Great essay to remind us about the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies. The 2026 midterms could be a huge victory for democracy. But we have to vote! And encourage others to do the same.
People think political cynicism protects them. What they don't often realize is that the line between "I know better than to expect better" and "I don't deserve better" is thinner than it looks.
I get really upset by the left-leaning folks in my orbit who claim 'both sides are corrupt' and are likely either not voting or part of the two percent voting for fringe third party candidates.
Schrodinger's cat was originally an argument against superposition! Because a cat is obviously alive or dead, even if you don't know which one it is. In the years since, people have lost the original meaning and now use it as a valid example of superposition.
You’re right but the reason it became an explanation is everything points to that being how quantum superpositions behave. E.g, since the double slit experiment shows the particle going through both routes unless we measure it (collapse the wave function) beforehand, the cat is indeed both alive and dead.
Schrödinger was a smart man who was wrong and the analogy is being used appropriately given what we now know. I hope your pet peeve is quelled.
(The specific point the thought experiment falls apart is that superpositions collapse upon interaction with non-quantum matter regardless of we measure it or not. I.e. the sensor for the particle collapses that wave function instead of the wave function spreading to the macro system.)
((Of course saying what happens to things we don’t measure is the same as claiming trees falling in a forest make a noise regardless of who’s listening. The entry of philosophy is where you get some crazy theories.))
Thank you for articulating this so clearly. Look no further than Snyder's "do as I say, not as I do" position when contemplating the decline of trust in elite academia.
I have so much instinctive sympathy for the people who are fleeing-- I have a couple of friends among them, in fact, and I've spent plenty of obsessive hours figuring out how and whither I would get my family out "if it came to that". And for those who are direct immediate targets, like brown-skinned immigrants or trans people, I can't in good conscience question their decision at all.
But for the rest, I have to ask: how safe do you think your refuges will be if the Trump regime succeeds in consolidating American authoritarianism? We know they actively want to side with Russia and China in supporting far-right, anti-liberal populist movements around the world: the National Security Strategy made that plain. How much do the fleeing folks want to bet that, in a world where the biggest and most powerful nations are all fascist dictatorships, their chosen boltholes will hold out?
This New Yorker article, on Americans fleeing to the Netherlands, is a good example. The expats there know Geert Wilders exists, and agree that he's bad, but don't really process what's likely to happen to them or to Europe if people like Wilders take over the EU:
Canada is of course even more vulnerable because it's right next to the US.
So to my mind, it's not just that we have a moral duty to stay and fight if we can: it's that our long-term practical interest in stable free institutions is better served by staying and fighting.
A clear and correct statement. The professor who famously said “don’t obey in advance” jumped up and ran out of the country long before it was lost. I understood his advice to mean people should fight to keep their rights and their country, not disappear as soon as there are clouds on the horizon and look out first for yourself.
The problem isn't Trump per se, it's the majority of the American electorate that looked at his lawless, anti-democratic first term capped with an attempted coup and eagerly voted for more of the same. THAT is what has me thinking about how to position my kids for a future in Canada. As you say, authoritarian regimes still need the will of the people to stay in power. Well here in the US we have half of the polulace that looked at the child separation policy and said 'more please'.
Trump is old and getting older by the day. He won't be around forever. The real problem we have isn't one loud asshole, it's all the people who are getting exactly what they wanted when masked ICE agents terrorize cities. I know quite a few of these people intimately. They are well-to-do, educated, and think of themselves as 'nice', upstanding citizens. These are the people who are a terrible threat to our democracy, and there are enough of them to win national elections.
Important technical point - there has never been a majority of the electorate that voted for Trump. In his first two races he lost the popular vote, and even in 2024, he only won the popular vote 49.8% to 48.3%, with nearly 2% voting for third parties. It’s possible that if you count his support from non-voters, he might have had majority support, but that’s at best speculative.
From my perspective it's speculative to split hairs saying 'sure, he won a majority of the vote, but there are other people out there who could have voted'. It's true, it depends on your definition of 'electorate', I was using it to mean the people who voted in the last presidential election. I'm aware that we don't have 100% turnout but nobody was unsure what we were getting from Trump. As close to 100% of the potential voters in the USA went into the last election understanding what it would mean for him to win and a majority of the people who voted decided that they would vote for the person who attempted to overturn the last election & ran on the promise to target big cities for mass depotation campaigns. That's the problem.
You misread what I wrote. I said that he has *never* received a majority of the votes. *Maybe* he gets a majority if you include non-voters. But among voters, Harris plus third parties beat him. He never once got an actual majority. Just 49.8%.
Ah, gotcha, he ticked just under 50% in the final tally. That's not really material. The point I was making is that Trump isn't the problem, he's just an asshole who attempts to appeal to the worst human impulses. The problem is the millions and millions of Americans who want more of what he's selling. Like I said, I'm close to several (family) and it's chilling. They are educated and well-to-do and what they want is the power to trample people who are different than them. It's a hideous ideology that the press has long made excuses for rhapsodizing about the left-behind working class etc., but the core is affluent, connected people who desire deference and control above all else and are very happy with the ends Trump is using to that means. They'd like him to go farther. There are a lot of them and they won't magically go away when Trump inevitably dies of old age.
The only things abnormal about the 2025 elections were the exceptional amount of backlash against the Trump administration, and the election of relatively conservative Democrats in places that won’t ever vote Democratic in a national or statewide election. Which was normal before 2012. This suggests that 2026 will be more of the same.
I think we will, in 5-10 years with hindsight and more information, see 2025 as a series of avoided flashpoints that could have rapidly unspooled, or at least significantly weakened, American democracy, but didn't. I think liberals do ourselves a disservice by disregarding fears that the system will fail because we so strongly believe that it will work - even when we're right. If we've had to learn and re-learn one political truth, it's that people don't like being told that everything is actually okay. The great existential threat to liberalism is simply that a significant number of Americans do not view their country's government as a fully functional liberal democracy, whether it manifests as voting for Trump or genuinely fearing Trump might successfully tear down American democracy. Same coin.
The prevailing fatalism regarding the state of our democracy mirrors a specific psychology found in financial markets. There is a distinct 'reputational asymmetry' in forecasting. In finance, the person long the market often sounds like a cheerleader, while the short-seller sounds like a physicist. The pessimist sounds sober, rigorous, and 'above' the delusion of the crowd.
This negativity acts as a perfect reputational hedge. If you predict authoritarianism and you are wrong, you get to say 'I am so glad I was wrong' with zero penalty. But if you argue for resilience and the worst happens, you are memorialized as the naive fool who did not see it coming. Cynicism is the low-risk, high-status position.
This creates a political version of the 'Keynesian Beauty Contest.' In this economic theory, investors do not pick the stock they think is best, but the one they think everyone else will pick. Right now, the consensus among the intelligentsia is that it is 'smart' to be bearish on American democracy. Demsas is essentially pointing out that the market for democratic cynicism is potentially overbought.
The danger is that these predictions are not harmless, since the fatalism is itself depriving institutions and communities of the will they need to meet the moment.
“We tend to conflate fatalism for intellectual depth. Dooming is smart, and pointing out all the ways things are going wrong is a great way of signaling that you’re a Serious Person Who Gets It”
Ah this is such a pet peeve of mine. It first irritated me in sports - the people that love to be the first ones to say “the game is over” or “the season is over”. Now social media is full of political doomers, and if you point out how much progress we’ve made and how great things are in relation to human history, well you’re soft headed or in on the take.
i think for most people, their decision to obey this far in advance betrays a lack of either 1) perspective, 2) courage, or 3) imagination. or all three.
i've made a deliberate choice stay abreast of the issues while continuing to believe in and hope for a way through—largely because i don't see the point in the alternative.
There isn’t a single point at which “we” win or lose. It is a succession of additional persecutions aimed at different groups, starting with the most vulnerable and easy to “other.” It is a movement that depends on enemies, and it will keep finding them. No one knows when or if their group will be targeted. If leading thinkers on transitions to dictatorship are right (Snyder; Ziblatt $ Levitsky, Applebaum), and we are rapidly moving along that path, we could have a MAGA regime in place beyond 2028 (not necessarily through fair elections). Without a critical mass of courageous Republicans standing up against it that could happen. Academics who criticize Trump and MAGA-ism will eventually be targeted. I know several academics who can afford to do so who have exit plans in place, and I don’t condemn them for it.
Despite his many assumptions of power, Trump himself is merely the figurehead of an administration whose authority relies on the *indirect* support of a cult, whose members have been persuaded by and kept in line by a constant exposure to propaganda, from both mass and niche media. It's the influence of Trump's cult which has persuaded the Republican Party to support Trump *directly*, and it is only with their permission (and through their authority) that he's able to exercise power.
Trump's support therefore features many points of failure, any of which could be exploited to an extent which would transform the cosplay strength he enjoys presenting, into the optical illusion which it actually is.
There is no SA, no Chancellor Brüning, no Franz von Papen, no president Hindenburg, no Reichstag fire, no Enabling Act. This is not 1933. Not yet.
If we are in Weimar, then the year is closer to 1920 and Trump is closer to a man called Wolfgang Kapp, who attempted to overtake the Republic by force — only to see his gestures rejected by the German masses, who staged a general strike which demonstrated to Kapp that the power he had assumed, existed only in his own mind.
If this were Prussia, then the departed Yale professors would be like facets of Frederick the Great, who famously fled the Battle of Mollwitz in 1741 following the failure of a cavalry charge. He did not return before his army was able to defeat Austria later that day, securing Silesia for his kingdom.
Running away from the battlefield of a winnable fight is cowardly and embarrassing. Announcing your intention to do so in advance is akin to desertion.
We should all be fighting against the possibility of fascism by continuing to undermine Trump's authority from below. This means luring his support base — made up from many erstwhile liberals — away from seduction by his lies, and toward leaders whose policies are designed to promote a healthy society, rather than false personal identifications with race or with "nation". Threats of such a loss will weaken the Republican Party support upon which Trump's real authority directly relies, pushing him out of the spotlight, and off the public stage. Where he belongs.
Great essay to remind us about the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies. The 2026 midterms could be a huge victory for democracy. But we have to vote! And encourage others to do the same.
People think political cynicism protects them. What they don't often realize is that the line between "I know better than to expect better" and "I don't deserve better" is thinner than it looks.
I get really upset by the left-leaning folks in my orbit who claim 'both sides are corrupt' and are likely either not voting or part of the two percent voting for fringe third party candidates.
Schrodinger's cat was originally an argument against superposition! Because a cat is obviously alive or dead, even if you don't know which one it is. In the years since, people have lost the original meaning and now use it as a valid example of superposition.
(Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine)
You’re right but the reason it became an explanation is everything points to that being how quantum superpositions behave. E.g, since the double slit experiment shows the particle going through both routes unless we measure it (collapse the wave function) beforehand, the cat is indeed both alive and dead.
Schrödinger was a smart man who was wrong and the analogy is being used appropriately given what we now know. I hope your pet peeve is quelled.
(The specific point the thought experiment falls apart is that superpositions collapse upon interaction with non-quantum matter regardless of we measure it or not. I.e. the sensor for the particle collapses that wave function instead of the wave function spreading to the macro system.)
((Of course saying what happens to things we don’t measure is the same as claiming trees falling in a forest make a noise regardless of who’s listening. The entry of philosophy is where you get some crazy theories.))
Thank you for articulating this so clearly. Look no further than Snyder's "do as I say, not as I do" position when contemplating the decline of trust in elite academia.
I have so much instinctive sympathy for the people who are fleeing-- I have a couple of friends among them, in fact, and I've spent plenty of obsessive hours figuring out how and whither I would get my family out "if it came to that". And for those who are direct immediate targets, like brown-skinned immigrants or trans people, I can't in good conscience question their decision at all.
But for the rest, I have to ask: how safe do you think your refuges will be if the Trump regime succeeds in consolidating American authoritarianism? We know they actively want to side with Russia and China in supporting far-right, anti-liberal populist movements around the world: the National Security Strategy made that plain. How much do the fleeing folks want to bet that, in a world where the biggest and most powerful nations are all fascist dictatorships, their chosen boltholes will hold out?
This New Yorker article, on Americans fleeing to the Netherlands, is a good example. The expats there know Geert Wilders exists, and agree that he's bad, but don't really process what's likely to happen to them or to Europe if people like Wilders take over the EU:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/how-to-leave-the-usa
Canada is of course even more vulnerable because it's right next to the US.
So to my mind, it's not just that we have a moral duty to stay and fight if we can: it's that our long-term practical interest in stable free institutions is better served by staying and fighting.
Wild. I haven’t seen you since the days of Google+. Small world.
A clear and correct statement. The professor who famously said “don’t obey in advance” jumped up and ran out of the country long before it was lost. I understood his advice to mean people should fight to keep their rights and their country, not disappear as soon as there are clouds on the horizon and look out first for yourself.
The problem isn't Trump per se, it's the majority of the American electorate that looked at his lawless, anti-democratic first term capped with an attempted coup and eagerly voted for more of the same. THAT is what has me thinking about how to position my kids for a future in Canada. As you say, authoritarian regimes still need the will of the people to stay in power. Well here in the US we have half of the polulace that looked at the child separation policy and said 'more please'.
Trump is old and getting older by the day. He won't be around forever. The real problem we have isn't one loud asshole, it's all the people who are getting exactly what they wanted when masked ICE agents terrorize cities. I know quite a few of these people intimately. They are well-to-do, educated, and think of themselves as 'nice', upstanding citizens. These are the people who are a terrible threat to our democracy, and there are enough of them to win national elections.
Important technical point - there has never been a majority of the electorate that voted for Trump. In his first two races he lost the popular vote, and even in 2024, he only won the popular vote 49.8% to 48.3%, with nearly 2% voting for third parties. It’s possible that if you count his support from non-voters, he might have had majority support, but that’s at best speculative.
From my perspective it's speculative to split hairs saying 'sure, he won a majority of the vote, but there are other people out there who could have voted'. It's true, it depends on your definition of 'electorate', I was using it to mean the people who voted in the last presidential election. I'm aware that we don't have 100% turnout but nobody was unsure what we were getting from Trump. As close to 100% of the potential voters in the USA went into the last election understanding what it would mean for him to win and a majority of the people who voted decided that they would vote for the person who attempted to overturn the last election & ran on the promise to target big cities for mass depotation campaigns. That's the problem.
You misread what I wrote. I said that he has *never* received a majority of the votes. *Maybe* he gets a majority if you include non-voters. But among voters, Harris plus third parties beat him. He never once got an actual majority. Just 49.8%.
Ah, gotcha, he ticked just under 50% in the final tally. That's not really material. The point I was making is that Trump isn't the problem, he's just an asshole who attempts to appeal to the worst human impulses. The problem is the millions and millions of Americans who want more of what he's selling. Like I said, I'm close to several (family) and it's chilling. They are educated and well-to-do and what they want is the power to trample people who are different than them. It's a hideous ideology that the press has long made excuses for rhapsodizing about the left-behind working class etc., but the core is affluent, connected people who desire deference and control above all else and are very happy with the ends Trump is using to that means. They'd like him to go farther. There are a lot of them and they won't magically go away when Trump inevitably dies of old age.
What makes you think there will be relatively normal elections in '26? This is a world of difference from 2017.
The only things abnormal about the 2025 elections were the exceptional amount of backlash against the Trump administration, and the election of relatively conservative Democrats in places that won’t ever vote Democratic in a national or statewide election. Which was normal before 2012. This suggests that 2026 will be more of the same.
I think we will, in 5-10 years with hindsight and more information, see 2025 as a series of avoided flashpoints that could have rapidly unspooled, or at least significantly weakened, American democracy, but didn't. I think liberals do ourselves a disservice by disregarding fears that the system will fail because we so strongly believe that it will work - even when we're right. If we've had to learn and re-learn one political truth, it's that people don't like being told that everything is actually okay. The great existential threat to liberalism is simply that a significant number of Americans do not view their country's government as a fully functional liberal democracy, whether it manifests as voting for Trump or genuinely fearing Trump might successfully tear down American democracy. Same coin.
The prevailing fatalism regarding the state of our democracy mirrors a specific psychology found in financial markets. There is a distinct 'reputational asymmetry' in forecasting. In finance, the person long the market often sounds like a cheerleader, while the short-seller sounds like a physicist. The pessimist sounds sober, rigorous, and 'above' the delusion of the crowd.
This negativity acts as a perfect reputational hedge. If you predict authoritarianism and you are wrong, you get to say 'I am so glad I was wrong' with zero penalty. But if you argue for resilience and the worst happens, you are memorialized as the naive fool who did not see it coming. Cynicism is the low-risk, high-status position.
This creates a political version of the 'Keynesian Beauty Contest.' In this economic theory, investors do not pick the stock they think is best, but the one they think everyone else will pick. Right now, the consensus among the intelligentsia is that it is 'smart' to be bearish on American democracy. Demsas is essentially pointing out that the market for democratic cynicism is potentially overbought.
The danger is that these predictions are not harmless, since the fatalism is itself depriving institutions and communities of the will they need to meet the moment.
“We tend to conflate fatalism for intellectual depth. Dooming is smart, and pointing out all the ways things are going wrong is a great way of signaling that you’re a Serious Person Who Gets It”
Ah this is such a pet peeve of mine. It first irritated me in sports - the people that love to be the first ones to say “the game is over” or “the season is over”. Now social media is full of political doomers, and if you point out how much progress we’ve made and how great things are in relation to human history, well you’re soft headed or in on the take.
Not to mention in the past six months the newsfeed has gone from "no one likes democrats" to "no one likes trump."
this schrodinger's analogy is great.
i think for most people, their decision to obey this far in advance betrays a lack of either 1) perspective, 2) courage, or 3) imagination. or all three.
i've made a deliberate choice stay abreast of the issues while continuing to believe in and hope for a way through—largely because i don't see the point in the alternative.
There isn’t a single point at which “we” win or lose. It is a succession of additional persecutions aimed at different groups, starting with the most vulnerable and easy to “other.” It is a movement that depends on enemies, and it will keep finding them. No one knows when or if their group will be targeted. If leading thinkers on transitions to dictatorship are right (Snyder; Ziblatt $ Levitsky, Applebaum), and we are rapidly moving along that path, we could have a MAGA regime in place beyond 2028 (not necessarily through fair elections). Without a critical mass of courageous Republicans standing up against it that could happen. Academics who criticize Trump and MAGA-ism will eventually be targeted. I know several academics who can afford to do so who have exit plans in place, and I don’t condemn them for it.
“Pet” peeve - literally!
(Of course you’re right….)
Despite his many assumptions of power, Trump himself is merely the figurehead of an administration whose authority relies on the *indirect* support of a cult, whose members have been persuaded by and kept in line by a constant exposure to propaganda, from both mass and niche media. It's the influence of Trump's cult which has persuaded the Republican Party to support Trump *directly*, and it is only with their permission (and through their authority) that he's able to exercise power.
Trump's support therefore features many points of failure, any of which could be exploited to an extent which would transform the cosplay strength he enjoys presenting, into the optical illusion which it actually is.
There is no SA, no Chancellor Brüning, no Franz von Papen, no president Hindenburg, no Reichstag fire, no Enabling Act. This is not 1933. Not yet.
If we are in Weimar, then the year is closer to 1920 and Trump is closer to a man called Wolfgang Kapp, who attempted to overtake the Republic by force — only to see his gestures rejected by the German masses, who staged a general strike which demonstrated to Kapp that the power he had assumed, existed only in his own mind.
If this were Prussia, then the departed Yale professors would be like facets of Frederick the Great, who famously fled the Battle of Mollwitz in 1741 following the failure of a cavalry charge. He did not return before his army was able to defeat Austria later that day, securing Silesia for his kingdom.
Running away from the battlefield of a winnable fight is cowardly and embarrassing. Announcing your intention to do so in advance is akin to desertion.
We should all be fighting against the possibility of fascism by continuing to undermine Trump's authority from below. This means luring his support base — made up from many erstwhile liberals — away from seduction by his lies, and toward leaders whose policies are designed to promote a healthy society, rather than false personal identifications with race or with "nation". Threats of such a loss will weaken the Republican Party support upon which Trump's real authority directly relies, pushing him out of the spotlight, and off the public stage. Where he belongs.