Chapter 37: The Crisis of American Democracy

An Historical Perspective

To begin with the conclusion:

1. The United States is on the road to a totalitarian dictatorship.

2. Donald Trump is opposed to democracy and the rule of law. He is using the immense power of the federal government to destroy democracy in America.

3. Responding to Trump will be difficult. Collective action is needed, and such action is hard to organize. However, failure to respond effectively will exact a very high price for each of us.

4. Effectively opposing Trump will not be without cost. There will be casualties in this effort.

These propositions are not extreme. They are descriptive. We are living through a crisis. The American way of life is on the line.

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I.

For the first time in American history, we have a President who is opposed to democracy. Since Trump’s ride down that escalator in Trump Tower on June 15, 2015, he has dominated the American political scene. This fact alone is worth thinking about. He is unquestionably the most important political figure since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Donald Trump is the new normal.

What evidence is there that Trump is opposed to democracy? There is no shortage. In their well-known book published back in 2018, How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitzky and Daniel Ziblatt propose “four key indicators of authoritarian behavior.” These are:

1. Rejection of “democratic rules of the game”;

2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents;

3. Encouragement of violence;

4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents and of the media.¹

“With the exception of Richard Nixon,” Levitzky and Ziblatt write with a sense of wonderment, “no major-party Presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria . . . . Donald Trump [has] met them all.”² Remember that this was written in 2018, well before the January 6, 2021, riot and attempted coup.

Trump’s racist history is well known. Perhaps never was it more dramatically illustrated than during his conduct with regard to the “Central Park Five.”³ In 2011, Trump “became America’s most prominent birther, appearing repeatedly on television news programs to call on the President [Obama] to release his birth certificate. And when Obama’s certificate was made public in 2011, Trump suggested it was a forgery.”⁴ Here we see a violation of numbers one and two above. Trump rejected the democratic rules of the game and denied the legitimacy of his opponent.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump, as he always does, doubled down on these tactics. He regularly attacked the media as dealing in “fake news.” He lambasted Jeff Bezos, threatening to go after him with anti-trust prosecutions if he won the White House. As he said, “If I become President, oh do they have problems.”⁵

He labelled Hillary Clinton a criminal and delighted in chants of “lock her up.” In August of 2016, “Trump issued a veiled endorsement of violence” against Clinton telling supporters at a rally that “if she [Clinton] gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. . . . Although the Second Amendment people – maybe there is, I don’t know.”⁶

As far as violence is concerned, “during the 2016 campaign, Trump not only tolerated violence among his supporters but at times appeared to revel in it. In a radical break with established norms of civility, Trump embraced – and even encouraged – supporters who physically assaulted protesters.”⁷

There can be no doubt that if Trump had lost the election in 2024, there would have been violence. We know this because of the violence he incited after losing the election of 2020.

At a baseline minimum, someone who believes in democracy has to agree to abide by the results of elections. An important aspect of the power of democracy is that it enables the peaceful, ordered transit of power through regular elections. No dictatorship can make the same claim. Trump has never expressed a willingness to accept the outcome of any election that he does not win. Prior to the 2016 election, he insisted that the election would be rigged. Trump won in 2016 because of the electoral college. He lost the popular vote by about three million. However, he continued to insist that the only reason Clinton beat him in the popular vote was because of millions of illegally cast ballots. This is pure fantasy.

Trump lost the election of 2020 to Biden. He never conceded. And to this day he insists that he won because the election was stolen from him. This is a lie.

On July 30, 2020, it was reported that Trump suggested that the election scheduled for November 3 should be delayed.⁸ Will the United States hold elections as scheduled in 2026 and 2028? For the first time in American history, it is not unreasonable to ask such a question. This is what Trump said on July 27, 2024:

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. . . . You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. . . . I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, you got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”⁹

No important American public figure has ever spoken this way. Will Trump really “have it fixed?” That is now within the realm of possibility.

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II.

Trump was inaugurated for the second time on January 20, 2025; and in the succeeding days he has launched a blitzkrieg against the civil service, the nation’s leading universities, the most prestigious law firms, and major media corporations. He is the most powerful President since at least 1945. By some measures, he is the most powerful President in American history. No other President ever had the benefit of the Supreme Court decision in Trump versus the United States, handed down on July 1, 2024, enshrining Presidential immunity.¹⁰

Trump is using using his unprecedented power like a wrecking ball. With the help of Elon Musk, he has, as noted, declared war on the civil service. Only time will tell how completely agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the National Institutes of Health have been rendered powerless to do their jobs.

Trump’s assaults on the media have been devastatingly effective. Jeff Bezos obeyed in advance by castrating the Washington Post, which he owns. Trump conducted a successful shakedown against ABC, which paid a $15 million fine rather than defend a very defendable position.

Trump’s attacks on law firms, attacks which he views as retribution for imagined transgressions, have had mixed results. Four prominent firms, Paul, Weiss; Skadden, Arps; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; and Milbank reached settlements with Trump, although these firms had done nothing wrong. What did their cowardice buy these firms? Nothing. They received no “binding promises” from Trump. And, of course, Trump is never bound by any promise he makes anyway. Trump can threaten and bully these firms again. They have put themselves into “virtual receivership” to him.¹¹

Other laws firms - Perkins, Coie; Jenner & Block and WilmerHale - have opted to fight back against his illegal assault. It is unclear why some firms are fighting and others are caving in. What is apparent is that Trump wants to do more than influence the policies of these firms. He wants to humiliate them. Trump himself is pleased with how easy it has been to humiliate the nations largest law firms. “They’re all bending and saying: ‘Sir, thank you very much.’ Nobody can believe it. . . . Law firms are just saying: ‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?’”¹²

The same is true of Trump’s attacks on universities. He is stopping the funding of innumerable research projects not for a reason but on a pretext. Columbia buckled to Trump and received nothing in return. It did not even have the funding in question restored. “[I]t won merely permission to begin negotiating with the administration.”¹³ And the universities, which need to be acting in concert, are being picked off one by one. The atomization of society has always been the ally of the tyrant. That is what we are seeing now.

Trump is threatening Harvard, for example, with the elimination of $8.9 billion of funding. What follows is the letter, entitled “Our Resolve,” sent out to members of the Harvard community on March 31 by the university’s president, Alan Garber:

What is one to make of this letter? What precisely is “our resolve”? Trump doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism. It is obviously a pretext. But this letter is written as if he does care. Moreover, the letter concedes the point when President Garber himself confesses that he has encountered antisemitism even as president. The University and the nation deserve a stronger statement than is made in this letter.

What, one can fairly ask, choice did Garber have? One option would have been to write no letter at all. Silence would have been better than this. Another option would have been to say something to the effect of: There is antisemitism at Harvard, and we are doing what we can to rid ourselves of it. It is to be doubted that there is more antisemitism at Harvard than there is anywhere else. We applaud your commitment to this subject. We encourage you to eliminate the antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in your administration. For example, in Elon Musk, you have a man who has raised his right arm in a Nazi salute. Wouldn’t we all be better off if he were not part of your administration?

On the subject of bigotry, we note that a member of Musk’s DOGE outfit is a man named Marko Elez. Here is what has been published about Mr. Elez:

“The account connected to Mr Elez - first reported by the Wall Street Journal - posted a variety of inflammatory comments that were verified by the BBC as authentic.

"‘Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,’ read one post from the pseudonymous account in July.

Another post, in September, said: "‘You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.’

"‘Normalize Indian hate,’ another post that month said.”¹⁴

We look forward to learning about the fight against bigotry in your administration. Please work as hard to eliminate it in the federal government as we are working to see that it is not a problem at Harvard. Please also know that you cannot cancel contracts on a whim.¹⁵

Is it absurd to make the suggestion? No it is not. The President of Wesleyan University, Michael S. Roth, is extraordinarily astute when discussing sensitive issues of the day. As he has pointed out, “Anti-antisemitism can be appropriated by any political movement.”¹⁶ And one must be on guard against its exploitation. Here is a link to an article which expresses his views in The New Yorker entitled “A University President Makes a Case Against Cowardice.”

When Trump tried to intimidate Governor Janet Mills of Maine, she told him she would see him in court. Trump’s lackeys are now trying to exact retribution because she was uppity.¹⁷ This leaves us with an important question. When attacked by a bully, do you fight back or bend the knee?

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III.

My thinking about our situation in the United States today has been profoundly affected by a book about Nazi Germany from the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944, to the surrender on May 8, 1945. The book is entitled simply The End.¹⁸ The author is Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the leading experts in the world today on Hitler and Nazism. I have read about this period previously, but only reading this book now and seeing it through the eyes of where America is at present have I come to realize its lessons.

Let me begin by setting the scene. On July 20, 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg along with a number of other army officers attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler. By the time of this attempt, it was obvious to everyone who could examine the situation in a clear-eyed fashion that Germany had lost the war. To repeat, the war was lost. Everybody knew it. Or, put differently, there was no excuse not to know it. But the Germans fought on. What was the result?

Forty million people lost their lives in the European theatre of World War II, four times as many as died in World War I. A total of 5.3 million German servicemen died in World War II. Of these almost half – 2.6 million men – were killed in the last 9 and a half months of the war. Thus, just under half of all the German soldiers who perished in World War II lost their lives in the last months of the war when it was obvious to everyone that the war was lost. Each one of those deaths was pointless. Toward the very end, 300,000 to 400,000 men were dying every month.¹⁹

For the civilian population of Germany, these months were equally dire. Indeed, far more German civilians died during that period than in all the previous years of the war.²⁰ In 1942, a total of 41,440 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany. In 1943 the figure rose to 206,000 tons, and in 1944 it expanded more than five fold to 1,202,000 tons. 471,000 tons, or more than twice the amount dropped in the whole year of 1943, were dropped between January and the end of April 1945. The 67,000 tons dropped by the RAF in March 1945 amounted to almost as much as the entire tonnage unloaded on Germany during the first three years of the war.²¹ Germany became a giant hell-scape. The obvious question is: Why did the country not surrender when every objective analyst knew that victory was out of the question?

A British heavy bomber photographed flying over Hamburg, Germany. Source

Dresden’s Altstadt (old town) in 1910 (above). Dresden in 1945 (below). Source

By February of 1945, Germany’s western front was defended by 462,000 soldiers. The western allies faced them with more than 3.5 million men. In the east, the Germans were outnumbered at least 2.5 to one. The numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. The soldiers Germany was fielding by this time were nowhere near battle ready and were slaughtered in great numbers. The war should have been over. Why was it not?

At some times in history, individuals matter a great deal. During the months from July 20, 1944, to May 8, 1945, in Germany, Hitler was certainly one of those figures. He was uniquely charismatic. Allegiance to him was based as much if not more so on emotion rather than on reason.

Consider the fate of a German boy born in, say, 1925. He could have joined the Hitler Youth before reaching the age of 10. By 1945, at the age of 20, the only political leader that he would have known was Hitler. Our boy born in 1925 was old enough to be mustered into the Volkssturm by 1945. Poorly trained and ill-equipped, facing battle-hardened veterans hungering for revenge, there is a good chance he would have been killed.

An American born in 2005 would have been 10 years old when Trump rode down the escalator in 2015. And for years prior to that, this young person would have bathed in Trump’s tabloid and television celebrity. At present, it appears that Trump will be dominating politics until at least 2029 and perhaps thereafter if he decides he does not want to leave the White House. For people born in 2005 or thereabouts, Donald Trump equals President of the United States.

Kershaw observes that “perhaps the most fundamental element in trying to find answers to the question of how and why the regime held out to the point of total destruction revolves . . . around the structures and mentalities of charismatic rule.”²² Please consider that last phrase. We are living with “the structures and mentalities” of Trump’s “charismatic rule” right now.

Toward the very end, Hitler’s mystique did began to wane. Nevertheless, in an intriguing observation, Kershaw writes that paradoxically, by the last weeks of the war, Germany was experiencing “charismatic rule without charisma.”²³ In the same sense, Trump’s impact will be felt well after he finally steps off the political stage, whenever that might be.

On the afternoon of April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide. A remarkably large number of Germans were doing the same thing about this time. Only late on the evening of May 1 were Germans informed that “Hitler had fallen ‘at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich capital,’ a propaganda lie to the last.”²⁴

Kershaw observes: "[W]ith Hitler’s death, the insuperable obstacle to capitulation was removed. What had been impossible as long as he was alive became immediately realizable as soon as he was dead. Nothing demonstrates more plainly the extent to which he personally had held together the regime.”²⁵

There are many other contributing factors to the grotesque prolongation of pointless horrendous violence. These factors include the bureaucratic tradition in Germany, the tentacles of the Nazi party which reached into every hamlet, magical thinking about salvation thanks to rumored secret weapons, learning the wrong lessons from the German capitulation in 1918, and fear of what the occupying powers, especially the Soviet Union, would do. One could go on.

However, one phenomenon leaps off the pages of Kershaw’s book. The Germans kept on fighting because they believed they had no other choice. Time again, Kershaw remarks that the Germans felt they had no alternative but to continue. “[P]eople kept going,” Kershaw writes. “And what alternative was there?”²⁶ This observation or something similar to it appears repeatedly in the Kershaw book.

There were points at which Hitler and the Nazis could have been stopped. They could have been stopped after the Beer Hall Putsch failed in 1923. They could have been stopped after Hitler’s vote totals declined late in 1932. If you had tried to stop them and had not succeeded – here, the book to read is Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty²⁷ – that was time to get out. Hundreds of thousands of people did, which is why their descendants are alive today.

I know people who are preparing to leave the United States now. My wife and I have discussed this possibility. We, however, are going to stay, at least for now. That is because – despite the fact that in 2024, when there was no excuse for people not knowing who and what Trump is, he got 77.3 million votes – we believe the fate of the United States is not yet sealed. We believe this despite the fact that the Republican Party has, as the saying goes, transformed itself from a watchdog to a lap dog, and despite the fact that the Democratic party gives us Schumer, Biden, and Harris, there is hope. Perhaps we are at as delusional as the average German was on July 21, 1944.

What is the lesson of the German catastrophe? The degrees of freedom of movement diminished every single day. I believe that is true for us today. It is never going to be easier to combat Donald Trump and all that he is doing to destroy our country than it is today. It will be more difficult tomorrow, more difficult in a month, and more difficult in a year. If you are unsatisfied with the direction of the country, you must act now.

1. New York: Broadway Books, 2018. Pp. 64-65.

2. Levitzky and Ziblatt, Democracies, p. 65.

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case

4. Levitzky and Ziblatt, Democracies, p. 159.

5. Levitzky and Ziblatt, Democracies, p. 181.

6. Levitzky and Ziblatt, Democracies, p. 64.

7. Levitzky and Ziblatt, Democracies, p. 62.

8. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/27/us/politics/trump-votes-christians.html

9. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/us/politics/trump-delay-2020-election.html?searchResultPosition=1

10. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/opinion/trump-law-firms-universities.html

12. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/trump-law-firm-executive-order

13. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/opinion/trump-law-firms-universities.html

14. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93q625y04wo

15. See for example: https://balkin.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-title-vi-demand-letter-that-itself.html

16. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-university-president-makes-a-case-against-cowardice

17. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/04/02/maine-governor-trump-transgender/

18. New York: Penguin, 2011.

19. Kershaw, End, p. 379.

20. Kershaw, End, p. 379.

21. Kershaw, End, pp. 235-236

22. Kershaw, End, p. 400.

23. Kershaw, End, p. 400.

24. Kershaw, End, p. 346.

25. Kershaw, End, p. 346.

26. Kershaw, End, p. 101.

27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.