In defense of alarmism

There’s a reason this administration has started off targeting immigrants. Those in charge are calculating—and have plenty of evidence to back them up on this—that the average American won’t care. Or won’t care enough to do anything. Besides, they’ve been preparing you for this. Go back to some of Trump’s earliest speeches, and you’ll find hateful, xenophobic rhetoric. At the time, many were shocked. Now, even for those who find it abhorrent, it’s the not-even-new normal.

And, there’s a reason historians have been disproportionately represented in the “alarmist” camp since day one. We know that this kind of xenophobic rhetoric is a strategy straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Demonize “the other,” concoct stories of imminant danger, and use those to justify any act of violence and aggression. The stories need not be true. In fact, even better if they aren’t. As Hannah Arendt observed, lies unite.

But why stop at immigrants? There are plenty of other enemies to be found. Enemies of what? Of America? No. Of Trump’s vision of America. If you’re reading, this, there’s a good chance you’re in that camp as well. Even people supporting Trump now may find themselves in that camp, sooner or later. While I’m using “camp” in a metaphorical way, as I write, it occurs to me that the literal sense may also apply.

Today at Axios, Brittany Gibson writes of ideas being floated around the administration right now of expanding deportations to include deporting convicted U.S. citizens. Convicted of what, you ask?

Ideas are also being floated that anyone who criticizes Trump’s policies could be charged with a crime. From Axios:

• "Homegrowns are next," Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele last week, referring to sending Americans convicted of crimes to serve time in foreign prisons.

Don’t we have laws against this? Of course we do. But thinking that laws will save us suggests you haven’t been paying attention.

• "We always have to obey the laws," Trump said, "but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies over the head ... I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country."

Won’t the courts step in?

• The White House says the decision to return Abrego Garcia rests with El Salvador because the U.S. Supreme Court told the administration only to "facilitate" his return, not "effectuate" it.

A federal judge raised the concern that what happened to Garcia could happen to anyone:

• "If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?" wrote Judge Harvie Wilkinson III.

• "And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?"

Any lawyer will tell you that without due process, no one is safe. And, given the absolute loyalty and obeisance Trump demands, anyone can be targeted. Since Trump conflates his followers with “true Americans” and his personal enemies with the nation’s enemies, it is a very slippery and very short slope to identifying any one of us as a threat to national security and to justify any action taken, no matter how illegal, unconstitutional, or immoral that action might be.

I read Gibson’s Axios piece this morning just after I read Toby Buckle’s “Trump ‘Alarmists’ Were Right. We Should Say So.”

The whole “I told you so” posture never comes off well, so I know I’m taking a risk here. But I’m going to set aside concerns about coming across as obnoxious or annoying because I think what he has to say is important. Besides, those of us who have been raising the alarm are used to coming across as obnoxious and annoying. That’s the point of Buckle’s piece:

Throughout the Trump era I’ve been firmly in the camp unaffectionately dismissed as ‘alarmist’ by most commentators. Put simply: It is that bad. Liberal democracy is in danger. Facism is a reasonable term for what we’re fighting.

For veteran ‘alarmists’ this is a strange moment. People are at a loss. It seems wrong, given all that is at stake, to say “I told you so”. I’ve felt that discomfort. For the longest time I avoided saying that. It felt . . . petty, childish, gauche, it just wasn’t the done thing. One of the big political awakenings I’ve had over the last year, and particularly since Trump’s 2024 victory, is realizing that it's OK to say “called it”. More than OK. Even if it feels awkward, it's actually important, perhaps necessary, that we do.

My view has not been, to put it mildly, the mainstream position. You’re allowed, with a certain amount of resentment, to say it today. But that wasn’t always the case. I recall first voicing it as the antecedents of Trump, the tea party and growing white supremacy, started to arise. Obama’s “the fever will break” seemed hopelessly naive to me. The press treated them either as legitimate libertarians or an eccentric curiosity, not a threat. To the activist left, what would become the Bernie movement, they were a joke—the punchline to a Jon Stewart monologue. Nothing more. When Trump first rode the elevator down to announce his candidacy, it was entertainment, not omen.

If you saw in any of this a threat to liberal democracy writ large, much less one that could actually succeed, you were looked at with the kind of caution usually reserved for the guy screaming about aliens on the subway. Trump’s election in 2016 was a shock to people who insisted it could never happen. But those most complacent before quickly found their way back to complacency after. For a certain type—specifically, the type who has a column in legacy media despite never having written an interesting or original paragraph in their lives—smug condescension became the order of the day: yes, Trump is bad, but dear me those liberals are being hysterical. As late as the last election they were writing pieces with titles like “A Trump Dictatorship Won’t Happen” or “No, Trump won't destroy our democracy.” Even after the election, as the scale of the incoming lawlessness became clear, we were dismissed: “Trump Is Testing Our Constitutional System. It’s Working Fine” respected legal commentator Noah Feldman told us—the legal rationale for his actions was very flimsy. Courts would strike it all down. And certainly the administration would not ignore a court order.

One thing I’ve always wondered about the anti-alarmists during this decade was, to put it bluntly, weren’t they worried about looking stupid? The path we were on seemed clear enough to me, but I didn’t know the future. I always stressed that my predictions were one of any number of possible outcomes. They didn’t. What I was saying was dismissed, not just as unlikely, but impossible. Did they not want to hedge their bets even a bit? And it’s not as if the liberal democratic collapse happened all at once. The last decade has been a steady drum beat of them being wrong, again and again. Yet it never shook them.

I was giving them, and our wider political culture, far too much credit. And in my angrier moments I knew this. In a twitter rant following the Dobbs decision I predicted “the people, of all stripes, who got it so badly & utterly predictably wrong . . . will just continue. They'll never admit they were wrong.”

And so it has come to pass. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and so on, cover our constitutional collapse with a “who could possibly have foreseen this” sort of tone. Even now, the alarmists are still the problem. At times, the mental gymnastics on display are darkly comedic. Thomas Chatterton WIlliams, unable to admit it may have been in error to focus so much on woke college kids during a fascist takeover, offered this amazing rationalization: “The administration is not anti-woke; it is woke with right-wing characteristics.”

Where there have been apologies, they’ve been very limited, and of a specific kind. David Brooks, in his big mea-culpa piece “I should have seen this coming”, does admit he underestimated how much conservatism had simply become an anti-liberal reaction, but then quickly pivots. He “sympathized with the populist critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies” stressing again and again that he shares their frustrations. Liberals, particularly the social justice types, are very annoying. He spends multiple paragraphs on this in a piece that should be him admitting we got it right.

Buckle has much more to say—on people like Jon Stewart and Corey Robin, on “reactionary centrists” and even a subset of the left.

These semi-mea-culpas are the most we’ve gotten out of the anti-alarmists. Some have been very impressed with them admitting error and I’m . . . not. Robin seemed annoyed to be asked. Given this was, by far and away, the most consequential political challenge of our lives and he had spent a decade confidently and condescendingly on the wrong side of it, one question, at the end of an interview, does not seem unreasonable.

None could hide their contempt for the alarmists, even in their big ‘my bad’ moments. Robin snipping that critics were wrong (even if they turned out to be right), Stewart was unable to resist a dig at liberals, and Brooks devoting a big chunk of his essay to the usual anti-social-justice grievances. I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t strike me as a very genuine sort of apology.

As much as anything, all of them seemed unable to say what they got wrong. They had been right, but then events went the other way. The point they made at the time still stands. People weren't being sent to foreign gulags before, so those who warned about it were wrong to do so. And they were so annoying. It was, in fact, fairly predictable that they’d get it wrong. We (annoying, alarmist, Bluesky using, Trump derangement syndrome sufferers) could have (and did!) tell them at the time why they couldn’t see the obvious.

To start with, a big part of this isn’t more complicated than old dogs not learning new tricks. If you’ve spent decades writing the same ‘social justice gone too far’ column, it can be difficult to switch gears to something else. That thing that looks a heck of a lot like fascism, that must be a reaction to social justice going too far. Even for those with more valid projects—a critique of neoliberal capitalism for instance—new events were subsumed into existing concerns.

There was a persistent refusal to see Trump and MAGA as real, as an active force in their own right. The flip side of this was a gendered shifting of blame and anger from (male-coded) conservatism to (female-coded) liberalism and liberals. We must have done something to provoke them. We should be more careful not to set them off. We, surely, are being hysterical in our reaction. This varies a bit by anti-alarmist; Brooks is a classic ‘what did you say to make him hit you?’ writer, his immediate reaction to Trump’s win in 2024 was a long missive about ‘identity politics.’ Robin is more complicated; his (pre-Trump) book on conservatism includes agental and non-agental accounts (it's both about hierarchy and a reaction to progressive movements). Some have found it useful, others have argued Robin doesn’t think ordinary MAGA supporters “believe what they say and have agency” and that he reduces them to “being used or manipulated in the service of elites.” What I would point out is, regardless of the exact intellectual underpinnings, the emotional response is actually quite similar: In his more popular writing and commentary Robin is clearly very angry at mainline liberalism (see below) in a way he isn’t with the right.

Finally, there’s an irreducibly temperamental component. Men—and they usually are men—who just can’t stand to be corrected. It's not (or not merely) that their paradigm was wrong, there was a flat refusal to ever consider how the world looks from within another. A closing the door, in advance, to the thought that another perspective might have seen something that theirs had missed. A noticeable discomfort, an annoyance with, the female coded-emotions (panic, fear) of those who did take Trump seriously.

This is why, even if it feels petty and unpleasant, it is important to stress that these commentators got it badly wrong. It's not about being punitive: they’ve learnt nothing. It’s good that they’re in the anti-Trump coalition, but they shouldn’t lead it. They shouldn’t be who people look to for answers. The same frameworks and biases that made them wrong before will make them wrong again. These are people stuck in their core-preoccupations. Even in admitting error they circle back to them. Because they do not see MAGA as an agental force, they are unable to contemplate real solutions to it. Brooks, immediately after admitting he got it wrong, stresses things will sort themselves out; “what’s likely to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes.” Other than stressing democrats must abandon “insular faculty-lounge progressivism”, that was the plan. Recently, to the praise of many, Brooks did a bit better, calling for an ‘uprising’ against Trump. Even there he could not resist blaming universities for having become "shrouded in a stifling progressivism." He also dismissed the rallies led by Sanders and AOC as “partisan”, hence an “ineffective way to respond to Trump.” It’s fine to have him on the team, but he can’t be calling the plays.

Absolutely none of the anti-alarmists have ever reckoned with the gendered way they shift anger and blame from conservatism to liberalism. They have never asked why the people panicked by Trump made them so angry.

What does Buckle suggest anti-alarmists who are alarmed should do? Give careful thought to how they missed the boat. He sees few inclined to do so:

To hear the anti-alarmists tell it, you’d think those of us who called this from the start did so by chance. That we made a foolish bet on a bad poker hand and are now taking a victory lap when the right cards came up. Through gritted teeth, they’ll acknowledge the win, but no more. They won’t let go of the feeling that we got lucky, that they had been right to be skeptical.

That they might have something to learn from us alarmists has never really occurred to them. And this is the heart of my case for why we should stress that we ‘called it.’ As the situation gets worse, as our constitutional, economic, and social orders unravel, more and more less political people will start tuning in, looking for answers. Who should they listen to? At the moment, the bulk of space in both traditional and new media is taken up by people who got it badly wrong. If they are allowed to define the response, we will continue to be a step (several steps) behind.

I propose we promote a simple rule for these uncertain times: Those who saw the danger coming should be listened to, those who dismissed us should be dismissed. Which is to say that those of us who were right should actively highlight that fact as part of our argument for our perspective. People just starting to pay attention now will not have the bandwidth to parse a dozen frameworks, or work backwards through a decade of bitter tit-for-tat arguments. What they might ask—what would be very sensible and reasonable of them to ask—is who saw this coming?

As people start to ask this, as they already are, we alarmists should confidently raise our hands. We need to have the courage of our convictions here. We didn’t just get lucky. We were right for a reason.

One of the people who has been raising the alarm longer, lounder, and more clearly than nearly anyone I’ve seen is Anthea Butler. She has never been one to mince words. And she hasn’t been afraid to use the f-word—fascism—even when doing so risked ridicule and dismissal. She was calling it as she saw it.

As an African American woman and historian of American Christianity, she had eyes to see.

Now is a good time to find the people who had eyes to see, and listen to what they have to say. You can follow Anthea here on Substack.

What else can you do? Set aside your fears of not being taken seriously. Your fears of being called “alarmist.” Tune out those trying to position themselves above the fray, to those modeling a cynical detatchment, to those looking down smugly on those raising the alarm. Pay attention instead to those soberly, systematically, and courageously tracking what is happening. Pay special attention to where they say this leads. Because unless something happens to change the trajectory, history shows us exactly where this leads.