It’s now two weeks past the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and I am sad to see that the effort to minimize the insurrection has been amazingly successful. I perhaps shouldn’t say “amazingly,” because millions of Americans never wanted to hear about it in the first place, even as the Department of Justice has hauled 11 people into court on charges of seditious conspiracy. Trump voters, elected cowards in the GOP, and conservative-media enablers continue to insist that it was just a tourist visit that got a little rowdy, and they want to know why the rest of us can’t just move on.

This effort has succeeded, in part, because so many Americans are unable or unwilling, as my Atlantic colleague George Packer wrote, to imagine what it would actually look like to have our democracy implode in the wake of a failed election. I want to suggest what things would look like some time aftersuch an event.

It would not, I think, be what you might expect. It certainly won’t look like what the more inane cosplayers on the left think it would look like. That is, it wouldn’t be a sudden, dramatic fascist takeover, with Trump or Ron DeSantis or Ted Cruz striding to the podium on Pennsylvania Avenue with a red-and-black armband and shouting the beginning of a new millennium. None of these guys are remotely that organized, and besides, it’s not what they really want.

Remember always that the post-Trump Republicans are now, at heart, mostly a kind of venal junta, a claque of avaricious mooks who want to stay in office but who don’t really know why, other than that they like money, power, and being on television. (Also, I firmly agree with George Will that they don’t want to live among their own constituents, who mostly scare the bejeebers out of them.) Most of them have no actual program beyond political survival. 

And that’s why the collapse of democracy in the United States will look more like an unspooling or an unwinding rather than some dramatic installation of Gilead or Oceania. My guess—and again, this is just my stab at speculative dystopianism—is that it will be a federal breakdown that returns us to the late 1950s in all of the worst ways. 

Imagine that the GOP wins the House and Senate in 2022, and in 2024, even if Biden narrowly squeaks past Trump or some other Republican nominee, the GOP Congress and a group of secretaries of state hijack the election for the Republicans, and the United States returns to unified Republican government. Speaker Kevin McCarthy hands committees to the Loon Caucus and goes and hides in his office. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gets back to the great national project of lining the pockets of his donors while avoiding having to live in Kentucky.

What’s that mean for the rest of us?

For many of you, on a day-to-day basis, it will mean nothing for quite a while, especially if you’re white, coastal, and middle-class. Two limited cheers for federalism, I guess; as long as you pay your taxes and live far from Republican state governments, the national government will mostly leave you alone. If you live in a traditionally blue state, you’ll still control your local laws. Schools will still teach the Lincoln-Douglas debates (because in those states, they know the difference between Stephen Douglas and Frederick Douglass). 

In those blue states, there will still be restrictions on guns, there will still be legal abortions, there will still be high taxes for education and social programs and all that other liberal stuff that the culture-war conservatives hate. The federal government will not be able to compel odious policies in Democratic-controlled states so much as it will just remove barriers to instituting them in the Republican-controlled states.

This is where we really will have “free” and “unfree” Americas, side by side. To drive from Massachusetts to Alabama—especially for women and people of color—will not be crossing the Mason-Dixon line so much as it will be like falling through the Time Tunnel and emerging in a pre-1964 America where civil rights and equal treatment before the government are a matter of the state’s forbearance. If an American citizen’s constitutional rights are violated, there will be no Justice Department that will intervene, no Supreme Court that will overrule. (And arresting seditionists? Good luck with that. I expect that if Trump is reelected, he will pardon everyone involved with January 6.) The highest authority in these areas will be the governor with maybe the occasional peep out of a state court here and there.

Some conservatives will read that last paragraph and think: “Great! What’s wrong with any of that? Local control! Small government!”

But conservatives who still think of themselves as Federalists—this newsletter’s name is a shout-out to John Adams, after all—know that whatever this mess would be, it would not be “the United States.” This would be an America where the Constitution is yet more unevenly enforced than it is today, a corporatist authoritarian dream in which certain groups and interests, from churches to fast-food joints, would be given preferential treatment as long as they made deals to support the state authorities. 

The “United States” would become a patchwork of small democracies agreeing to share a currency and certain other conveniences with a small cluster of half-assed, repressive oligarchies who agree only to help the federal government keep air traffic sorted out and the Wi-Fi strong. The nosy national courts and other federal institutions—at least until they are fully infested with right-wing cronies—will be told to go mind their own business about things like “free assembly,” “cruel and unusual punishment,” or that other whatchamacallit, “the rule of law.”

There wouldn’t be civil war, because there’d be no one to fight. (If you can end democracy in Idaho or Arkansas, how much energy will you expend to fight it in New Mexico or Vermont?) This doesn’t mean there will be no political violence in America. You might see more Oklahoma City–style attacks against federal installations, but I am sorry to say that I think that’s inevitable anyway.

More to the point, you’d have neighborhoods seceding from each other within states. Prosperous—and heavily minority—cities would push back against their own state governments. At least as a matter of politics and law, life in rural Georgia would not be like life in Atlanta; life in West Texas would not be like life in Austin. This means that Austin and Atlanta would spend a lot of time in court, and likely lose on any number of issues. 

Meanwhile, those Americans who can afford it, right or left, will retreat (as many of them are already doing) to gated communities and private schools, leaving smaller municipalities to finally focus on those really important quality of life issues, such as preventing local educators from teaching critical race theory—whatever they think that is—to kindergartners.

Some of you might think I’m too sanguine here, and that a GOP sweep in 2024 will mean a national wave of brownshirts cruising the streets of Brookline and Santa Monica, smashing the windows at Whole Foods and burning up school libraries full of scary books. I am not sanguine. I am merely cynical about the degree to which winning elections will satisfy most of the people who have no idea what they’re protesting in the first place.

Now, I grant you that if the GOP were to rely on people like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule, we could face some scary constitutional engineering that could turn us into a theocracy. But most Republicans aren’t nearly as committed as Vermeule. Also, Vermeule wants to outlaw pornography and institute Sabbath laws, and let’s face it: If you think Americans, urban or rural, are going to sign on for some sort of porn-free ethno-state with mandated church services, you haven’t met many Americans.

No, what Republican elected officials really want, more than anything, is to own the libs and stay in power, with the former as the necessary condition for obtaining the latter. If that means letting some states become resegregated tent revivals where Black people have to jump through hoops to vote and poor women can’t have abortions (while the white bourgeoisie makes expensive and hasty arrangements in case someone they care about gets, uh, in a family way), well, so be it. You have to break some eggs if opportunists like Josh Hawley and Elise Stefanik are going to enjoy their omelets on Capitol Hill.

The bright spot, if there is one, is that Republican control even in red states is probably unsustainable, and will eventually collapse under its own hypocritical weight. Likewise, demographics—not only of race, but of age—will dilute a lot of this craziness. But in the meantime, millions of people will suffer. And demography takes a long time; the damage in the meantime to the Constitution and its norms could be take generations to repair - if such repair is even possible.

We should also realize (as we so often forget) that we do not live alone in the world. If democracy in the United States becomes a luxury only practiced in Hartford and not the heartland, authoritarian states—the natural enemies of free nations in the world—will take notice. They will test our commitment, and use our weaknesses against us, as they have been doing for some years now already. We could find ourselves in a world ruled by others because we lost the nerve abroad and the credibility at home to lead free nations in maintaining a global system of peaceful cooperation.

In sum, after enough years of this, the “United States” would be no more. The national experiment with representative democracy would finally fail, and we would all end up living in a miserable national union of urban democracies and backward exurban dukedoms run by shameless (and highly educated) political entrepreneurs.

So what is there to do? 

I’ll say it again to Democrats and others in the democracy coalition: Pay attention to state and local races. Show up in the off-year elections, especially the coming one in 2022. Vote out the Republicans down to dogcatcher, and thus eliminate the future farm teams of the repressive right. It does you no good to have the Democrats keep winning the White House if the entire infrastructure of democracy around it goes under without much of a fight. If you can find centrists to run against GOPers in primaries, that’s great, but don’t hold your breath. The only way to change the GOP is to destroy it and rebuild it as a new party. And the only way to do that is to deprive it of electoral oxygen at every possible level. 

The erosion of American democracy has been gradual and uneven. But the rapid acceleration toward a final collapse could begin the morning after an election in November 2022.

— Tom Nichols