A lot has happened in the last week. Donald Trump won an Electoral College and popular vote victory. Democrats in the Senate prevented the worst outcome, but still lost the majority. The House remains unresolved, but Democrats there too overperformed the top of the ticket.
Elections have consequences and an emboldened Trump White House is set to deliver those consequences on wide swaths of America. The policy implications are just the start.
Trump’s victory will reshape our society in ways we can only start to appreciate. Assuming he makes good on his promises, he will reshape the executive branch to be loyal to him, rather than the citizenry and the U.S. Constitution.
Immune from prosecution, he will weaponize the government against his perceived opponents. He will almost certainly convert the White House from an institution advancing the public good to one that maximizes private gain for Trump and his cronies.
These are difficult times.
Though I have been immersed in pro-democracy literature for years, in the days leading up the election, I learned a new concept for the first time: anticipatory obedience. The term was coined by Yale Professor Timothy Snyder. In his book On Tyranny, he wrote:
“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
This admonition took on urgency when the owner of The Washington Post decided, at the last minute, to scuttle the paper's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Democracy might die in darkness, but people noticed when one of the world’s richest men preemptively bent his knee to Trump before the election even took place.
In the days that followed hundreds of thousands of Post readers canceled their subscriptions. In contrast, pro-democracy news outlets, like Democracy Docket, saw their readership swell.
And it is not just Bezos who is learning how to bow and scrape. Since the election, other media, business and civic leaders have offered public flattery for the man they one condemned for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In many respects, the most important question in politics right now is…
