I get why it’s hard to see Trump as anything other than the singular threat. We’ve been conditioned to see politics through the democracy–fascism binary, where he’s the villain and everything against him is “saving democracy.” But that framing obscures the bigger story. My work tries to expose this.

Trump isn’t the “end” of American democracy, he’s a symptom of decades of bipartisan erosion in a system that was already failing most people. Treating him as the endpoint turns a structural crisis into a single-villain story, and that story lets the deeper rot go unchallenged. That is my argument.

What I'm really disturbed by and what few are talking about is how Democrats have been gerrymandering for years and now are using rhetoric of war and the American project to grab more power, by making seats safer for them. We cannot let them off the hook for that.

The trouble is, once that power is consolidated, Democrats rarely use it to expand economic democracy or materially improve people’s lives. Instead, they stabilize the same broken order of austerity that helped create the crisis. Calling this a defense of democracy risks gutting the term entirely.

I don’t deny the authoritarian strain in the GOP. But the liberal political and media class has an incentive to cast Trump as an unprecedented fascist, b/c it turns politics into “democracy vs. dictatorship” and lets them justify power grabs like gerrymandering as acts of noble necessity.

And before anyone comes at me for being naive or not understanding politics, please read the article. I go through the major arguments being made in favor of this and try to dispel them.

I was just made aware of this by an excellent article by @evelynquartz.bsky.social!

quartzevelyn.substack.com/p/what-eliss...

So it’s either a project that remains deeply undemocratic or fails due to its unpopularity with the people. As citizens and voters who care about justice and economic equality, we have to understand this for what it is and demand something better.

You see, my concern is that it's not the authoritarianism they hate; we already have a soft version of that. But the aesthetic betrayal that Trump represents. Trump peels the mask off the "respectability" of elite governance.

Suspended civil liberties, eviscerated privacy, and militarized the homeland

Used a crisis (9/11) to consolidate executive power and criminalize dissent

Oversaw the largest transfer of wealth to defense contractors and oil companies in modern history