Trump ‘Alarmists’ Were Right. We Should Say So.

Throughout the Trump era I’ve been firmly in the camp unaffectionately dismissed as ‘alarmist’ by most commentators. Put simply: It is that bad. Liberal democracy is in danger. Fascism is a reasonable term for what we’re fighting. 

For veteran ‘alarmists’ this is a strange moment. People are at a loss. It seems wrong, given all that is at stake, to say “I told you so”. I’ve felt that discomfort. For the longest time I avoided saying that. It felt . . . petty, childish, gauche, it just wasn’t the done thing. One of the big political awakenings I’ve had over the last year, and particularly since Trump’s 2024 victory, is realizing that it's OK to say “called it”. More than OK. Even if it feels awkward, it's actually important, perhaps necessary, that we do. 

The wilderness

My view has not been, to put it mildly, the mainstream position. You’re allowed, with a certain amount of resentment, to say it today. But that wasn’t always the case. I recall first voicing it as the antecedents of Trump, the tea party and growing white supremacy, started to arise. Obama’s “the fever will break” seemed hopelessly naive to me. The press treated them either as legitimate libertarians or an eccentric curiosity, not a threat. To the activist left, what would become the Bernie movement, they were a joke—the punchline to a Jon Stewart monologue. Nothing more. When Trump first rode the elevator down to announce his candidacy, it was entertainment, not omen. 

If you saw in any of this a threat to liberal democracy writ large, much less one that could actually succeed, you were looked at with the kind of caution usually reserved for the guy screaming about aliens on the subway. Trump’s election in 2016 was a shock to people who insisted it could never happen. But those most complacent before quickly found their way back to complacency after. For a certain type—specifically, the type who has a column in legacy media despite never having written an interesting or original paragraph in their lives—smug condescension became the order of the day: yes, Trump is bad, but dear me those liberals are being hysterical. As late as the last election they were writing pieces with titles like “A Trump Dictatorship Won’t Happen” or “No, Trump won't destroy our democracy.” Even after the election, as the scale of the incoming lawlessness became clear, we were dismissed: “Trump Is Testing Our Constitutional System. It’s Working Fine” respected legal commentator Noah Feldman told us—the legal rationale for his actions was very flimsy. Courts would strike it all down. And certainly the administration would not ignore a court order. 

One thing I’ve always wondered about the anti-alarmists during this decade was, to put it bluntly, weren’t they worried about looking stupid? The path we were on seemed clear enough to me, but I didn’t know the future. I always stressed that my predictions were one of any number of possible outcomes. They didn’t. What I was saying was dismissed, not just as unlikely, but impossible. Did they not want to hedge their bets even a bit? And it’s not as if the liberal democratic collapse happened all at once. The last decade has been a steady drum beat of them being wrong, again and again. Yet it never shook them.

End of the line

I was giving them, and our wider political culture, far too much credit. And in my angrier moments I knew this. In a twitter rant following the Dobbs decision I predicted “the people, of all stripes, who got it so badly & utterly predictably wrong . . . will just continue. They'll never admit they were wrong.” 

And so it has come to pass. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and so on, cover our constitutional collapse with a “who could possibly have foreseen this” sort of tone. Even now, the alarmists are still the problem. At times, the mental gymnastics on display are darkly comedic. Thomas Chatterton Williams, unable to admit it may have been in error to focus so much on woke college kids during a fascist takeover, offered this amazing rationalization: “The administration is not anti-woke; it is woke with right-wing characteristics.”

Where there have been apologies, they’ve been very limited, and of a specific kind. David Brooks, in his big mea-culpa piece “I should have seen this coming”, does admit he underestimated how much conservatism had simply become an anti-liberal reaction, but then quickly pivots. He “sympathized with the populist critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies” stressing again and again that he shares their frustrations. Liberals, particularly the social justice types, are very annoying. He spends multiple paragraphs on this in a piece that should be him admitting we got it right. 

Jon Stewart recently had a similar backtrack. At the start of the administration he had nothing but contempt for people using the label ‘fascist’. We lacked “specificity and nuance”. Indeed we were partly to blame—all we had done “over the past ten years was cry wolf.” To those who doubted more nuanced criticisms of Trump would have been an effective strategy for stopping him, Stewart’s message was simple: “Shut up!” Subsequent events have been enough for him to say:

I gotta tell you, I did not think [Trump] would get this authoritarian this fast. I really didn’t. I’m sorry. Who could’ve known? Maybe if somebody out there had yelled at me on BlueSky about this, I would have known (audience laughs). But no one did (more laughs). Except every day. In all caps.

It’s leftist canon that The West Wing rotted a generation of liberal brains. But it is actually Jon—he's who they all (politically) grew up listening to (many older millennial lefties too actually, though they might not admit it now), and what was his ultimate message? His Rally to Restore Sanity is up there with “the fever will break” as one of the great milestones of not Getting It on the road to American authoritarianism. Behind the edgier vibe, his politics are of civility, of ‘both sides’ calming down. In the current moment, it's all frankly very quietist. 

And it isn’t only the reactionary centrists who’ve reached this point of absurdity. There’s a subsection of the left who’ve long held that liberals are overreacting. The ‘low church’ version of this is the social media posters mocking ‘resist libs’, ‘girlbosses’, ‘normies’, and so on. “Orange man bad” became a meme for them to caricature what they saw as an undue focus on Trump. The more committed amongst this crowd are as likely to levitate as they are to admit error, but I have seen some softening from those on the periphery—maybe, just maybe, the wine moms had it right; the orange man was actually bad. 

The ‘high church’ version would be someone like Corey Robin, a respected political scientist, who insisted at length, and often with real derision, that anyone calling MAGA fascist was being ridiculous. John Ganz, one of his primary opponents, recalled “we in the 'It’s fascism' camp were made out to be hysterics, neurotic children, useful idiots for devious Cold War liberals and neocons”. When directly challenged about this on a recent podcast appearance, Robin offered this:

I was afraid you were going to ask me about this. I was skeptical in the first Trump administration that they had the kind of power and the kind of authority that many of their critics feared that they had . . . I was skeptical coming into this second administration that they would be able to wield the kind of power that people feared they would wield. I have since turned out to be wrong. They have set off multiple conflagrations and I have been shaken out of my skepticism.

Well, at least they said they got it wrong, right? 

These semi-mea-culpas are the most we’ve gotten out of the anti-alarmists. Some have been very impressed with them admitting error and I’m . . . not. Robin seemed annoyed to be asked. Given this was, by far and away, the most consequential political challenge of our lives and he had spent a decade confidently and condescendingly on the wrong side of it, one question, at the end of an interview, does not seem unreasonable. 

None could hide their contempt for the alarmists, even in their big ‘my bad’ moments. Robin snipping that critics were wrong (even if they turned out to be right), Stewart was unable to resist a dig at liberals, and Brooks devoting a big chunk of his essay to the usual anti-social-justice grievances. I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t strike me as a very genuine sort of apology. 

As much as anything, all of them seemed unable to say what they got wrong. They had been right, but then events went the other way. The point they made at the time still stands. People weren't being sent to foreign gulags before, so those who warned about it were wrong to do so. And they were so annoying. It was, in fact, fairly predictable that they’d get it wrong. We (annoying, alarmist, Bluesky using, Trump derangement syndrome sufferers) could have (and did!) tell them at the time why they couldn’t see the obvious. 

To start with, a big part of this isn’t more complicated than old dogs not learning new tricks. If you’ve spent decades writing the same ‘social justice gone too far’ column, it can be difficult to switch gears to something else. That thing that looks a heck of a lot like fascism, that must be a reaction to social justice going too far. Even for those with more valid projects—a critique of neoliberal capitalism for instance—new events were subsumed into existing concerns. 

There was a persistent refusal to see Trump and MAGA as real, as an active force in their own right. The flip side of this was a gendered shifting of blame and anger from (male-coded) conservatism to (female-coded) liberalism and liberals. We must have done something to provoke them. We should be more careful not to set them off. We, surely, are being hysterical in our reaction. This varies a bit by anti-alarmist; Brooks is a classic ‘what did you say to make him hit you?’ writer, his immediate reaction to Trump’s win in 2024 was a long missive about ‘identity politics.’ Robin is more complicated; his (pre-Trump) book on conservatism includes agental and non-agental accounts (it's both about hierarchy and a reaction to progressive movements). Some have found it useful, others have argued Robin doesn’t think ordinary MAGA supporters “believe what they say and have agency” and that he reduces them to “being used or manipulated in the service of elites.” What I would point out is, regardless of the exact intellectual underpinnings, the emotional response is actually quite similar: In his more popular writing and commentary Robin is clearly very angry at mainline liberalism (see below) in a way he isn’t with the right.

Finally, there’s an irreducibly temperamental component. Men—and they usually are men—who just can’t stand to be corrected. It's not (or not merely) that their paradigm was wrong, there was a flat refusal to ever consider how the world looks from within another. A closing the door, in advance, to the thought that another perspective might have seen something that theirs had missed. A noticeable discomfort, an annoyance with, the female coded-emotions (panic, fear) of those who did take Trump seriously. 

This is why, even if it feels petty and unpleasant, it is important to stress that these commentators got it badly wrong. It's not about being punitive: they’ve learnt nothing. It’s good that they’re in the anti-Trump coalition, but they shouldn’t lead it. They shouldn’t be who people look to for answers. The same frameworks and biases that made them wrong before will make them wrong again. These are people stuck in their core preoccupations. Even in admitting error they circle back to them. Because they do not see MAGA as an agental force, they are unable to contemplate real solutions to it. Brooks, immediately after admitting he got it wrong, stresses things will sort themselves out; “what’s likely to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes.” Other than stressing Democrats must abandon “insular faculty-lounge progressivism”, that was the plan. Recently, to the praise of many, Brooks did a bit better, calling for an ‘uprising’ against Trump. Even there he could not resist blaming universities for having become "shrouded in a stifling progressivism." He also dismissed the rallies led by Sanders and AOC as “partisan”, hence an “ineffective way to respond to Trump.” It’s fine to have him on the team, but he can’t be calling the plays. 

Absolutely none of the anti-alarmists have ever reckoned with the gendered way they shift anger and blame from conservatism to liberalism. They have never asked why the people panicked by Trump made them so angry. In one of his first posts after the 2016 election, Robin focused his fury not on the incoming Republican administration, but on liberals and lefties whose politics were “grounded on fear”, who saw in Trump the potential for institutional collapse, in his election some “deep, dark truth” about our society:

I cannot tell you how much I loathe this kind of politics. At a very deep and personal level. I loathe its operatic-ness, the way it performs concern and care when all it really is about is narcissism and a desperate desire for a fix. I loathe its false sense of depth and profundity.

There’s a lot to say about this. At a minimum, someone who still feels this way is not who we want defining our response now. 

This isn’t simply a matter of being unfair—people have made terrible mistakes because they didn’t take liberal warnings about Trump seriously. In 2016, reactionary centrists in the press devoted as much coverage to HIllary’s emails as they did to all Trump scandals combined. About a quarter of Bernie Sanders primary voters—or 3.5 million Americans—abstained or voted 3rd party. Both dismissed warnings in overtly gendered terms. Both were outcome-determinative for Trump’s victory. The 2024 election showed neither group has learnt anything from this. Even where anti-alarmists don’t explicitly condone press assassination or abstention, they created an environment where people felt justified in them. 

Why (some) liberals got this right 

To hear the anti-alarmists tell it, you’d think those of us who called this from the start did so by chance. That we made a foolish bet on a bad poker hand and are now taking a victory lap when the right cards came up. Through gritted teeth, they’ll acknowledge the win, but no more. They won’t let go of the feeling that we got lucky, that they had been right to be skeptical.

That they might have something to learn from us alarmists has never really occurred to them. And this is the heart of my case for why we should stress that we ‘called it.’ As the situation gets worse, as our constitutional, economic, and social orders unravel, more and more less political people will start tuning in, looking for answers. Who should they listen to? At the moment, the bulk of space in both traditional and new media is taken up by people who got it badly wrong. If they are allowed to define the response, we will continue to be a step (several steps) behind. 

I propose we promote a simple rule for these uncertain times: Those who saw the danger coming should be listened to, those who dismissed us should be dismissed. Which is to say that those of us who were right should actively highlight that fact as part of our argument for our perspective. People just starting to pay attention now will not have the bandwidth to parse a dozen frameworks, or work backwards through a decade of bitter tit-for-tat arguments. What they might ask—what would be very sensible and reasonable of them to ask—is who saw this coming? 

As people start to ask this, as they already are, we alarmists should confidently raise our hands. We need to have the courage of our convictions here. We didn’t just get lucky. We were right for a reason. 

‘What are the right frameworks to process a moment of political and moral decline?’ Is a huge question, I’m not going to do it justice here. But I’ll note a few things that have helped me. For one, I was taught political theory by Michael Freeden, who always stressed an open ended (and decidedly liberal) view of political change. For him, different political visions of the world (ideologies) competed over the meaning of ‘big picture’ values like freedom, justice, the nation, and so on. These values are essentially contestable; different people will have different ideas (conceptions) of what they mean. Those conceptions, and the contours of disagreement will change over time, but never ultimately resolve. 

What follows from this is a view of politics as ongoing and always changing. There is not, contra conservatism, an underlying order to things. Nor will there be, contra some socialists, a revolutionary end point after which substantive disagreement will cease. Nor, contra some liberals, is current liberal democracy itself a (less exciting) end point. Politics goes on. There will be periods of (semi) consensus, in which enough people’s core values overlap for a rough stability. And, as things invariably change, periods in which those consensuses come apart. I interviewed Freeden in the early days of Trump, and mentioned how useful I had found this framework. To understand, going in, that "these sorts of ideologies [fascism] aren't dead, they're dormant, & they can reawaken.” He smiled grimly “with a snap of the fingers.”

I think some people get this intuitively and some don’t. Liberalism is often derided as a whiggish faith that things will always get better, but in the Trump era I’ve found it’s ordinary liberals who’ve proved most alive to the possibility of reversion. The core democratic primary electorate—the much derided ‘wine moms', or the largely ignored older Black voters—were much more likely to ‘Get It’ than supposedly sophisticated commentators. Liberalism is about time and change. Progress and its enemies. 

Because of this, we’ve developed a technique that has given us radically powerful predictive abilities. I call it ‘listening to what the right is telling us they plan to do.’ Because we understand change is possible, and because we see the right as agental, not just a reaction, we’re able to take their measure much better. Early in the Biden administration, over a year before the Dobbs decision, I confidently predicted it "The fate of abortion rights in America has been decided . . . like with so much of American politics; the solution was we shouldn't have lost in 2016. That's it." All I was doing was taking the conservative legal movement at their word. This seems obvious now, but it was exceedingly uncommon at the time. The conventional wisdom, from political and legal experts alike, was that they would continue to tamper around the edges of abortion access, but not overturn such a long-standing precedent. 

Finally, there is also an irreducibly temperamental component on our side too. The alarmist vs anti-alarmist debate isn’t a reason vs emotion thing. That’s how they see it, but in fact it's two, very different emotional reactions to a terrifying time. Are we frightened and alarmed by the danger, or are we exasperated by, angry at, the people reacting to it? We’re both working backwards from our gut reactions. 

Liberalism isn’t just theory and philosophy, it’s a way of being in the world. Essentially the ‘trick’ to liberalism is being able to understand complexity and values pluralism, without collapsing into relativism. We approach the world with the view that there are many different creeds, some of which may have insights we have missed. We also understand that people want very different things (which the left can miss). But we don’t think all these paths are of equal value, or that the truth must be somewhere in the middle (as reactionary centrists usually assume). We’re ready to say that people, including people in power, may just be wrong. For some, this is self-conscious, for others it's an implicit orientation. It’s what we’re referring to when we use ‘liberal’ as a synonym for ‘broad minded.’

It’s what’s made liberalism so adaptive, so successful historically. It’s also what’s allowed us ‘alarmists’ to have the right gut reaction to Trump and rationalise it correctly. This is my final point in favour of us saying ‘called it.’ The anti-alarmists are not temperamentally fit to lead, in the same way that not everyone is temperamentally fit to be a general, or to teach a class of students, or to be a bereavement counselor. In all those professions it's essential to have someone of a certain disposition. Talking people through the most terrifying political moment of our lifetimes is some bizarre combination of all three and they have shown they’re not up to it. 

Finding our voice 

None of this is to say that mainline liberalism is without blame. We’ve allowed ourselves, often without a fight, to be pushed out of the conversation. Traditional press media is now the sole preserve of reactionary centrists, new media dominated by the anti-establishment left. People who blame you for the current moment are not going to make space for you. We have not spoken up for ourselves enough, and that has to change. 

People are looking for answers, and if we alarmists don’t assert ourselves they will get them from people who have been arrogantly wrong the entire time. Given that we are starting from behind in terms of reach, the strongest argument we can make, the one that will have the most cut through, is that we saw this coming. I increasingly wear the derisive label ‘alarmist’ with pride. 

In some ways the whole era has reaffirmed my faltering faith in liberalism. I’ve been right, not because I’m smarter than the anti-alarmists (sometimes I was, sometimes I wasn’t) but because I was a liberal. Mainline liberals have seen, have felt, most clearly what is at stake. And that is not an accident. Passionate, earnest, female-coded liberalism has been much more worldly, much more grounded in reality, than men who imagine themselves to be cynical, detached observers.

The reigning wisdom for some time has been that for liberalism to survive, it must repent and be silent. We must acknowledge how we brought this on ourselves. We must put our frameworks, our fear, our frustration to one side. However correct, however validated they’ve been.  We must deny our most foundational way of existing in the world, so we don’t annoy them, so we don’t ‘set them off.’ This is nonsense. And if liberalism is to blame, it’s that we’ve indulged that nonsense for far too long.

The stark reality is that if even a few more people hadn’t dismissed us alarmists out of hand we wouldn’t be here. This was all predictable. It was all preventable. 

For liberalism to survive now, we need to listen to liberals. 

Featured image is DC Women's March 2017, by Liz Lemon