A temporary security fence topped with razor wire surrounds the US Capitol on February 17, 2021, in Washington, DC. The fence was erected around the Capitol-area buildings following the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Is it election theft, minority rule, voter suppression, or all of the above?
Leading Democrats, many academics, liberal commentators, and left-leaning activists agree: American democracy is in grave peril. It’s besieged on all sides, the threats culminating so far in Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election from Joe Biden. More tumult likely lies ahead.
But there’s a surprising amount of murkiness about what, exactly, this peril entails — and what can and should be done about it.
Several dark scenarios for the future have been posed, but each is quite different. One is the threat of a stolen election — Republicans could outright steal elections Democrats won, as Trump tried to do, perhaps enhanced by mob violence. Another is the minority rule threat, in which Republicans could consistently win according to the rules but without getting a majority of votes nationwide, due to advantages in the Senate, Electoral College, and redistricting.
There has also been much discussion of the threat of voter suppression. Democrats worry that GOP policy changes making it more difficult to vote could thwart a majority’s will.
Another fear is less about the way Republicans win power, but is more about what they’ll do with it. Let’s call this the irresponsible party threat. For the people with this point of view, any Republican win — even one with sweeping voter majorities — is dangerous, since a faction that does not respect democracy is influential and arguably dominant in the party.
There’s a great deal of debate on just how plausible, and how worrying, each of these scenarios is. Some argue they’re all unfolding at once and are all immensely serious — and that’s part of why this problem is so difficult to solve. There’s also disagreement about root causes, most notably, on how much of the problem comes from Donald Trump personally, and how much comes from broader forces in American society or institutions.
Too often, though, all this is conflated and treated as similarly urgent in what has become a thinkpiece-industrialcomplex aboutdemocracy’speril, and by a liberal establishment mostly concerned with offering reasons to vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. These threats may well have a common root, but they are distinct problems that would have separate solutions.
The threat of election theft
Many believe that the worst, most dangerous threat to American democracy by far was Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election, leading up to his supporters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
John Minchillo/AP
The face of President Donald Trump appears on large screens as supporters participate in a rally in front of the White House prior to marching to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In this line of thinking, the many other issues liberals care about — voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, the Senate’s rural skew, Trump’s election in the first place — pale in importance when compared to the attempted theft of 2020. Institutional biases or voter suppression might affect election outcomes on the margin. But election theft is about throwing out the results entirely. That arguably should make it the most dangerous scenario for democracy, at least in the short term, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp writes.
Though the mob at the Capitol rightfully got much attention, many experts don’t think the mob itself is the main problem. “The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will ‘legally’ overturn an election,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote at the Atlantic last year. That means stealing an election, but through institutions like election officials, legislatures, or Congress, not through brute force.
Trump tried to pressure officials at all these levels to try and throw out Biden’s wins, but his efforts failed. The question is whether he, or someone else, could succeed next time. His supporters are trying to replace various GOP officials who upheld the results with hardcore believers in his narrative of election fraud, or cynics more willing to pander to such beliefs.
If you believe this threat looms above all, then addressing vulnerabilities in the system is paramount. So Democrats should jump at Republicans’ offer to discuss reforming the Electoral Count Act, the antiquated law Trump tried to use to get Congress and Vice President Pence to throw out results. The specific details of said reforms will matter a great deal, but as Rick Hasen writes at Slate, it’s worth getting talks rolling, rather than scoffing at them, as some Democratic leaders have so far.
But the greater threat of a stolen election might come in the states — either from partisan state officials who refuse to certify rightful results, or state legislators who block the winner’s electors. If either happens, it’s not clear the courts will intervene to set things right, since many conservatives argue states have ultimate authority over their own elections.
If possible (it may not be), it would be worth trying to include protections against state election theft in Electoral Count Act reforms. But there’s no foolproof solution. The system will only work if enough people in power agree to let it work. So one key test will be in whether Republicans who stood up to Trump, like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, can survive primary challenges. Retaining a core of elites in the Republican Party who respect democratic norms is crucially important. Much could also hinge on whether Trump himself runs again and wins the GOP nomination.
Tasos Katopodis/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump and then-Sen. David Perdue at Nationals Park in Washington, DC, on October 27, 2019. Trump has endorsed Perdue in his campaign for governor of Georgia over incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp after bitterness over Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia.
The threat of minority rule
Yet many Democrats, activists, and academics aren’t just worried about elections being outright stolen. They’re also concerned that Republicans could consistently win elections while lacking a majority of overall votes nationwide. This, they argue, is an affront to the core democratic principle that a majority should prevail, and to the idea that some people’s votes shouldn’t be worth more than others.
Lately, many United States’s electoral institutions have given the GOP an advantage. “The GOP has dropped any pretense of trying to appeal to a majority of Americans,” writes Ari Berman of Mother Jones. “Instead, recognizing that the structure of America’s political institutions diminishes the influence of urban areas, young Americans, and voters of color, it caters to a conservative white minority that is drastically overrepresented in the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandered legislative districts.”
In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by more than 4 percentage points, but only barely eked out a win in the tipping point Electoral College state. The median states were even a bit more tilted toward the GOP, suggesting the party has a 4- to 6-point advantage in competition for the Senate. Gerrymandering will likely continue to give the GOP a narrow advantage in the House of Representatives and far greater advantages in some swing state legislatures. And we shouldn’t forget the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has three justices appointed by a president who never won a majority of the nationwide vote.)
This is a frustrating state of affairs for Democrats, but is it a fundamental threat to democracy comparable to that of stolen elections? The US has never had a system where the popular vote dictated these outcomes. Republicans (including those who criticized Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election) argue that they have been playing by the long-established rules of the game, and that Democrats are simply upset that they are losing. Democrats argue back that the rules are unfair because they disadvantage nonwhite voters.
Whatever the arguments, there are few plausible solutions. The party’s filibustered election bill would have reformed House gerrymandering, but it left these other institutions untouched. Other proposals preferred by some on the left, such as adding new states to the Senate and packing the Supreme Court, didn’t even make the cut. The most popular idea for reforming the Electoral College — a “compact” among states to give their electors to the popular vote winner — isn’t going anywhere unless Democrats seize power in many more swing states.
There are some arguments that these problems are surmountable without big reforms. The current round of redistricting probably won’t be as bad for Democrats as many expected in the House (some state legislatures are another story, though). And the Electoral College bias is hardly set in stone — Democrats had a slight advantage in it compared to the popular vote in 2004, 2008, and 2012. Democrats’ woes there, as in the Senate, are in large part a Trump-era problem brought on by a sharp increase in the polarization of the electorate by education.
Yet reversing that trend would likely require a change in the party’s political coalition. They’d have to get significantly better at appealing to the non-college-educated voters, particularly white voters, whose power is amplified by these institutions, as Democratic data guru David Shor has argued. For the foreseeable future, the conversation about reforming the Electoral College or the Senate is a dead end — no constitutional convention is coming to save us. Democrats’ only option is to try to win despite their disadvantages.
The threat of voter suppression
Another threat that’s gotten enormous attention from Democrats, advocates, and experts this year is voter suppression. They argue that Republicans have a longtime practice of trying to effectively trying to distort the electorate, making it harder for certain voters (especially young, poor, nonwhite, and immigrant voters) to actually cast their ballots, so the GOP can have a better shot at winning.
This effort accelerated in 2021 with a set of new laws in GOP-controlled states. Some toughened voter ID requirements, some reduced the time in which mail ballots can be requested, some limited drop boxes, some made it easier to “purge” voter rolls. Republicans claim they’re simply rolling back pandemic expansions or trying to combat possible fraud, but occasionally a Republican admits these measures are aimed at helping their party win.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Protesters rally in Washington, DC, on August 28, 2021, to demand protection for voting rights on the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Biden and others have compared these laws to the old Jim Crow laws of the South. “We feel if they can do these voting rights laws and other voting rights laws, we will never have a majority,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently told the Washington Post. And the provisions of certain new laws that could enable partisan election subversion — election theft — could be quite dangerous.
But whatever Republicans’ malign intentions or Democrats’ fears, the real-world effects of voter suppression provisions on election outcomes seem likely to be considerably less dramatic. “There is very little that politicians can do to alter election administration in such a way that it would have a permanent, obvious effect on turnout or the composition of the electorate,” MIT political scientist Charles Stewart told my colleague Ian Millhiser last year.
There simply haven’t been big variations in state election outcomes based on how much early or mail voting states have — it just doesn’t seem to matter much, because people largely adapt to the new rules. Studyafterstudy has found that voter ID laws have little effect on outcomes. And it isn’t the case anymore, if it ever was, that high-turnout elections are self-evidently bad for Republicans, given the parties’ changing coalitions and recent voting patterns.
Some political scientists are still worried. Charlotte Hill, Jake Grumbach, Hakeem Jefferson, and Adam Bonica write that it’s “not at all clear” that voter suppression policies have little impact. They posit that perhaps outcomes don’t change “because grassroots groups have invested ever-greater resources” to overcome barriers to voting, and such investment might not be sustainable.
Expanding and standardizing voting accessibility can be a worthwhile and important thing to do regardless of its partisan effects or impact on outcomes. Provisions of these laws, like the Georgia one that bans giving away food and water to people waiting in line at a polling place, can be cruel and arbitrary. And if an election is close enough, even policies with very small effects could theoretically tip the outcome. But major transformations of the electorate in these states from policies of this kind seem unlikely.
The threat of the irresponsible party
Finally, some liberals would define the threat to democracy in even more worrying terms. It wouldn’t just be a stolen election, or a Republican win without a majority of votes — any Republican victory at all is a threat, because of what the GOP might use its powers to do next time around.
“There’s something deep to confront about the aberrant nature of this particular faction and political formation that is the primary problem that all others flow from,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently argued on The Ezra Klein Show.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, center, and other members of the House Republican Conference arrive for a news conference outside the US Capitol on July 29, 2021.
Trump’s actions, and the willingness of so much of the GOP to excuse or accommodate them, go a long way toward making the case that the GOP may well not respect future election results if it’s in power. The more difficult question is what can be even done about this. “What do you do in a two-party system if one coalition is not fully committed to democracy?” Hayes continued.
The solution Democrats would prefer, of course, is that everyone should just vote for Democrats. But as recent election results and polling numbers suggest, that likely won’t work. The Republican Party is going to stick around and remain competitive in the future, at the state level and nationally. The grand, final defeat of Trump or the GOP, either electorally or legislatively, is a pipe dream.
Some have mused about electoral reforms like a top 5 ranked-choice system, which perhaps could give GOP moderates a path to the general election. But the forces pushing the GOP in extreme directions, such as identity-based polarization and media dynamics, are broad and unlikely to be solved by policy tweaks.
So for those who believe the Democratic Party and the forces of democracy are permanently locked in combat with an extremist GOP, there’s not a comforting prescription. Whether this will change depends on the GOP itself.
But at least when it comes to election theft, there’s a counterargument that the party isn’t yet lost. In particular, key Republicans with positions of authority to affect the results largely didn’t use their formal powers to help Trump steal the election. Swing state governors, state officials, state legislative leaders, GOP-appointed judges, Senate leaders, and Justice Department leaders let Biden’s win through. Many in the party postured irresponsibly, some sought to use theirpower corruptly, but it’s not the case that the GOP is a well-oiled election-stealing machine: at least not yet.
If Trump is deposed or retires, and is replaced by a less conspiracy-addled, norm-breaking, boundary-pushing party leader, that could help. If the party accepts that they’re making gains among nonwhite and other low-propensity voters and stops trying to suppress their turnout, that would be nice. If high-ranking members of the party who oppose election theft and respect democratic norms manage to hold on to their positions, rather than being purged, that would be encouraging.
Trump’s coup last time around was stopped, in large part, because Republican elected officials stopped it. Whether they will do so again is not really something Democrats or liberals can control. They can only hope for the best — and fear for the worst.
Bráulio Amado for Vox
The very real psychiatric term has become so omnipresent in pop culture that some experts worryit’s losing its meaning.
A preeminent book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, rocketed to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction paperback bestseller list in February 2021, at the start of the second year of the pandemic.
The Body Keeps the Score wasn’t a newcomer to the NYT bestseller list — though it was published in 2014, it crept onto the list in 2017, where it has remained for 168 weeks, selling almost 2 million copies worldwide.
Though it’s occasionally been dethroned — recently by bell hooks’ All About Love and, later, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in the wake of their deaths — it keeps rallying back to the top. Men’s Health named Bessel van der Kolk’s opus one of the best mental health reads of 2021. The singer Phoebe Bridgers declared it her favorite book. Maybe you’ve seeninfluencerspose with their copies.
The Body Keeps the Score is a part of the zeitgeist. Trauma is everywhere.
The Listen Notes podcast search engine lists more than 5,500 podcasts with “trauma” in the title. Trauma is on our screens, too: Grey’s Anatomy, Succession, Fleabag, I May Destroy You, Yellowjackets, and Station Eleven are just a few examples of shows whose characters are haunted by the past. The Matrix Resurrections features trauma therapy as a key plot point. In an essay last month, The New Yorker’s Parul Sehgal criticized what she called “the trauma plot” trope — essentially, when trauma discovery or revelation acts as the story payoff. “Dress this story up or down: on the page and on the screen, one plot — the trauma plot — has arrived to rule them all,” she wrote.
In a GQ profile last spring, Justin Bieber alluded to “trauma stuff” affecting his first year of marriage. The internet’s favorite yogi, Adriene Mishler, has a “Yoga for Post Traumatic Stress” class on YouTube. Trauma “therapists” (accredited and not) are there for you on color-coordinated Instagram grids, espousing views on triggers and flashbacks, and trauma “experts” (accredited and not) are on TikTok, too, posting 60-second skits about what trauma responses look like. The TikTok hashtags #traumadump and #traumadumping, a trend where creators describe their various traumas via sound memes or “story time” retellings, have a collective 31 million views. #Trauma has 6.2 billion.
Trauma is real, and can result in real disorders, though its meaning is ever-evolving. The DSM-5, the standard in American psychiatric diagnosis, currently defines it as “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence,” either as a victim or a witness. Growing attention to the term has pushed forth a larger acknowledgment of the indirect and long-lasting consequences of violence, certainly overdue in American culture.
Some who study trauma, however, say current cultural references to the word have become a mess of tongue-in-cheek and casual mentions, mixed with serious confessions and interrogations of the past — of definitional misunderstandings and the absurd and the trivial and the profound and the sincere.
“Trauma is one of those words that can mean anything,” says Michael Scheeringa, a medical doctor, professor at Tulane University, and author of the upcoming bookThe Trouble with Trauma. “I was stuck in traffic: That was traumatic. My football team lost: That was traumatic. That’s the way it’s used in our culture.”
The word hasn’t simply been watered down, but adopted widely as a kind of cultural touchstone.
“‘I have trauma,’ just becomes like, ‘I’m depressed’ or, ‘I’m addicted to cookies,’” says Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist. “It has become a popular idiom tossed around without meaning.”
While it may be tempting to point to the Covid-19 pandemic as the source of our growing interest in trauma — and certainly, it has been traumatic for many — trauma has been on the tips of our tongues for years. Over the past 18 years, Google searches for “trauma” have steadily risen, peaking in 2021. Books have caught onto that trend, too, with a boom in references to trauma since the 1980s. Many invoked the word after the Trump election, during the height of the Me Too movement in 2017, and in connection with the long history of killings of Black people by police, along with other major world events.
“This is not a mere terminological fad,” University of Melbourne psychologist Nick Haslam wrote in a Washington Post op-ed a few years ago. “It reflects a steady expansion of the word’s meaning by psychiatrists and the culture at large. And its promiscuous use has worrying implications.”
Trauma is everywhere, and it’s worth asking why.
“We speak of trauma incessantly these days.”
So wrote Murray M. Schwartz in a review of Trauma: A Genealogy in 2003. Schwartz was referring to the Catholic church scandal of the early aughts, but also pulled in September 11, 2001, for additional context, writing that the terror attacks “exacerbated the stretch marks of linguistic usage, but the problem of locating sources and meanings of overwhelming experiences and psychic dangers was felt urgently long before that disruptive day.”
Schwartz’s analysis might seem harsh, a kind of bullying finger-wagging akin to conservative eye-rolling about sensitive “snowflakes.” But Schwartz hints at the “elastic uses of loaded terms,” in a prescient way.
As a term, trauma is slippery. It can indicate a physical injury, an experience, or an emotional response to a horrific event. Derived from the Greek for “wound,” it’s still used today to describe physical injury in medical settings. The idea of trauma as psyche damage didn’t emerge until the late 1880s.
That’s not to say trauma wasn’t discussed before, at least in some form. Aberrations in behavior — such as flashbacks or what was considered “hysteria” — were often attributed to spirits, magic, or evil. In Herodotus’s writings of the 490 BC Battle of Marathon, he described an Athenian spear-carrier who lost his sight without having been wounded, a physical manifestation of the psychological strain of war.
Eventually, the field of psychology began to secularize matters of the mind and soul. As scholar Jill L. Matus wrote of this revelation, “[W]e no longer look to the priest or turn to theories of external possession; instead, we employ the discourse of memory to explain how, having been transfixed by some experience so overwhelming that it cannot be properly remembered, we have hidden and buried memory and knowledge deep within ourselves.” In 1889, the French psychologist Pierre Janet published the first scientific account of traumatic stress, “L’automatisme psychologique,” a work which was cited in Sigmund Freud’s 1893 paper on hysteria, a foundational work of trauma study.
Fast forward to World War I, when the British diagnosed soldiers with “shell shock.” Though patients were initially given treatment and disability pensions, it was eventually deemed a character defect of “undisciplined and unwilling soldiers,” van der Kolk wrote in The Body Keeps the Score. By WWII, interest in shell shock was piqued again, and detractors returned, too. General George Patton infamously slapped several soldiers suffering from “battle fatigue,” threatening one with a gun and calling another a “gutless bastard.”
By the time van der Kolk began working with Vietnam veterans in the late 1970s, he wrote, “there was not a single book on war trauma in the library of the VA. … At the same time, interest in trauma was exploding in the general public.” After being identified in veterans and in those responding to disasters (such as those who identified dead bodies at the 1978 Jonestown Massacre), post-traumatic stress disorder was added to the DSM-III in 1980. Over the next 14 years, DSM revisions placed more emphasis on the patient’s degree of distress rather than the objective severity of an event. The definition of the disorder also expanded to include those who didn’t just experience a traumatic event, but witnessed or even just heard of it.
As Americans emerged from the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and ’70s, racial injustice, violence against women, and child abuse began to be viewed as traumas in their own right.
By the 1990s, terms such as “cultural trauma,” “collective trauma,” “historical trauma,” and “intergenerational trauma” were on the rise, particularly in connection to genocide, enslavement, and war.
The expansion of the term had an unforeseen side effect, however. “Trauma started to become an easy go-to narrative for mental health challenges,” says Janis Whitlock, a research scientist at Cornell University who studies mental health in adolescents.
It didn’t take long after researchers began to grasp the concept of trauma for the nation to reach a flashpoint: trauma as trend.
“Trauma” in its current usage has created a tidy framework within which to understand our lives and roles. The word evokes a narrative in which one is stripped of agency: An event happens to us, an aggressor attacks us, we are born into generations of suffering. In this telling, we are powerless. Our minds protect us, or our memories get stuck, or our behavior changes — and it’s beyond our control.
“The trauma narrative became a very easy one to adopt, even for the people who didn’t have what we would call a lot of trauma,” Whitlock says. “It has currency, so people broker in it.”
Whitlock began hearing trauma used to describe more universal, upsetting experiences about 15 years ago, as she was conducting interviews for a self-injury study among youth. It was the heyday of Myspace and LiveJournal, when “for one of the first times, we went all in online,” she recalls. “People were sharing their lives, candidly.” That included posting about mental health and personal struggles. “One of my participants talked specifically about how she perceived a hierarchy of trauma,” Whitlock says. “There was a sense of, the worse your trauma is, the more justified your mental health challenges.”
Scheeringa also marked 2005 as a turning point — the dawn of a new, controversial understanding for trauma in the research realm. Complex PTSD — defined as a type of PTSD caused by repeated harmful events, such as childhood abuse — was being pursued by Scheeringa’s colleagues in a way he says he felt “wasn’t following the evidence.” Essentially, relying on ideas that trauma rewired the brain, “saying we think it not only causes PTSD, it can change your neurobiology permanently,” he says. “This is what I expected in Hollywood movies and in popular culture, but I didn’t really expect it from my colleagues.”
Much of this research pointed to brain scans of traumatized people, which show abnormalities in the brain, including the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for evaluating danger. Yet, to truly understand if trauma changes brain structures, longitudinal studies must prove that there weren’t pre-existing neurobiological differences. Scheeringa argues that there’s still way more research to be done.
Regardless, the idea has stuck among people who have endured hardships — or are just drawn to the idea. As Scheeringa says, “At the individual level, patients say, ‘I believe in complex PTSD because it helps me, that explains things for me.’”
Can an event be harmful and damaging, have consequences and even change the way we live, without also being traumatic? Some experts speak of “big-T” versus “little-t” trauma to differentiate, but that might not be going far enough.
I began reporting this story open to the idea that, perhaps, we are all traumatized. Then I read The Body Keeps the Score, which chronicles the stories of patients van der Kolk has seen in his decades of work. This includes, but is not limited to, survivors of child sexual abuse, perpetrators of war crimes, and a woman who woke up in the middle of surgery and couldn’t move but felt every incision. His examples are at turns sobering and horrifying, making it clear what constitutes trauma and what it looks like to be traumatized.
Van der Kolk also disagrees with the idea that all “traumatic” events are universally traumatizing. As he tells it in The Body Keeps the Score, the young son of his friend had just been dropped off for school on September 11, 2001, when the chaos broke out. The school looked directly on the Twin Towers and the students watched through the classroom window as the terrorist attacks unfolded. Witnessing September 11 certainly qualifies as a traumatic event: Frightening, life-threatening, shocking, and unexpected. Yet, van der Kolk wrote, the boy was not traumatized. His family supported him. He integrated the day into his larger story of himself, and of greater possibilities.
Twenty years later, plenty of headlines have suggested that we’re suffering from masstrauma from the Covid-19 pandemic. Isn’t the alienating isolation, uncertainty, and fear traumatizing? As van der Kolk told the Atlantic, “When people say the pandemic has been a collective trauma, I say, absolutely not.”
Excluding extraordinary circumstances, such as working on the frontlines as a doctor, “that speaks less to being victimized, more to the sense of overwhelm,” Whitlock says. “It’s more than we can process, it makes us feel small and helpless.” There’s a great difference, then, between feeling distress and being disordered. “What we’re lacking is a language nuanced enough to capture the experience we’ve collectively and individually had,” she says. “We need new glossaries to describe the human experience.”
To Scheeringa, trauma is strictly the result of a singular and unexpected life-threatening event. These days, however, many people are operating off the definition of trauma as laid out by Rutledge: “that your way of understanding the world has changed.”
By relying on trauma to understand our modern lives, we’re undercutting the very real impacts of stress and overwhelm. We’re flattening all hardships, conflating the horrific and life-shattering with the merely unpleasant. “Using the word ‘trauma’ turns every event into a catastrophe, leaving us helpless, broken and unable to move on,” Haslam wrote.
What of awareness? Doesn’t increased visibility push the traumatized to seek help? Perhaps. “It does mean that, in some capacity, people are aware that an experience can have negative consequences beyond just feeling bad in the moment,” Rutledge says, though it might be unhealthy for those suffering from trauma to meme-ify their experiences. “You’re not processing it,” she says, “you’re just advertising it.”
Misrepresenting trauma could also “stop a good portion of people from getting the right type of treatment for PTSD,” Scheeringa says. And, he says, signal-boosting unproven or bunk research “harms our science — when people think that scientists aren’t speaking truth, they stop respecting and listening to them.”
Our inclination to generalize trauma speaks to a commendable desire to recognize the complexity of the human experience. “There’s a golden opportunity for our own self-awareness and awareness of others and how humans work,” Whitlock says. Tightening the definition of trauma doesn’t take anything away from terrible personal experiences, the horrors of history, or the difficulty of being alive within our current social structures. It doesn’t limit our capacity for empathy or undercut the need to recover from tragedy, crises, or challenges. It doesn’t ignore the truth of violence and existential horror — though it does recognize that there can be consequences without there necessarily being trauma.
Perhaps, as Scheeringa says, “we’re not as fragile as we think.”
Lexi Pandell is a writer from Oakland, California. Her nonfiction work has been published in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Wired, and elsewhere. She last wrote about our brains and obsession for the Highlight.
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A new book aims to show why directives to “just be more confident!” are so harmful.
It’s hard to pin down exactly when it happened, but if you paid attention to women’s media in the 2000s and kept paying attention into the next decade, you definitely noticed it. Magazines that devoted their pages to diet tips and celebrity snark suddenly started preaching “empowerment.” Fashion brands that made clothing that only went up to a size 12 wanted you to “love your body” just the way it was. Parenting books wanted you to know that messing up was okay, that as long as you raised resilient, self-assured children, nobody cared about your stretch marks or your glass of wine in front of the TV.
Regardless, somewhere along the way — perhaps having to do with a catastrophic financial crisis and the rise of social media — it became imperative for capitalist enterprises to recognize that people were rediscovering a certain kind of feminism, a kind that emphasized self-love and self-care, embraced imperfection, and called on women to advocate for equality. All of this coalesces in what the sociologists Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill call “confidence culture” in their book of the same name due out January 28.
“To be self-confident is the imperative of our time. As gender, racial, and class inequalities deepen, women are increasingly called on to believe in themselves,” reads the first line of the text. It criticizes the individualistic, neoliberal missives from corporations to “just be more confident” — in our bodies, in our relationships, in motherhood, in the workplace, and within humanitarian efforts to support global development — and argues that, most of the time, they end up reinforcing the very beliefs they aim to deconstruct. For example: Orgad and Gill describe one “love your body” campaign that features a dozen or so women all dressed similarly against a minimalist background as “an attempt to use and strategically deploy images of minoritized groups (people of color, disabled people, Muslims, queer people) in commercial culture to ‘take diversity into account’ only to empty any particular differences of their meaning and social significance.”
I chatted with Orgad and Gill over Zoom, where we discussed the difficulties of critiquing confidence culture without critiquing confidence as a concept, the “girl-powering of international development,” and how the new wave of “anti self-help” is basically just … self-help.
When did you begin to see directives for women to “just be more confident!” as a systemic cultural trend?
Shani Orgad: We were working across different fields — Rosalind in intimate relationships and body image, I in motherhood and work, and we both had worked in issues of international development — and over the last decade or so, were witnessing very similar imperatives that were particularly addressed to women: to be confident, to believe in themselves, to love themselves.
Rosalind Gill: The timing is not accidental, partly in the context of the financial crisis. That was a very significant moment that gave rise to this new common sense. Here in the UK, there was a really strong austerity culture distinctively targeted at women. It was all about women being thrifty and going back to traditional crafts and cultivating these qualities and dispositions that they needed to survive in this tougher, financially strained period. It really intersected with feminism and created a very neoliberal or individualized feminism: putting it on women to turn inward, focus on themselves, and stop thinking that structural barriers are out there and start thinking that they’re just something we need to work on.
You note throughout the book that what you’re critiquing isn’t confidence itself but the culture around it and “what its fetishization does.” How did you approach marking the difference between criticizing women with confidence and the more insidious confidence culture?
Rosalind Gill: For me, the “love your body” advertising and body positivity really resonates. It has a power and I am not ashamed to admit that I cried when those first Dove adverts came out. We were very, very critical of the work that they were doing, while also recognizing that we were doing similar things with our own students. We’d be trying to support our young graduate students and making them feel more confident. We’re deeply implicated in it. But we make clear that we’re attacking that fetishization and the way that it’s become this article of faith, this kind of unquestioned common sense, rather than attacking the idea of confidence per se.
In many instances you style “confidence culture” as “confidence cult(ure),” implying that this is more than a culture, it’s a cult. How do you define the confidence cult?
Rosalind Gill: It’s like a cult in the way that it’s been placed beyond debate: Who could be against confidence? Nobody could possibly argue against it because it’s so taken for granted. I think it’s good to be suspicious of the things that get placed in that space where they can’t be interrogated at all. It was also just a culture in the way that it saturated right across society — it was disseminated so, so widely. We were encountering exactly the same messages, literally word for word, in our respective areas of research.
Shani Orgad: The women I spoke to describe it as something that isn’t tangible: When you ask them, “Where did you get these expectations that you should be the confident mother and the full-time worker who’s assertive?” they say, “It’s everywhere.” It becomes so unquestioned that it’s being internalized into the most intimate sphere, whereby women, often very painfully, judge themselves according to this unattainable expectation.
There’s been a lot of backlash to these individualist, neoliberal ideas in the past five or so years, but you also argue that a lot of the responses — from “anti self-help” media like the How to Fail podcast, the bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, or on another end, Brené Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability — are simply repackaging the same ideas. How so?
Shani Orgad: It’s again about looking inward. It’s about you, as a person, working on yourself, recognizing how you’re experiencing vulnerability. It’s not matched by any call, for instance, to invest in developing a community that would support these vulnerable selves. So in this way, it’s very similar and actually kind of reinforcing to confidence culture. It ultimately becomes yet another site of privilege because very particular people can afford to be and be seen as vulnerable. It’s about a very temporary and contained moment that you are allowed to be vulnerable, so long as you ultimately overcome and become the confident, self-loving, resilient, content person. Vulnerability is fine, but oftentimes, those who write about being vulnerable are already “on the other side.”
Rosalind Gill: It’s almost like there’s these two clashing tones, one which is defiant, breaking the rules, “fuck everything,” and the other which seems really paradoxical is this kind of vulnerable, more fragile, “let’s give space to our insecurities and not aspire to be perfect.” They both sit alongside each other as “self-believing, self-accepting, confident-yet-relatable and not overconfident because that would be off-putting.” What would a properly feminist, antiracist, LGBTQ, non-neurotypical collective resistance self-help look like? It’s really hard to imagine.
A lot of people would argue, well, what’s the problem with Dove saying that all bodies are beautiful, or campaigns that feature larger or non-normative bodies? But you make a compelling point that this actually reinforces the same harmful messages. Can you lay out that counterargument?
Rosalind Gill: There are so many ways into this critique. One is that, until very recently, it represents a fake or pseudo-diversity, and claims to be a lot more diverse than it actually is. It will claim to show diverse ethnicities, religions, body sizes, but barely differing from what went before. The whole company is premised on exploiting women’s insecurities, selling products targeted at that. It also has a post-racial tenor in the way it flattens our differences to make them seem as if they’re all on one plane and as relevant as each other while appropriating social justice language. It takes all the differences and empties them out of their meaning and appears that, say, being pregnant is as significant as being disabled.
Body image is probably the most common association people have with “confidence culture.” As much as “body positivity” is a common and very popular and marketable phrase, you show that at no point in history have people been this focused on their bodies. How does that dichotomy work?
Rosalind Gill: It delegitimizes the feelings that anyone could have about their own body insecurities because we’re supposed to be comfortable in our skin. Yet that isn’t the world that we live in. We’re in a world of absolute forensic surveillance where everybody feels under intense scrutiny. I’ve just been doing some interviews with young people around how judged they feel all the time around their appearance. Yet they don’t feel that they can speak about it on their social media posts because that would be seen as being attention-seeking and attract more criticism.
In the chapter on “confident mothering,” you say that many of the blogs and communities where women can vent, rant, and commiserate, claim that what they’re selling is “real,” but still perpetuate the idea of a perfect mother, that idea of “perfectly imperfect.” What does that look like?
Shani Orgad: There’s been lots of research documenting significant shifts in the ways in which mothering is being talked about and represented in popular media. Some popular TV shows and films offer much more complicated portraits of mothering and comment on the many frustrations and disappointments and imperfections that this experience entails. That is a significant break from what characterized earlier decades. But it didn’t release the pressure — it transformed the pressure to be a “perfectly imperfect” mother, to be “authentic.” One of the things that was very apparent in our research into these kinds of websites and blogs is how the idea of the “perfectly imperfect” mother is still very much white and middle class. This is a time where there has been significantly growing visibility on Black motherhood in popular discourse, so at the same time that [the perfectly imperfect white, middle-class mother] is gaining visibility, there’s also a reinforcement of a new ideal mother.
We call it the double whammy of confidence culture because it works as a double burden: Women have to perform confidence for themselves and also for their daughters, so they have to model it all the time. It introduces a whole new layer of self-vigilance and self-inspection and a constant awareness of yourself as a mother, not just in how you might harm yourself but how you might harm your daughter. There’s very little talk about what role men who are parents play in their children’s confidence. It’s unspoken that it’s the mother alone.
One of the most fascinating sections of the book is your discussion of the “girl-powering of international development.” Can you explain what that means and how you see it as part of this larger confidence culture?
Shani Orgad: The whole industry of, for instance, voluntourism is marketed as a good cause to help the “faraway other,” but it’s never separate from investing in your own self. We looked at numerous volunteer tourism websites, and they all have this feel-good, adventurous, exciting vibe. They’re often about how you can “hone your leadership skills” or discover yourself. It’s a self-discovery, while you’re also “rescuing” your sister in the Global South. In an era that has already seen so much criticism of earlier tropes that NGOs have been blamed for — dehumanizing the suffering of the other, the undignified depiction of victims — you would expect that something new would occur and in many ways, confidence culture is yet another iteration of these problems. We call it “confidence without borders” as a new movement that seems to characterize a lot of these initiatives in the humanitarian fields today.
Shani Orgad: We were interested to find examples that at least partly challenged or refuted the tropes and logics of confidence culture. For example, we looked at the TV series Sex Education, appreciating its take on intimate life in all its nuance and complexity, that didn’t ever recourse to easy clichés of self-esteem or “confidence is the new sexy,” but actually showed how relationships of all kinds are striated by power. We talked about Hannah Gadsby’s shows Nanetteand Douglas, and the striking way in which she actively rebutted individualist accounts of sexism, sexual harassment, and homophobia with her line, “this is not an isolated incident.”
We included also the example of Lizzo, because in many ways she epitomizes confidence culture, but we found her to be a really interesting and important example of how some of the limits of confidence culture can be repaired or at least challenged. She represents a radical deviation from the normative ideal of female attractiveness and the highly restrictive beauty standards that dominate the confidence culture; the ways she privileges and celebrates Black bodies and experiences; the way she refuses the post-racial tenor of the confidence culture and instead connects her performance and persona to her experience of racism, sexism, and fat-shaming; and how she does not hide the immense work that self-love requires.
How has the pandemic changed our relationship to confidence culture?
Shani Orgad: The pandemic presented a moment that could significantly challenge the existing neoliberal order and disrupt the confidence culture. It has exposed intersectional inequalities and the way it highlighted our relational interdependence. However, during the pandemic, we have witnessed the reinforcement of confidence imperatives and proliferation of self-care messages. Staying positive and practicing “self-care” became motifs throughout the pandemic, seen in everything from exhortations to exercise, breathe deeply, and sleep better; to the promotion of “uplifting” tunes, “comfort” food, and “feel-good” TV. They encouraged women to turn inward rather than encouraging action to challenge and transform the structural conditions that have affected women disproportionately. So, seemingly benign and often undoubtedly well-meaning messages of confidence, calm, and positivity during the pandemic seem to buttress the confidence culture in very problematic ways.
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Where the crisis in American democracy might be headed.
Americans have long believed our country to be exceptional. That is true today in perhaps the worst possible sense: No other established Western democracy is at such risk of democratic collapse.
January 6, 2021, should have been a pivot point. The Capitol riot was the violent culmination of President Donald Trump and his Republican allies’ war on the legitimacy of American elections — but also a glimpse into the abyss that could have prompted the rest of the party to step away.
Yet the GOP’s fever didn’t break that day. Large majorities of Republicans continue to believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and elected Republicans around the country are acting on this conspiracy theory — attempting to lock Democrats out of power by seizing partisan control of America’s electoral systems. Democrats observe all this and gird for battle, with many wondering if the 2024 elections will be held on the level.
These divisions over the fairness of our elections are rooted in an extreme level of political polarization that has divided our society into mutually distrustful “us versus them” camps. Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University, has a term for this: “pernicious polarization.”
In a draft paper, McCoy and co-author Ben Press examine every democracy since 1950 to identify instances where this mindset had taken root. One of their most eye-popping findings: None of America’s peer democracies have experienced levels of pernicious polarization as high for as long as the contemporary United States.
“Democracies have a hard time depolarizing once they’ve reached this level,” McCoy tells me. “I am extremely worried.”
But worried about what, exactly? This is the biggest question in American politics: Where does our deeply fractured country go from here?
A deep dive into the academic research on democracy, polarization, and civil conflict is sobering. Virtually all of the experts I spoke with agreed that, in the near term, we are in for a period of heightened struggle. Among the dire forecasts: hotly contested elections whose legitimacy is doubted by the losing side, massive street demonstrations, a paralyzed Congress, and even lethal violence among partisans.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Trump supporters gather for the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election.
Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist who studies polarization and political violence in America, warned of a coming conflagration “like the summer of 2020, but 10 times bigger.”
In the longer term, some foresaw one-party Republican rule — the transformation of America into something like contemporary Hungary, an authoritarian system in all but name. Some looked to countries in Latin America, where some political systems partly modeled on the United States have seen their presidencies become elected dictatorships.
“The night that Trump got elected, one of my Peruvian students writing about populism in the Andes [called me] and said, ‘Jesus Christ, what’s happening now is what we’ve been talking about for years,’” says Edward Gibson, a scholar of democracy in Latin America at Northwestern University. “These are patterns that repeat themselves in different ways. And the US is not an exception.”
Others warned of a retreat to America’s Cold War past, where Democrats stoke conflict with a great power — this time, China — and abandon their commitment to multiracial democracy to appeal to racially resentful whites.
“The losers in the resolution of past democratic crises in the United States have, more often than not, been Black Americans,” says Rob Lieberman, an expert on American political history at Johns Hopkins.
America’s dysfunction stems, in large part, from an outdated political system that creates incentives for intense partisan conflict and legislative gridlock. That system may well be near the point of collapse.
Reform is certainly a possibility. But the most meaningful changes to our system have been won only after bloodshed and struggle, on the fields of Gettysburg and in the streets of Birmingham. It is possible, maybe even likely, that America will not be able to veer from its dangerous path absent more eruptions and upheavals — that things will get worse before they get better.
Part I: Conflict
Barbara Walter is one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars. A professor at the University of California San Diego, she has done field research in places ranging from Zimbabwe to the Golan Heights, and has analyzed which countries are most likely to break down into violent conflict.
Her forthcoming book, How Civil Wars Start, summarizes the voluminous research on the question and applies it to the contemporary United States. Its conclusions are alarming.
“The warning signs of instability that we have identified in other places are the same signs that, over the past decade, I’ve begun to see on our own soil,” Walter writes. “I’ve seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.”
Walter uses the term “civil war” broadly, encompassing everything from the American Civil War to lower-intensity insurgencies like the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Something like the latter, in her view, is more likely in the United States: One of the book’s chapters envisions a scenario in which a wave of bombings in state capitols, perpetrated by white nationalists, escalates to tit-for-tat violence committed by armed factions on both the right and the left.
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The Boogaloo Boys hold a rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing on October 17, 2020. Some of the men arrested in the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer reportedly subscribed to the ideology of the anti-government “Boogaloo” movement.
Countries are most likely to collapse into civil war, Walter explains, under a few circumstances: when they are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic; when the leading political parties are sharply divided along multiple identity lines; when a once-dominant social group is losing its privileged status; and when citizens lose faith in the political system’s capacity to change.
Under these conditions, large swaths of the population come to see members of opposing groups as existential threats and believe that the government neither represents nor protects them. In such an insecure environment, people conclude that taking up arms is the only recourse to protect their community. The collapse of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s — leading to conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo — is a textbook example.
Worryingly, all four warning signs Walter identifies are present, at least to some degree, in the United States today.
Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images
Supporters of former President Donald Trump protest outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona, where a recount of ballots from the 2020 general election was underway on May 1, 2021. The Maricopa County ballot recount came after two election audits found no evidence of widespread fraud in Arizona.
Walter doesn’t think that a rerun of the American Civil War is in the cards. What she does worry about, and believes to be in the realm of the possible, is a different kind of conflict. “The next war is going to be more decentralized, fought by small groups and individuals using terrorism and guerrilla warfare to destabilize the country,” Walter tells me. “We are closer to that type of civil war than most people realize.”
How close is hard to say. There are important differences not only between the United States of today and 1861, but also between contemporary America and Northern Ireland in 1972. Perhaps most significantly, the war on terror and the rise of the internet have given law enforcement agencies unparalleled capacities to disrupt organized terrorist plots and would-be domestic insurgent groups.
But violence can still spiral absent a nationwide bombing campaign or a full-blown war — think lone-wolf terrorism, mob assaults on government buildings, rioting, street brawling.
Historical examples abound, some even in advanced democracies in the not-so-distant past. For about a decade and a half beginning in 1969, Italy suffered through a spree of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by far-right and far-left extremists that killed hundreds — the “Years of Lead.” Walter and other observers have pointed to this as a possible glimpse into America’s future: not quite a civil war, but still significant political violence that terrified civilians and threatened the democratic system.
Since Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory, America has seen a surge in membership in far-right militias. During the Trump era, some prominent militias directly aligned themselves with his presidency — with some groups, like the heavily armed Oathkeepers and street-brawling Proud Boys, participating in the attack on the Capitol. In May, the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security both testified before Congress that white supremacist terrorism is the greatest domestic threat to America today.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
Trump supporters breached security and entered the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, disrupting Electoral College proceedings.
Fears of white displacement — the anxieties that Walter and other scholars pinpoint as root causes of political violence — have already fueled horrific mass shootings. In 2018, a gunman who believed that Jews were responsible for mass nonwhite immigration opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11. The next year, a shooter who claimed Latinos were “replacing” whites in America murdered 23 shoppers at an El Paso Walmart that has a heavily Latino clientele.
Other forms of political conflict, like the 2021 Capitol riot, may not be as deadly but can be just as destabilizing. In 1968, a wave of demonstrations, strikes, and riots initiated by left-wing students ground France to a halt and nearly toppled its government. During the height of the unrest in late May, President Charles de Gaulle briefly decamped to Germany.
In the coming years, the United States is likely to experience some amalgam of these various upheavals: isolated acts of mass killing, street fighting among partisans, protests that break out into violence, major political and social disruption like on January 6, 2021, or in May 1968.
AP
Anti-riot police charge through the streets of Paris, France, during student demonstrations that turned violent on May 6, 1968.
The most likely flashpoint is a presidential election.
Our toxic cocktail of partisanship, identity conflict, and an outmoded political structure has made the stakes of elections feel existential. The erosion of faith in institutions and growing distrust of the other side makes it more and more likely that neither party will view a victory by the other as legitimate.
After the November 2020 contest, Republicans widely accepted Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election. With the January 6 riot and its aftermath, we now have an example of what happens when a Trumpist Republican Party loses an election — and every reason to think something like it could happen again.
An October poll from Grinnell-Selzer found that 60 percent of Republicans are not confident that votes will be counted properly in the 2022 midterms. Election officials have been inundated with an unprecedented wave of violent threats, almost exclusively from Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent.
The behavior by Republican leaders is all the more worrisome because elites can play a major role in either inciting or containing violent eruptions. In their forthcoming book Radical American Partisanship, Mason and co-author Nathan Kalmoe ran an experiment testing the effect of elite rhetoric on Americans’ willingness to engage in violence. They found that if you show Republican partisans a message attributed to Trump denouncing political violence, their willingness to endorse it goes down substantially.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Then-President Donald Trump speaks at the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC, on January 6, in an hour-long speech during which he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol to protest Electoral College proceedings.
“Our results suggest loud and clear that antiviolence messages from Donald Trump could have made a difference in reducing violent partisan views among Republicans in the public— and perhaps in pacifying some of his followers bent on violence,” they write. “Instead, Trump’s lies about the election incited that violence” on January 6, 2021.
Doubts about the legitimacy of election results can also run the other way. Imagine an extremely narrow Trump victory in 2024: an election decided by Georgia, where an election law inspired by Trump’s lie gives the Republican legislature the power to seize control over the vote-counting process at the county level. If Republicans use this power and attempt to influence the tally in, say, Fulton County — a heavily Democratic area including Atlanta — Democrats would cry foul. There would likely be massive protests in Atlanta, Washington, DC, and many other American cities.
One can then imagine how that could spiral. Armed pro-Trump militias like the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys show up to counterprotest or “restore order”; antifa marchers square off against them. The kind of street fighting that we’ve seen in Portland, Oregon, and Charlottesville, Virginia, erupts in several cities. This is Mason’s “summer of 2020, but 10 times bigger” scenario.
Maybe these melees stay contained. But violence may also beget more violence; before you know it, America could be engulfed in its own Years of Lead.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
White nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the alt-right clash with counterprotesters as they enter Emancipation Park during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017.
It’s all speculative, of course. And this worst-case scenario may not even be likely. But Walter urges against complacency.
“Every single person I interviewed who’s lived through civil war, who was there as it emerged, said the exact same thing: ‘If you had told me it was going to happen, I wouldn’t have believed you,’” she warns.
Part II: Catastrophe
In McCoy and Press’s draft paper on “pernicious polarization,” they found that only two advanced democracies even came close to America’s sustained levels of dangerously polarized politics: France in 1968 and Italy during the Years of Lead.
The broader sample, which includes newer and weaker democracies in addition to more established ones, isn’t much more encouraging. The scholars identified 52 cases of pernicious polarization since 1950. Of these, just nine countries managed to sustainably depolarize. The most common outcome, seen in 26 out of the 52 cases, is the weakening of democracy — with 23 of those “descending into some form of authoritarianism.”
Almost all the experts I spoke with said that America’s coming period of political struggle could fundamentally transform our political system for the worse. They identified a few different historical and contemporary examples that could provide some clues as to where America is headed.
None of them is promising.
Viktor Orbán’s America
Since coming to power in 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has systematically transformed his country’s political system to entrench his Fidesz party’s rule.
Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Viktor Orbán delivers a speech in Budapest, Hungary, in March 2018.
The party’s opponents have been reduced to a rump in the national legislature, holding real power only in a handful of localities like the capital city of Budapest. A desperate campaign by a united opposition in the 2022 election faces an uphill battle: a polling average from Politico EU has shown a Fidesz advantage for the past seven months.
There was no single moment when Hungary made the jump from democracy to a kind of authoritarianism. The change was subtle and slow — a gradual hollowing out of democracy rather than its extirpation.
The fear among democracy experts is that the US is sleepwalking down the same path. The fear has only been intensified by the American right’s explicit embrace of Orbán, with high-profile figures like Tucker Carlson holding up the Hungarian regime as a model for America.
“That has always been my view: we’ll wake up one day and it’ll just become clear that Democrats can’t win,” says Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell who studies democracy in Southeast Asia.
In this scenario, Democrats fail to pass any kind of electoral reform and lose control of Congress in 2022. Republicans in key states like Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin continue to rewrite the rules of elections: making it harder for Democratic-leaning communities to vote, putting partisans in charge of vote counts, and even giving GOP-controlled state legislatures the ability to override the voters and unilaterally appoint electors to the Electoral College.
Megan Varner/Getty Images
Demonstrators wear chains while holding a sit-in on March 8, 2021, inside the Georgia Capitol building in Atlanta in opposition to a pair of bills that would have placed more restrictions on early and absentee voting.
The Supreme Court continues its assault on voting rights by ruling in favor of a GOP state legislature that does just that — embracing a radical legal theory, articulated by Justice Neil Gorsuch, that state legislatures have the final say in the rules governing elections.
These measures, together with the built-in rural biases of the Senate and Electoral College, could make future control of the federal government a nearly insurmountable climb for Democrats. Democrats would still be able to hold power locally, in blue states and cities, but would have a hard time contesting national elections.
Political scientists call this kind of system “competitive authoritarianism”: one in which the opposition can win some elections and wield a limited degree of power but ultimately are prevented from governing due to a system stacked against them. Hungary is a textbook example of competitive authoritarianism in action — and, quite possibly, a glimpse into America’s future.
The Latin American path to a strongman
The rising hostility between the two parties has made it harder and harder for either party to get the necessary bipartisan support to pass big bills. And with its many veto points — the Senate filibuster being the most glaring — the American political system makes it exceptionally difficult for any party to pass major legislation on its own.
The result: Congressional authority has weakened, and there’s a rising executive dependence on unilateral measures, such as executive orders and agency actions. Only rarely do presidents repudiate powers claimed by their predecessors; in general, the authority of the executive has grown on a bipartisan basis.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
A man holds an anti-filibuster sign with a depiction of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as Uncle Sam during a rally in support of voting rights on September 14, 2021.
So long as America is wracked by partisan conflict, it’s easy to see this trend getting worse. In response to an ineffectual Congress and a party faithful that demands victories over their hated enemies, presidents seize more authority to implement their policy agenda. As clashes between partisans turn more bitter and more violent, the wider public begins crying out for someone to restore order through whatever means necessary. Presidents become increasingly comfortable ruling through emergency powers and executive orders — perhaps even to the point of ignoring court rulings that seek to limit their power.
Under such conditions, there is a serious risk of the presidency evolving into an authoritarian institution.
“My bet would be on deadlock as the most plausible path forward,” says Milan Svolik, a political scientist at Yale who studies comparative polarization. “If there’s deadlock … to me it seems [to threaten democracy] by the huge executive powers of the presidency and the potential for their abuse.”
Such a development may be more acceptable to Americans than we’d like to think. In a 2020 paper, Svolik and co-author Matthew Graham asked both Republican and Democratic partisans whether they would be willing to vote against a politician from their party who endorses undemocratic beliefs. Examples include proposals that a governor from their party “rules by executive order if [opposite party] legislators don’t cooperate” and “ignores unfavorable court rulings from [opposite party] judges.”
They found that only a small minority of voters, roughly 10 to 15 percent, were willing even in theory to vote against politicians from their own party who supported these kinds of abuses. Their research suggests the numbers would likely be substantially lower in a real-world election.
“Our analysis reveals that the American voter is not an outlier: American democracy may be just as vulnerable to the pernicious consequences of polarization as are electorates throughout the rest of the world,” Svolik and Graham conclude.
Globally, some of the clearest examples of a descent into presidential absolutism come from Latin America.
Unlike most European democracies, which employ parliamentary systems that select the chief executive from the ranks of legislators, most Latin American democracies adopted a more American model and directly elect their president.
In the late 20th century, social and economic divisions in countries like Brazil and Argentina led to legislative gridlock and festering policy problems; presidents attempted to solve this mess by assuming a tremendous amount of power and ruling by decree. Political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell termed these countries “delegative democracies,” in which voters use elections not to elect representatives but to delegate near-absolute power to one person.
“Presidents get elected promising that they — strong, courageous, above parties and interests, machos — will save the country,” O’Donnell writes. “In this view other institutions — such as Congress and the judiciary — are nuisances.”
The rise of delegative democracy in Latin America exposed a flaw at the heart of American-style democracy: how the separation of executive and legislative power can grind government to a halt, opening the door to unpredictable and even outright undemocratic behavior.
“I think what we’re going to have is continued dysfunction … that could lead people to say, as we’ve seen in so many other countries, especially in Latin America, ‘let’s just have a strongman government,’” says McCoy, the scholar of “pernicious polarization.”
Dante Zegarra/AFP via Getty Images
Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori addresses a crowd outside the government palace in Lima during a surprise public appearance on April 20, 1992. Just two weeks earlier, he had announced the dissolution of the Congress and the suspension of the Constitution in a military-backed move.
In some cases, like contemporary Ecuador, presidents were granted new powers by national referenda and pliant legislatures. But in others, like Peru in the 1990s, the president seized them more directly. An outsider elected in 1990 amid a violent insurgency and a crisis of public confidence in the Peruvian elite, President Alberto Fujimori frequently clashed with a legislature controlled by his opponents. In response, he took unilateral actions culminating in 1992’s “self-coup,” where he dismissed the legislature and ruled by decree for seven months — until he could hold elections to legitimize the power grab. His regime, authoritarian in all but name, persisted until 2000.
Much like the slide toward competitive authoritarianism, a move toward Fujimorism in America would happen gradually — one executive order at a time — until the US presidency has become a dictatorship in many of the ways that count.
A civil rights reversal
Americans do not need to go abroad in search of examples of democratic breakdown.
Jim Crow, primarily remembered as a form of racial apartheid, was also a kind of all-American autocracy. Southern states were one-party fiefdoms where Democratic victory was assured, in large part due to laws denying Black people the right to vote and participate in politics.
The Jim Crow regime emerged out of a national electoral crisis — the contested 1876 election, in which neither party candidate was initially willing to admit defeat. In 1877, Democrats agreed to award Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency on the condition that he withdraw the remaining federal troops stationed in the South. The result was the end of Reconstruction and the victory of so-called Redeemers, Southern Democrats who aimed to rebuild white supremacist governance in the former Confederacy.
“In the [early and middle] 20th century, polarization looks low,” Lieberman, the Johns Hopkins scholar, explains. “That’s because African Americans are essentially written out of the political system, and there’s an implicit agreement across the mainstream to keep that off of the agenda.”
America is obviously very different today. But as in the past, divides over race and identity are the fundamental driver of deep partisan polarization — and whites are still over 70 percent of the population. It’s not hard to conjure up a scenario, borrowing from both our distant and not-so-distant past, in which minority rights are once again trampled so whites can get along.
Imagine a future in which, with the benefit of structural advantages, Republican electoral victories pile up. Protests against GOP rule and racial inequality once again turn ugly, even violent. In response, an anxious Democratic Party feels that it has little choice but to engage in what the Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon calls “white appeasement politics”: Think Bill Clinton’s attack on the rapper Sister Souljah, his enactment of welfare reform, and his “tough on crime” approach to criminal justice.
J. David Ake/AFP via Getty Images
President Bill Clinton addresses the National Governors Association in Washington, DC, in February 1993, when he said he would allow states to use federal money for welfare reform experiments, and repeated his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.”
Democrats dial back their commitment to policies aimed at addressing racial inequality, including abandoning any serious attempts at reforming the police, defending affirmative action, reducing discrimination in the housing market, or restoring the Voting Rights Act. They also move to ramp up deportations (which has happened in the past) and substantially lower legal immigration levels.
Democrats and Republicans primarily compete over cross-pressured whites, while Black and Latino influence over the system is diminished. America’s status as a multiracial democracy would be questionable at best.
“That is a real possibility,” warns Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford who studies race and American democracy.
And there’s another twist to this scenario that some experts brought up: Democrats attempting to unify the country through conflict with a foreign enemy. The theory here is that low polarization in postwar America wasn’t solely an outgrowth of a racist detente; the threat of nuclear conflict with the Soviets also played a role in uniting white America.
There’s one obvious candidate for an adversary. “I’ve always thought Americans would come together when we realized that we faced a dangerous foreign foe. And lo and behold, now we have one: China,” the New York Times’s David Brooks wrote in 2019. “Mike Pence and Elizabeth Warren can sound shockingly similar when talking about China’s economic policy.”
The result would be a new equilibrium, one where China displaces immigration and race as the defining issue in American public life while the white majority returns to a state of indifference to racial hierarchy.
Is this scenario likely? There are good reasons to think not.
Jefferson thinks the makeup of the modern Democratic Party, in particular, poses a significant barrier to this kind of backsliding. Racial justice and pro-immigration groups are powerful constituencies inside the party; any Democrat needs significant Black and Latino support to win on the national level. The progressive turn on race among liberal whites in the past few years — the so-called Great Awokening — means that even the white Democratic base is likely to punish racially conservative candidates in primaries.
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People rally outside the US Capitol on December 7, 2021. Progressive Democrats have urged the Senate to include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the US in the Build Back Better Act.
And the best research on China and polarization, a 2021 paper by Duke professor Rachel Myrick, finds ramping up tensions with Beijing is more likely to divide Americans than to unite them. “I have difficulty imagining the set of circumstances under which we’re going to see bipartisan cooperation in a way that’s analogous to the Cold War,” she tells me.
But in the long arc of American history, few forces have proven more politically potent than the politics of fear and racial resentment. While their reconquest of the Democratic Party may seem unlikely now, stranger things have happened — like the party of Lincoln becoming the party of Trump.
In 1930, a far-right nationalist movement called Lapua rocketed to prominence, rallying 12,000 followers to march on the capital, Helsinki. The movement’s thugs kidnapped their political opponents; the country’s first president, who had finished his term just five years prior, was one of their victims.
In 1931, the Lapua-backed conservative Pehr Evind Svinhufvud won the country’s presidential election. The movement became even more militant: In March 1932, Lapua supporters seized control of the town of Mäntsälä.
But the attack on Mäntsälä did not cow the Finnish leadership: It galvanized them to action. Svinhufvud turned on his Lapua supporters and condemned their violence. The armed forces surrounded Mäntsälä and forced the rebels to put down their arms. Leading political parties worked to limit Lapua’s influence in the legislature. The movement withered and ultimately collapsed.
The Finnish story is one of three examples in a 2018 paper examining democratic “near misses”: cases where a democracy almost fell to autocratic forces but managed to survive. The paper’s authors, University of Chicago legal scholars Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq, find a clear pattern in these near misses — that political elites, including both politicians and unelected officials, can change the way a crisis unfolds.
“Sustained antidemocratic mobilization is hard to defeat, but a well-timed decision by judges, generals, civil servants, or party elites can make all the difference between a near miss and a fatal blow,” they write.
In the United States, we have plenty of reasons for pessimism on this front.
During the Trump years, shocking developments and egregious violations of long-held norms would invariably give rise to a hope that this, finally, was the moment where Republican elites would abandon him. The aftermath of the Capitol riot, a literal violent uprising, could have been their Mäntsälä — a moment when it became clear that the extremists had gone too far and the American conservative establishment would pull us back from the brink.
In the days following the attack, that seemed like a live possibility. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gave a fiery speech on January 19 condemning the uprising and Trump’s role in encouraging it. Other establishment Republicans who had previously defended Trump, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, also openly criticized his conduct.
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell walks to his office at the conclusion of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial at the US Capitol on February 13, 2021. The Senate voted 57-43 to acquit Trump of the charges of inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
But McConnell and the bulk of the Republican Party reverted to form, refusing to support any real consequences for Trump’s role in the insurrection or make any effort to break his hold on the GOP faithful. There is no American Svinhufvud with the power to change the Republican Party’s direction.
With one of America’s two major parties this far gone, it’s clear that preserving democracy will not be a bipartisan effort, at least not at this moment. But Democrats do currently control government, and there are things they can do to improve America’s long-term outlook.
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People participate in a “Freedom Friday March” protest at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC, on the 56th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 2021. Activists urged the US Senate “to end the filibuster so we can pass legislation to solve the urgent crises confronting our nation, voting rights, DC statehood, and reparations.”
Even more fundamental reforms may be necessary. In his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, political scientist Lee Drutman argues that America’s polarization problem is in large part a product of our two-party electoral system. Unlike elections in multiparty democracies, where leading parties often govern in coalition with others, two-party contests are all-or-nothing: Either your party wins outright or it loses. As a result, every vote takes on apocalyptic stakes.
A new draft paper by scholars Noam Gidron, James Adams, and Will Horne uncovers strong evidence for this idea. In a study of 19 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017, they find that ordinary partisans tend to express warmer feelings toward the party’s coalition partners — both during the coalition and for up to two decades following its end.
“In the US, there’s simply no such mechanism,” Gidron told me. “Even if you have divided government, it’s not perceived as an opportunity to work together but rather to sabotage the other party’s agenda.”
Drutman argues for a combination of two reforms that could move us toward a more cooperative multiparty system: ranked-choice voting and multimember congressional districts in the House of Representatives.
In ranked-choice elections, voters rank candidates by order of preference rather than selecting just one of them, giving third-party candidates a better chance in congressional elections. In a House with multimember districts,we would have larger districts where multiple candidates could win seats to reflect a wider breadth of voter preferences — a more proportional system of representation than the winner-take-all-status quo.
But it’s very hard to see how these reforms could happen anytime soon. Extreme polarization creates a kind of legislative Catch-22: Zero-sum politics means we can’t get bipartisan majorities to change our institutions, while the current institutions intensify zero-sum competition between the parties. Even Sen. Mitt Romney, an anti-Trump Republican, voted against advancing the For the People Act, which regulates (among other things) partisan gerrymandering and campaign finance — a relatively limited set of changes compared to those proposed by many political scientists.
Drutman told me that the most likely path forward involves a massive shock to break us from our dangerous patterns — “something that sets enough things in motion that it creates a possibility [for radical change].”
This brings us back to the specter of political violence that hangs over post-January 6 America.
Is there a point where upheaval and instability, should they come, get to be too unbearable for enough of our political elites to act? Will it take the wave of far-right terrorism Walter fears for Republicans to have a Mäntsälä moment and turn on Trumpism? Or a truly stolen election, with all the chaos that entails, for Americans to flood the streets and demand change?
America’s political system is broken, seemingly beyond its normal capacity to repair. Absent some radical development, something we can’t yet foresee, these last few unsettling years are less likely to be past than prologue.
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Trump supporters stand near the Capitol, in front of a makeshift gallows, on January 6, 2021.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham during an appearance at the 2016 Republican convention. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
The texts expose how the rich exploit culture wars to benefit themselves.
As the Capitol riot unfolded on January 6, Fox News hosts knew exactly how bad things were.
“The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Laura Ingraham texted to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “Please, get him on TV — [the riot is] destroying everything you accomplished,” Brian Kilmeade wrote to Meadows. “Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?” wrote Sean Hannity in yet another Meadows text.
The texts, revealed during a Monday hearing of the House January 6 Commission, were at odds with the hosts’ on-air comments on the night of the attack. Ingraham suggested that “antifa supporters” may have been responsible for the violence. Kilmeade took a similar line: “I do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation.” Hannity, for his part, asserted that “the majority of them were peaceful.”
This is tangible proof that some of Fox’s marquee personalities knowingly lied to their audience about January. The lying began basically immediately, in the direct aftermath of a national tragedy.
This isn’t the only issue on which Fox’s dishonesty has been exposed. On one of the fundamental policy topics of the day, the pandemic, the right’s most influential news network is saying one thing to its audience and doing another in private.
They are lying to their audience, and anyone paying close attention can see it.
These incidents speak to a deep pattern in modern conservatism, a parasitic relationship in which a super-wealthy elite preys on the fears of the conservative base for profit.
Fox and the GOP’s “plutocratic populism”
Last summer, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson published a book titled Let Them Eat Tweetsthat diagnosed what they see as the central political strategy of the modern Republican Party. They call it “plutocratic populism”: a “bitter brew of reactionary economic priorities and right-wing racial and cultural appeals.”
The basic idea is that the super-rich and their allies are in the driver’s seat of the GOP’s policy agenda — and what those elites want, more than anything else, are tax cuts and attacks on the social safety net. Recognizing that making the rich richer is an unpopular policy agenda, they have married their political fortunes to the forces of cultural reaction. The GOP wins elections by engaging in thinly veiled appeals to racism, xenophobia, and sexism; the super-rich win when those GOP majorities pass deeper and deeper tax cuts.
Fox News, which Hacker and Pierson call in their book the “the epicenter of resentment politics,” plays a crucial role in cementing this relationship.
And yet, Fox’s corporate structure is at odds with its actual product. The network is part of an international media empire owned by Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who has badmouthed Trump in public and in private. Its headquarters are in midtown Manhattan. The network’s most aggressively populist host, Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson, is from a patrician family; his stepmother comes from the Swanson family of frozen food fame.
Fox, in short, is plutocratic populism incarnate — the purest distillation of the Hacker-Pierson analysis of the GOP. Fox hosts lie about January 6 and Covid-19 because that is what they exist to do.
Of course, not all plutocratic populism is disingenuous. Some of the right’s billionaires, like leading Trump backer Rebekah Mercer, appear to be true-believer culture warriors in addition to being plutocrats.
This is consistent with a separate body of political science research that finds that, on the whole, self-interest is less politically salient than partisan and cultural identity. Broadly speaking, people identify with a political party based on cultural affinities; once they do, they tend to bring their economic views in line with whatever the party’s mainstream is. That’s part of why white working-class voters vote against social safety net expansions that would benefit them.
But there is at least some dishonesty going on in today’s conservative movement, as the January 6 commission and Fox vaccine mandate debacle have exposed. And that’s something that we, as a society, need to be honest about.
Joe Biden enters the room before his address to the Summit for Democracy at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, on December 9. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Biden’s Summit for Democracy is supposed to highlight democracy’s global plight. But in America, not many people are paying attention.
During the opening speech at Thursday’s Summit for Democracy, President Joe Biden told the assembled international leaders that the stakes of their meeting were nothing less than existential: that the survival of democracy itself depended on what his audience did next.
“We stand at an inflection point in our history,” Biden said. “The choices we make at this moment are going to fundamentally determine the direction our world is going to take in the coming decades.”
No one other than Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the room to hear Biden’s call to action. The summit is a fully virtual affair due to the pandemic, with leaders of democratic countries speaking to each other via videoconference.
Absent the applause and pageantry of an in-person event, Biden’s words rang strangely hollow. It was as if he was issuing a dire warning to no one in particular.
This is a decent metaphor for the current American approach to democracy where it counts the most — at home.
There is no doubt that democracy in the United States is at serious risk. The year began with an attack on the Capitol designed to thwart the transition of power; instead of repudiating this violence, Republicans doubled down on the lie that Trump won the election and are working, right now, to rig the system in their favor. Neither Democrats nor the general public are doing much of anything to stop them.
Several pieces of legislation on voting rights have been stopped cold by the filibuster, as neither Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) nor Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) seems willing to make an exception to the archaic Senate rule in order to protect democracy. Meanwhile, the voters who care are mostly Republicanpartisans, believers in Trump’s lies about 2020. An October poll found that 71 percent of Republicans believe democracy is facing a “major threat,” as compared to just 35 percent of Democrats.
Experts on democracy warn that America is sleepwalking toward a disaster, a situation where the electoral playing field is so tilted in the GOP’s favor that America’s people no longer have a meaningful voice in who rules them. “We’ll wake up one day, and it’ll become clear that Democrats can’t win,” says Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell University.
In theory, the Summit for Democracy is supposed to be the crown jewel of Biden’s global democracy agenda. It kicks off an international “year of action” where countries across the world, including the United States, work to strengthen democracy at home and abroad. In his speech, Biden called for the passage of two laws — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — as a way for America could fulfill this promise.
But so far, neither his government nor the public in general is doing much to force these bills through. It’s a state of affairs that raises a grim question: Is this what it looks like when a democracy dies and nobody cares?
We need a mass pro-democracy movement. It doesn’t exist.
Across the world, there are many cases of democratic “backsliding” — where a once-stable democracy starts buckling, taking on characteristics of an authoritarian system. Sometimes, as in modern Venezuela or Hungary, this ends in a full-tilt slide away from democracy. Other times you get “near misses,” cases where democracy beat back the authoritarian threat. Some notable cases include Finland in 1932, Colombia in 2010, and South Korea in the mid- to late 2010s — countries that are all participating in Biden’s democracy summit.
When you read about these near misses, two factors prove decisive again and again: when a society’s elite stands up to an authoritarian faction, using their power to beat it back, and when the mass public organizes and demonstrates in favor of democracy.
In the United States, we are experiencing failures on both the elite and mass public level. Republican elites, unlike Svinhufvud, have chosen to normalize the violence committed by their extreme right flank on January 6 — and pass legislation, like Georgia’s SB 202, that actually enable Republican partisans to subvert the 2024 election.
Many elite Democrats are fully aware of the problem. Some, like Sen. Raphael Warnock (GA) and the activist group Indivisible, have worked to try to sound the alarm. But at the very highest levels of the party, democracy has become something of a side issue rather than a top priority.
“Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it,” the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman writes. “Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.”
There’s a similar asymmetry on the mass public level. The Trump faithful are gearing up for a fight in 2024, organizing at the very local level to influence the outcome of future elections. A September ProPublica investigation documented the emergence of a “precinct strategy,” beginning with a call to action on Steve Bannon’s radio show, in which Republicans have begun flooding local voting precincts with volunteers who could shape the counting process in the next election cycle.
“ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties,” the outlet explains. “We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.”
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A pro-voting rights demonstration in Washington, DC, on December 7.
Republicans, at both the elite and mass public level, are actively organizing against democracy — with largely ineffectual pushback from Democratic elites and partisans. There is no evidence of a mass movement to save democracy in America today.
Why?
Broadly speaking, it looks like elites and the mass public are locked in a mutually reinforcing democratic disinterest loop. The party leadership has chosen a political strategy that deprioritizes democracy reform, making partisans less likely to care about the issue. At the same time, Democratic partisans are less interested in the issue with Trump out of power, making them less likely to push their leaders to act.
“The Democratic coalition is focused on normal coalition politics and governing, which is understandable in some ways but also neglects the gathering threat,” explains Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist and the co-director of the pro-democracy group Bright Line Watch. “Covid and the economy have sucked up a lot of oxygen and Trump is receiving a tiny fraction of his past coverage. Diffuse threats to democracy don’t command the same level of attention.”
In this sense, the politics of saving democracy look like a sped-up version of the politics of climate change. In theory, everyone on the Democratic side knows it’s important. In practice, the threat feels remote and abstract — far enough removed from their everyday concerns that they aren’t willing to change their behavior to avert looming catastrophe.
I asked Rob Lieberman, an expert on the history of American democracy at Johns Hopkins University, about what social forces could take us off this current path. His first thought was pointing to the summer of 2020, where Americans across the country organized against racism and galvanized successful police reform efforts across the country. That energy, he thinks, could be harnessed in democracy’s defense.
“If the Democrats, or the Black Lives Matter movement, or some coalition on [the pro-democracy] side can mobilize around the idea of multiracial democracy, and a vision that embraces that, maybe that’s a possibility,” he said.
That the prospect feels so remote at this late hour suggests just how serious our situation is — how difficult it will be, in the coming years, for America to remain a democratic model for the world.
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Amid distance and estrangement and strain, some are happily replacing the clans they’re born into with chosen families.
Stephanie Drury set one boundary with her mother: Don’t shame me. Stephanie’s mom wasn’t allowed to shame her daughter for her hair or her wardrobe or the way she raised her own children. If she did, Stephanie would stop talking to her.
The boundary didn’t hold. Every time they spoke, Stephanie’s mom would inevitably shame her for one reason or another. Stephanie would cut off contact for a month or two, feel guilty, then call her mother back. Even when her mother promised to do better, she would fall back into her own patterns. So would Stephanie: She would cut off contact again, she would feel guilty again, rinse, repeat.
Finally, after a year of back-and-forth, Stephanie’s husband asked whether she and her parents would be willing to have a mediated conversation on how to improve their overall relationship. They asked a trusted family friend who was a pastor to mediate. When he sent an email to the people who would be participating in that discussion, Stephanie’s mother seemed to interpret the very act of asking for a meeting as an act of aggression. She replied with, “It’s too bad that Stephanie has decided to never talk to us again. It’s so sad that Stephanie has made this decision, and that we’re never going to see our grandchildren.”
“I was so relieved that someone else was bearing witness to this insanity that I grew up with,” Stephanie, who works as a risk analyst in Seattle, says. (Several people in this article asked that their last names not be used in order to speak freely about estrangements, abuse, and complex familial relationships.) “I had an extreme emotional response. I kicked a hole in the wall. It was finally real to me. And my therapist was like, ‘Your conscious brain finally accepted what your subconscious had always known, which is that your parents were always capable of disowning you. You were disposable to them all your life.’”
That was 15 years ago, and Stephanie hasn’t been in touch with her parents since. In that time, her oldest child has gone off to college, and her youngest is now in high school. In that time, Stephanie’s siblings have tried to set similar boundaries with their parents and been similarly rejected; they have since cut off contact with their parents as well. And in that time, Stephanie has learned to rebuild her self-esteem, her faith, and her sense of self, finding new versions of them that were not dictated to her by her parents.
When Stephanie finally cut her parents out of her life in 2006, the language she needed to talk about her decision wasn’t readily available. Even the word “boundary” wasn’t exactly part of the common lexicon. Slowly but surely, she found her way to a larger community of people who cared about her in ways that were loving and supportive, some of them in real life but many of them online.
“Now I have boundaries around, ‘I don’t care if you’re family, you can’t talk to me that way.’ I guess that’s pretty good,” she says. “There’s grief around not being loved. But there’s also the joy and promise of finding loving people. They’re everywhere. They don’t have to be your blood relatives.”
We are, in 2021, somewhat moreacquainted with the ways that concepts like toxic relationships and gaslighting can warp families beyond recognition and turn these bonds sinister. Many people are conscious of the idea of setting boundaries, and understand that the definition of family can be elastic enough to include, say, beloved friends. None of these ideas are new, but the language we’re using to talk about them has a clinically detached vibe that allows us to confront incredibly painful experiences with some degree of distance. It feels precise; it captures an inexact idea we know to be true in our bones: Sometimes, family isn’t worth it.
But what do we mean when we say that? Just what is a family anyway?
Here’s one possible answer: Your family is the people who raised you and the people you grew up with. Usually, you were born to them, but sometimes you were adopted by them at an early age. You can think of a dozen variations on this idea, but the core of it is always the same: the nuclear family unit.
This definition of a family has been provided to us by our culture, our storytelling, and our religious traditions for the past several centuries, and it is officially underwritten by government policy in most nations, including the United States. Just think of how many TV sitcom episodes have ended with some family patriarch reminding his children — and by proxy all of us in the audience — that family comes first, and your family will never let you down. The unshakable primacy of the family unit is one of the earliest tropes we learn.
But it’s an idea with profound limitations.
At the core of that idea is obligation. Some obligations are necessary for society to function; parents need to either care for their children or find others who will. But other obligations are messier and more prone to abusive dynamics. “Your parents raised you, so you owe them a debt you cannot repay” is all right in theory, but it starts to break down the second you consider a parent who perhaps didn’t have their child’s best interests at heart. Similarly, “family comes first” can quickly turn horrific if a member of a family abuses another, and the primary actions taken to repair the situation are aimed at preserving the family, not at helping the victim heal.
Another model for a family already exists in American culture: the queer chosen family.
But toxicity doesn’t have to enter the picture for our definitions of family to evolve. In an era when migrating from one’s hometown to an urban area might be the only way to find work, many families, even really good ones, are feeling the strain of trying to keep relationships alive across the distance. More and more, for those of us who have moved far away from home, our nearby friends have begun to fill family-like roles, without us ever quite defining them as such.
There’s a model for a family made up of people you are not related to that already exists in American culture. For a long time, queer chosen families, loose structures of people who support each other in family-like ways, have offered an alternative to the nuclear family structure, though more queer people are opting for the nuclear family structure of two parents raising children. Even as the evangelical church that dominates much of American politics actively works to reinforce a more rigid definition of family, the more loosely defined chosen family model has gained prominence.
Daniel reached a crisis point shortly before the holidays in 2019. He had broken with the evangelical church he grew up in, and in the process of therapy meant to help him work through his complicated emotions around that break, he started to uncover vague memories of childhood sexual abuse in his childhood home. He called his parents to say he was going through some intense therapy, that he and his wife wouldn’t be coming home for the holidays, and that he would check in after a few months. He’d had a good relationship with his parents before that point, but he came to feel as though that relationship had been predicated on conviviality more than anything real.
“They never asked what was happening. They never pushed any further than, ‘Whatever space you need, take it,’” says Daniel (who asked that Vox not use his real name, out of concern of family reprisal). “My dad eventually sent me an email saying, ‘Hey, don’t email us anymore with these updates of when you think you might be ready to talk. When you’re ready to have a congenial relationship again, come back and we can talk.’ There was no, ‘What’s happening? Are you okay?’ I found that very unusual, and for me, that was an indicator that there was a lot of shit that they were avoiding.”
Daniel and his wife are both cisgender, and they’re in a heterosexual marriage. But after the break with his family, they found the most support and solace from hanging out with their queer friends, particularly a lesbian couple that lives a couple of blocks away from them in Chicago. The more time the couples spent together, the more Daniel found the kind of support and security he had found lacking in his own family.
The concept of “found” or “chosen” family is not unique to queer spaces, but it has become strongly associated with them. In the mid-20th century, queer people who had migrated to major cities began forming ersatz family structures that resembled but didn’t completely replicate the more traditional nuclear family. The creation of queer chosen families, Kath Weston writes in her landmark 1991 book Families We Choose, stemmed from the fact that gay and lesbian people kept migrating to particular cities. Often they had been rejected by family, but sometimes they had just left. And once they had gotten to, say, San Francisco, they would form close ties with other queer people around them. Of course they would. How could they not? It’s how human beings work.
The queer chosen family became of paramount importance during the AIDS crisis, as gay men, especially, cared for each other during a time of horrifying death and devastation. These men had often been completely cut off by their families of origin, but they still sought the kind of care, empathy, and love people typically expect from a family.
In the late 20th century, especially in the midst of the AIDS crisis, the legal recognition of these families — and how difficult it was to fit them into the existing framework of family as we knew it — became a major concern for many queer people. After all, if your lover of a decade was dying alone in a hospital, or if the homophobic biological family of a teenage runaway you were caring for returned to take them back “home,” wouldn’t you want the same sort of legal rights as a spouse or a parent?
Weston’s book recognized how dissimilar chosen families could be to nuclear families, while also fulfilling many of the same emotional needs. Because of that dissimilarity, the mere existence of chosen families posed a threat to core assumptions about what families were. Weston writes:
Does it not make sense to argue that gay families represent an alternative form of family, a distinctive variation within a more encompassing “American kinship”? Because any alternative must be an alternative to something, this formulation presumes a central paradigm of family shared by most people in a society. In the United States, the nuclear family clearly represents a privileged construct, rather than one among a number of family forms accorded equivalent status.
Indeed, as queer people were afforded more acceptance within American society, our ability to fit into the nuclear family framework increased. In 2021, I can marry another woman quite easily. In California, the two of us can even adopt a child relatively easily. Neither of those things would have been easy or even possible 40 years ago. However, there’s still less recourse for legal recognition of, say, a polyamorous triad or a loose commune of queer people raising children collectively.
“Does it not make sense to argue that gay families represent an alternative form of family, a distinctive variation within a more encompassing ‘American kinship’?”
“Vanilla queerness is something that’s pretty acceptable now with many older generations and families. But when you start thinking about the forms of sexual identity and sexual practices that are still understood as marginal or deviant or somehow unhealthy in the mainstream, you come to this threshold where that isn’t considered acceptable,” says Aren Aizura, an associate professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota.
“Queer and trans sex workers have been instrumental to creating queer community because they can’t come out to their biological families as doing sex work,” Aizura explains. “It’s similar for people who are involved in kink communities. So if it’s something that is an everyday part of your life that is difficult to reveal to family, then you have to organize a much wider and more comprehensive vision of queer family. Who’s the person you call when you’re sick? When you need someone to bring you food? When you need help covering rent? For sex workers, for instance, it’s often other sex workers doing mutual aid with each other.”
Aizura adds that it’s tempting to idealize the queer chosen family, but in some cases, chosen families can also breed toxicity and abuse. Treating others poorly or spreading one’s pain outward is not exclusively reserved for cisgender, heterosexual people. It’s something we’re all capable of. Because queer chosen families are often formed by people who were ostracized by their families of origin in painful or even traumatic ways, those people can replicate that trauma within the space that was meant to offer an escape from trauma.
The prevalence of traumatic backgrounds within queer spaces, however, makes them uniquely well-suited to discussing and processing those backgrounds. And the more that a collective awareness of how trauma operates moves into the American mainstream, the more that queer ideas about chosen family also move into the mainstream. As queer people are being granted greater legal protections, so long as our family structures replicate the nuclear family structure, it follows that cishet people are adopting more ideas about how family might consist of the friends you’re especially close to, not just your family of origin (see: the rise of Friendsgiving).
“When friends are moving from being really good friends to what you and they would consider chosen family, the responsibility to one another — communication, staying in touch, checking in — that changes and in a really good and meaningful way,” Daniel said of his evolving relationship with his and his wife’s friends. “But big life stuff changes too. If my wife and I decided we wanted to move and didn’t have a conversation with these folks, it would be very different than it would be even with some of our other close friends. … We joke with our [chosen family], ‘Don’t you dare think about moving without talking to us.’”
If the mainstream evolution toward affording chosen family structures some degree of prominence is largely thanks to the gravitational pull of the queer community, then in America, at least, the evangelical church is the other pole, trying to drag the culture back toward something more rigid and patriarchal. And while that split is expressed most dramatically in the lives of queer people, it affects many non-queer people too.
I spoke with about a dozen people who are estranged from their families and have found chosen family structures that better suit them. In all but a couple of those conversations, the evangelical Christian church or a similar conservative religious tradition came up.
“I spent well into my mid-20s thinking I couldn’t name bad things about my parents, or I somehow was dishonoring them. As a kid, as a Christian, that’s the way you make Jesus happy. You do what your parents ask you to do,” Daniel says. “I went from being a really hyperactive zero-through-6-year-old to being a picture of complacency. And some of that was the hyperactivity working its way off as I got older. But the complacency was reinforced by religious messaging in the church. So even when stuff was not okay, [you didn’t say anything]. So much of my journey over the past two years is finding the voice that I never had in my family to advocate for or protect myself. In that religious program, kids just didn’t advocate for themselves.”
White evangelicalism in America (particularly upper-class white evangelicalism) remains defined by a rigid family structure with a father holding supremacy over a wife and both parents holding supremacy over their kids. Abuse within a culture tends to correlate with how patriarchal that culture is, and in recent years, evangelical Christian America has been beset by numerous scandals underscoring abuse within specific churches and evangelicalism more generally. (One recent example of this is the ongoing revelations about the prevalence of sexual assault at Liberty University.)
What’s more, evangelical culture also revolves around the family unit as the core social organizing structure of our lives, says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Obviously, the family is a core social organizing structure in most people’s lives, but within evangelicalism, the family’s primacy outstrips even that of the government or church. That belief system leaves little recourse for, say, children growing up within abusive homes.
“Worst comes to worst, the church maybe can step in. So you have to bring any family issues through the church, through the elders, and in these churches, they’re all men,” Du Mez says. “So if you have sexual abuse or domestic violence, members of these communities are strongly discouraged from or even ordered against reaching out to police, to any counselors outside of their own religious community.”
Within chosen family structures, however, there’s often an abundance of discussion of traumatic upbringings and rejection by families of origin, something rooted, in America at least, in the idea of the queer community building spaces where these conversations aren’t being hushed up.
“It’s been really helpful to see what actual love looks like,” says Dianna Anderson, a writer from Minneapolis, who became estranged from their father over his vote for Donald Trump, despite knowing he had a queer child. (The role of Trump in family estrangements has been frequently documented.) “Coming from an evangelical context, a lot of times we’re told love is being nice to a person or still having terrible thoughts about them but not telling them, which becomes a sort of gaslighting. Whereas the queer community at its best is very much showing love in support of your identity, understanding you as an entire person, and not trying to dissect parts out.”
“It’s been really helpful to see what actual love looks like”
The divide between queer people and evangelical America has been written about endlessly, and some polling suggests the evangelical church’s opposition to queer identities is responsible for its falling membership rates. So it makes an ironic sort of sense that the alternative family structures Weston wrote about in 1991 now form a similar oppositional role to the drumbeat of white evangelical patriarchy, a tension that seems likely to grow ever more fraught.
And yet one of the primary drivers of our redefinition of families is often much beloved by conservative evangelicals. It’s modern capitalism.
One thing that tends to introduce emotional distance in families is physical distance. It gets harder and harder to maintain tight emotional bonds when people are living a long way away from each other. Once that physical distance opens up, it often also allows the mental space someone might need to reconsider toxic elements of their family of origin.And in the modern world, more people are moving away from their families of origin because the jobs they want are situated in major cities, sometimes quite far away.
Ale grew up in Romania, in a conservative Catholic community. But when they were able to leave home to go to university, they opted for the United Kingdom, where they were finally able to begin exploring their gender identity in earnest. The physical distance that existed between them and their family allowed an emotional distance to grow as well.
Now, more than a decade later, Ale is in their early 30s and maintains a relationship with their parents, but not really as themselves. They see their parents rarely, and when they talk on the phone or over video chat, their parents are addressing the child they thought they had. They are not really talking to the child they do have, because Ale doesn’t want to talk about their life with their parents. And so the relationship frays.
“Once a week, we’re gonna chat for about 15 to 20 minutes on FaceTime, and I will ask them probably the same stuff, and I will reveal nothing about my life,” Ale says. “‘Yeah, work is really busy. Always is. Stuff is fine. Here are the cats, aren’t they cute? I’m seeing some friends. We’re gonna hang out.’ That’s it. Nothing further ever gets explained.”
Can you call this an estrangement? Technically, it’s not. Ale still dutifully talks to their parents every so often. But their journey toward accepting their queerness drove a wedge between them and their parents that their parents are unaware is even present. Ale has thought about coming out to them but feels that would likely end the relationship.
This sort of not-an-estrangement estrangement is far more common, in my experience, than outright cutting one’s family out of one’s life. I no longer speak with my own parents, for example, but I spent most of my adult life dutifully calling them every so often to talk about matters of no great importance. When I did try to be honest with them about my transness, the relationship collapsed because my parents chose a phantom son over the daughter they actually had. But even before that, the relationship didn’t really exist because I wasn’t ever being honest with my parents or myself. We were performing the rituals of family, not actually honoring a real connection.
One doesn’t need to embrace a queer identity for simple physical distance to create a gap between family members. It’s really hard to maintain relationships across geography, even in a modern era of instant communication. You’re much more likely to form close relationships with people you see all the time, and you’re more likely to see people all the time if they live in close proximity to you.
Thus, the simple act of migration is a major factor in our modern reconceptualization of the family. Modern capitalism has devalued rural and suburban areas, siphoning more and more kids who grew up there into metropolitan areas, often on the coasts. And if you’re moving from, say, South Dakota to Los Angeles, as I did, you are slowly but surely going to feel the influence of the place you grew up start to wane. The money is on the coasts, so kids move there, while parents stay behind. And relationships fracture.
And this shift has implications beyond the slow fraying of parent-child bonds when neither side is particularly active in trying to keep them alive. If you grew up in an abusive family structure 100 years ago, you were highly unlikely to be able to leave it, which would mean you would more or less come to accept it as normal. When you can leave that structure and move away, you might find yourself coming to accept that the way you were raised was pretty messed up. Drawing boundaries with toxic family members is far easier when you have half a continent to act as the ultimate boundary for you.
Stephanie’s children are reaching the age where, if they so choose, they could cut her out of their lives. She doesn’t expect them to do this. She doesn’t want them to do this. She believes she has a good relationship with them. But her own experience with her parents has convinced her that she owes her children so much, and they owe her very little.
“I once had a counselor say, ‘You don’t owe your parents anything.’ And when she said that to me, I was in a place where that was hard to let sink in. And she said, ‘Well, look at it this way: Would you say that your children owe you anything?’ And I was immediately like, ‘No! Absolutely not!’” Stephanie says. “[As a parent], you only really need to be good enough. But the bare minimum of being good enough is equality and treating your child like a human and not expecting them to tend to your narcissistic injuries.”
We’ve all grown up immersed in a culture that insists, at all turns, that family comes first, that your family will always be there for you, that the worst thing you could do is turn your back on your family.
But we also know how untrue that is. We know families can be broken in millions of different ways and even the most loving families have moments of dysfunction. That’s not a reason to abandon the idea of family altogether. Of course not. But maybe it is an argument to expand the definition of family from “the people I’m related to” to “the people who come first, the people who will always be there for me, the people I will never turn my back on.”
Or, to put it more simply: Sometimes, your family isn’t your family, and that’s okay.
So maybe there’s a better model to build our families around. I asked those I interviewed for this article who are estranged from their families what characteristic they believe is most crucial to the definition of family. To my surprise, nobody said love. Instead, the theme that came up the most often was that of safety, of security, of having a place to be yourself without fear or consequence.
“This is very schmaltzy, but: Who feels like home to you? Family should be who feels like home. There are definitely people who I just click with and feel safe with and resonate with. Not all of them but parts of them,” Stephanie says. “And I’m learning to lead with that more and more. Your intuition is never wrong.”
A poster of Kyle Rittenhouse held in protests outside his trial. | Nathan Howard/Getty Images
The verdict exposed a disturbing point of agreement between violent militias and the GOP.
In the apocalyptic imagination of the American far-right, violence plays a central role. The right’s radical extremists believe that mainstream American institutions have been rotted from within, undermined by the nefarious influence of Blacks, Jews, and liberals. White Americans are justified — maybe even obligated — to take up arms to protect their people and their culture.
Immediately after Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal on Friday, the fringe right’s online forums lit up with celebration — and among some, a belief that they too can kill without legal consequence. On Telegram, a secure messaging app popular with extremists, the leader of a neo-Nazi group wrote that the verdict gives “good Americans legal precedent and license to kill violent commies without worrying about doing life in prison if we defend ourselves in a riot.”
There is every reason to take such rhetoric seriously. “It has never taken more than a whisper of approval to fan the flames of militant right action. The Kenosha acquittal is a shout,” writes Kathleen Belew, a historian of white power movements at the University of Chicago. Based on how it’s been cheered in some quarters, the verdict is potentially setting the stage for future violence.
Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project shows that, between January 2020 and June 2021, there were 560 protest events where either demonstrators or counter-demonstrators showed up with guns — about 2 percent of all protests in the United States during the studied time period. The data also shows that these demonstrations are more than five times more likely to involve violent or destructive behavior as compared to unarmed ones.
Johns Hopkins political scientist LillianaMason — the co-author (with Nathan Kalmoe) of the forthcoming Radical American Partisanship — worries that this trend will escalate. At future protests on charged issues like racial justice and voting rights, armed right-wing counterprotesters may continue to descend on America’s cities, in increasingly large numbers. “The January 6 folks coming by, Kyle Rittenhouse-style,” as she put it.
Mason and Kalmoe’s research documents rising support for political violence in the US, prompting worries that eventually, the killing in Kenosha will repeat itself elsewhere. The more it does, the more likely it is to lead to retaliatory violence from the other side. The ultimate risk may be what Mason terms “an endless cycle” of partisan killing, like Italy’s Years of Lead or pre-Civil War Bleeding Kansas.
Looking at the reaction to the verdict from mainstream conservatives makes the current predicament even scarier. Far from cooling the passions of the fringes, mainstream Republican politicians and allied media are canonizing Rittenhouse, elevating him into a model for ordinary conservatives to follow.
Rittenhouse’s acquittal is in a certain sense unsurprising: America’s self-defense laws are incredibly permissive, making it difficult to convict someone in a violent situation who claims to fear for their life. Yet it is one thing for conservatives to say the jury reached the legally correct verdict and another thing entirely to describe Rittenhouse as a moral exemplar: a gun-toting American standing guard against the country’s internal enemies.
“By suggesting he is a hero,” Mason tells me, “the implication is that what he did was not a tragedy at all. It wasn’t a conflict gone lethally wrong, it was a good lethal conflict.”
A bloody turn in this deeply polarized moment for American democracy need not be inevitable. But the Rittenhouse case has revealed a scary convergence between the fringe and the mainstream on the wisdom of turning guns against their political enemies. Its resolution validates that belief in ways that challenge the basic nonviolent compact at the heart of democratic political life.
After Rittenhouse’s acquittal, the fringe right gears up for battle
According to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish nonprofit that tracks the fringe right, extremists have spent the past year lionizing Rittenhouse as an example of a white man taking the struggle against the left into his own hands. The “not guilty” verdict was, for them, a kind of vindication.
“As soon as the jury announced its verdict, online extremist spaces erupted in cheers and self-congratulatory rhetoric,” the ADL explained in a Friday blog post. “Supporters heralded the Rittenhouse verdict as a victory for the principle of self-defense and providing legal precedent for violent responses to perceived threats, and some argued that people no longer need to avoid acting during tense situations for fear of legal repercussions, a potentially dangerous development.”
The ADL documented a wealth of examples, including a large number of right-wing extremists interpreting the ruling as a license to engage in intimidation or violence at future Black Lives Matter protests:
A user on a chat room called “Warriors for America (Oath Keepers)” wrote that it was “open season on lib trash commies!”
A Twitter user affiliated with the extreme right boogaloo movement — which reportedly seeks to foment civil disorder — wrote “WE CAN PROTECT OUR COMMUNITIES NOW REFERENCING RITTENHOUSE V. Wisconsin.”
One member of patriots.win, a pro-Trump web forum, wrote that “BLMKKK gotta be shitting. We have permission to defend ourselves now.”
The ADL is not the only organization or expert to notice a surge in right-wing calls to arms on Friday.
Within minutes of the jury’s announcement, “the verdict [was] already being rallied around as justification for racial violence” writes Alex Newhouse, the deputy director of the extremism research center at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “Rittenhouse has been ‘sanctified’ (joining the ranks of mass shooters like the Christchurch, El Paso, Norway shooters).”
Over direct message, Newhouse pointed me to a group of extremist Telegram channels, frequented by people he called “the absolute worst of the worst.” Perusing these forums, I found memes celebrating Rittenhouse’s violence, dancing on the graves of those he killed, and a sense that the ruling was a real victory for their movement.
“Hey parasites, Kyle Rittenhouse killed 2 of your friends and got away with it. Now he’s celebrating life as a free man, and being showered with praise,” one Telegram extremist wrote. “Your impotent rage only makes the victory all the more sweet for us. Literal National Socialists are celebrating your failure. … Hail Rittenhouse.”
Another far-right group claimed to be “monitoring” a protest in Boston after the verdict, vowing that “our activists will intervene if senseless attacks are carried out by Antifa on white civilians.”
As of Monday, there haven’t yet been national media reports of deadly far-right violence in Boston or other parts of the country since the verdict. This reflects the fact that many of these Telegram posters are just that: posters. They talk tough on the internet but don’t actually plan to act on it in practice.
But all it takes is one to really mean it: The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, for example, posted about his plans on the social media site Gab before he killed 11 people in 2018. And for that reason, experts are warning that the Rittenhouse verdict could have far-ranging consequences for the safety of American protesters and American politics more broadly.
Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
Armed members of the boogaloo movement outside the State Capitol in Concord, New Hampshire, in January.
“We’ve already seen a lot of armed activity around protests over the last couple years,” J.M. Berger, an associate fellow at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague, tells me. “This verdict likely ensures that those armed people will feel more comfortable taking a much more confrontational stance.”
This is how the country could start drifting in the direction of Mason’s nightmare scenario. The more Rittenhouse’s acquittal inspires armed right-wingers to take it on themselves to “police” liberal protests, the more likely it is that there is another deadly incident. This is especially the case when far-right extremists who’ve been marinating in fantasies of violence get involved, as the country saw in the murder of Heather Heyer during the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, far-right rally.
In their studies of previous episodes of political violence, Mason and Kalmoe document a self-perpetuating effect: “Violent episodes tend to increase support for violence,” as Mason puts it. People see their side being killed and see violence against their enemies as a justified response.
Rittenhouse’s acquittal might not be the end of the story. It could be the beginning of a bigger and scarier one.
The dangerous convergence of the violent fringe and the GOP mainstream
Violent white nationalists on the internet’s fringes weren’t the only ones to immediately celebrate Rittenhouse’s acquittal. Within minutes of the not-guilty verdict, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) had already offered him an internship.
“Kyle, if you want an internship reach out to me,” he wrote on Instagram, adding that his supporters should “be armed, be dangerous, and be moral” — like Rittenhouse, presumably.
The celebrations in conservative media were, if anything, even more effusive.
“Not only did Kyle Rittenhouse have the right to do this, I encourage you to do it,” said Steven Crowder, a popular right-wing YouTube host. “Some people needed a catalyst, let today be the day,” he continued — adding that conservatives will make sure “there will not be another town burned down” if they take up arms against “this evil of the left.”
“Kyle Rittenhouse wound up on the streets in Kenosha with a gun in the first place for one reason. He was there because, in the summer of 2020, the leadership of the Democratic Party endorsed mob violence for political ends,” Fox’s Tucker Carlson said on Friday evening, while touting an exclusive interview to air on Monday night.
“If Kyle Rittenhouse can save his own life, you can too,” he said.
In theory, it would have been possible for conservatives to say the verdict was the right one without lionizing Rittenhouse. A handful of anti-Trump conservatives — like David French, who is also a staunch Second Amendment supporter — did just that.
But that’s not the tack that much of the mainstream right has chosen. They sound less like French than they sound like the extremists on Telegram — turning Rittenhouse into a hero, a model to be emulated, rather than a cautionary tale.
“The rhetoric is stated slightly differently, but the end result is the same: This is a young man who did the right thing,” Art Jipson, a professor at the University of Dayton who studies white racial extremism, told the Washington Post. “The arguments start from different origin points, but they create an almost iconic, or at least a powerful, symbol.”
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Pro and anti-Rittenhouse protesters argue outside the Kenosha County Courthouse on November 17.
In some cases, there are ties among the Republicans celebrating Rittenhouse and parts of the violent fringe. Gosar met with an Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers militia and, according to one participant, said that America was already in the midst of a civil war. Gaetz attended a rally where the Proud Boys, a “Western chauvinist” street brawling group, was providing security — and then praised them on his podcast. In this, they were following former President Donald Trump’s praise of the fringe, referring to the “very fine people” at the Charlottesville rally and telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate.
The fringe and the mainstream right differ on many key points — among others, the bigotry of the extremists is far more naked and eliminationist — but they agree on a conspiratorial worldview in which liberals are not mere political rivals but existential threats to the American way of life.
“One of the biggest problems this country faces is perceived polarization, driven by misinformation on the right [claiming] leftist extremists want to destroy our way of life and, thus, it is reasonable to do everything in our power to stop them,” writes Yphtach Lelkes, a scholar of political rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rittenhouse is a powerful symbol for the right because he acted out a long-held fantasy — a man with his gun, standing up to the liberal hordes. That he was found not guilty is validation that fantasy could be made reality, a godsend to genuine extremists.
But his acquittal’s celebration across a much broader spectrum of the right is perhaps even more troubling. It threatens the mainstream consensus that political violence has no place in a democratic society — and the related notion that Americans need to share a country with people who disagree with them.
Davin G Photography/Getty Images
How do you feel — literally? Nobel laureate Ardem Patapoutian explains the tactile science of sensation.
Before 2010, scientists knew very little about how the sensation of touch begins its journey into a person’s consciousness. They knew that nerve endings help carry the message from different parts of our bodies to our brains. But they didn’t know what kind of receptor on the nerve ending causes the message to fire — for example, when a person touches an ice cube or places a hand on a hot stove. You could say that researchers understood the wires, but not the light switch.
In 2010, Patapoutian and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute discovered the proteins that serve as two kinds of switches — proteins called Piezo1 and Piezo2 (piezo is Greek for the verb “to press”). This week, Patapoutian shared a Nobel prize with David Julius, who similarly discovered how sensations of heat and cold enter our awareness.
In mammals like humans, piezo receptors transmit mechanical sensations to the nervous system. When cells that contain these piezo receptors are stretched, the receptors open up, letting in ions (charged particles) and setting off an electrical pulse.
But each type of receptor has a slightly different use. Piezo1 is part of our body’s built-in blood pressure monitoring system, as well as other internal systems that rely on pressure-sensing. Piezo2, on the other hand, is “the principle mechanosensor for touch and proprioception,” Patapoutian told me in 2019.
That is, without Piezo2, we couldn’t feel another person’s hand graze our own.
Proprioception, which also relies on Piezo2, is less well-known than the sense of touch, but it’s sometimes referred to as the body’s “sixth” sense. It’s our sense of where our bodies are in three-dimensional space.
It’s easier to explain proprioception with a demonstration. If you put a cup out in front of you and then close your eyes, you can still find the cup with your hand. Proprioception is what guides your intuition of how far to move your hand and in which direction.
“It’s truly fascinating that we are not aware of it,” Patapoutian said of proprioception during a 2019 interview with Vox. “When I give lectures, even to college students or graduate students, I sometimes ask: “How many people know of proprioception?” Even specialized biologists often don’t know anything about it.”
I spoke to Patapoutian for a story about people who are missing Piezo2 receptors in their bodies because of a genetic inheritance. When they close their eyes, “it’s like I am lost,” one of them told me. With their eyes closed, they cannot reach for the cup in front of them. They have no idea where it is. They have no idea where their arms are in space.
Patapoutian helped me understand that the human sense of touch contains multitudes — and to this day, scientists don’t fully understand it. But as scientists learn more about touch receptors, they’re also figuring out how to tend to a body that’s in pain.
This conversation, which took place in 2019, has been edited for length and clarity.
Brian Resnick
What is the sense of touch?
Ardem Patapoutian
We think about the five senses: vision, olfaction, taste, hearing, and touch. If you really start digging deep into touch, it’s so different than the rest of the senses.
When you talk about touch, there’s so many modalities to it: There’s different physical forces we sense, like temperature and mechanical force. There’s itch. There’s this [spectrum] of pleasant touch to noxious to painful.
It’s a very complex system. The demarcation of when pleasant touch ends and painful touch starts is actually very flexible. If you have a sunburn, for example, the same amount of touch that could have been pleasant becomes painful.
All of what I was just talking about is sensation on skin.
Again, if you put on top of it proprioception and internal organ sensation, it’s a very complicated sense that we don’t really understand. There’s no totally, well-agreed terminology even to describe clearly what we mean by touch and somatosensation.
Brian Resnick
How is proprioception related to touch?
Ardem Patapoutian
Proprioception is dependent on your sensory system detecting muscle stretch. When that muscle gets stretched, these nerve endings that are wrapped around it can sense it. Piezo2 is actually sitting right at the ends of these nerves, where [they] wrap around the muscle.
When you close your eyes and touch your nose, how are you doing this? What’s the information that you’re basing this on? It’s all about learning, as you grow up, to sense how much each of these muscles are being stretched when you’re making these complex motions of your hand. From that, you know exactly where things are.
People sometimes call it muscle memory. It’s actually mostly these proprioceptive neurons that are giving you this understanding of where your limbs are compared to your body — simply from detecting how much your tendons and muscles are being stretched.
Brian Resnick
Touch and proprioception use the same receptor: Piezo2. But all those other sensations you described — temperature, itch, pain — do those all enter us through different receptors? Is it the case that all these different types of touch feelings have a different specific molecule responsible for them?
Ardem Patapoutian
Absolutely, the molecules are different. There are temperature sensors at very different ranges of temperature. Cold, heat, warm are all different.
From 2000 to 2010, my lab studied temperature sensation. We, for example, identified the first cold-activated ion channel. It ended up also being the receptor for menthol. Anytime you use one of these chewing gums or toothpastes that gives that cooling sensation in your mouth, it hijacks the cold-activated channel.
Brian Resnick
Is the goal to try to find the sensor responsible for each sensation?
Ardem Patapoutian
Yeah. What seems to have worked is starting with a very reductionist approach, in the sense of finding the sensor.
Brian Resnick
Are some of these sensors still elusive?
Ardem Patapoutian
Absolutely. Without Piezo2, you don’t have touch, you don’t have proprioception. However, acute touch — the hammer hitting your finger “ouch” kind of feeling — the identity of these ion channels that account for acute pain is still unknown.
Brian Resnick
I don’t know if this gets more into philosophy than science, but are we just the sum of all these inputs?
Ardem Patapoutian
I think the clear thing one has to realize is that sensory biology is not telling us about reality. It is representing reality.
[Reality is] very related to these senses. But that’s the thing I would emphasize — it’s kind of an approximation. We’re interpreting the world according to what sensory systems we have.
Brian Resnick
I’m thinking about proprioception. I watched someone without Piezo2 receptors try to touch a ball on a table in front of her with her eyes closed. And she couldn’t do it. I asked her, “What does it feel like when your eyes are closed?” And she said, “It’s like I’m lost.”
Then I tried to think what I feel when I close my eyes and can sense the locations of objects around me. And I don’t have a word for it.
Ardem Patapoutian
It’s consciousness. That’s what I keep going back to.
Brian Resnick
Is that just pure consciousness? It’s just awareness?
Ardem Patapoutian
I think I would get into trouble if I called proprioception consciousness. But I actually think, at the most basic level, a physical aspect of consciousness requires proprioception.
Police officers in riot gear stand across from protesters on May 30, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky, where demonstrators marched after the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. | Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
How a surge in police force against demonstrators collided with last summer’s protests.
This story contains detailed depictions of violence against protesters that may be disturbing to some readers.
When 21-year-old Louisville, Kentucky, activist Cheyenne Osuala was violently arrested at a protest in July 2020, she tried to get the whole thing on video. An officer grabbed her, slammed her up against a wall, and started pulling the handcuff so far behind her back that her wrist fractured. As he tugged her arm further and further, she remembers screaming, standing on her toes to try to relieve the pain.
She dropped her phone during the attack, but shaky footage from a bystander shows the officer pushing her face-first against the wall while other protesters scream for her release.
Osuala said she was gathered with a small group of protesters outside of a parking garage when she noticed plainclothed men on the roof shooting pepper balls down at the people gathered below. Concerned that the men could be counterprotesters looking to harm their group, Osuala and other protesters asked Louisville police officers to confirm if the men on the roof were police. Osuala says the officers told them they weren’t aware of anyone currently stationed at the top of the parking garage, so they headedup to find out who the men were — and why they were firing at a peaceful crowd.
Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
Protesters at a May 2020 demonstration in Louisville, among a series of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests last year that drew tens of millions of demonstrators — an unprecedented number.
That’s when, she said, officers followed them into the parking garage, blocked them from leaving, and arrested her, breaking her wrist in the process. She was later charged with criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct, although both charges were later dismissed by a judge.
Osuala filed a complaint with the Louisville Metro Police Department but received no response. She later filed a lawsuit, alleging that she was wrongfully arrested and assaulted by the department’s officers, and this spring, the Justice Department separately opened an investigation into the Louisville department’s practices, including use of force against protesters. (Louisville police did not respond to requests for comment.)
Osuala said she can recall the experience in excruciating detail, but said that she still won’t go back and watch the video. “It was too traumatizing,” she said.
The broken wrist and resulting nerve damage eventually healed, but in the months that followed, she was left feeling powerless. “I still remember feeling his weight on top of me. He was so much bigger,” she said. “It felt like a power trip. He wanted to hurt me, and I couldn’t do anything.”
In uprisings last summer that drew tens of millions across the country — an unprecedented number — protesters called for an end to police brutality. Amid the mostly peaceful protests, some demonstrations, many spurred by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, were marked by incidents of police violence. In the first two weeks of demonstrations, more than 10,000 people were arrested. The total today sits at more than 17,000, according to the Washington Post. Most arrests were for low-level offenses, such as curfew violations or failure to follow dispersal orders.
At the height of the protests that June, police were repeatedly recorded using force, many of them punching, kicking, or shoving protesters. One criminal defense lawyer collected nearly 300 videos documenting police violence across the country. Among these videos were incidents where officers beat unarmed protesters in Las Vegas, fired tear gas canisters into a crowd in Dallas, and pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters in Columbus, Ohio.
One video showed officers in riot gear in Buffalo, New York, shoving a 75-year-old man to the ground, leaving him unconscious and bleeding on the sidewalk. In New York City, an officer was caught on camera violently shoving a woman to the ground. Another video shows a group of officers beating protesters with batons in Philadelphia.
Some departments also reportedly used rubber bullets and tear gas as a form of crowd control. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reporters filmed an officer shooting a protester in the head with a foam bullet, fracturing her eye socket. In one of the most controversial and widely shared incidents, police used tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters outside the White House in Washington, DC, to allow for President Donald Trump’s photo session outside of a church.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Law enforcement responds during a protest near Lafayette Park ahead of President Trump’s trip to St. John’s Church on June 1, 2020, in downtown Washington, DC. The proceedings that day became a national incident.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Demonstrators continued to gather at Lafayette Park in the following days despite the incident, in which police used tear gas to clear a crowd of protesters.
After protesters were arrested en masse, for some, the physical trauma was immediate. Explosive imagery from some protests shows people bleeding from projectiles, choking on tear gas, or left with swollen wrists after being detained for hours. In the face of an increasingly militarized police force — armored vehicles, military-grade riot gear, flash grenades, sound cannons, and tear gas canisters — protesters were left reeling from violence that felt like it belonged on a battlefield.
In the aftermath of the uprisings, another kind of pain lingers. While their physical wounds may have long since healed, some protesters, like Osuala, said they have been left with deep psychological scars that remain open and raw.
“I feel like we’ve all been through the war,” Osuala said. “All the people who have really been out there from the beginning and have stayed out there consistently — we all have PTSD.”
Vox spoke with several protesters about the lingering effects of last summer’s protests. Now that much of the attention on the George Floyd protests has faded, Osuala and protesters like her say they’re left wondering how to put the pieces back together when it feels like the rest of the world has moved on.
Since the protests began last summer, some therapists, including a few Vox spoke with, have reported an influx of patients experiencing hypervigilance, anxiety, panic, and nightmares from their involvement in the demonstrations.
Licensed psychotherapist Cheryl Ades has seen a spike in the number of people coming to her practice with protest-related trauma. “The level of PTSD is going to be extreme,” said Ades, who works with protesters as a part of the network Therapists for Protester Wellness in Louisville. “It might not hit for a while — a few months, a year, five years — but it’s going to come down on people sooner or later.”
Months after the demonstrations, dozens of evaluations of police departments across the country exposed the full scope of the violent response. These reviews found that officers behaved aggressively and used crowd-control munitions indiscriminately against largely peaceful demonstrators. Their tactics, the reports found, often escalated violence instead of defusing it.
These findings were the culmination of a broader shift in American policing, said Jennifer Earl, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona and an expert on policing tactics.
From the civil rights movement in the 1960s to last summer’s protests, police departments using military-grade riot gear have increasingly become the norm in American cities. In part due to the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows law enforcement agencies to receive military hardware, American police departments have access to a wide arsenal of such equipment. From 1998 to 2014, the value of military equipment sent to police departments shot up from $9.4 million to $796.8 million.
“The access to militarized equipment means they’re approaching the protests in a different way — with a sort of warrior mentality,” said Earl.
As the police response becomes more militarized, so do the tactics of protesters on the ground. “It contributes to the feeling of protests as a war zone,” says Dana R. Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who studies social movements in the US. “If you tear-gas people in the streets, they’re not going to go home and say they’re not going to go out again. What happens is that everybody goes home and comes out with gas masks and with helmets, leaf blowers, and umbrellas.”
Experts say that decades of research have led to a similar conclusion: Escalating force leads to more violence, not less. Police wearing riot gear and deploying military-style weapons is more likely to lead to the same kind of violence they were supposed to prevent.
Increased violence also leads to increased emotional trauma. A report by the nonprofit Don’t Shoot Portland in 2020 noted that experiencing or witnessing violence in a protest setting was linked in recent research to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety.
For some Black protesters, the trauma of violence experienced on the ground is only intensified by the ancestral trauma of centuries of oppression, experts say. “It’s personal,” says Jennifer Mullan, a psychologist whose Decolonizing Therapy business provides resources for therapists to address inequities in the mental health industry. “It’s tied to your liberation and the liberation of your people. This is something that many people of color have been experiencing our entire lives. These communities are already in a heightened state of trauma. It just amplifies the trauma of protest.”
Cory, a community activist from Los Angeles who is being identified only by his first name due to safety concerns, says protesting is just another part of survival. “[Being a Black person is] like trauma upon trauma. I’m literally fighting against these people who could kill me during a traffic stop. There’s so much more invested for me.”
More than a year after her arrestin June 2020, 20-year-old Judith Velasquez finds herself trapped in a recurring flashback. When she closes her eyes, she’s back on the police bus in Los Angeles, packed alongside dozens of other protesters, her hands cuffed. It’s completely dark; the only light comes from faded street lamps seen through the reinforced glass windows. She can barely make out the silhouettes of those around her.
“I was terrified,” Velasquez said about the several hours she spent on the bus after being arrested for breaking curfew. “We were completely vulnerable in the dark, just waiting for them to do something.”
All the while, she said, people were screaming and pleading to be released. Some were shaking uncontrollably. According to Velasquez, one protester urinated on her seat after hours without access to a bathroom.
Every time Velasquez sees a police car — a regular presence in her working-class Latino community in Los Angeles — she freezes. “I see the red, white, and blue lights, and it takes me back,” she says. “I start shaking so hard. Because I remember how there was nobody to protect us. They could do anything to me.”
Like Velasquez, Cory says he has signs of PTSD. Difficulty sleeping, distressed by loud noises, nightmares, flashbacks.
Months after the George Floyd protests in Los Angeles, Cory found himself on the streets again to protest Dijon Kizzee’s fatal shooting by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
On the first night of protests in September 2020, he was heading toward the front lines when there was a sudden shift in the air — he turned around to look at the line of officers, looked back at the crowd, and then, he says, there were rubber bullets flying all around him. He started running, diving behind a box truck for cover while the officers continued to fire at him. There was so much tear gas on the streets around him that he couldn’t breathe. (Vox has corroborated Cory’s account with other protesters and news sources.)
Over the four days of demonstrations in Los Angeles, Cory says that the protesters experienced continual violence. As they took cover from pepper balls and chemical irritants fired by the sheriff’s department, he watched someone get hit in the head with a concussion grenade. A friend of his was struck by several pepper balls, fracturing her hand and leaving her bleeding on the sidewalk.
The impact on his mind and his body was immediate. “I couldn’t really sleep, I couldn’t really go out. My nervous system was so fucked that I couldn’t think straight.”
These symptoms are now a constant presence in his life. When he goes back to the locations where he’s experienced violence, his anxiety spikes. Loud noises send his heart racing. He has trouble concentrating and often finds himself dissociating.
“It was like being in a war zone,” he said. “Watching that happen, watching people get brutalized — it will never leave me.”
The nature of this ongoing violence — night after night, week after week — can make the path to healing complicated.
Ihotu Ali, a Minneapolis-based healer and organizer, says it may be impossible to completely recover from these experiences. “If you continuously break your leg … it’s never going to heal.”
Tasos Katopodis /Getty Images
A woman reacts to being hit with pepper spray during protests in Washington, DC, on June 22, 2020.
When protesters turn to therapy for support, they can come away feeling even more traumatized. As both a community organizer and a mental health therapist in Los Angeles, psychotherapist Devon Young has seen it happen time and time again. “They’re experiencing trauma on the ground and then go to look for support from these experts,” she said. “But they might not find validation or recognition in that industry, which tends to overlook marginalized experiences. Not to mention barriers like money and health insurance.”
Thinking back on everything she’s been through, Velasquez knows there’s no turning back now. Her outrage has only grown over the past few months, amplified by the fact that it feels like the rest of the world has moved on.
“It’s been years of pain, years of people suffering at the hands of the system and on the streets,” she said. “If you can go back to normal after this, then you exhibit a privilege that I can only dream of.”
In the face of militarized policing and the continued deaths of Black people at the hands of police, Mullan acknowledges that many activists feel a need to stay on the front lines. But she stresses that community healing is just as important — and can even act as another form of resistance.
“We know the reason why they inflict this violence. They want to take us off the streets, to split us apart,” she said. “That’s why it’s deeply necessary for us to lean on each other for healing. Even as things are burning down around us, our communities become a form of home. We educate each other, take care of each other, support each other. It’s the opposite of what the system wants us to do. They don’t want us to come together.”
Instead of relying on systems that have consistently failed the most vulnerable in the protest community, Mullan encourages a shift toward community-based care. “Trust in the community, in the possibility for transformational restorative justice work, can be extremely healing for people who are on the front lines. Community can become a point of healing.”
Young echoes the need for a transformative shift in therapy for front-liners. “We need to build a better mental health infrastructure,” she said. “And it won’t come from the state. It needs to happen from within activist circles. We know the fight will continue and these traumas are going to occur. The best we can do is create support systems that are built by the people.”
For Velasquez and other dedicated protesters, stopping the fight for justice isn’t an option. The more the police try to drive them off the streets, they said, the more determined they are to stay.
“There’s something that stays with you after you’ve gone through something like this,” Velasquez said. “Even with everything that happened, I kept going.”
While her experiences left a deep emotional impact, she also remembers how the protesters kept their spirits up on the prison bus: singing songs, chanting protest slogans, pulling up each other’s masks, and finding ways to break free from the plastic cuffs. “We were all supporting each other,” she said. “And we weren’t quiet for one second.”
Even with the progress the movement has made over the past year, Velasquez can’t help but feel disillusioned with the system. Looking back on everything protesters have been through — and continue to go through — she says no amount of accountability or reform can make up for the impact of her experiences. But through community healing, she’s found a way forward.
“They’re not going to protect us,” she said. “But we can protect us.”
Julia Dupuis is a Los Angeles-based writer covering protest movements and police violence.
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