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Americans Don’t Want Progress. They Want Punishment.
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The Triad

Americans Don’t Want Progress. They Want Punishment.

The future is demagogues.

Jonathan V. Last's avatar
Jonathan V. Last
Dec 11, 2024
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The Bulwark
Americans Don’t Want Progress. They Want Punishment.
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We recorded The Next Level last night and it was a wheels-off show—night-time tapings will do that. During the course of the conversation I proposed that one path forward for Democrats is leaning into demagoguery. Sarah didn’t like this idea. I don’t like it, either.

But the question isn’t if the emergence of a populist, demagogic Democratic party would be good, as a question of morals and propriety. The question is whether or not such a thing could win elections.

And that’s what I want to talk about today.


Libby Depiero, a supporter of former US President Donald Trump, protests near Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 21, 2023. (Photo by GIORGIO VIERA/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Not. Nice.

There are two ways of viewing the Trump Era. The first is as a continuation of what came before in American politics, slightly exaggerated in various ways but basically recognizable as more of the same. The second is as a discontinuity—a new world.

Obviously both are true. Trump did continue some trends that had been present in American political life for years, or decades, or generations, even. But on balance, I find the latter view more helpfully descriptive: Trump extrapolated existing dynamics while also transforming the public’s attitudes toward violence, democracy, and the rule of law. In so doing he created something new, a sort of American Peronism.

Which has turned out to be a novel pathology against which our society has precious few defenses.

So if Trump has created a new political world, then how might the political opposition respond to it?

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