There is this story from the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
When it ended, Ben Franklin walked out of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to find
this anxious crowd.
And there was a woman from Philadelphia who was the first to speak to him.
And she asked "Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
And Franklin’s reply is really famous: "A republic,” he said.
“If you can keep it."
If we can keep it.
We have lost something Franklin had: a sense that this is an experiment, and it can fail,
things can, truly go wrong.
And I think one lesson of Trump is we need to rediscover that catastrophic imagination,
because there is a big flaw at the center of America’s democracy, and Trump found
it, and he used it, and other people are going to find it and use it too.
This election is close.
Close enough that something small could have completely thrown it — if Trump were just
a bit more self-disciplined, if he hadn’t bragged about sexual assault while wearing
a microphone, if Clinton’s pneumonia had lingered a bit longer, America would be ruled
by a cruel narcissist with authoritarian ambitions.
And when I say authoritarian ambitions, I mean it.
One of the truly important things we’ve learned about Trump is that he he admires dictators
for being dictators.
He was asked about Vladimir Putin, and said:
"He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country."
"Yeah but again, he kills journalists that don't agree with him."
About North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, he said:
He goes in and he takes over, he's the boss. It's incredible."
And here Trump was on Saddam Hussein:
"He killed terrorists.
He did that so good.
They didn't read them the rights."
The thing to note there is it’s not just that Trump admires authoritarians.
What he admires about them is that they are authoritarians. He likes that they dispense
with niceties like a free press, due process, and political opposition.
Trump has promised to bring this perspective to America.
He says he’ll jail Hillary Clinton if he’s elected.
He wants to strengthen libel laws to make it easier to cow the press.
During rallies, he pushed his followers to assault protestors, and promised to
pay their legal fees if they get arrested.
Imagine someone like that with the power to pardon.
So even if we dodge the bullet, we still need to understand how it is that we as a country
came to be standing in front of a gun.
It would’ve been no surprise to the Founding Fathers that Americans have proven susceptible
to the charms of a demagogue.
In Federalist 10, James Madison wrote that
“Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue,
by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests,
of the people.”
That is Founding Father speak for, "yeah, demagogues are appealing."
They can win elections. And then they can betray the very people who elected them.
That’s why we have a representative government, not a democracy.
It’s part of why the American presidency is so weak.
They always saw the popular will as a point of failure, a weakness.
And it is credit to the long success of the political institutions they created that we
think dangerous men can only win elections in far-off lands.
But what’s happening here, what's happening now is that our institutions are weakening.
And that’s where we have to turn to understand Trump.
To our institutions.
Donald Trump did two things to get this close to the presidency.
The first was that he won the Republican primaries.
The second is that after winning the primaries, he united the Republican party behind him.
These are not the same thing, even though they're often conflated.
Trump only had 13.8 million votes when he won the Republican primaries.
The distance between those 13.8 million votes and the more than 60 million votes he's expected to
get in the election is vast.
In 1972, for instance, George McGovern won the Democratic primary even though much of
of the Democratic Party hated him.
Major Democratic interest groups, like the AFL-CIO, refused to endorse him in the general
election, and top Democrats, including former governors of Florida, Texas, and Virginia,
organized “Democrats for Nixon.”
McGovern went on to lose with less than 40 percent of the vote, a dismal showing driven
by Democrats who abandoned a nominee they considered unacceptable.
A similar path was possible for Trump.
Top Republicans viewed him with horror.
"This man is a pathological liar. A narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen."
"Donald Trump's candidacy is a cancer on conservatism,
and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded."
"Donald Trump is a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag.
A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president."
And then every single one of those Republicans endorsed Donald Trump.
So did Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell
It is not surprising with this kind of elite support that Trump managed to get Republican-leaning voters behind
him.
The final NBC/WSJ poll of the election found that 82 percent of likely Republican voters
were supporting Trump — a precise match for the 82 percent of likely Democratic voters
supporting Clinton.
There are two things to say about this.
The first is moral.
There are many Republicans who honestly believe Trump would make a good, or at least adequate,
president; their endorsement of his candidacy is perfectly honorable, even if I think it
wrongheaded.
But many of the Republicans mentioned here believe Trump is a threat to world peace and
to fundamental norms, values, and institutions of American democracy; their endorsements
of his candidacy will stain their careers, and if he is elected, and if the
worst comes to pass, they will be remembered by history for their abandonment of country.
But the second thing that needs to be said here is structural.
And, believe it or not, that’s where it actually gets scary.
Here is the single most important sentence for understanding both Trump’s rise and
this dangerous era in American politics:
That sentence comes from political scientist Julia Azari, and her point is this: Parties, and particularly
the Republican Party, can no longer control whom they nominate.
But once they nominate someone — once they nominate anyone, even Donald Trump — that person is guaranteed
the support of both the party’s elites and its voters.
Let’s look at that in two pieces.
First, how did parties lose control of their primaries?
Primaries used to not matter that much...party officials made the decisions
that counted at the conventions, where they had almost total control.
But we’ve moved in recent decades towards primaries, they're more democratic,
they give voters more of a voice.
That's made parties and party officials less important.
But one way parties kept influence in primaries was through money.
Party organizations, they signal to party donors which candidates to back, who to take seriously.
But money turned out to be much less important to winning primaries than anyone thought — just
ask Jeb Bush, who spent $130 million only to be humiliated, even as Trump spent almost
nothing to win.
Similarly, parties used to drive media attention by signaling to reporters which candidates
to take seriously.
But that process has also democratized — just look at Trump’s twitter feed, and how it
can drive news coverage on its own.
But the most important thing parties have is the trust of their voters.
That’s why endorsements matter...They represent party officials using the credibility they
have built with their supporters to tell them whom to vote for.
Trump didn’t have any Republican endorsements of note until he had already won a bunch
of primaries.
And that arguably helped him — it was proof that he really was untouched and untainted
by the unpopular Republican establishment.
That Republican elites have so totally lost the faith of their base that their efforts to
persuade Republican voters were ignored at best and counterproductive at worst
is a tremendous failure of the Republican Party.
So that's how the party loses control of its primaries.
But then there's a puzzle: If partisans have so little faith in their party,
then why are they so much likelier to back whomever their party nominates?
The answer, in short, is fear and loathing of the other party.
In 1964, 31 percent of Republicans had cold, negative feelings toward the Democratic Party,
and 32 percent of Democrats had cold, negative feelings toward the Republican Party.
By 2012, that had risen to 77 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Democrats.
That is a lot more anger and fear toward the other party.
Today, fully 45 percent of Republicans, and 41 percent of Democrats, believe the other
party’s policies “threaten the nation’s well-being.”
This fear is strongest among the most politically involved.
Which makes sense: You're more likely to take an active interest in American politics if
you think the stakes are really high.
But that means the people driving American politics — and particularly the people driving
low-turnout party primaries — have the most apocalyptic view of the other side.
The angrier and more fearful partisans are, the more of a market there is for media that
makes them yet angrier and yet more fearful.
It is no accident that the CEO of Breitbart News, a hyper-ideological conservative media
outlet that specializes in scaring the hell out of its audience, is leading Trump’s
campaign.
One reason Trump has been able to unite Republicans is that Republican-leaning media has convinced
itself, and its base, that the alternative to Trump is a literal criminal who belongs in jail.
This offers a rationale for voting Republican even if you don’t particularly like your
candidate: a majority of Trump voters say they are voting against Clinton rather than
for Trump.
This helps explain the unified party support for Donald Trump.
Republican officeholders are terrified that if they don’t support him, or are seen as
in any way contributing to Clinton’s election, they’ll face the wrath of their conservative
base.
So here, then, is the key failure point in modern American politics, and observing it
in action requires looking no further than the Republican Party: Voters’ dislike of
their own party has broken the primary process, but fear of the opposition has guaranteed
unified party support to the nominee.
That means whoever manages to win a flawed competition dominated by the angriest, most
terrified partisans ends within spitting distance of the presidency.
Elites are often blamed for Trump’s rise — he is said to be the backlash to their
failures, their corruption, their obliviousness, their self-dealing, their cosmopolitanism,
their condescension.
All that may be true, but past moments in American politics have also featured angry
voters, out-of-touch elites, and social problems.
Those moments, however, featured political and media gatekeepers with more power, and
so Trump-like candidates were destroyed in primaries, or at conventions, or by a press
that paid them little mind.
Now, however, traditional gatekeepers have neither the power nor the cultural capital
to stop Trump-like candidates.
And in the Republican Party, where the collapse of institutional authority is most severe
and most dangerous, the aftermath of a Trump loss will further weaken the party’s center,
Trump’s supporters are going to turn on the Republican Party officials whose tepid backing
they feel doomed their candidate.
Sean Hannity has already called Paul Ryan a “saboteur.”
The country is on a fast path to becoming majority minority, and many white male voters
will continue to perceive this change as a loss in both status and political power, which,
in some ways, it is.
Now it's not to say Republicans will always, or even routinely, nominate candidates as
dangerous as Trump.
Much had to go wrong for him to be nominated.
The lesson of this unnerving year is that less can be taken for granted than we thought
— the American people are not immune to demagogues, and the American political system
is too weakened to reliably stop them.
America, like all the world’s other countries, is vulnerable to catastrophic political failure.
It can happen here.
Trump is a crude and undisciplined demagogue.
But we need to remember:
The world also produces clever, disciplined demagogues.
And they are the ones who truly threaten republics.