Still, this much is dead-on true: “Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work,” Kagan writes of the time since Trump’s rise. “At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences.” And not enough people took such action. They “behaved normally,” as Kagan put it, either on the assumption (early on) that Trump would fade, or in the naïve faith that he couldn’t really be that bad, or out of sheer cowardice, or out of literal physical fear for their families (as Mitt Romney recently articulated to McKay Coppins).
The incredible thing to me is how it’s all happening again. Here are six culprits who seem to think this is just another election.
Republican donors and corporate titans: Maybe that’s two categories, but I’d call them 1A and 1B. Most of these people can’t possibly want Trump to return to the White House. They know who he is; they know what he’ll do. And yet, they really want their tax cuts. They really hate Biden’s love of unions and how his administration is trying to bust up monopolies and oligopolies. Is that more important to them than democracy? I fear the answer is a pretty unequivocal yes.