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Democracy is under attack around the world; in the United States, the summer brought good news and bad news. The institutions of democracy are still functioning, but not for long if enough Americans continue to support authoritarianism.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tim Alberta: The thrill of defeat The metaphor that explains why America needs to prosecute Trump There’s a word for blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. What were the Russians doing in Chornobyl?

Layered Repression

Almost two years ago, I engaged in a thought experiment about what the failure of democracy in the United States might look like. I wrote it for an Atlantic subscriber newsletter I had back then, and I hope you’ll forgive me for revisiting it, but after a summer in which American democracy has been walking a tightrope over the authoritarian chasm, it’s worth looking back to see how we’ve done since early 2022.

The most important point, and the one that I think bears repeating, is that the failure of democracy in America will not look like a scene from a movie, where some fascist in a black tunic ascends the steps of the Capitol on Inauguration Day and proclaims the end of freedom:

The collapse of democracy in the United States will look more like an unspooling or an unwinding rather than some dramatic installation of Gilead or Oceania. My guess—and again, this is just my stab at speculative dystopianism—is that it will be a federal breakdown that returns us to the late 1950s in all of the worst ways.

We’re already seeing this unwinding in slow motion. Donald Trump and many on the American right (including the national Republican Party) have made clear their plans to subvert America’s democratic institutions. They made continuous efforts to undermine the will of the voters at the state level, most notably in Georgia, after the 2020 presidential election, and then they tried to overrule the results at the national level by setting a mob on Congress on January 6, 2021. If Trump returns to the Oval Office, he and his underlings will set up a system designed to set up a series of cascading democratic failures from Washington to every locality they can reach.

They intend to pack courts with judges who are loyal to Trump instead of to the Constitution. They want to destroy an independent federal civil service by making all major civil servants political appointees, which would allow the right to stuff every national agency with cronies at will. They want to neuter independent law-enforcement institutions such as the FBI, even if that means disbanding them. They will likely try to pare down the senior military ranks until the only remaining admirals and generals are men and women sworn not to the defense of the United States but to the defense of Donald Trump, even if that means employing military force against the American public.

Trump and his supporters are not even coy about some of these ideas. The Heritage Foundation—once a powerhouse think tank on the right that has since collapsed into unhinged extremism and admiration for foreign strongmen—has a “Project 2025” posted on its website, with sections that read like extended Facebook comments. I took a look so that you don’t have to, including at a policy-guide chapter on the military authored by former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Heritage and Miller (a seat warmer brought in by Trump at the tail end of his administration) think it’s very important for the next president—I wonder who they could possibly have in mind—to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs” and to reinstate personnel dismissed for disobeying orders to get vaccinated.

Also:

Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.

Why not just write up a loyalty oath to Trump? Little wonder that Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is holding up the promotion of some 300 senior officers; perhaps it’s occurred to him (or others) that sitting on those promotions until 2025 might open the door for Heritage’s unnamed next U.S. president to sweep out the Marxist gender theorists and replace them with “real Americans” who know that their duty is to a man rather than a moldering document in the National Archives.

The rest of Project 2025 is a lot of putative big-think from wannabe conservative intellectuals such as Ken Cuccinelli, Ben Carson, Stephen Moore, and Peter Navarro (who is currently on trial for contempt of Congress). Much of this stuff is nonsense, of course, but it’ll be nonsense right up until the point it isn’t: These are all names that would reappear in a second Trump administration, and this time, they’d move a lot faster in breaking down the federal guardrails around democracy.

This layered state, federal, and local repression is what I worried about back in early 2022:

This is where we really will have “free” and “unfree” Americas, side by side. To drive from Massachusetts to Alabama—especially for women and people of color—will not be crossing the Mason-Dixon line so much as it will be like falling through the Time Tunnel and emerging in a pre-1964 America where civil rights and equal treatment before the government are a matter of the state’s forbearance. If an American citizen’s constitutional rights are violated, there will be no Justice Department that will intervene, no Supreme Court that will overrule. (And arresting seditionists? Good luck with that. I expect that if Trump is reelected, he will pardon everyone involved with January 6.)

Trump, of course, has since made the promise to drop pardons like gentle rain from the sky. America’s democratic immune system, however, is for now still functioning. The courts have done their duty even when elected officials have refused to do theirs. (Imagine how much healthier American democracy would be right now if the Senate had convicted Trump in his second impeachment. Alas.) Trump is now under indictment for 91 alleged crimes, and Jack Smith seems undaunted in his pursuit of justice.

Likewise, the major ringleaders of January 6—all but one, I should say—have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, among other crimes, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Some of these supposed tough guys ended up blubbering and pleading for mercy in a federal courtroom, but to no avail. The would-be Oath Keepers centurion Stewart Rhodes and a leader of the Proud Boys, Ethan Nordean, each got 18 years, a record broken yesterday when a Trump-appointed federal judge sent the ex–Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio inside for 22 years, meaning he will be sitting out the next five presidential elections.

This is the good news, but none of it will matter if Trump returns to the White House.

I shouldn’t end on such a dire note. Trump is the likely nominee, and although I still feel a chill about the threat of authoritarianism, I also can’t shake the feeling that most Americans in most states want no part of this ongoing madness. I still have faith that most people, when faced with the choice, will continue to support the constitutional freedoms of the United States—but only if they understand how endangered those freedoms are.

Related:

The former Proud Boys leader finds out. Is Tennessee a democracy?

Today’s News

A Russian missile strike killed at least 17 people and injured dozens of others in Kostyantynivka, according to Ukrainian officials. A federal judge found Donald Trump liable for making defamatory statements against the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019, carrying over a federal jury’s verdict in a related defamation case earlier this year. Trump has appealed the jury’s verdict. Delta Air Lines announced that it is bringing Tom Brady on board as a strategic adviser.

Evening Read

Photograph by Erik Paul Howard for The Atlantic

Hip-Hop’s Fiercest Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

One sunny day in 1995, the Notorious B.I.G. sat in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes-Benz, smoking joints and talking shit. Of course, Biggie did these things on many days during his short lifetime, but on this particular day, a neighborhood friend named dream hampton was in the back seat with a video camera. Wearing Versace sunglasses and a checked purple shirt, the 23-year-old rapper—whose breakout album, Ready to Die, had come out the year before—held a chunky cellphone to his ear. He was making plans and talking about girls, riffing in his lisped woof of a voice. He laughed and brought a square of rolling paper, full of pot leaves, to his lips.

From behind the camera, hampton asked whether he intended to consume their entire bag of weed. Annoyed at the interruption, Biggie mocked her question. Hampton’s voice turned sharp. “Why are you going at me today?” she asked. “What’s the problem? Do we need to do something before we go on the road? Take this outside?” The video cut to static.

Read the full article.

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Robots are already killing people. America could be in for a rough fall. Women have been surfing for centuries. The taint of nuclear disaster doesn’t wash away.

Culture Break

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Read. These six books are correctives to isolation.

Watch. D.P., on Netflix, is a compelling K-drama without a drop of romance.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I voted yesterday in Rhode Island, where our district had a special primary election to choose contenders to replace resigning Representative David Cicilline. Rhode Island CD 1 is a heavily Democratic district (it went for Joe Biden in 2020 by 29 points), so the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to prevail in the general election. Yesterday’s Democratic winner was Gabe Amo, a young man who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations. Amo is Black, and if he goes to Washington, he’ll be the first person of color to represent Rhode Island in Congress.

But what fascinated me yesterday was that we all voted in Rhode Island CD 1 without having much of an idea who was likely to win. For various reasons, including the short run-up to the primary, none of the local media outlets or universities did any polling. Twelve candidates, including several Rhode Island elected officials, ran in the primary. A few looked to be prohibitive favorites early on; one was felled at the last minute by scandal. Another, Aaron Regunberg, seemed to be ubiquitous on the airwaves, with ads touting his endorsement from Bernie Sanders. (Probably not a great idea in Rhode Island; Regunberg came in second but ran more than seven points behind Amo.)

I often say that people should vote as if their one vote will make the difference; for once, I walked into the booth with the thought that my vote could, in fact, be the deciding vote. As a political junkie, I love polls, but it was nice to be able to cast a ballot without knowing whether my preferred candidate was the likely winner or loser.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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METTER, Ga. (AP) — A South Korean company that makes automotive seating said Wednesday that it plans to build a $35 million factory in eastern Georgia to supply a new Hyundai Motor Group plant near Savannah.

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With four separate criminal cases moving forward against Donald Trump, the rule of law in America appears both commanding and startlingly fragile. Small scenes at courthouses from Florida to New York underline the ever-present threat of violence. In Fulton County, Georgia, officials set up bright-orange security barriers around the courthouse in advance of Trump’s indictment there. In Washington, D.C., fences and yellow tape surrounded the U.S. district court. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will oversee the federal case against Trump for his efforts to overturn the election, has received increased protection from U.S. marshals—and perhaps not a moment too soon, as a Texas woman was recently arrested for calling in death threats against the judge. Trump, meanwhile, has been busy attacking Chutkan and other judges on social media, smearing the prosecutors bringing the cases against him as a “fraud squad” doing the bidding of President Joe Biden, and promising to turn the Justice Department against his foes should he win a second term.

It’s a grim picture. “The next 18 months could further undermine confidence in democracy and the rule of law,” The Washington Post warned in June. Some commentators, largely on the right, have cautioned that the investigations and prosecutions of Trump might widen cracks in the already-unstable foundations of the American public sphere. Last year, the National Review editor Rich Lowry cautioned in Politico that U.S. institutions “are ill-equipped to withstand the intense turbulence that would result from prosecuting the political champion of millions of people.” Writing more recently in National Review, John Yoo and John Shu argued that even a successful prosecution of Trump for his efforts to overturn the election “will leave many doubtful of the conviction and more distrustful of the Justice Department and the criminal-justice system, especially at a time when public trust in our institutions is already in decline.”

As the threats of violence and attacks on the justice system show, these concerns are not unfounded—far from it. But worrying about the dangers of prosecuting Trump is a bit like focusing on the risk that chemotherapy poses to a cancer patient’s health. The reasoning isn’t exactly wrong; it just begins the analysis in the wrong place. The chemotherapy might be ugly, but it isn’t the source of the problem. It’s the treatment for the underlying disease.

During Watergate, Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel, John Dean, famously told the president that the scandal had become a “cancer growing on the presidency.” Trump’s presence in American politics is similarly malignant. He has made the country meaner, uglier, and more violent. During his first term, he ate away at the protections guarding the U.S. system from authoritarianism, insisting on his own right to absolute power. For prosecutors to have ignored Trump’s provocations would have been to allow the cancer to progress—to acquiesce to his vision of a fundamentally corrupt politics in which the only constraint on power is the threat of vengeance.

Still, that doesn’t mean the prosecutions will be a pleasant experience. Even under the best of circumstances, the country’s first trial of a former president—especially a former president once again seeking office—would have been a high-stakes test of the ability of American political institutions to hold the powerful to account. Trump, though, seems dead set on making the experience as grueling as possible. Already, he may be headed for confrontations with the three separate judges who have cautioned him against using incendiary language and threatening witnesses—which hasn’t stopped him from attacking the prosecutors and complaining on Truth Social that Judge Chutkan is “VERY BIASED & UNFAIR.”

The analogy to chemotherapy has some obvious shortcomings. In 1978, Susan Sontag—who would herself later be diagnosed with cancer—argued in Illness as Metaphor against the temptation to dramatize disease, warning, “Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness.” Trump is not a sickness; he is a person who has the choice not to act as a destructive force.

Even so, the notion of the body politic has persisted for a reason. What would happen if the current disease were to go untreated? What might unfold if Trump continues to push the boundaries of what he can get away with—deciding, for example, to skip out on appearing at his trials? The judges and prosecutors would have to decide whether to hold Trump to the standards they would use for any other defendant and reprimand him for his insouciance—potentially, as incredible as it seems, by jailing him. A decision to hold Trump in custody before a conviction would be a bitter and contentious choice: Trump would be sure to complain about the terrible injustice and persecution he faces, eating away at public confidence in the legal system.

Likewise, there’s been a recent surge of interest in the notion that Trump may be barred from returning to the presidency under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, a post–Civil War provision that disqualifies onetime government officials who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from returning to office. Any effort to block Trump’s candidacy on these grounds would surely involve a prolonged legal battle—and raise uncomfortable questions about the wisdom, in a democracy, of ruling out by judicial fiat a serious contender for the presidency. It would make for harsh medicine.

Yet this harsh medicine wouldn’t be necessary if Trump hadn’t brought this challenge to American democracy in the first place. And letting the challenge go unanswered would have far more destructive effects. The idea of the body politic, and the risks of its decay, is a very old one. Trump’s actions are the source of its current illness, and though the treatment may seem extreme—and have unpleasant side effects—it’s what’s needed to stop the disease from taking over.

The Georgian government has proposed a ban to prevent foreign couples from accessing commercial surrogacy.

Say this for the Proud Boys: They abide by their own creed. “Fuck around, find out!” members of the group, with Joseph Biggs in front, chanted as they marched down the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.

Over the past week, they’ve found out. Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, was sentenced today to 22 years in prison on charges of seditious conspiracy. Tarrio, who was not physically present at the riot after being kicked out of Washington the day before, was convicted in May. It’s the longest January 6–related sentence yet, and follows a series of long sentences announced last week for other Proud Boys: 17 years for Biggs, 18 for Ethan Nordean, 15 for Zachary Rehl—all of whom were found guilty of seditious conspiracy—and 10 years for Dominic Pezzola, who was acquitted of sedition but convicted of six other felonies. In May, Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years for sedition, in his capacity as head of the Oath Keepers, another group involved in the insurrection.

[Michael Signer: America does have a way to save itself]

Seeing these long sentences levied now, more than two and a half years after the insurrection, is heartening. Hundreds of people have been sentenced for violence and more minor offenses committed at the Capitol, but the Proud Boys’ sentences, along with Rhodes’s, are more important, because they punish not just spontaneous violence but also a concerted, planned attack on the government.

The convictions and stiff sentences are a message about what the United States will tolerate. Juries have proved willing to convict even though the charges in question are rare and even though the likely sentences are strong. They also show that juries and judges, and not just prosecutors, are unwilling to treat the insurrection the way too many Republican elected officials have—as just a rally that got a little out of hand.

Political scientists call laws that defend democratic institutions from authoritarian threats—and the enforcement of them—“defensive democracy.” “American laws against seditious conspiracy and against advocating for overthrowing the government are quintessential defensive democracy,” Michael Signer wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year.

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy]

The Proud Boys leaders have received serious, hard-time sentences, not slaps on the wrist. This is true even though the prison terms are short of both the federal guidelines and what prosecutors requested (33 years for Tarrio and Biggs, 30 for Rehl, 27 for Nordean, 20 for Pezzola). Such sentences would verge on draconian, given the crimes involved: The conspiracy was dangerous and appalling, but also feckless and obviously doomed. (For comparison, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was jailed for two years before being released without trial.) And it’s true even if the men don’t end up serving the full terms, as is common—though their unrepentant attitudes suggest that they’re banking on pardons from a restored President Donald Trump, not early releases.

Notably, for the purposes of a sentence enhancement, Judge Timothy Kelly ruled that the Proud Boys’ actions represented terrorism, even as he gave them less time than the guidelines would stipulate. The defendants were aghast. “I know that I messed up that day, but I am not a terrorist,” Biggs protested at his sentencing. But Kelly, and common sense, said otherwise. Americans may be accustomed to the idea that terrorists are foreigners, most likely Muslims, but what the Proud Boys did on January 6 amounted to “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government or civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives,” which happens to be the FBI’s textbook definition of terrorism. It doesn’t matter that they were American-born or believed that they were in the right.

Speculating about the deterrent impact of the strict sentences and terrorism label would be premature, but the long sentences will take a direct bite out of the groups. The Proud Boys have since January 6 seemed to shift their efforts into grassroots involvement in local government, which could give them a lasting grip even with their top leadership locked up. The Oath Keepers, which centered around Rhodes, may be in more dire straits.

[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]

These are positive indications about the strength of American defensive democracy, but they are not the final answer. Another test will come in the trials of the many people involved in what I call the paperwork coup—the series of extralegal (though often lawyerly) attempts to subvert the 2020 election. Recent indictments from Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis demonstrate how the various tendrils of this effort were intertwined. They add up to a scheme that was less blatant and less violent than the January 6 riot, but also a greater threat to the integrity of the election system. Will juries and judges recognize that peril, or will they treat it as bumbling paper-pushing?

Also unresolved is the larger question of Trump. If Tarrio and other Proud Boys deserved to have the book thrown at them, and if the rank-and-file rioters are serving their time, the justice system still hasn’t proved whether it can sufficiently hold accountable the man all of this was designed to benefit—and who, if the prosecutors are to be believed, orchestrated much of it. Even as the highest-profile Proud Boys cases are finishing, Trump is only now facing charges in Washington and Fulton County for his own role in the election plot.

[From the October 2023 issue: The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump]

While those cases slowly ramp up, though, Trump remains the strong favorite for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and would enter a rematch with President Joe Biden with something near even odds at victory. As my colleagues Quinta Jurecic and David Frum have recently pointed out, the best and perhaps only way to contain the danger Trump still poses to the American system is to defeat him at the ballot box—in other words, putting the democracy in defensive democracy.