I'm wondering how soon this prosecutor will be another good German, executing the prerogative laws of the dual state.
The interesting thing about post-Nazi Germany is how few lawyers were disbarred or convicted of crimes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dua...

Did Maria swallow that?

It's taken a generation (at least) to destroy trust and it will take a generation to rebuild it.

Yes, I absolutely agree with this. This isn't something that merely process or procedure reform can grapple with. We have to articulate a common set of values that can undergird this effort.

And I strongly believe that even that will not be possible without an intentional effort to build trust.

One thing that's often overlooked is that what underlies civil society, and thus the maintenance of democracy is people with character and courage -- those are something that is built--formed over time. Values aren't just fungible, it's important to advocate compassion & honesty as essential.

And a substantial part of my concern here is that I think a lot of elites are operating under the assumption that these democratic institutions will simply click back into place post-Trump.

I do not believe that will happen.

I am grateful to @zeit.de for giving me the space (about 2,500 words) for such a deep dive.

I’m hoping to make an English version available via my own newsletter, Democracy Americana, soon.

If you’re interested in such long-form explorations, please subscribe:

If and when Trump leaves the scene, the country will still face a dauting task: Who can channel the disruptive political energies of a society in which the established institutions have lost the people’s trust into a (small-d) democratic direction?

However, both major parties are vastly unpopular, and trust in established institutions has been declining massively.

America is not experiencing a realignment as much as it is going through a de-alignment of the established order.

Among Latinos, for instance, support for Trump is concentrated heavily among protestants, and especially evangelicals – and among those who favor a strict anti-immigration policy and generally regard the prospect of a pluralistic, liberal society very skeptically.

We do see a sorting of the non-white electorate according to identity and ideology – something that has shaped the white electorate for decades. But that doesn’t mean Trumpism as a political project isn’t defined by a reactionary ethno-national vision for America.

Almost everyone with a high level of racial resentment tended to vote for Trump in the 2024 election, regardless of educational attainment. Conversely, those with a low racial resentment score tended to support Harris, whether they had a college degree or not.

Amon white people, the correlation between racial resentment and their vote is much, much stronger than between educational attainment and political alignment.

In fact, if you control for racial resentment, education polarization basically disappears.

The tribune of the poor, the downtrodden? Studies clearly indicate that Trump’s most ardent supporters, especially in poorer areas, are, by local standards, quite wealthy / financially stable. Economic anxieties are mostly downstream from anxieties over racial and cultural status.

Lots and lots specific empirical information, plenty of links to studies and surveys in my piece.

We now have a really solid empirical base for most of these questions. Those who cling to disproven, implausible myths often do so because they find them politically useful.

In this piece, I tackle three building blocks of the misleading “realignment” narrative: The idea that U.S. society moved right in accordance with the broader outlines of Trumpism’s vision; that Trump is the tribune of the working class; that he is building a stable multiracial coalition.