Democracy is at stake in 2024. Do voters care?
We know the stakes. The question is whether it matters.
Jay Rosen, a prominent media critic and journalism prof at NYU, has been promoting an interesting mantra for journalists as the 2024 election: “Not the odds, but the stakes.” The idea is that reporters should focus less on horserace coverage — the polls, who’s up and who’s down — but instead on what will happen to the country if Donald Trump wins the presidency.
Today is a good day for Rosen. Both the New York Times and The Atlantic are out today with hair-on-fire coverage stating rather explicitly that Trump’s election would be a disaster for democracy.
NYT:
Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason.
What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much his character as his surroundings. Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.As a result, Mr. Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.
The Atlantic is devoting an entire special issue to the topic. Here’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg:
It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.
The NYT in particular has often come under criticism that it has enabled Trump instead of opposing him. I don’t buy that. But it’s still right and good and true that both publications today are making the stakes of a Trump presidency absolutely clear.
Also: I’m not much sure it matters.
Part of it is a question of audience: I’m pretty sure that NYT and Atlantic readers already know that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, by and large, and that they agree it’s bad. The folks who need to hear it probably won’t, because they’re tuned in to Fox News or Newsmax, and because those channels wouldn’t tell them about the risk Trump poses because they’d lose viewers and that’s bad for business. It’s a vicious cycle that nobody has figured out how to disrupt. May be that’s not possible
But also, I have a fundamental belief:
Every 2024 voter was alive and presumably sentient on Jan. 6, 2021. I think the debate is not whether people know and understand that Donald Trump is an authoritarian who will destroy and upend democratic institutions. It's whether they're cool with it.
Forget all the talk of misinformation and “silos” and “bubbles.” If democracy is what we claim it to be — government of the people, by the people and for the people — then at some point the people are responsible for the choices they make. If you can see the violence of Jan. 6 and figure that it’s not a disqualifier for Trump — or choose to believe (falsely, wrongly) the feds caused it, or that Antifa did it — that is, fundamentally, a decision you’re making.
A lot of Americans, it seems, are willing to make that decision.
Hopefully it’s not so many that Trump ends up in power. But we don’t know yet, do we?
The truth is: I really want to enjoy 2024 Christmas 2023. Because I’m convinced that however this turns out, 2024 will be an ugly and violent shitshow in America. I hope we survive it.