Donald Trump’s plans to remake American society is not incremental or gradual. Trump, his advisor and agents are attempting to impose a revolutionary project on the whole of American life that will, in various ways, likely impact every person in the country.

Trump, however, is not a political ideologue. He is obsessed with expanding the realm of his own self-interest and getting and exercising more corrupt power; “politics,” however defined and understood, is just a means to an end for Trump. By comparison, the people (and organizations) in Trump’s closest orbit such as JD Vance, Stephen Miller, the Heritage Foundation and the many White Christian nationalists and gangster capitalists (to the degree they are distinct from one another) are actual ideologues who possess a coherent theory of society (and human nature) and how to advance and achieve their desired outcomes. Because they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the threat and struggle, the combination of these forces will be very difficult if not impossible for the “institutionalists” and mainstream members of the political class, news media and other elites to stop.

On this, Historian Tim Snyder warns:

It was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.

Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate — a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean?....

A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it.

That requires presence, which Trump has always had. His charisma need not resonate with you: probably, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s would not have reached you, either. But it is nevertheless a talent. To be a fascist and to call someone else a fascist requires a cunning that is natural to Trump. And in that naming of the enemy, absurd as it is, we see the second major element of fascism.

A Leader (“Duce” and “Führer” mean just that) initiates politics by choosing an enemy. As the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt maintained, the choice is arbitrary. It has little or no basis in reality. It takes its force from the decisive will of the Leader. The people who watched Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color. The magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part of an overwhelming conspiracy.

The one thing that is not arbitrary about the choice of an enemy is that it must exploit vulnerabilities.

Throughout the Age of Trump and the democracy crisis, Masha Gessen has repeatedly counseled that we should take his threats seriously. In a new essay at the Times, Gessen continues with their warnings — which are now even more critical given Trump’s imminent return to power:

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. …

Trump and his supporters have shown tremendous hostility to civic institutions — the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits, some religious groups — that seek to define and enforce our obligations to one another.

Related

On Monday, Trump confirmed that he will declare a state of national emergency as part of his plans to use the military and other forces as part of his mass deportation program targeting nonwhite migrants, refugees and other “illegal aliens.” This could potentially lead to the forced removal of more than 10 million people from the country – including American citizens who are caught up in the dragnet. Beyond the collective psychic, physical and emotional trauma, economists and other experts are warning that Trump’s deportation plan will also cause great financial and economic harm to the American people. On this, historian Heather Cox Richardson notes in her newsletter that, "While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere."

In all, to navigate (and survive) the next four years of Trump’s MAGA America, the American people and their leaders will need to internalize and act upon the wisdom of Snyder, Gessen, Richardson and other leading pro-democracy voices. M. Steven Fish is one such voice. He is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has appeared on BBC,........

© Salon