Where's The Hope? -- Digby, Garret Graff

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/10/27/wheres-the-hope/

Garret Graff writes one of the darkest newsletters about our current situation and he’s pretty much always on target. But he offered some more optimistic thoughts in this one and I think they’re well worth sharing:

I’ve written over the last three months about how the United States has tipped into authoritarianism — we’ve crossed an invisible line never crossed before in our history — but that slide is not necessarily permanent nor irreversible, and I hope that this weekend’s “No Kings” protests will someday be looked back upon as a turning point when the public anger’s and resistance to fascism began to boil.

Last month, at the Author’s Guild literary festival in the Berkshires, an audience member asked me a question I at first stumbled to answer: What are my reasons for hope in this time? I will admit that they are few and far between right now. However, there are three significant reservoirs of hope for me:

The first is that there are more of us than them, and that’s true and it’s important. He notes:

Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the other corrupt cronies and would-be fascists of this administration are in many ways racing the clock. As Paul Krugman wrote last month, “Trump is nakedly following the playbook of autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. As his poll numbers fall, he is rushing to lock in permanent power by punishing his opponents and intimidating everyone else into submission… Yet Trump has a significant problem that neither Putin nor Orban faced. When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocracies, they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept.”

According to all of the experts on modern authoritarianism, this is key. On the other hand Trump’s doing some old school stuff like putting brownshirts in the streets and calling in the military. The minute any violent resistance happens, as is very possible, I think we’re going to see a reversion to the old style of violent state repression. Still, they are inept and Trump is not a focused ideologue. He’s just dancing as fast as he can swinging wildly from wanting to be the biggest asshole on the planet to the prince of peace. I just don’t know if he’s got what it takes to pull off Stephen Miller’s fascist agenda.

The second thing that gives Graff hope is America’s history which has had some extremely dark periods and yet the country survived and went on to improve and show progress. It’s all true. But as Keynes famously quipped, sure it will work out in the long run “but in the long run we’ll all be dead.”

The third thought is the one I’m most interested in and I think it’s what gives me the most hope:

Trump won’t last forever, which means “Trumpism” will fall.

Trump may want to be a dictator and emulate Franco and Orban, and — who knows — maybe the ridiculous White House ballroom he’s building is an indication he doesn’t plan to leave peacefully on January 20, 2029, but time tells us that he’s never going to be Franco, the dictator who reigned in Spain from 1939 until 1975. The reality is Donald Trump is 79 and not well — and probably less well than the media is willing to dig into — and his reign as president and America’s would-be king will be measured in years, not decades.

Whenever and however Donald Trump exits the stage, there just isn’t anyone who will step into the MAGA movement’s shoes — there are plenty of people who will try, from JD Vance to Marco Rubio to Ron DeSantis to Don Jr. to Ted Cruz, but the thing we’ve seen over and over across the last decade is that no one is Donald Trump. Vice President JD Vance, an incredibly awkward and unfunny Trump-lite who is widely despised by both sides, is most certainly not Donald Trump.

Trump has built in MAGA not a movement but a personality cult — a fragile coalition of anti-government extremists, white nationalists, conspiracists, disaffected people hurt by globalization, and a lot of low-information voters whose brains have been fried by right-wing media and social media algorithms.

If civil society and good people, like the millions who will march this weekend at the No Kings protests, can stay strong, vocal, and active in the months and years ahead, there’s plenty of reason to believe that the United States — or at least parts of the United States — can begin to repair the damage done by Trumpism and continue to advance our national, collective 250-year-old dream of a multiracial democracy more just, more equal, and more free.

The damage that Trump has already done to our government, our institutions, and our civic national fabric will be real and lasting. We will never be the country we were before Donald Trump corruptly won the election in 2016 with Russia’s help, but someday — across years and decades, and maybe not even during my lifetime but perhaps during my childrens’ lifetime — we can strive to work together to ensure that the country we hand off to future generations is better than the one we’ve inherited.

. . .

[rampartd]

1. his successor will be as alexander's : the strongest

the life and death struggle to succeed trump has already begun. the winner will probably not be one of his effete sons or spineless lackeys, but maga's next "dear leader" will have the infrastructure of data, privatized oppression, and legal precedent to continue trump's barbarism.