The Plot to Manage Democracy

by Jacob Siegel |Oct 15, 2024

What T. S. Eliot said of humankind, that it “cannot bear very much reality,” must be doubly true for Americans. It’s a feature of being a providential nation, protected by two oceans and mostly spared the harsher existence that habituates other societies to corruption and tyranny, while left free to cultivate its uniquely optimistic political culture. The drawback of this good fortune is that, at decisive moments, a hopeful people can be blind to self-inflicted disasters. The reality facing America now is that of widespread, coordinated efforts to control our politics, carried out by a self-interested elite grown openly disdainful of the nation’s traditions.

If not for a last-minute postponement, a Manhattan judge would have sentenced Donald Trump for the former president’s conviction last May by the time this article appeared, in what could fairly be characterized by an objective observer as a politically motivated trial, intended to hamper his 2024 presidential campaign. The charges pushed the “outer boundaries of the law and due process,” according to a former federal and state prosecutor, now working as an analyst for CNN—not exactly a bastion of conservative bias. The judge in the trial, Juan Merchan, previously violated New York State ethics rules by donating to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and to a group called Stop Republicans. The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, a professional political operative, has done campaign work for both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. After repeatedly refusing to recuse himself over such conflicts of interest, Merchan barred Trump’s lawyers from arguing that the trial might be politically motivated. He had originally scheduled the sentencing for September 18, roughly six weeks before the election. (In late August, Trump was also reindicted on election-subversion charges by special counsel Jack Smith, in what Politico described as “an attempt to recalibrate the case after the Supreme Court’s immunity decision” in July.)

All of which is to say that current efforts to manipulate the American electoral system are not subtle or restricted to working around the law. The Democratic Party’s strategy to win the presidency in 2024 hinges in large part on preventing a normal election from taking place. Procedural and voting irregularities that would have triggered alarm across the political spectrum until recently have become an accepted feature of the landscape. The party has pursued this strategy since 2016, when the Obama White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign worked with U.S. intelligence agencies to frame Trump falsely as a Russian agent. The strategy aims to preserve the ceremony of voting, while constraining its influence, in the same way ideologically motivated bans on “hate” and “misinformation” uphold the appearance of a right to speak, while dictating what can or can’t be said.

Since 2020, lawfare has become progressives’ main weapon against Donald Trump. (Mark Peterson/UPI/Alamy Live News)

The assumption that voting in national elections is a neutral process that belongs to neither major party but allows American citizens to choose freely between them is, at this point, inaccurate. Americans casting their votes in November will do so within the guardrails of an increasingly managed democracy, designed to grant party elites control over its outcomes. This does not mean that the election’s results are already determined, or that individuals should not vote. No one knows what will happen; even a “managed” election could still come down to narrow margins in a few states. Much space remains between what the elites want and what they can accomplish.

A decade ago, this might all have been dismissed as the ranting of some far-left or LaRouchean political conspiracy. Today, it describes public events extensively covered by the mainstream press. Shortly after the 2020 election, a breathless article in Time celebrated the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The article detailed “a vast, cross-partisan campaign” that “got states to change voting systems and laws” and “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation.” More recently, we saw the orderly replacement of President Joe Biden—no longer the “sharp as a tack” geopolitical mastermind depicted in yesterday’s propaganda—with a new Democratic nominee, whose glaring political liabilities were once captioned in a headline by the liberal Atlantic, “The Kamala Harris Problem,” but is now heralded as a political genius. More recently still, in late August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that his company faced regular pressure from senior Biden administration officials to censor Covid-19-related Facebook content, even satire, that the government didn’t like. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Zuckerberg also admitted that Facebook had throttled discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, after the FBI warned the firm—in a deliberate falsehood—that it was Russian disinformation. (The point person for the administration’s pressure campaign against Meta and other social media platforms was Rob Flaherty, the former Biden White House director of digital strategy, who is now the deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris.)

What has changed in America that brought us here? For most of the past century, the country was governed through a system of distributed rule wielded by local parties, individual voters, civic institutions, independent power centers such as the press, and competing regional elites. Over the past two decades, this system has been replaced by one that is highly centralized and dominated by a party of concentrated wealth, state-corporate collusion, and progressive monoculture. Recognizing the long-term trends in digital technology and economic globalization, President Barack Obama and other progressive leaders built a new kind of vertically integrated, national political organization. The key was unifying America’s professional-managerial class and federal bureaucracies with its progressive billionaires, especially those in Silicon Valley, in the mutually supportive structure of a party-state.

In this new approach, the state initiates “whole of society” campaigns, a term popularized in Obama’s second term. That is, the state enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs, and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree regulative power made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think provide your communal safety net, and perhaps your neighbors. Any group or individual violating those policies faces censorship, social cancellation, and even denial of access to banking, credit, and other essential services.

The might of this system was publicly unveiled in the 2016 whole-of-society attack on Trump. Every aligned institution in America, from the New York Times to the CIA, lent its credibility to unfounded claims that Trump was an agent of Vladimir Putin, or a fascist leading an American Nazi movement, or some other heinously disqualifying label. The details were less important than justifying a state of emergency, in which Trump and his supporters could be treated as national security threats and denied constitutional protections. Despite ultimately failing to prevent Trump’s election, the 2016 exercise validated the potential and organizational structure of the whole-of-society playbook. It fueled the funding and growth of a vast network of nonprofits dedicated to “protecting democracy” and “election integrity.”

These organizations now occupy a quasi-permanent space in the U.S. political and electoral infrastructure. Using this network, the party-state seeks to control elections. A comprehensive review of all the groups, techniques, and actions involved in this endeavor would require an encyclopedia-length book. The aim here is to provide an overview of some of the main lines of effort. These roughly fall into four categories: lawfare, censorship, institutional interference and targeted policy, and information operations.

Since 2020, lawfare has eclipsed “Russian disinformation” as the progressive party-state’s primary weapon to disqualify Trump from the presidency. This has involved multiple prosecutions at both the local and federal level for alleged crimes, ranging from improper use of campaign funds to mishandling of classified documents. The technical merits of the cases vary, but the common features are a disregard for precedent regarding prosecution of former presidents and a tendentious application of charging protocols.

The shift to legal warfare was foreshadowed in the lead-up to the 2020 race. One notable case involves the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), an election initiative launched in 2019 under the auspices of a different group, Protect Democracy, founded by a team of lawyers who had served as White House counsels under Obama. The project, explained one of its founders, Ian Bassin, grew “out of concern that the Trump administration may seek to manipulate” the 2020 election.

The initiative gathered roughly 100 influential people, including leading Democratic officials, like Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta, and members of the media and NGO world, to wargame potential scenarios resulting from a contested election. In one scenario, Podesta, playing the role of Joe Biden, refused to accept a Trump election victory and threatened to seize control over several West Coast states and secede from the rest of the country unless congressional Republicans agreed to demands, including the elimination of the Electoral College. The move was sufficiently egregious to provoke criticism from other participants in the wargame. And yet, according to the TIP report on the event, Podesta’s secession gambit, far from a flight of personal fancy, was carried out “with advice from President Obama.” In a detailed report on TIP’s exercises, Matt Taibbi describes “multiple passages on the subject of abiding by and/or trusting in the law, and how this can be a weakness.”

Back to the trial in New York. “The charges against Trump aren’t just unusual,” wrote former prosecutor turned CNN analyst Elie Honig, “they’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else.” The district attorney who brought the charges, Alvin Bragg, campaigned for the office on the suggestion that he would prosecute Trump. While saying he would follow the facts wherever they led, Bragg boasted that he had sued Trump’s administration “over 100 times.” Even the reliably anti-Trump website Vox deemed the legal theory used to indict Trump “dubious.” Still, it was enough to convict the former president on 34 felony counts.

In Florida, 30 FBI agents raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022, searching for illegally stored classified documents. Various incriminating theories about what the FBI was hunting were leaked to the press, including one suggesting that Trump was trading nuclear secrets. Notwithstanding those theories, even the left-leaning Washington Post called the raid “unprecedented.” In July, a judge dismissed the case on the grounds that the government’s selection of its special prosecutor violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. (The dismissal is under appeal.)

Shortly after the Florida case was thrown out, the conservative legal analyst Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that it was “already possible to declare the Democrats’ lawfare a failure.” He based his conclusion on the premise that lawfare’s “principal objective was to deny Trump the presidency, and even if Trump loses, that won’t be its doing.” McCarthy might be misjudging lawfare’s function within the party-state’s broader strategy, however. The court cases against Trump do not need on their own to defeat his presidential run; lawfare is only one among many weapons deployed in concurrent and overlapping waves to overwhelm their target. A single shot isn’t needed to deliver the kill. In non-military terms, this resembles the strategy of “throwing it all against the wall and seeing what sticks.”

McCarthy attributes the alleged failure of lawfare to the backlash it engendered “because it violated our instinctive American sense of fairness,” and to the “overzealousness of the prosecutors” that left their cases vulnerable to legal remedies. This assumes that the American political system of 2024 is the one that existed before the rise of the progressive party-state. Whatever the ultimate disposition of the cases against Trump, his opponents have succeeded in branding him a felon, tying him up in the courts (thus hindering his campaign), and demonstrating that they will wield the power of false arrest against their enemies. The correct measure of lawfare’s defeat is not what happens to Trump now but whether progressives continue to utilize it in the future.

Moreover, lawfare extends beyond Trump himself. The draconian sentences handed down to nonviolent protesters present at the January 6 Capitol riots are clearly meant to send a message. Following the summer of Black Lives Matter mass protests in 2020, during which 19 people were killed in violence across the U.S. that caused over $1 billion in damages, most charges against the rioters were dismissed. In Philadelphia, where charges were dropped against 95 percent of those arrested in the protests, the city paid out a $9.25 million settlement to 343 plaintiffs, who accused the police department of using excessive force. In the January 6 trials, by contrast, sentences have routinely exceeded federal guidelines, with even nonviolent protesters who spent only a few minutes on Capitol grounds getting prison sentences. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington D.C. has an overall conviction rate at trial of about 70 percent, according to William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor now representing many of the J6 defendants; as of August 1, the office is running a 100 percent conviction rate at J6 trials.

The 2020 election was the most censored in U.S. history. The censorship encompassed both high-profile cases (like the aforementioned suppression of reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop) and many less visible instances. The coordinating hub of the censorship industrial complex was an organization called the Election Integrity Partnership.

The seeds of the EIP were planted on January 6, 2017, when the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, unilaterally placed control over the entire U.S. electoral system, formerly run by 8,000 local election jurisdictions, under the DHS. This extraordinary power grab, little noted at the time, except by state electoral officials who objected to having their authority usurped, applied to more than just voting machines. With just days left in office, amid an atmosphere of Russia-panic, the Obama administration effectively deputized a federal agency to oversee all online speech on national security grounds.

The effects of this takeover are still not widely appreciated, but one result was the establishment in 2018 of a new agency inside the DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Its mission: to defend America’s infrastructure from foreign attacks—now including the Internet as a component of its election systems. But having adopted the censorship of disinformation and misinformation as its goal, the agency faced legal obstacles to carrying this out, starting with the First Amendment. To overcome this hurdle, it helped launch the EIP in July 2020 as a consortium of private and nongovernmental groups, empowered to police the Internet for supposed disinformation. In an internal briefing, later leaked to the public, EIP director Alex Stamos noted that the group was created “to try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves,” as the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations.” The EIP’s officials would repeatedly claim that theirs was an independent body, not a government cutout.

The EIP claims to have classified nearly 22 million separate posts across social media and other Internet sites as “misinformation incidents” from August 15, 2020, to December 12, 2020. Working with CISA officials, the EIP sent “tickets” directly to social media companies, requesting that they remove or reduce visibility on specific content and suspend certain users. After the 2020 election, disclosures revealed that content the EIP had deemed misinformation included innocuous pro-Trump statements, clearly protected by the First Amendment.

In a November 2023 report from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, congressional investigators found that, along with removing individual posts, the EIP, working with the CISA, sought to censor entire discussion threads. CISA officials knew that flagging individual posts for removal would not be sufficient to suppress disfavored viewpoints categorically—primarily conservative political speech and often of the most anodyne variety. In one instance, the EIP flagged an October 2020 tweet by former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, in which Gingrich claimed, well within the realm of constitutionally protected political speech, that Pennsylvania Democrats were “methodically changing the rules so they can steal the election.” Pursuant to multiple subpoenas, the Subcommittee obtained communications between these groups, demonstrating that the true objective in flagging content to social media platforms was to censor not just specific, flagged posts but whole narratives; some EIP misinformation reports contained over 500 individual links.

Less than two weeks after Election Day in 2020, CISA director Christopher Krebs declared the vote “the most secure in American history,” and was promptly fired by President Trump. Just two months later, in January 2021, the EIP’s Stamos partnered with Krebs to open a new cybersecurity consulting firm.

Also in January 2021, with its election predicate no longer in effect, CISA adopted an even broader mandate granting it more latitude to monitor and police the speech of American citizens. Without any announcement to the public or deliberation by Congress, the agency “transitioned its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM,” according to an August 2022 report from DHS’s Office of Inspector General. The MDM acronym stands for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, the last of which is an especially Orwellian neologism for information that is factually true but which government officials deem to have been “used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” Having effectively dispensed with the pretense that it was focused on foreign threats, CISA moved on to policing domestic speech on a range of contested political issues. In a leaked draft copy of a DHS Quadrennial Homeland Security Review released in October 2022, the department’s plans to target “inaccurate information” included “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Facing a backlash over revelations about CISA and EIP, the party-state’s censorship apparatus has evolved to become more decentralized. To avoid congressional scrutiny, most censorship work is now outsourced to private industry groups. The most powerful of these is NewsGuard, an Internet ratings agency that “whitelists” or “blacklists” websites, based on its determination of their credibility. A Media Research Center study found that in NewsGuard’s trustworthiness rating, liberal news sites score 27 points higher on average than conservative outlets. Such bias is now baked into the infrastructural layer of the Internet, where it is often invisible to news readers. Last November, for example, Microsoft integrated NewsGuard’s “Misinformation Fingerprints” tool across its suite of products, including its browsers, search engines, and news aggregators. The tool, partially funded by an award of $750,000 from the U.S. government, is billed on NewsGuard’s website as “the internet’s most complete, machine-readable catalog of top false claims circulating online,” and offers “detailed debunks citing trustworthy sources.”

Continuous ideological curation is now the norm throughout most of the media and Internet. Sometimes it gets carried out indiscernibly, for instance by filtering search results and artificial intelligence “answer bots.” In other cases, it operates through the guise of nominally objective bodies, such as the modern fact-checking industry. A full accounting of how fact-checking became an enforcement arm of the party-state is needed, but two points are worth noting here. First, while modern “fact-checking” shares a name with a journalistic practice, it is a separate industry with distinct funding, organizations, and ideology. Traditional fact-checking was typically an entry-level job, paid for from within a publication’s editorial budget. It provided an internal audit to make a publication more reliable, and thus more valuable to readers. Modern fact-checking, by contrast, was constructed over the past decade through centralized institutions like the International Fact Checking Network to police public debate.

Second, the army of fact-checkers now embedded in U.S. news outlets don’t concern themselves with the accuracy of their own publications. Instead, they use a facade of scientific objectivity to play the role of truth cops, arbitrating disputes on politically contentious matters. On matters of significance, their rulings inevitably align with the interests of progressives. With a massive infusion of funding from left-wing billionaires, fact-checking has emerged as one of the only growth fields in a journalism industry that faces cratering revenues.

The record of the modern fact-checkers proves that, for progressives, it has been money well spent. In 2020, the fact-checkers declared Hunter Biden’s laptop Russian disinformation, while “debunking” speculation that Covid-19 might have leaked from a laboratory. More recently, a chorus of fact-checkers decried speculation about Biden’s mental acuity, with headlines like “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead.” That headline ran on a Washington Post “fact checker” feature published on June 14, less than two weeks before Biden’s disastrous debate performance helped end his reelection campaign.

Institutional interference and targeted policy, the third line of effort, is the broadest and shares the most with traditional electoral politics. It differs, however, by co-opting institutions and processes whose neutrality is key to civic peace into the realm of partisan politics. The category encompasses actions taken by nominally independent institutions, and by astro-turfed organizations operating under the auspices of neutrality.

In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg’s family spent more than $400 million on the election, much of it going to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a left-of-center nonprofit devoted to election-related issues. Zuckerberg’s defenders claim the money was needed “to plug holes left by the government.” Critics note that it was overwhelmingly spent in battleground states that Democrats had to win. The conservative think tank Capital Research Center found that the CTCL “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden.”

The spending came with strings attached. The CTCL used the Zuckerberg millions to issue grants to local election offices, with stipulated conditions for how the money could be used. Included in CTCL’s demands: local offices had to promote “universal mail-in voting through suspending election laws, extending deadlines that favored mail-in over in-person voting, greatly expanding opportunities for ‘ballot curing,’ expensive bulk mailings, and other lavish ‘community outreach’ programs that were directed by private activists.” A $10 million CTCL grant to Philadelphia required the city to “use its funds to provide printing and postage for mail-in ballots and scatter ‘Secure Dropboxes’ for voters to drop ballots into.” In effect, that requirement, which significantly complicated the necessary chain of custody for ballot tracking, “greased the wheels for an unprecedented flood of largely untraceable, potentially fraudulent mail-in ballots submitted via private dropboxes with no official oversight or accountability after the fact,” according to a Capital Research Center report.

What may turn out to be the most consequential of the “targeted policies” that the party-state uses to engineer elections involves immigration. In 2020, Biden campaigned on the promise to protect sanctuary cities and impose a 100-day moratorium on deportations. In office, Biden has allowed an unprecedented level of illegal immigration into the U.S. According to a July letter from members of the House Judiciary Committee, 5.3 million people have entered the country illegally since January 2021, including more than 1.5 million who are believed to have snuck into the country after evading border officers. Meantime, Democratic politicians, including a majority in the House, have pushed to protect local laws, including one in Washington, D.C., that allow “noncitizen” voting. And in July, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading congressional progressive, called for a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal aliens, claiming that a President Harris would work with Congress to get it done.

Last year, a bipartisan coalition of anti-Trump groups secretly plotted to block the independent organization No Labels from running a third-party candidate in the election. The plan went public when the recording of an 80-minute private phone call was leaked to Semafor. Attendees on the call included an aide to the Democratic billionaire and major Democratic Party funder Reid Hoffman, as well as prominent “Never Trump” Republicans. Participants discussed attacking No Labels using lawfare and opposition research to discredit the group and its affiliates. One speaker put out a call to action: “Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone—everyone—should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it.” The message was not missed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., until recently a lifelong Democrat who had been the premier third-party candidate in the race. In a blistering speech announcing his endorsement of Trump, Kennedy blasted the party for using lawfare and dirty tricks against him: “President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88 percent landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party controlled the Russian press and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot.”

The “whole-of-society” approach leaves no institution outside the party-state’s reach. Thus, even doctors and hospital patients are being mobilized to drive votes. Records recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal the progressive nonprofit Vot-ER’s role in helping to draft a 2021 White House executive order on “promoting access to voting.” Technically, IRS rules require voter registration groups to be nonpartisan. But, as Park MacDougald writes in The Scroll, Vot-ER “has all the trappings of a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort.” The group was founded in 2021 by “Biden White House fellow Alister Martin with seed funding from Tides and Arabella,” two of the largest donor funds channeling money to party-state causes. In practice, Vot-ER “partners with local federally qualified health centers—which this year received an additional $4.4 billion from the Biden administration—to register low-income Medicare and Medicaid recipients to vote.” Martin, who now sits on a Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel responsible for outreach to “minority and underserved communities,” explained Vot-ER’s approach in a 2023 interview with the Aspen Institute. First the group tries to channel federal funds “directly into the pockets of low-income patients,” and “then we can have a conversation with them in six months, nine months about voter registration.”

The Washington Free Beacon recently revealed a particularly macabre Vot-ER scheme, in which doctors at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute register their mentally disturbed patients to vote, claiming that voting is “a therapeutic tool.” Schizophrenic and suicidal patients are among those being pushed to register. The effort is not exclusive to psychiatric facilities. The Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reports that Vot-ER has provided its voter-registration toolkit to “cancer hospitals, emergency rooms, substance abuse clinics, palliative care departments,” and “neonatal intensive care units.”

The most elusive of the party-state’s strategies, information operations are also the most characteristic of its distinctive approach to politics. These are the continuous manufacturing of pseudo-events and “current things” that define the contemporary psychic atmosphere and distinguish it from earlier epochs in America’s political life. Using trusted government sources to plant stories in newspapers, injecting tropes online by seeding them into the digital networks of social media influencers (isn’t J. D. Vance, like, so weird), shadow-regulating search-engine algorithms to determine what kinds of stories appear in a person’s feed, pressuring social media firms to amplify certain stories, thereby generating network effects—all fall under the broad banner of information operations.

Information operations are not simply a method of spreading particular messages. The constant stream of narratives also conditions the public to accept an indefinite state of emergency, in which it relies on “trusted sources” to warn it of the latest danger. People so conditioned become fearful and reactive, prone to forgetting yesterday’s dire message and accepting whatever next flashes on their screens. Whole categories of thought and speech can be abruptly reversed. The various documented instances in which Democrats like Hillary Clinton denied the results of the 2016 election and declared Trump an illegitimate president get memory holed. By repeating often enough that election-denialism is solely a right-wing offense, it becomes one.

The original information operation of the modern era, the Russia-collusion hoax, hijacked the American political system and has yet to let it go. The false claim that Donald Trump was a Kremlin agent and that Russia “hacked” the 2016 election was—to borrow a term—disinformation, launched into the nation’s political culture by Obama and Clinton officials, working with top U.S. intelligence figures, including former CIA chief John Brennan. It was Brennan who inserted the fabricated Steele Dossier into the official record by including it in an official CIA report. With the imprimatur of credentialed intelligence professionals, the Russiagate conspiracy was then spread by a credulous media apparatus and reinforced by think tank and academic “experts.” Most significantly, it led to special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation of the Trump campaign’s purported collusion with Russia to sway the 2016 election, which found no evidence of such a conspiracy.

In a sense, the lack of fearmongering about Trump being a “Kremlin stooge” is one of the most conspicuous features of the current election. The Russia trope hasn’t disappeared entirely—one article published in August warned of “How Russian gender-based disinformation could influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election”—but its diminishing significance suggests both public exhaustion with the strategy and a maturation of the informational control system.

The party-state’s ability to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris in a matter of weeks, and with the support of Democratic voters (in effect, disenfranchising 15 million primary voters who had overwhelmingly endorsed the president’s reelection bid) and most of the media, signals that it now has the power to make more or less anything seem normal. Having conditioned the public to accept a constant stream of propaganda, party officials can now openly laugh about how preposterous and unconvincing their own talking points have become—as recently happened when California governor and likely future presidential candidate Gavin Newsom was asked on the Obama-bro Pod Save America show how he was feeling about “the switch” that replaced Biden with Harris. Newsom responded by mocking the very absurdity of the question. “We went through a very open process, a very inclusive process,” Newsom said, while guffawing with the show’s hosts. “It was bottom-up, I don’t know if you know that. That’s what I’ve been told to say.” Meantime, serious concerns about election integrity get dismissed as evidence of a right-wing conspiracy.

Is such an approach to politics sustainable? The progressive party-state’s coalition is held together by two binding forces—the distribution of federal largesse, including entitlements and contracts, and the constant manufacturing of crises, victims, and enemy groups—that require extraordinary effort to maintain. The party-state has acquired unprecedented power, in other words, but the system it oversees is fractious and likely to prove brittle.

But the damage the party-state is inflicting to the republic in the meantime is massive and should worry all Americans, regardless of their partisan identifications—as RFK Jr. discovered when he sought to challenge Biden for the 2024 Democratic nomination and found himself facing media smears and extensive litigation to keep him off the ballot. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has faced similar ballot opposition. Support for the legitimacy of our political institutions is eroding. Neither party retains even the pretense of believing that the other will play fair. What Clinton told supporters in 2019—“you can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you”—now appears a near-universal belief. Trump, of course, has repeatedly insisted that the 2020 election was stolen from him. It’s hard to conceive how either side will accept the other’s victory this November.

Still, the race has already undergone two dramatic shifts in less than two months—once after Trump survived the July 13 attempt on his life, and again when Harris revived her party’s flagging fortunes. American voters may yet have their say.