In Philadelphia this past weekend, I met a number of people who’d given up on democracy. They railed about politicians who make promises they don’t keep. They spun conspiracy theories about the government. A number of those who answered the door told me that they weren’t going to vote.

Then there were the grim young men who said, hell yeah, they were going to vote for Trump. They spoke of the Republican presidential candidate as if he were Tony Montana, the gangster played by Al Pacino in the film Scarface: violent, lawless, and powerful. Trump elicited respect laced with fear. According to his supporters, he’d stand up to America’s enemies abroad and be tough on crime domestically. Several said to me—with the usual preface of “don’t get me wrong but…”—that a woman president would be too weak or “mixed up by hormones” to do those necessary things.

If you cross celebrity culture with gun culture and add a few dollops of testosterone, you get Donald Trump.

Much has been written about the rise of the global far right (including by me). It’s important to understand that this global trend is not a type of politics. It is an anti-politics. The far right embodied by Vladimir Putin in Russia, Victor Orban in Hungary, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and others is determined to unravel democracy. They have contempt for elections. They revise, bend, or undermine the constitutional order.

And they despise the civic engagement at the heart of thriving democracies. They crack down on dissent. They target protesters. They ruthlessly purge the “enemy within.” This is what Donald Trump has promised to do this time around.

The Republican campaign in 2024 relied on anti-government rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and violent innuendo (against FEMA, against the border patrol, against Republican politicians that didn’t toe the MAGA line) in order to do two things. These strategies drew the disaffected to the polls. And........

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