Since I wrote my first post calling for a different kind of response to Trumpism, two trends have saturated the news: First, Democrats have, in their gerrymandering tit-for-tat led by California governor Gavin Newsom, accelerated a form of “fighting back” against Trumpism that I described as momentarily satisfying but ultimately wrong-headed and morally vacuous distraction. Second, the Trump administration has leaned further into authoritarianism, perhaps casting doubt on my label of Trump only “cosplaying authoritarianism.” Meanwhile, I’ve received feedback that the elaborate metaphor animating my post was distracting. In this post I’ll restate the main ideas, filter the latest news through them, and make my prescriptions more concrete.

For the Trump administration the month of August featured sending red-state National Guardsmen into Washington D.C., under the pretext of “cracking down on crime,” and threatening to make blue Chicago next in line for federal invasion. The administration has also stepped up its targeting of perceived enemies, including arranging an FBI raid of the home of former Trump national security advisor and published Trump critic John Bolton, and declaring the (probably illegal) firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, under trumped-up charges of mortgage fraud – the same kind of allegations previously leveled at J6 committee chairman Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Anti-Trumpists, ranging from grassroots protestors to journalists, historians, and academics on authoritarianism, continue to raise the alarm about the U.S.’s descent into authoritarianism. Another quiet development I find noteworthy is what Chris Armitage calls blue states’ “Soft Secession”, a combination of creating a parallel system of mutual aid and withdrawing cooperation from the federal system. Whether Armitage’s reporting is accurate or not, such a response would be very sensible. Politics is a game for managing social cooperation and if the rules are bent beyond recognition, the most natural consequence is for the aggrieved side to take their ball and go home – not necessarily permanently, but just as a reminder that everyone benefits when everyone plays nice.

The biggest noise from the resistance, however, has come from Newsom’s all-caps MAGA-trolling tweets and push to retaliate in kind for Texas’s mid-decade redistricting. Both seem to have generated excitement among Democrats for “fighting back” and repaired Newsom’s image with progressives (which had been damaged by him hosting far-right guests like Steve Bannon on his new podcast earlier in the year). But Newsom’s retaliatory gerrymandering has serious problems, an important one being that it is not all that retaliatory. True retaliation is supposed to act as a deterrent, causing the aggressor to rethink their aggression. But parties want to gerrymander, as it makes elections less competitive; it’s equivalent to sellers in a market colluding to give each their own exclusive turf instead of competing with one another. California’s mirroring of Texas, for all its performance of outrage, functions as agreement, welcoming even more gerrymandering. Newsom could have chosen methods to actually deter Texas. For example, as described in a piece by legal scholars Matthew Seligman and Aaron Tang (paywalled), California’s independent redistricting commission’s mandate could have been amended so that gerrymandering elsewhere, by either party, would automatically trigger a countering adjustment, making it self-defeating on the dimension of the national balance of power. The Texas legislature could still gerrymander, but only to screw over their own voters interested in real choice during congressional elections. Seligman and Tang’s proposal is not rocket science; it would be surprising if Newsom’s staff were unable to come up with such alternatives. I welcome explanations for his choice that might dispel my cynicism.

The bigger problem, however, is that even if we accept Newsom’s “retaliation” at face value as the only way to restrain an unfair Republican advantage in the House, it still doesn’t rise to meet the threat of a nation slipping into autocracy. Sure, gaining a small Democratic majority in the midterms would be better than nothing. But it is still just a business-as-usual response to what everyone keeps saying is an unprecedented threat to American democracy. It is continuing to play the game, the opposite of taking their ball and going home.

Believing in democracy means believing that it is not a mere preference: the alternatives are dystopian, such that, when given the opportunity, a large proportion of the people forced to live under them would willingly suffer enormous costs to overthrow them and reestablish conditions in which democracy can work. In fact, the pain of autocracy and restoration is considered to have a galvanizing effect that can rejuvenate a failed democracy. If power has been seized by an authoritarian, as anti-Trumpists keep saying, an appropriate response would be to adopt a kind of founder’s mindset for making democracy work, not just for the next election cycle, but the next generation.

Many Trump voters have expressed, even with ambivalence, their hope that voting for Trump might trigger a reset away from a status quo that anti-Trumpists also believe to be unsatisfactory. Because talk is cheap, there is a lot of noise in this signal. It would be entirely appropriate to deride such “radical deconstructors” as being, at best, ignorant of the costs of destruction, or worse expecting them to be paid by those far more vulnerable than themselves. However one may feel about the morality of such a gambit, though, we should acknowledge the enormous potential for rebuilding stronger in the aftermath of Trumpism. All that’s lacking is an anti-Trump willing and capable of seizing the opportunity.

The recent trend of “democratic backsliding” in places like Turkey and Hungary, though, has been for elected autocrats to maintain zombified democratic institutions, in an attempt to arrest the cycle of democratic collapse and renewal. The most visible part of the strategy for staying in power is writing into the rules an unfair structural advantage, one that a committed opposition might theoretically overcome. A less visible part is leaving the old opposition intact but frozen in whatever unpopular form opened the door for the autocrats’ initial rise to power. The new, improved “autocracy lite” avoids applying selective pressure on the opposition that would help it evolve into an effective insurgency, popular and competent enough to overcome the structural advantages of the autocrat. The national Democratic Party is playing the role of domesticated opposition.

There is no need to prove a case of Democrats acting in bad faith. Under normal circumstances politics is a game for managing cooperation under conditions of partial disagreement, not a revolutionary battlefield. There is nothing in the workaday political process that selects for the required founder’s mindset; on the contrary, the normal process should select against radical ambition. Unfortunately, the environment with high polarization, gerrymandering, and the absence of effective restriction on money in politics selects for candidates that can fire up their donor-voter base by feeding deluding messages casting every election as an apocalyptic final battle against the enemy on the other side. The best way for a candidate to pull off the act is to authentically believe it. Thus we end up with an opposition that thinks it’s holding the line against autocracy while colossally failing to exceed the opportunity cost.

If enough blood were shed to defeat autocracy, it would be obviously ludicrous for the victors to then propose an election (in the name of democracy) but aim for only a bare majority against candidates from the regime they had just violently ousted. Why spill all that blood to risk ending up in the same position, under the power of the autocrat? After winning militarily, a victorious pro-democracy opposition would have to build, temporarily, a much broader coalition willing to endorse constitutional reforms and other lasting measures to prevent authoritarianism from gaining a foothold.

But how high a blood-price ought to be required? After the shock of January 6th, if anti-Trumpists had known that a second impeachment attempt and multiple indictments, including one felony conviction, would only lead right back to another Trump presidency, I think it’s safe to say most would have demanded a more drastic approach, not shrugged their shoulders and accepted the present as the product of a healthy democratic process. If constitutional reforms and other last measures are required to prevent from gaining a foothold after a military defeat, it would be even better to build that broad coalition for a non-violent electoral victory.

As with so many protracted conflicts, the obstacle isn’t the lack of agreement about the significant parts of a desirable outcome (“establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”). It’s the fear that disarming will be met by treachery from the other side. Gerrymandering is a great example: no one thinks it’s a good thing in the abstract, but under the belief that the advantage is necessary to prevent the enemy from gaining the upper hand and doing unspeakable evil, gerrymandering is accepted. Reforming the Supreme Court is another example that could draw broad appeal if the Roberts majority’s hostility to the interests of the not-ultra-rich (such as its obstruction of sensible limits on money in politics, which affects majorities in red and blue states alike) could be separated from its positions on culture war issues. The political obstacle to reform is that conservative voters believe that the court is the most reliable defender of their interests in the culture war. That obstacle could be overcome by leaders with the credibility to broker a truce on key culture war issues, such as abortion.

The party system is not currently capable of doing this kind of founding work – neither has the necessary credibility with reasonable voters on the opposing side nor with the wary and disillusioned middle. The current Republican Party, being in Trump’s pocket, has no political interest in such work, and so the onus falls on the Democratic Party, which talks about wanting to preserve democratic norms, to drop the pretense that firing up the base and squeezing donors can get it done and make room for a process that can.

Aside from the problem of the Democratic Party’s obstruction, the challenge is in testing leaders for a true anti-Trump opposition that, while not encumbered by the Democratic Party’s commitments, are not mere neophytes and opportunists. A Democrat railing against Trump is not being tested, only doing what’s expected. But Trump has applied selective pressure on the Republican Party, which has revealed many to put loyalty to country above the party (as proven by their ouster from the party). The fatal flaw with the Democrats trotting out Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 election is that they got the priority wrong. The value of Cheney and Kinzinger was supposed to be credibility: they had already proven their ability to put country above party, and so their endorsement of Harris was considered to be meaningful to skeptical voters. But they were mere side-show props for a presidential candidate who hadn’t herself proven her true worth. An opposition that was serious about defeating authoritarianism and driving for institutional renewal would elevate figures like Kinzinger and Cheney into the position of deciding if and how someone like Harris could be helpful to the cause.

Cheney and Kinzinger are just examples of leaders that might be revealed by the testing mechanism. There are many others in the candidate pool: federal employees who have jeopardized their careers by defending the integrity of the institutions they serve from Trump’s onslaught, for example. Outside of politics, people who have routinely put themselves in harm’s way, such as in the armed forces or as first responders, also deserve the benefit of the doubt as prospective leaders of a reform-oriented political movement. For completeness, it’s worth mentioning that even picking people at random off the street could produce better representation than the status quo that rewards loyalty to partisan labels and the ability to raise campaign funds.

To summarize, old-school authoritarianism selectively breeds, through oppression, rebellions with battle-tested leaders focused on destroying the oppressive regime, not scoring points with a narrow base. Electoral autocracy wins by keeping the opposition domesticated and focused on traditional irresolvable divisions. While the maintenance of elections means there is still a non-violent route out of the authoritarian trap, making use of it demands reforming the opposition from one used to firing up a partisan base in a small margin “ground game” to one capable of overwhelming the autocrat’s structural advantages, and then instituting meaningful reforms to address the structural weaknesses that opened the door to authoritarianism in the first place.

The pattern isn’t getting Democrats and Republicans to work together again, any more than it is to get Democrats to ‘fight back’ against Republicans; it’s to build a coalition around conservatives and liberals whom most people can trust not to collude to screw us all over.