Was Democracy Ever in Peril?

Some great fools like George Mason University's Tyler Cowen have taken Tuesday's results as proof that there was never any threat to democracy in the first place.

One wonders if he believes that the freedom of assembly was never under threat in Minneapolis because the people there continued to relentlessly show up. They showed up when it was −20 degrees Fahrenheit. They showed up when ICE murdered them, indeed they showed up in even greater numbers afterwards. They continued to show up as ICE officers explicitly threatened to murder them again.

So was freedom of assembly secure in Minneapolis? Was there never any threat?

The situation is the same with regard to democracy. I have been quite consistent, myself. In 2024 I argued that he would try to destroy democracy:

Many of you wouldn't deny this, and even take it for granted. I am asking you not to take it for granted, to take seriously what it means to say that one party's candidate will not try to cripple our system of free and fair elections, and one party's candidate is guaranteed to. How high do his odds of success have to be before you treat this as a genuine emergency? Is a 20 percent chance of losing our democracy too low? Is 30?

I think that before the midterms, giving Trump a 20 percent chance of successfully consolidating a competitive authoritarian regime would not have been wildly pessimistic. When you use your position at the head of the federal executive branch to try and censor the media—including consolidating ally control over major organizations—when you use federal law enforcement to retaliate against your opponents, when you make numerous attempts to interfere with the administration of elections, when you punish law firms because you don't like their clients—when you just in general use the federal government to try to impose a personalist dictatorship—I think 20 percent is a fair, even conservative estimate of your chances of success.

That obviously implies an 80 percent chance of failure. And I did say, back in December, that we were going to win, going to defeat authoritarianism at the ballot box.

Is a 20 percent chance of consolidating authoritarianism a situation where "democracy never was under threat and the United States has not been under risk of fascism"?

Cowen began teaching expected value to economics students the last time Texas had a Democratic senator. Perhaps he simply does not think the magnitude of a scenario where we lose our democracy would get us a large negative number when multiplied by 0.2. But that's how the math works out for me, personally.

After the midterms, things look very different. And I'm not sure that Trump or his inner circle quite appreciate just how different.