This piece grows out of a reaction to a Washington Post article about the threat to democracy posed by Trump.  The piece does a good job about the loss of the Founding Father’s vision and the human progress it represents.  The problem is that’s only part of the story,  A Trump election would hurt the United States in so many ways that it’s hard to do justice to what’s at stake. 

This is an attempt to think about some of the rest.  An authoritarian Trump takeover would be terrible for people, terrible for business, and terrible for the world as a whole.

The Dobbs decision is just a foretaste of the way Trump’s Christian society would impinge on people’s daily lives. Trump’s last-term tax cut is a foretaste of the way he will undermine fundamental part’s of the way people are accustomed to living: in education, healthcare, social security, opportunity for social advancement generally. No regulation of business practices at all–not for health, not for working conditions, not for pollution.

His regime, like all other authoritarian regimes, would be fundamentally corrupt, because there would be no means to challenge it. Businesses would be subject to arbitrary shakedowns.  The announced tax cuts—however attractive they may seem—would be small consolation in the new reality.

Then there is governance itself. Arbitrary decision-making that cannot be challenged and mistakes that can never be acknowledge. Denying climate change in particular will be a disastrous and unchallengeable mistake. We would lose our technical edge by supporting existing business over innovation and denying government’s role in research, since the private sector does everything better.

As a nation we’ve had stability for so long that people far too easily assume basic continuity—with no notion of how fragile it really is. As a nation it’s easy to lose what you have: Brexit made Britain poorer overnight. Israel accepted Netanyahu as proto-dictator, and is caught an ill-conceived and unsuccessful war fought for his personal benefit.  Electing Trump would be on that order but worse.

For the world as a whole, we’re talking about a US unwilling to challenge Putin’s Russia or China on Taiwan.  A world in which we have essentially ceded both political and economic supremacy to China.  The Chinese and the Russians understand this perfectly and are backing Trump’s campaign, because they understand that whatever near-term issues there might be with his tariffs, Trump is their ticket to power.

In his first campaign Trump asked a question: “What have you got to lose?” That’s still in the air. We’ll throw out everything that has made us great—so what? why not? Because we’re talking about a disaster for the vast part of the US population and the world overall.