Trump Beats Biden on Trust in Democracy?!

Right now, more than ever, it is time to shout as loudly as we can that we refuse the forces of repression.

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

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(Photo by Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images)

It’s been a surreal decade. But even after an insurrection, the decision to police women’s bodies (even further than they already have been) and a presidency that broke all previous norms by vilifying the press, contorting the truth and persistently using nationalistic, inflammatory rhetoric, a new poll out this week is very, very hard to fathom.

The poll, conducted by The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, found that in six swing states Biden won in 2020, voters trust Donald Trump over the president to handle threats against democracy.

Even in our topsy-turvy world, this is not only a head-scratcher, it’s a bug-eyed, batshit bananas finding. How did we get here?

Rather than get into all the ways that this is uniquely absurd, here are some thoughts from one our history’s greatest thinkers about democracy.

Hannah Arendt wrote in 1970:

Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.

As the electoral college decides who becomes president every four years, you’d be forgiven for throwing glass bottles at your TV screen. Never meant to represent the U.S. population as it exists today, we are eternally disenfranchised in the most fundamental sense: Our votes as individuals rarely matter. Then there is the disconnect from governance of the American republic, as Arendt described.

The very fact that Trump, aka Mr. Buddy-Buddy of the murderous Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, is somehow more trusted to safeguard our most precious of tenets, the underlying reason for our experimental democracy, the freedom we enjoy here, is…unbelievable.

Yet it must be believed, lest we fall into inaction and quiet. Now is not the time for either.

As Arendt wrote in the preface to her book the The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1950:

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.

Her words have never been more prudent in the United States.

But the last time I checked, we still have our voices and freedom of the press. And right now, more than ever, it is time to utilize both. To shout as loudly as we can that we refuse the forces of repression that Donald Trump has and will continue to bring and to pile onto our country.

Let’s use our hard-won freedoms — while we still have them.

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