked phone call to a friend. I told him that I feared the country was sliding into the hands of a demi-fascist, and that it might even be time to start considering an exit plan. My life, like those of many Black people of my generation, was shaped not by the brutality of segregation, as my parents’ lives had been, but by the success of the battles of the nineteen-fifties and sixties to uproot it. The prospect that a Presidential candidate could be embraced not only by white supremacists but also by one of the two major political parties and almost half the electorate triggered an enduring dread that the progress we had made was fragile and impermanent—and that, with the right incentives, the old order could resurrect itself in the present.
By the end of that late-night phone call, though, we had sorted through the “guardrails” theory of the various checks and precedents that would constrain Donald Trump. The advantage of the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal government is that it takes a brilliant level of orchestra-conducting to achieve anything significant—a skill set that a mercurial, chronically uninformed career real-estate developer did not likely possess. It was to be presumed that the Republican establishment, craven and increasingly reactionary but on the whole more sound than its presumptive leader, would curb Trump’s impulses, or at least dangle enough distractions in front of him to keep him from focussing for too long on any truly destructive goal. The press and the courts would be the redoubt of democracy; they were designed precisely for such a moment.
Conversations like ours took place across the country in the shocked first days and weeks after the 2016 election. The difference between those conversations and the ones that began on Tuesday night is that we can no longer rely on the guardrails theory. Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be rationalized as the product of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the nihilistic pivot of around a hundred thousand voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters in state after state decisively chose Trump, who has become more autocratic and belligerent, building a popular-vote advantage for a man now wholly unfit to hold office. He has grown more maniacal over the years, and now he is a maniac with a mandate. It is chilling to observe the landscape of possibilities before him—and us.
Journalism is as eager as it ever was to perform its essential accountability function, but it is also impaired by financial struggles, declining trust, and disruptive new technologies. More ominously, the decisions of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to cancel their papers’ planned Presidential endorsements suggest that journalists may face complicated impediments even within these news organizations. The courts represent a more consequential and compromised situation: unlike in 2016, the federal judiciary is now stocked with more than two hundred Trump appointees, whom he selected in overtly politicized ways. And any semblance of restraint within the ranks of the G.O.P. establishment vanished long ago. In the coming Administration, the executive branch will likely be staffed by acolytes who will co-sign Trump’s worst and most random pursuits. The decision of Kamala Harris’s campaign to invest heavily in appealing to anti-Trump Republicans and to showcase Liz Cheney’s support was a product of bright-side thinking—of an optimistic belief that the ranks of the G.O.P. were not entirely lost and that at least a meaningful minority of the Party sees and understands the danger that Trump represents. That thinking was wrong.
Eight years ago on Election Night, as the returns came in from North Carolina, where I was reporting, I made a panicked phone call to a friend. I told him that I feared the country was sliding into the hands of a demi-fascist, and that it might even be time to start considering an exit plan. My life, like those of many Black people of my generation, was shaped not by the brutality of segregation, as my parents’ lives had been, but by the success of the battles of the nineteen-fifties and sixties to uproot it. The prospect that a Presidential candidate could be embraced not only by white supremacists but also by one of the two major political parties and almost half the electorate triggered an enduring dread that the progress we had made was fragile and impermanent—and that, with the right incentives, the old order could resurrect itself in the present.
By the end of that late-night phone call, though, we had sorted through the “guardrails” theory of the various checks and precedents that would constrain Donald Trump. The advantage of the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal government is that it takes a brilliant level of orchestra-conducting to achieve anything significant—a skill set that a mercurial, chronically uninformed career real-estate developer did not likely possess. It was to be presumed that the Republican establishment, craven and increasingly reactionary but on the whole more sound than its presumptive leader, would curb Trump’s impulses, or at least dangle enough distractions in front of him to keep him from focussing for too long on any truly destructive goal. The press and the courts would be the redoubt of democracy; they were designed precisely for such a moment.
Conversations like ours took place across the country in the shocked first days and weeks after the 2016 election. The difference between those conversations and the ones that began on Tuesday night is that we can no longer rely on the guardrails theory. Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be rationalized as the product of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the nihilistic pivot of around a hundred thousand voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters in state after state decisively chose Trump, who has become more autocratic and belligerent, building a popular-vote advantage for a man now wholly unfit to hold office. He has grown more maniacal over the years, and now he is a maniac with a mandate. It is chilling to observe the landscape of possibilities before him—and us.
Journalism is as eager as it ever was to perform its essential accountability function, but it is also impaired by financial struggles, declining trust, and disruptive new technologies. More ominously, the decisions of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to cancel their papers’ planned Presidential endorsements suggest that journalists may face complicated impediments even within these news organizations. The courts represent a more consequential and compromised situation: unlike in 2016, the federal judiciary is now stocked with more than two hundred Trump appointees, whom he selected in overtly politicized ways. And any semblance of restraint within the ranks of the G.O.P. establishment vanished long ago. In the coming Administration, the executive branch will likely be staffed by acolytes who will co-sign Trump’s worst and most random pursuits. The decision of Kamala Harris’s campaign to invest heavily in appealing to anti-Trump Republicans and to showcase Liz Cheney’s support was a product of bright-side thinking—of an optimistic belief that the ranks of the G.O.P. were not entirely lost and that at least a meaningful minority of the Party sees and understands the danger that Trump represents. That thinking was wrong.
There are other equally challenging concerns. In the years since Trump lost the last election, he launched a coup attempt, became a defendant in four criminal cases, and was convicted (so far) of thirty-four felonies. In the past few months, he has spread increasingly unhinged misinformation and racist lies, made lewd comments and gestures, and spewed offensive and obscene language. None of these actions prevented his popularity from expanding in multiple electorates across the country; they may even have facilitated it. Stunningly, Trump fared better in New York City this year than he did in 2020. The questions that confront the Democratic Party are gigantic and existential. Following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, strategists hypothesized that a new electorate was emerging, one that was forward-looking and egalitarian, comfortable with people from backgrounds different than their own. The catastrophic losses in 2016 and 2024 call this idealism into question and also highlight how wildly unlikely Obama’s success actually was. Both Hillary Clinton and Harris were eminently qualified for the Presidency, and neither ran flawless campaigns—no one does. But it is also inescapable that some portion of the blame for those losses is tied to the identities of the candidates.
The outcome of the election has also turned a new spotlight on crucial moments in the past. At the conclusion of the last election, Trump incited an attack on Congress to prevent the certification of the results, which led to him being impeached for the second time. The cowardice of Senate Republicans—who, having been evacuated from the Capitol building as a Trumpist mob advanced, nonetheless refused to convict Trump—was a catastrophic abdication that directly enabled this moment. It never should have come to this.
We will be a fundamentally different country by the end of the next Administration; indeed, we already are. Vice-President Harris, in her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday, said, “I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but, for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case.” Given what we already know about Donald Trump, it is all but certain that it will be. I awoke the morning after the election thinking not of the battles that supplanted segregation but of what people must have felt at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that enshrined it. The difficult lesson in that history is that, although further progress is possible, we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. We believed that we had broken with history, but it is apparent that history has, in fact, broken some part of us. ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “Unchecked, Unbalanced.”
The outcome of the election has also turned a new spotlight on crucial moments in the past. At the conclusion of the last election, Trump incited an attack on Congress to prevent the certification of the results, which led to him being impeached for the second time. The cowardice of Senate Republicans—who, having been evacuated from the Capitol building as a Trumpist mob advanced, nonetheless refused to convict Trump—was a catastrophic abdication that directly enabled this moment. It never should have come to this.
We will be a fundamentally different country by the end of the next Administration; indeed, we already are. Vice-President Harris, in her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday, said, “I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but, for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case.” Given what we already know about Donald Trump, it is all but certain that it will be. I awoke the morning after the election thinking not of the battles that supplanted segregation but of what people must have felt at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that enshrined it. The difficult lesson in that history is that, although further progress is possible, we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. We believed that we had broken with history, but it is apparent that history has, in fact, broken some part of us. ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “Unchecked, Unbalanced.”
https://www.semafor.com/article/11/15/2024/democratic-turnout-plummeted-in-2024-but-only-in-safe-states
Democratic turnout plummeted in 2024 — but only in safe states
by David Weigel
November 15, 2024
Semafor
Politics
North America
by David Weigel
November 15, 2024
Semafor
Politics
North America
Megan Varner/Reuters
The vast majority of votes from this election have been counted, with just a few million ballots outstanding in western states. Total turnout is on track to fall just short of 2020, well ahead of some observers’ expectations on Election Night, when conspiracy theories about more than 10 million “missing Biden voters” flourished among Democrats.
Harris will win fewer votes than President Joe Biden did four years ago — but the decline was significantly steeper in safely red or blue states than in swing states. Where there was no national campaign spending on turnout, and where voters knew that they were unlikely to change the outcome, Harris ran further behind Biden.
In the 43 states (and D.C.) where neither campaign invested resources, there was an average 8-point shift toward the Republican ticket. In battleground states, the shift was 3 points.
The Harris campaign’s desperate strategy, of reconstituting a Biden coalition with fewer non-white voters and more college-educated white voters, came close to working — she lost by less than 2 points in the decisive Rust Belt states and only a little more in Georgia.
In four swing states, Harris was even able to win more raw votes than Joe Biden did four years ago: Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Adjusted for population growth, that didn’t mean much in the first three states, and Black turnout was disappointing enough to Georgia Democrats that Sen. Jon Ossoff is calling for a change in party leadership. But there was no overall decline in Democratic votes.
There was one in uncompetitive states. Trump ran stronger with non-white voters in big cities than any Republican nominee in decades. That performance looks even stronger because so many Biden voters, in places where they knew she would win, didn’t come back for Harris.
Harris won Illinois by just 10 points, the smallest win margin for a Democratic presidential candidate in 20 years. As of Friday morning, Trump had added just 29,532 votes to his 2020 total, but Harris had run 514,017 votes behind Biden. In Chicago’s Cook County, the Trump electorate grew by just 12,448 in four years, while Harris earned 350,524 fewer votes than Biden.
That didn’t happen in Milwaukee, a short drive (or Amtrak ride) north. Democrats poured resources into turnout, into a place where voters expected (and got) their third consecutive presidential election decided by less than 1 percentage point. Trump added just 3,827 votes, after holding the RNC in Milwaukee itself; Harris ran just 1,271 votes behind Biden. In Madison’s Dane County, Trump improved by 6,655 votes, but Harris improved, too, winning 13,833 more votes than Biden. And because Trump improved more dramatically over his 2020 performance outside of cities and suburbs, he narrowly won the state.
He did even better in some states he didn’t win. Trump’s gains in New York were driven by two things — more votes from non-white New Yorkers in the five boroughs and their suburbs, and a steep decline of Democratic votes. In New York City itself, Trump added 95,594 votes from 2020 to 2024. One in four of those new votes came in the Bronx, a testament to his breakthrough with Latino men.
But the Democratic fall-off was more dramatic. Harris won 573,622 fewer votes in the city this year than Biden did in 2020. That wasn’t just about traditional Democrats switching to Trump. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers opted not to support Harris, some leaving the top of their ballots blank.
Notable
In the New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall looks more deeply at the constituencies that moved away from Democrats: “Republican success or failure in building a more durable coalition will depend in large part on how the public reacts to the policies adopted during Trump’s second term.”
In Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, J. Miles Coleman examines the races where there were significant gaps between voters’ presidential choices and their down-ballot choices. “In blue counties, Senate Democrats performed better than Harris, while the reverse is true in red counties.”
