What the Next US Presidential Election Is (Really) About

It’s Funny To Hear Trump Compare DeSantis to Hitler. But It’s Funny for a Reason.

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There are moments when watching democracies in peril becomes farce. Think of any number of dictators in self-styled commandant outfits, or, perhaps the way that Brexit Britain…chose self destruction. Yesterday was just such a moment. Ron DeSantis was finally to announce his bid for Presidency. With a little help from a new friend, the creepy billionaire who bought Twitter. Together, they were going to make an announcement that’d rock the world. Only, first, Twitter melted down. LOL. And then Donald Trump, the gorilla in the room — and that’s an insult to gorillas, our expressive cousins — made his own rebuttal, which was even funnier and weirder than…the spectacle of the world’s richest man helping America’s most disgraceful politicians try and hijack the nation and turn it into the Handmaid’s Tale.

“Hold your horses Elon, the real president is going to say a few words,” Trump said. Or at least an AI Trump voice did. “Devil, I’m going to kick your ass very soon. Hitler you’re already dead, Dick Cheney, it sounds like you’ll be joining Hitler very soon.”

LOLOLOL. Go ahead and laugh, my friends. That is every bit as bizarre and hilarious as it sounds. Did Trump just compare…DeSantis to…Hitler? Did he suggest that Elon Musk’s hanging out with the devil? Ahahah. That’s right, let it all out. De…vicious…licious.

The answer to those questions is: who knows? I mean, I think Trump just called DeSantis Hitler, which is funny on cosmic levels.

But let’s get serious. The 2024 election. What’s it really about? Let’s quickly decipher the above, and then come to the real meat of the issue. Trump’s suggesting that DeSantis is the “real” extremist here. In other words, he’s going to portray himself as moderate. Which makes sense, because most Americans don’t actually support DeSantis’s comic-book-villain-level- authoritarian agenda of book bans and preying on kids and investigating teachers. That’s nice, I guess, for the GOP, too, since it gives them a Good Cop Bad Cop routine, a charade of a feud which, American media being what it is, will make headlines about for…years.

That’s not what the 2024 election is about. Here’s what it is about, and I won’t mince words. Democracy versus autocracy. I mean that in formal terms, and harsh ones, too. There won’t be any coming back from this if America blows it, and America’s a lot — a lot — closer to the edge, that of losing its democracy, than it really understands.

Let me explain.

Way back in 2017, something happened that barely anyone even remembers. But it was as significant a moment for America as it was for the world. America got demoted. It was demoted from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy.” A profound moment — yet one that still goes unremarked upon. America was then the world’s largest full democracy. And now it isn’t. The world lost a leader, and America gave up something of its future.

What does all that mean, though, really? A full democracy is — the best example left is Canada. If you’re Canadian, thank your lucky stars, or your grandparents, or both. They bequeathed you this great gift. It’s exceedingly rare — less than 10% of the world, closer to around 5% of it, has ever enjoyed living in a full democracy.

A full democracy is just what it sounds like: it’s a place where institutions function, systems work, and democratic norms and values, of truth, justice, equality, and nonviolence are widely held and shared. There aren’t widespread abuses of power, corruption, system breakdowns, institutional dysfunction. In plainer English, problems like abuses of civil of rights, voter suppression, and basic democratic pillars like the rule of law, elections, and basic freedoms being attacked. A full democracy is a peaceful place, and it tends to be a good place. To live, to grow, to grow up, to grow old.

A flawed democracy, on the other hand, is just what it sounds like. One with widespread challenges and problems. Abuses of power. Abuses of rights. Voter suppression. Gerrymandering. Those foundational pillars of democracy come under attack — the rule of law, elections, representative governance, basic freedoms for all — as demagogues rise. And as people are radicalized by demagogues, the democratic values of truth, peace, justice, and equality come under attack, too — and society begins to destabilize. Big Lies, violence, brutality, and supremacy begin to replace them.

That was America during the Trump years, and it’s why indices of democracy — which is how we assess the health of democracies — had to downgrade America. Because it was flagrant, undeniable, obvious. America had stopped being a full democracy — and we can talk about, later, how its time as one was short, in truth, from the dawn of civil rights in the 70s, to the dawn of the Trump years, in the 2010s.