Bracing for Impacts

“Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn’t just happen; we have to make it happen.” ― Bill Moyers

What can be said about the 2024 election that will be helpful? Everyone’s looking for someone to blame. At this point it feels like a waste of time to finger-point, unless we’re willing to recognize who really deserves the blame: wealthy donors, social media sites, and political action groups who, unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, funded and enabled a disinformation blitz that created very specific emotional realities designed to overwhelm objectivity. This made voting into a choice of what people feared the most. Immigration, for example. Even though Trump torpedoed heavily supported bipartisan legislation that would have helped solve the border problem, that fact was drowned out in hyperbolic rhetoric that blamed Biden and Harris for not fixing the border.

Funding all that noise were 150 billionaire families who donated a record $2 billion to presidential and congressional campaigns, 72 percent of which went to Republicans. That financial weight meant that a handful of billionaires outweighed tens of millions of ordinary families. Citizens United helped make this election a collapse of the system that was supposed to regulate campaign finance.

The blizzard of disinformation created a false binary that insists you either believe fully in the total goodness of the current system, or you are willing to blow it up. No in-betweens, no nuance. The problem with blowing it up, however, is that no one has proven you can do that without a war and a mass disruptive event.

 As a result of all that disinformation, too many stories are emerging about people who ended up voting against their own interests. But buyer’s remorse will be irrelevant. When a Republican strategist recently asked focus groups for the definition of an authoritarian, the #1 response was, “What’s an authoritarian?

In a time where women are now hearing “your body, my choice,” this isn’t about liberal tears, either. As a retired federal employee who tracks what’s going on, I’ve read a sizeable chunk of Project 2025, Agenda 47, and other incoming administration plans. I fear most what the effects will be on ordinary Americans across the political spectrum, from “slashing and burning” through the complex, multilayered, but admittedly imperfect operations of the federal government. Decapitating agency leadership and going back to the cronyism of the mid-1800s is an invitation to graft and chaos. Combined with the creation of a new and legally unaccountable “efficiency” agency named after a joke cryptocurrency startup that will be run by an unqualified billionaire and his sidekick, well, brace, because it’s going to be a fight, and everyone will be needed.

What can one person do? A meme in circulation says, “What will you do with your one wild and precious month of democracy?” Let’s not look at it that way. Instead, let’s ask ourselves the same thing President John F. Kennedy did: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Author Timothy Snyder advised this in his 2017 book, On Tyranny: “Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to the use of the words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.” He added that by manufacturing the notion that the present moment is exceptional and unlike any other moment in history, and then by transforming that state of exception into a permanent state of emergency, this is how authoritarians persuade people to trade real freedom for fake safety.

None of us can crystal-ball the next four years, but we aren’t helpless and mustn’t allow ourselves to be emotionally immobilized or let daily outrages define our lives. We can refuse to accept the cruel, bizarre, or fearful as natural or normal just because they might become familiar. We can resist outrage fatigue. We can refuse to be “owned” by anyone whose goal is to anger us. We can seek common ground with anyone who’s willing to be open-minded and civil. We can reclaim our attention spans and focus on our physical and mental health. We can speak out when it’s called for, and call out intolerance. We can read history to know about past eras in which our democracy was threatened.[9] We can support good journalism and shun charlatans. Our duty is not to withdraw, but to stand up and protect who and what we love and cherish.

Photo by Karen Sullivan

For further reading: 

Brennan Center for Justice. “Citizens United Explained,” December 2019.  

Brookings Institution. “How disinformation defined the 2024 election narrative,” November 7, 2024. 

Americans for Tax Fairness. “Billionaire Clans Spend Nearly $2 BILLION On 2024 Elections,” October 29, 2024. 

Highly recommended: This analysis in which historian Heather Cox Richardson is interviewed by Jon Stewart.