If their candidate loses in November, Trumpists will dig in their heels just as their predecessors did after Barack Obama's 2008 victory. Only a month after his inauguration, the Tea Party was already up and running. But the Tea Party will prove child's play compared to the resistance the Trumpists are likely to mount if their candidate tanks on Election Day 2020. And such resistance could succeed in finishing what Trump started -- disuniting the country and destroying the democratic experiment -- unless, that is, the United States were to undergo a thorough de-Trumpification.
Other societies have gone through such processes, but those efforts -- Reconstruction after the American Civil War, denazification in Germany after World War II, and de-Baathification after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 -- have all been flawed in various ways. Reconsidering them, however, might help us avoid repeating the mistakes of history as we try to drive a stake through the heart of Trumpism.
Regime Change
The United States hasn't recently been invaded, lost a major war in its homeland, or had its government fall to a popular uprising.
That's usually what it takes to dislodge a deeply entrenched ruling ideology. The South lost the Civil War, the Nazis World War II, and Saddam Hussein the second Gulf War. Those defeats provided the winners with unprecedented opportunities to remake the old order, but don't seem to apply to America in 2020. The electoral defeat of a president and party, if that's even what happens in November, doesn't constitute regime change. It's just the kind of peaceful transition of power that's the cornerstone of democratic stability.
But let's face it: 2020 isn't shaping up to be a normal election year. Conservative pundits, like military historian Victor Davis Hanson, believe that Barack Obama and the Democrats have brought the country to the brink of a literal civil war. During last year's impeachment hearings, Trump himself tweeted approvingly a comment made by Robert Jeffress, an evangelical ally, that impeachment "will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal." Meanwhile, typically enough, Obama's first secretary of labor, Robert Reich, suspects that President Trump's flagrant disregard of the Constitution will precipitate major social unrest, even as comedian Bill Maher urges Democrats to reach out to Trump supporters as part of a bid to defeat the president -- or risk civil war.
Many Americans seem to agree. In a 2018 Rasmussen poll, one-third of respondents thought it likely that another civil war would break out within five years. According to a 2019 civility poll from the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, the consensus was that the country is already two-thirds of the way toward a civil war.
Nor is there much confidence that the 2020 presidential election will go smoothly. Take your pick from a menu of potential disruptions: allegations of voter fraud and Republican voter suppression, a resurgence of the coronavirus, voting machine software glitches, Russian hackers, confusion over mail-in ballots, or an authoritarian president who repeatedly jokes about serving more than two terms. A recent Georgia primary offered a warning of what might come, with fiascos aplenty, particularly for voters of color. There weren't enough polling places, people waited in line for endless hours, absentee ballots never arrived at homes. Multiply Georgia by 50 and you'd have a full-blown crisis of political legitimacy.
Even if this country manages to pull off the 2020 presidential election, a post-election insurrection is not out of the question. During the lame-duck period, a defeated Trump might call on his supporters -- gun owners, militia members, active-service military -- to serve as a Praetorian guard to keep him in office. Mark Villalta, an attendee at Trumpstock in Arizona last October, was typical of some Trump supporters in confessing that he's hoarding weapons just in case Trump loses. "Nothing less than a civil war would happen," he told The New York Times. "I don't believe in violence, but I'll do what I got to do."
It's essential to ensure that the November 3rd election is free and fair, but if Trump loses, then the bigger problems are likely to begin.
Confederacy of Dunces
In the 1860 election, America confronted a polarized electorate, a stupendously mediocre president in James Buchanan, and a clear geographic divide between north and south, urban and rural. Not even the election of Abraham Lincoln could save the union. The attack on Fort Sumter, the opening salvo of the Civil War, took place roughly a month after his inauguration.
Donald Trump seems to have learned all the wrong lessons from the "War Between the States," resisting as he's done recently the removal of "beautiful" Confederate statues and the redesignation of U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals. In the last Oscar season, he even wished that Gone with the Wind had won rather than some South Korean film he'd never heard of. Such favoritism for the disgraced and vanquished should be as politically disqualifying as a Heil Hitler salute.
The reason that Trump can get away with his Confederate nostalgia comes, at least in part, from the failure of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War to extirpate racism and its associated economic inequality from American society. In fact, as historian Allen Guelzo points out, "Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. Southern whites played the most obvious role in this overthrow, but they would never have succeeded without the consent of the Northern Democrats, who had never been in favor of an equitable Reconstruction."
The Democrats of the time, in other words, became a party of resistance -- to Reconstruction, civil rights, and the radical Republicans of that moment. So the Confederacy continued to live on not only in the hearts and minds of defeated Southern whites but also in the racist policies that elected officials in both parts of the country would resurrect.
Here, then, is a lesson of the Civil War's aftermath for this moment. Today's Republicans, the equivalent of the northern Democrats of the post-Civil War era and a true confederacy of dunces, cannot be allowed to persist in their current incarnation as a vehicle for Trumpism. A thorough thumping at the polls in November is a necessary but insufficient response to what they've become.
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