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Item one: There’s only one way to save democracy

A lot of people are talking about the long piece Robert Kagan wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday about how, as the headline put it, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” 

They’re talking about it, I think, for two main reasons. One, it’s interesting coming from Kagan, an influential neocon who has spent his career promoting a hard-line foreign policy. He hasn’t written regularly on such domestic topics as presidential elections, although people this week seem to have forgotten that he’s been a Donald Trump foe since 2016, when he endorsed Hillary Clinton and wrote a Post column warning, “This is how fascism comes to America.”

The second reason is that the piece is gripping, dark, and alarming. The sections on what a second Trump term would look like are terrifying (even if other liberal columnists, including me, have been saying similar things for years). But I want to draw attention to a different section of the piece, where he recounts the cowardice and indifference that enabled Trump’s rise and lays out how the deck is stacked in Trump’s favor as we hurtle toward the 2024 election. 

I think Kagan tells a pretty one-sided story with respect to the stacked deck. But at the same time, he’s right about the complacency and shoulder-shrugging indifference that put Trump in the White House. And what’s shocking to me, what I puzzle over for at least a couple of hours every day, is this: After all we’ve seen from that man, how can it possibly be the case that we’re going to shrug our shoulders again? And yet, all signs suggest we are.

With respect to the stacked deck, Kagan writes that Trump “will enter the general-election campaign early next year with momentum, backed by growing political and financial resources, and an increasingly unified party,” and that the criminal proceedings will be a strength rather weakness: “He is going to use the trials to display his power.” No doubt Trump will try. But it’s hardly clear that this will work. If he’s convicted of at least one serious crime before Election Day, sure, that will galvanize his base, but will it really help him with swing voters? In a number of polls I’ve seen, Trump is under 50 percent among Republican-leaning independents. There’s also the question of Trump’s mental decline, which is becoming increasingly obvious and which the media will eventually cotton on to (and has, a bit). These and other facts don’t fit into the doomsday narratives, but they’re real. So there are a lot of balls that could bounce Joe Biden’s way that Kagan doesn’t mention. 

Still, this much is dead-on true: “Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work,” Kagan writes of the time since Trump’s rise. “At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences.” And not enough people took such action. They “behaved normally,” as Kagan put it, either on the assumption (early on) that Trump would fade or in the naïve faith that he couldn’t really be that bad, or out of sheer cowardice, or out of literal physical fear for their families (as Mitt Romney recently articulated to McKay Coppins).

The incredible thing to me is how it’s all happening again. Here are six culprits who seem to think this is just another election.

In sum, here’s where we are. One of two people, and only two people, is going to be president on January 20, 2025. You can wish Biden had stood down. Nearly a year ago, I wrote a strong endorsement of him running again. But he has aged in that year. I might now say that on balance, he should have stood down at some point in the summer.

But he didn’t. And that’s that. He may not be fully up to the job by 2027 or whatever, but here are some things he won’t do: He won’t appoint lackeys based on loyalty. He won’t bomb Mexico. He won’t arrest political opponents. He won’t invoke the Insurrection Act to have protesters arrested. He won’t give Putin Ukraine. And we can know to a certainty that he won’t try to make himself president for life.

Donald Trump might do all those things and a whole lot more. And yet, all six of those people and groups I listed above think this is a fine time to ignore all this and/or run a pipe-dream candidacy for president. 

I can almost understand in retrospect how Trump got elected in 2016. He was an outsider then, moderate voters had been instructed for 25 years to hate Hillary, and he drew a narrow inside straight. But now, eight years and multiple offenses against democracy later, we’re really going to sleepwalk our way to a Trump presidency again?

To borrow from Kagan, we need people to do extraordinary things. If now is not the time, when will be?

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Quiz time!

Most recent quiz: The hills are alive … On the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The second-greatest songwriting partnership of the twentieth century. And no, you shouldn’t have to ask.

1. In “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City,” from their first and greatest collaboration (Oklahoma!), how many stories high is the skyscraper over which character Will Parker marvels?

A. Five

B. Seven

C. 20

D. 33

Answer: B, seven. As high as any buildin’ otter go!

2. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel won a second life that continues to this day because it was recorded by which rock-era act, after which it was adopted by which professional sports team?

A. Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes; New Jersey Devils

B. Huey Lewis and the News; Oakland Athletics

C. Men at Work; Adelaide Rams Rugby Club

D. Gerry and the Pacemakers; Liverpool F.C.

Answer: D, Gerry and Liddypool. My fake answers were quite good here (I was especially proud of C), but I think this was probably an easy one.

3. From South Pacific, the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” was controversial because:

A. It was a straight-on critique of racial bigotry and supported interracial marriage.

B. It was seen by the right as a secret ode to communism.

C. It was in fact a secret ode to communism.

D. It was a defense of white supremacism.

Answer: A, it was a sharp attack on racial bigotry:

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate—

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

4. Who originated the role of Anna in The King and I when it debuted on Broadway in 1951?

A. Julie Andrews

B. Celeste Holm

C. Gertrude Lawrence

D. Shirley Jones

Answer: C, Gertrude Lawrence. This is one musical I never particularly liked.

5. Which fairy tale did the duo set to music in a 1957 musical created for television and watched by a staggering 107 million viewers (in a country of 167 million people!) on CBS?

A. “Cinderella” 

B. “Sleeping Beauty” 

C. “Rapunzel” 

D. “Snow White” 

Answer: A, “Cinderella.” This was broadcast in color (!) on CBS in 1957 and starred Julie Andrews. I’m old enough to recall as a wee laddie the 1965 remake starring Lesley Ann Warren and Stuart Damon, who would go on to complete a 30-year run as Dr. Alan Quartermaine on what daytime soap opera? (Answer at the bottom of the new quiz.)

6. Match the song in The Sound of Music to its principal vocalist(s).

Answer: “So Long,” children; “Edelweiss,” the Captain; “Favorite Things,” Maria; “Mountain,” Mother Abbess. I was going to throw in less well-known numbers like “Something Good” (Captain and Maria) and even the super-obscure “No Way to Stop It” (Max and the Baroness), which was in the Broadway play but dropped from the movie. But I decided to keep it easy.

This week’s quiz: Don’t “Tempt” Me: on the history of Motown, because I noticed this week that not only is Berry Gordy still alive but he celebrated his 94th birthday on Tuesday!

1. The Funk Brothers, the Motown house band that played the backing tracks on the hits for so many vocal artists, were legendary. Perhaps its most celebrated member was the bassist, considered one of the great innovators in bass history. Who was he?

A. Benny Benjamin

B. Isaac Hayes

C. David Sancious

D. James Jamerson

2. Which Motown songwriter composed the most Hot 100 hits?

A. Barrett Strong

B. Smokey Robinson

C. Lamont Dozier

D. Eddie Holland

3. Everybody knows that Diana Ross led The Supremes, and most people know that Mary Wells was the group’s second-most-famous member (until she left because she and Ross were such rivals). But who was the third Supreme in the group’s heyday?

A. Tammi Terrell

B. Ronnie Spector

C. Florence Ballard

D. Martha Reeves

4. Match the artist to the hit.

5. What was the date, in the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” that the singer’s daddy died?

A. The 3rd of September 

B. New Year’s Day

C. The 4th of July

D. Juneteenth

6. Berry Gordy, who founded Motown in 1959, also wrote or co-wrote a substantial number of his label’s classic hits. Which of these hits did he not write or co-write?

A. “Shop Around”

B. “I Want You Back”

C. “Money (That’s What I Want)”

D. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”

What great stuff. And Motown is still going strong, by the way. 

Oh—and Dr. Alan Quartermaine was a mainstay of General Hospital. The Quartermaine family, in fact, was a prominent clan in mythical Port Charles, New York, where the show was set. Check that—is set. Like Berry Gordy, G.H. still hums along, 60 years after its 1963 debut. I watched briefly during the infamous Luke and Laura period. Anyway, answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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