The Indictment of Donald Trump and the Battle for American Democracy

How Do You Defend a Democracy in as Much Peril as America’s?

Image Credit: Timothy A. Clary

Over the last couple of days, we’ve been talking about the indictment of Donald Trump. I want to offer a few closing thoughts — for now, anyways. How much does this matter? A great, great deal. To understand why, really, though, consider the context, which goes like this. America’s in a pitched battle — still — for the survival of its democracy.

In an irony that would’ve made Marx proud, America’s fanatics have learned to seize control of the means of democracy itself. They’re taking control of the basic workings of democracy from the bottom up. Fanatics contest school board seats, shouting death threats at teachers. In Wisconsin, a figure who was involved in putting forth fake slates of electors is now…in a heated race for sitting on the state Supreme Court. In Florida, of course, the laboratory of American extremism, Ron DeSantis has become an expert in decentralizing power, and handing it to fanatics, who are then able to ban books, words.

What was once a battle for American democracy from the top down has become one from the bottom up. State after Red State is turning dystopian, at light speed — banning everything from womens’ rights to LGTBQ rights. Parents and kids are scared. Teachers and classes are criminalized. There seems to be no end or bottom to this race. Vigilante paramilitaries. Tip lines. Shadow institutions, reminiscent of Gestapos and SS’s. And this contest is about taking inalienable rights — which belong to everyone — away.

This is an evolution in collapse. How did it happen? Because the top-down approach failed. Trump ascended to power, and then did his absolute worst — to the point that those of us who warned what was coming feared. As the Jan 6th Commission went on to reveal, there really as a “sophisticated plan” to “overthrow democracy,” right down to overturning the election, declaring it “null and void,” instituting martial law, and holding another one, under military surveillance. The stuff of dystopian fiction — and yet it came within a hairs’ breadth of reality.

And yet while many Americans hope that all that — the failure of a coup, after years of top-down attempts to corrode and overthrow democracy — would be enough to win this battle for it, it wasn’t. The fanatics haven’t given up. If anything, they’ve doubled down, in increasingly absurd ways. If I’d told you a decade ago that a figure who sent fake slates of electors to Congress was in shouting distance of winning a seat on a state Supreme Court — thus giving him the power to fully do it next time — you might have laughed at me. But this is where America is.