It feels like this moment in history deserves a definitive ending. It wont get one.
The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy
It feels like this moment in history deserves a definitive ending. It won’t get one.
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I don’t want to argue with Davidson’s prediction of a dramatic demise for the Trump presidency; Jim Newell and Jeet Heer have thoughtful responses noting that the path is trickier than Davidson suggests. I don’t know who’s right, and I don’t want to make an overly confident prediction only to be proven wrong in a couple months or years.
What I want to argue with, instead, is the broader intellectual tendency — a yearning, really — of which Davidson’s piece is a part. This yearning is for something, anything, to end the death loop that American democracy appears to be trapped in, for a big, dramatic blowup to fix the system’s ills. In the liberal imagination, that blowup typically takes the form of Trump’s removal from office, an event that sets us back to a path of normalcy and sane politics.
This yearning is understandable — but it is both dangerous and misplaced. Ending the Trump presidency will not fix, or even substantially ameliorate, most of the problems plaguing the American political system. They were mounting for years before he took office — indeed, they made him possible — and they will continue to plague us for years after he leaves.
What’s more, the desire for a dramatic explosion of the Trump presidency at times seems to blend into a desire for the dramatic blowup of the American political system altogether, a sense that we need some apocalyptic event that will wipe the slate clean and revitalize our democracy in one big revolutionary motion. It’s no accident that the rise of Trump has coincided with fearful but titillated worries about coups d’état, collapses into tyranny, and even a second American civil war or secession. These concerns are partially specific to Trump. But they reflect worries that transcend him too.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/23/17233952/trump-democracy-decay-decline-coup-war-collapse-impeachment
