American winter is coming

Good morning from Washington, where I am making sense of a new political landscape amidst the graven monuments, memorials, and institutions. These civic spaces make our nation’s Capitol a unique environment to write about government, technology, and policy. There’s sunlight and shadows everywhere. Today, I’ll be focusing on more fears than hopes, sharing what lies ahead.

The last twenty four hours have been …hard. I apologize for taking a day to rest, reflect, grieve, and focus on being a parent. I know you have no shortage of news sources to inform you how the world has changed since I last wrote to you, on Election Day. Thank you for subscribing.

I will keep working to earn and keep your trust this winter, into whatever the next year holds. If enough of you become members this year, this will become sustainable. If not, I will need to find another way to make a living in 2025.

Mea culpa: I made the cardinal error of raising my hopes at the worst time. The stakes were too high, however, not to allow myself that room. I knew what the consequences of returning Trump to office would be for our nation. For DC. For marginalized Americans and climate refugees. For a pluralistic, multiracial democracy. For humanity, and our ability to mitigate the worst effects of a rapidly changing climate.

I tried to create space for disappointment, both here and for my daughter: An unpopular incumbent, higher cost of living, fears of immigration, rising inequality, and pervasive propaganda all created the structural conditions for Americans to vote for change.

That didn’t make yesterday easier. I found many illustrations online.

Successive body blows to weakened public trust after a year of medical misinformation and official lies made this much worse:

Inflation wasn’t transitory. COVID-19 vaccines didn’t stop infection, only reduced serious illness & death. The Afghanistan government and army folded quickly. A surge in immigrants at the southern border wasn’t a mirage. President Biden was more diminished than many of us had realized.

The Justice Department failed to quickly hold Trump accountable for corruption and conspiring to overturn the election. (Their prosecution of Trump was not political, no matter what you might hear.) Justice delayed will now be justice denied.

Our country has voted with our pocket books, as has been the American Way.

By doing so, however, I fear we just willingly walked into an entrenched illiberal democracy that could endure for more than four years.

A corrupt autocrat will preside over creeping authoritarianism that infects hearts and minds across our union, leaving billions of people around the world to defend their own democracies or to suffer under corrupt presidents, theocrats, and dictators.

We will have to work incredibly hard and be lucky to escape a dystopian further for decades to come.

Native fascism will now arrive in Washington to be enshrined in power with pomp and circumstance, wrapped in the flag and bearing a cross, welcomed with chants of “USA!” and enforced with the barrel of the gun and the threat of a midnight knock at the door.

Fire, fury, and fear will follow, as a president seeks revenge and retribution to all of his perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.

Generational damage to the American experiment now seems certain, as opposed to an abherration of a singular demagogue degrading our institutions for a term, activating the immune systems of our democracy.

The rule of law, civil rights, civil liberties, reproductive rights, and many freedoms will be in jeopardy, as will anyone who dissents and dares to speak truth to power.

8 years on, we remain weakened by our divisions after a historic pandemic and insurrection. Calls for unity won’t be any more effective than they were in 2016 or 2020, if Trump governs for himself and his partisans.

He won‘t change, become fit, or presidential. He has shown us who he is for decades. I don’t think Americans believed him. Or worse, enough of us have lost enough faith in our system of government that they support a corrupt, venal strongman as their avatar of grievance and anger, investing him with religious significance as we barrel towards end times.

I have never been shy about warning everyone who would listen about the danger a corrupt businessmen who had never served in the military or held elected office posed to American democracy in 2015, before I began working at a nonprofit where I could not comment on campaigns. This has sometimes been to my detriment, which officials and editors dismissed as hyperbole or partisan critique.

I would have preferred to be wrong about the impact of disinformation on public trust and social cohesion, a hate campaign towards the press, the corruption of opaque foreign entanglements, or the consequences of failing to reform good governance laws and strengthen the guardrails against an imperial presidency.

On the work ahead

When Trump first won office, I remember coming to work at the Sunlight Foundation in a daze. I knew history had changed. I knew weren't ready as an organization or individuals. There was no plan, yet. I also knew the context for our work on government transparency, accountability, and freedom of information had just changed for ever.

Our collaboration with international partners had helped us see who Trump was and understand that authoritarianism meant we needed to behave differently.

So we starting making lists, cataloging his many conflicts of interest, collaborating to save records and data, researching which norms and vulnerabilities could be exploited, and pushing for them to be codified or closed. That chapter closed for me in 2018, but I kept moving forward, continuing the work on digital democracy and open governance for four years.

That work remains urgent today, but the context shifted again. So today I am taking time to grieve, reflect, and prepare for what lies ahead.

First principles: I’m not giving up on American democracy. Too many previous generations fought and sacrificed and died to create and defend a nation of laws, not men.

I believe our institutions and federalism are more resilient and resistant to corruption that is coming than some people may expect, as is our press.

But some may not hold. People will die because of corruption. Children will suffer with the return of preventable diseases. Others will be traumatized as families are separated and deported. Hate will beget hate. We may experience darkness and violence unlike any in living memory.

We will likely face the greatest stress test to the American system of governance since 1860, as norms and traditions give way to raw power and politics.

We cannot say we weren’t warned: Washington told us that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

On accountability

Today, President Joseph Robinette Biden will address the nation about the transition ahead. I expect he will do what President Obama did in 2016, directing his administration to cooperate with the shift in power.

Instead of seeking to subvert the Justice Department, fomenting insurrection with lies about fraud, and blocking the General Services Administration from providing space and support for the inbound administration laid out in the Presidential Transition Act, he will accept the will of the American people, as Vice President Kamala Harris did in her confession yesterday.

I doubt he will apologize for not passing the torch to the next generation of leaders far earlier, nurtuing a strong succession process, much less for failing to defend our union against autocracy from within. His stubbornness and arrogance has now put the American experiment at incalculable risk.

History will remember Biden as the President who led us out of the pandemic, but failed to defeat the rise of a clear and present danger to our Constitution after an insurrection and failed auto-coup.

Instead of wielding all of the powers of the presidency to hold off the corrupt demagogue that Washington had warned us of in parting, President Biden lost public trust in his first two years in office and never recovered it.

He refused to take bolder, more ambitious actions that centered transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration in civic life.

Instead of engaging us directly about public business and historic achievements using the modern tools, he has let truth drown in a hurricane of lies about crime, immigration, and the economy. Showing that “democracy delivers” doesn‘t work if people don’t know about it, feel it, experience it, or believe it.

Maybe Biden will surprise us with honesty, humility, hope, and candor, but the sun is setting on this presidency. What will dawn in 2025 will not be drenched in sunlight.

I still believe in our union’s capacity for renewal and reformation. I fear that much will get worse before we see the opportunities we had for structural reforms of our democracy we had in 2009 or 2021 come again.

I would like to be wrong due to unforseen events, like the death of the oldest president in history in office, or his removal under the 25th amendment due to dementia.

In the interim, I plan to keep writing, advocating for open government, and finding ways to scrub in to help protect and defend our democracy against enemies of the Constitution.

After today, CivicTexts will adopt and add a new format to complement the essays and digests I’ve sent since April to help make sense of the tsunami of changes headed our way

I won’t stop writing about all of the topics you’ve heard about this year, but the moment demands more.

So, I plan to apply the advice for the press corps that my friend Jack Shafer offered in 2017, riffing on one of my tweets, and answer the following questions each time:

Can what just seems to have happened be confirmed? Is it unprecedented? Is the recent act of governance normal by the usual standards? Is what just happened a threat to democracy?

If this clear approach informs and helps you, please share and amplify as we go. If it doesn’t, please tell me what I can do better.

Stay safe. 74 days until Inauguration Day.

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