A Life-and-Death Struggle
The outcome of the 2024 election is not just about sustaining democracy. It's also a question of whether civilization as we know it will survive.
A terrible thing happened in Pennsylvania this week. A 32-year-old man allegedly murdered and decapitated his father with a machete and kitchen knife, then displayed the decapitated head while recording a YouTube video. It was seen first in a plastic bag and then in a cooking pot.
This is awful enough, the kind of event I try my best not to dwell on, given the too-frequent reality of depraved individuals who reach a personal breaking point and act out in the most heinous ways.
But this Pennsylvania man who is now in custody titled his 14-minute video (later removed by YouTube) “Mohn's Militia—Call To Arms For American Patriots" and spewed right-wing conspiracy theories. He called his father, a federal employee for 20 years, a traitor. He urged death for all federal officials who he said should be “publicly executed for betraying their country.” And he attacked the Biden administration, the Black Lives Matter movement, the LGBTQ community and Antifa activists.
Polarization in America is not new. Nor is the existence of radical, right-wing extremists and a small population of mentally ill individuals capable of being triggered. Nor even is talk of civil war.
But what is new is the depth and nature of the polarization, the emergence of these extremists from the fringe with a chilling sense of empowerment, and more frequent talk and behavior that suggests a growing desire for civil war.
In this violent climate, those on the other side are not just perceived as opponents or political enemies, but believed to be evil. Too often, violent, mentally unwell extremists are incited to commit acts of stochastic terrorism by a man who occupied the highest office in the land and continues to scapegoat enemies in the most horrendous ways (“vermin,” “poisoning the blood”). Talk of civil war has not just inspired angry radicals from the lunatic fringe to yearn for a conflagration: Texas’ extremist governor is exploiting the border crisis and right-wing paranoia to flout federal law and intensify a long-present yearning for secession, convinced that the people—his people—are with him. Never mind where such bloody impulses lead.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud described man’s death instinct as “the inclination to aggression” and “the greatest impediment to civilization.” To be a civilized society means possessing the ability to “obtain mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by…setting up an agency within him to watch over it.” In Freud’s construction, the superego represents the conscience, the means by which individuals rein in their darkest impulses.
Throughout history, those dangerous impulses have been unleashed. Consider the terrible violence of the Ku Klux Klan in the first decade after the Civil War and this terrorizing group’s unbridled and often deadly attacks on Black voters and Black leaders. Note the more than 4,000 documented racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950, often committed by mobs and watched by others. Think of the ultimate expression of this deadly drive during the Holocaust, coldly committed to the complete annihilation of the Jewish people and almost succeeding with the extermination of more than 6 million.
Fast forward to September 11, 2001 when America witnessed a terrorist attack that the mind had a hard time comprehending at first. Was that really a plane that flew into the World Trade Center? Was that another? Were those really commercial jets with passengers onboard? How could this small number of bad actors commit a deed that would cause these massive towers, these iconic expressions of American achievement and might, to collapse in barely a flash?
What first seemed impossible to fully imagine became all too real. A line had been crossed. The barrier to commit an act that awful disintegrated in a day, motivating a society to plan for the possibility that it could happen again. And again.
Think of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when two twelfth-graders murdered 12 of their Colorado classmates and one teacher. This mass shooting, this horror, rocked the nation. It was an unthinkable act. Until it wasn’t. Until mass shootings became, week-by-week and year-by-year, occurrences so regular that the media sometimes doesn’t even cover them. (Last year the reported tally was 656 mass shootings involving four or more victims injured or killed.)
I continue to reflect on the best ways to articulate both the current danger of Donald Trump and the threat that he represents were he to be successful at retaking the levers of power. He and many of his enablers have made clear their desire to implement a dictatorship in which he can count on immunity from the law, pursue retribution against enemies, end an independent judiciary, install only loyalists to do whatever he wants, round up and deport millions of migrants without due process—and so much more.
Institutional changes like these—along with the probability that this bunch is unlikely to give up power after four years—already express a dark fate for our democratic republic. But I think there’s a darker and deeper potential outcome that demands our attention.
We already know that Trump has tried his damnedest to incite his cult to take violent collective action. In the post-Jan. 6 world where over 1,000 people have been charged for their involvement in the Capitol attack and more than half have pleaded guilty, we haven’t seen any mass acts approximating that scale, no matter how much the cult leader was counting on them to disrupt his civil or criminal proceedings.
But the ferment is real, as are the random acts of violence, stirred in the rancid cauldron of hate that has defined the Trumpist hunger for carnage. Were he to regain the levers of power and pursue a fascist future, we can expect over time an increasingly demoralized majority and an unleashed minority that feels liberated to act on their destructive instincts without fear of consequence. It’s not hard to imagine the scapegoats among myriad vulnerable communities.
In this future, destruction and violence would expand with the wink and the nod of the state apparatus. At an individual level, stigmas that previously limited dangerous behavior would be superseded by a growing hunger to see the violence played out.
What was lodged in imagination would likely become real. Columbine opened a door. September 11 opened a door. January 6 opened a door. Trump and his cult—driven by anger, grievance, victimhood and a hunger for power—are trying to smash the door open permanently.
So far Trump is failing in fulfilling his deepest desire to seek vengeance with impunity—and motivate his followers to join him. But for how long?
Ensuring that he never comes near the White House again is not just a matter of politics. It’s not even just a matter of whether democracy as we know it can survive. This represents a life-and-death struggle over the kind of society America can and will be.
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When I was growing up my mother always warned me if Hitler came back they would take me to the ovens. I was not raised in the Jewish faith but my parent’s families in Europe were Jewish and many of them were lost in the holocaust. Today, her voice in my head resonates as truth. I thought she was crazy to worry but now I understand. It only takes a moment for our wonderful way of life to be obliterated by the sickest of humanity, those who don’t follow rules in search of dominance. I can’t watch TV news in any form any more, it is too concerning. (And still normalizes MAGA without context)
As if I didn't have enough trouble sleeping at night....
I've thought about this, too, and worry that even if President Biden wins re-election, there will be another, likely more successful January 6. I do not understand this desire for chaos and violence, nor the people who wish and visit harm on their fellow citizens, many times including themselves.
All this while we are destroying our planet. Imagine what we could accomplish if all this energy spent on hate would be directed to addressing and solving our problems.
Humans have, unfortunately, become destructive parasites of Earth. The animals probably wish that we would go away, as long as we didn't take them with us. We are certainly not the superior beings that we like to think we are.