Why Liberals Can’t Afford to Check Out

Exhaustion is their weapon. Resilience is ours.

Since Election Day, I’ve felt an eerie quiet fall over America. 

Liberals are showing little of the defiant energy that marked their preparation for Trump’s presidency after his shock 2016 win. Americans are reporting exhaustion and coping by hopping onto planes or into unreality. Stories of Americans deciding to flee abroad have become common, an ironic turn for the greatest hub of migration in human history. Some billionaires are even telling themselves that maybe Trump won’t be so bad.

Checking out surely is easier. 

In the closing days of World War II, people on the ruined streets of eastern Europe hailed passing Soviet tanks as their deliverers. These people had just survived decades of war, dictatorship, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and the Soviets promised an end to all of it. As it became clear, however, that they had merely traded one totalitarian dictator for another, people coped not only by retreating inward, but even by giving themselves over to the regime. During the Soviet occupation of Poland, anti-communist writer and poet Czesław Miłosz likened this surrender to a patient taking a pill in his book The Captive Mind:

Despite [the intellectual’s] resistance and despair, the crisis approaches. It can come in the middle of the night, at his breakfast table, or on the street. It comes with a metallic click as of engaged gears. But there is no other way. That much is clear. There is no other salvation on the face of the earth. This revelation lasts a second; but from that second on, the patient begins to recover. For the first time in a long while, he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a "positive" article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it. In the last analysis, there was no reason for raising such a fuss. Everything is in order. He is past the "crisis." 

Miłosz called it the “pill of Murti-Bing,” after a character from a then-current science fiction novel. Since Trump won reelection, liberal public figures are taking the pill, too; they are “writing the positive article.” After Trump’s first victory, I remember taunting conservatives as they deluded themselves about Trump; after his second, I am bewildered to watch liberals do the same.

This is exactly the wrong time to check out or give in. 

Not only does it amount to “obeying in advance,” it emboldens would-be autocrats to proceed with their plans. As if aware of their guilty consciences, history’s dictators have always been profoundly afraid of the people they seek to oppress, especially before they solidify their grip on power. Even the most cunning of them won’t make a play for absolute power unless success is assured: it took Vladimir Putin twenty years fully to establish personal rule in Russia, and only then when fear of a global pandemic kept people unable to take to the streets.

Fortunately for us, our country is not the Russia of the 2010s: unlike the people of that country, we have a long experience of democracy and the institutions to match. Unfortunately for us, Donald Trump was seemingly designed in a lab to overwhelm our capacity for outrage and benumb us to his violations of our norms and laws. As Tom Nichols has written, Trump is counting on this. His firehose strategy of obnoxious cabinet nominations is a small taste of his planned war of attrition on the American psyche. 

Trump will not be invincible in his second term. The good guys scored a major victory in forcing accused sex-pest Matt Gaetz to withdraw before his nomination even came before the Senate for a vote. This has the double effect of taking this (hatefully coiffed) piece off the board, but it exposes the next most vulnerable picks – say, the increasingly tragicomic Pete Hegseth or the cartoonishly villainous Kash Patel – to media, public, and ultimately Senate scrutiny. It seems likely others will share Gaetz’s fate.

It is perfectly understandable for Democrats to want to take the time to process a loss: I took a week off myself after November 5 for the first time in my content-creating career. However, we cannot afford to reach for the pill of Murti-Bing. From the streets of Seoul to Damascus, people rose up this week to remind power whom it works for. The Syrian people however paid dearly for this freedom: 54 years of dynastic rule, 14 years of civil war, thousands of political prisoners, and half a million dead. 

While we are fortunate not to face Syria’s challenges, their example should inspire us: If they can take up arms to reclaim freedom, we can resist burying our heads in the sand and look Trump’s threat square in the face.¹

As Winston Churchill said, “Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”

1. Rather than giving in to outrage-mongers on cable news, we can start by setting aside time for reliable sources of news like the BBC or AP and turning to pro-democracy outlets like The Atlantic and The Bulwark for opinionated pieces.