A Failure of Imagination Could Do Us In

The Only Way to Avoid the Worst Case Scenario is to Understand How Close It Is

When the president of the United States states on television that he does not know whether he has to uphold the Constitution and America shrugs, we are in trouble. When the most egregious tariff the tariff-happy would-be king imposes is the one on those who seek his favor, rendering the White House into a toll booth generating income for Trump enterprises and the country considers it business as usual, we are in trouble. When the presidents advisors publicly assert that anyone who criticizes them is a terrorist and they seek to outlaw ideas they find uncomfortable, we are in trouble. When vital services are shut down and millions will suffer in order to “pay for” tax cuts for billionaires, we are in trouble. When we attack science, the arts, education, and vital national security resources in ways that will weaken America for decades to come—at the very least—we are in trouble.

You know that. Otherwise you would not be here, reading this.

But, are you aware of how truly grave our national crisis is? Have you sat down and imagined or discussed with your friends just how bad it could become? How shocked are you by where we are? How shaken are you by how rapidly the checks and balances that were to have protected the integrity of our system have decayed?

Are you ready for the possibility that we will never again have another truly free and fair election in America? Ready for critics of the president to be disappeared to foreign concentration camps? Ready for schools and major media outlets to be heavily censored? Ready for the end to separation of church and state? Ready for the end of due process for us all? Ready for American leadership in the world to be ended, over, done with?

You might say, yes. You might say, you have thought of these things. But have you really and truly grappled with the dark possibilities that loom on our near horizon?

In my view, almost no one I know has done so. The best informed and most thoughtful among them conflate their real anger and despair with having come to grips with the America that Trump and those close to him are seeking to engineer into being.

Have you asked yourself whether you would stay in an America that was no longer a democracy? Have you asked where you would go, what might become of your family, your possessions, your work, your future?

Already millions of our neighbors have had to grapple with these questions. Some are scientists or artists who lost their grants. Some are teachers and writers whose areas of expertise and views are no longer acceptable. Some are people of color or immigrants or their children who every day fear being rounded up and expect even worse in the future. Some are people who need medical treatments that the U.S. will no longer provide. Some are the elderly who had hope to retire with dignity who realize that will be impossible here.

Do We Even Understand Where We are at the Moment?

For them this is real. But still, I have talked to many such people and even they are not able or willing to grapple with the question: How much worse can it get? (And what will I do then?)

We know, because many, most of them, of us, just four months ago had no idea we would be where we are today. They had no idea that in every area of our lives that is touched by our government, what we once knew, expected and trusted to be the case is no more.

But you, maybe you knew better, right? You’ve despised Trump for a decade and condemned his racism, sexism, criminality, and ignorance for years. You knew, right?

Well, if so, congratulations. Then you’re not surprised by the daily headlines. You’re never shocked. You’re a better man or woman than I.

Because I, who have been openly, consistently, assiduously, deeply critical of Trump and cognizant of the threat he has posed, who have written books and countless articles about it and spoken so often on television, radio, on podcasts and in public fora about it that I am often sick to death of hearing my own voice…I am shocked and surprised daily. And daily, I try to to sit and spend some time imagining how much worse things could become.

I go through this exercise because it is clear to me that allowing things to have deteriorated to this point reflects a profound failure of our national imagination. We should have seen this coming. Not just during last year’s election nor in 2020 or 2016. But we should have seen what was happening to America for many decades, in fact, for our entire lives.

And of course, more importantly, only by having a clear sense of where we are headed can we possibly prepare for it or mobilize sufficiently to avoid the worst and, if humanly possible, rescue the United States from its current self-destructive course.

We have to know we could lose it all and soon or we will surely not have the sense of urgency or commitment required to avoid that worst possible case.

To do this properly will require a bit of humility, a recognition that our imaginations have failed us in the past and indeed that they have done so for so long that we can ill afford to allow them to continue to do so.

Doubt it? Let’s take a brief journey back into time and count just a few of the many many indicators that should have told us what is happening today was possible, that should have motivated us to take action fearing the consequences of events we let slide on by or, in some cases, even praised.

I could go back further, but in the interests of brevity, let’s just focus on the past fifty or so years.

Fifty Years of Collective Obliviousness

Last September we past the fiftieth anniversary of Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Many hailed the act as a step to ending our “long national nightmare.” But of course, it was also a step toward Nixon never being held accountable for his crimes and, therefore a step toward the idea, now embraced by the Supreme Court, that presidents should be immune from prosecution for anything that could remotely be defined as an official act.

John Roberts was beginning his sophomore year at Harvard when that decision was handed down. He was a graduating senior when Nixon declared to David Frost, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Many of us were outraged. Few worked as hard to prevent us from getting where we are as did Nixon supporters and those on the right ever since to promote the idea of a president who would be seen as above the law.

Nixon, like Ronald Reagan later, was elected in part because his supporters manipulated international events to support their candidacies. The interference in U.S. foreign policy was illegal. The election manipulation was at the very least profoundly unethical. But it too led us to Trump and his behavior in each of his election campaigns. Reagan looked the other way while members his administration broke the law and then lied to Congress about it (Iran-Contra) and he and his Vice President, George H.W. Bush were allowed to skate by, once again not held accountable. Members of Reagan’s team helped ease the way for Rupert Murdoch to buy into American media and then eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, laying in the 1980s the groundwork for what became the right wing media ascendancy of the first quarter of the 21st Century. (Some of that work was engineered by a lawyer named Roy Cohn who during the same period helped gain entree for young Donald Trump into Republican political circles, even going so far as to introduce him to Roger Stone.)

George H.W. Bush gave us the first member of the current Supreme Court and at the same time, set the stage for its tone and tenor in the battle surrounding the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas. Bill Clinton brought his own brand of sleaze to the White House and sought to parse the truth in ways that weakened his own party’s efforts to defend the rule of law later. But he also through the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act and passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996 both exacerbated inequality in the U.S. and at the same time, helped clear the way for the rise of the tech bros and other fortunes that have helped underwrite the current political elite. During the same era, Newt Gingrich and the GOP in the House helped to usher in the kind of scorched-earth right wing extremism that has metastasized into the toxic politics of today.

We celebrated the grace of Al Gore when he conceded victory to George W. Bush in 2000 and years later, that decision, like the pardon of Nixon, looks deeply questionable. Bush, with the aide of lawyers like Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, and a GOP-leaning Supreme Court, won a dubious victory that again, set in motion much of what we are seeing happen around us today.

During the Bush 43 presidency, you probably remember the enthusiasm many on the right showed for by-passing the Constitution in the name of “national security.” You remember the torture. You remember the renditions. You probably also remember the crazed jingoism that followed 9/11 and made its way into popular culture through movies like Zero Dark Thirty and Patriot’s Day and many others in which by-passing due process and the rule of law is celebrated as a nearly heroic American virtue. Remember? Did you cheer quietly or publicly for that? Or how about when Barack Obama attacked and killed an American citizen (or countless civilians) in drone strikes.

The fact that Trump faced no accountability for his first term crimes, reflects not only poorly on the Congress and on the Biden Administration that followed but also, of course on the American people.

But the bigger point here is that what we are seeing today in the assault on the rule of law and democracy…as well as on science, health care, education, climate, immigration policy and the foundations of our national security…did not emerge out of the pages of Project 2025 or the twisted mind of Stephen Miller or from beneath the wispy coif of our president over the past few months. In each of those areas, we have slid toward where we are today and at every turn, even when the consequences of breakdowns in our system or collective judgment should have been clear to us all, they were not.

The reelection of Donald Trump was a failure of our collective imagination.

We must all take the steps personally and collectively to ensure that another such failure of imagination does not result in the loss forever of what we value in American government and society.