There's no normal to go back to

In the now-too-familiar daze after Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016, I interviewed Ron Klain. You probably know that he would have been Clinton's Chief of Staff and eventually filled that role for Joe Biden. Klain had recently distinguished himself as the "Ebola Czar," an effort worth considering—given what has happened since.

Republicans led by Donald Trump hyped and twisted the threat of the deadly epidemic landing in America to significant effect, helping them take the US Senate and eventually deny Barack Obama the right to fill Antonin Scalia's vacant seat on the Supreme Court. Despite the wildly cynical outrage blaring from every orifice of the right-wing media, Klain stepped into that maelstrom to lead a wildly successful response that resulted in ZERO (O) deaths from Ebola transmissions in the United States while helping to mitigate and contain the horrific carnage from the disease in Africa. So I asked him how he felt about getting almost no credit for the response while Democrats had suffered extraordinary political costs for the scare.

His answer was, paraphrased, "You don't expect kudos for doing your job. People expect the government to work, and it should."

I still wonder about this admirable appeal to civic virtue. Is it true? Or is it rather a symptom of Democrats' inability to sell their product, which is a government that works for the people?

Either way, it's remarkable to compare Klain's humble stance to how Donald Trump has turned his horrific response to COVID into one of his most withering advantages as he wages war on our decency and Constitution.

Undoubtedly, Trump's response to the novel coronavirus was the worst in the rich world. His only competition is former Brazilian president and fellow failed coup-ster Jair Bolsonaro. Both wannabe strongmen didn't just incompetently handle the deadliest pandemic of the century; they turned their rabid followers against the best methods we had to contain the virus.

Above, in the latest NEXT COMES WHAT, Andrea Pitzer connects Trump and America's COVID response to the current state of our politics and country, which sees our country led by a death cult of personality (and, honestly, what a terrible personality). Here's just that part:

Trump's ability to turn his worst atrocities into advantages should have us genuinely freaked out. It should inspire us to step up the challenge of facing him, knowing that his superpower is avoiding consequences. But it also should remind us that giving into his worst instincts—his indifference for human life, his unquenchable desire to dominate others in public, his passion for weaponizing simplistic solutions against convenient enemies to feed his corruption—will only feed his sick lust for power.

No one in America is looking for the second-best Trump. The demagoguery that he's used to build his death cult isn't fungible or transferable. The issues he may talk about may relate to positions that you or your labor union have championed for decades, but his interest in them is only convenience. His goal is to destroy your labor union, to destroy your ability to run against him or his party, to kill any ability you have to challenge him in the courts, on the ballot, or in public.

And this isn't unique to Trump; it's true of any attempt to "accommodate" the far right. That's what a 2022 study from Werner Krause, Denis Cohen, and Tarik Abou-Chadi found:

We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. 

What is unique about Trump is his ability to co-opt America's establishment even as the American public immediately soured on his presidency and stepped up with a historic amount of opposition. In that way, we've "crossed the line" from democracy to competitive authoritarianism, as Harvard professor Steven Levitsky recently told Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth:

I've argued before that the current generation of politicians now in office has been traumatized by Donald Trump, possibly irreparably. He sent mobs to kill them, got away with it, and has more consolidated power than ever to show for it. And I think my governor, Gretchen Whitmer, offers a singular case of how she was targeted by a mob incited by Donald Trump, even if the case against the men charged with planning to kidnap her eventually fell apart.

But she—like Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW, and Elissa Slotkin—offers test cases in accommodating a man who is bent on destroying our democracy and using every tool and person he can find to neuter his opposition and conquer our ability to rule ourselves. It's a godawful bet to make.

But I also think it's built on a sense that has deluded Democrats for decades, the belief that only Democrats have agency and the best way to use that agency is to compromise with Republicans. This position will be "proven" in any poll and focus groups. People want "compromise." They want "bipartisanship." And rather than explain to the public that this is not possible in any party that can produce a Donald Trump, many Democrats think they just need to compromise harder.

This has also given to a common urge in the last few years to return to "normalcy." What did Joe Biden offer more than that? And John Roberts and the other five Republicans on the Supreme Court made the case that this is the new normal—Republican domination and impunity until we can fix our country. Pretending there's some concession or photo op with Donald Trump that will make the public choose Democrats and democracy over the new normalcy of Trump's authoritarianism is a recipe for not just surrender but humiliating surrender.

In the end, he's coming for all of us, any of us who have any line we will not let him cross—any school, any laboratory, any country that won't make a "deal" with him, any governor, any city, any county, any trans kid... And when he's done with them, he'll invent new enemies to come for.

There is no normalcy to wish for. There is no compromise with tyranny. At this moment, all you can do is stand up for something. And if you aren't sure what you should be standing for, I have a simple Ten Point Plan: