Larry Diamond - Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

H ANNAH A RENDT , On Revolution, 1963

On a gray Sunday afternoon two days before the November 2016 U.S. election, I entered the Berkeley Repertory Theatre with twenty Stanford students to see the final performance of a production of It Cant Happen Here. Adapted from the classic 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, the play traces the rise of an ultranationalist demagogue who, in the midst of the Great Depression, snatches the 1936 Democratic presidential nomination away from Franklin Roosevelt, wins the presidency, and establishes a dictatorship in the United States.

In the novel, Lewis memorably describes his authoritarian ruler, Buzz Windrip:

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.... There were two things... that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius.... He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes... [and] in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and factsfigures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.

The parallels to Donald Trump, the 2016 Republican candidate for president of the United States, were too stark to ignore. I watched the play with a level of anxiety I hadnt expected even a few weeks beforeand didnt want to fully share with the students. They were also shaken by the drama, but we reassured ourselves with the obvious facts. The play was a time-bound work of fiction. Roosevelt had been reelected in 1936. The United States wasnt sunk into anything close to a depression. Trump wasnt an actual fascist. And in any case, he wasnt going to win on Tuesday, right?

When the Berkeley Rep began writing its new stage adaptation of the novel in January 2016, no primary election votes had yet been cast. There was no reason to expect that a modern-day demagogue could win the nomination of a major American political party.

Indeed, since Trump had declared his candidacy in 2015, I had spent more than a year reassuring people around the world that it couldnt happen here in the United States. First I assured them that Trump had no serious chance of winning the Republican nomination. Then I told them that he had scant chance of winning the general election. To democratic activists gathered in Seoul for the World Movement for Democracy Assembly in November 2015, to Vietnamese dissidents who had come to Taiwan to watch the January 2016 presidential election there, to college students and civic activists in Hong Kong who had organized the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests against Chinese repression, to students, professors, journalists, and legislators in Burma and Argentina, I repeated it over and over: It wont happen in the United States.

Our institutions were too strong, I insisted, to permit a reality-TV star with no prior government experience to win a major-party nomination for president, much less the Oval Office. Our democratic norms were too resilient to produce a president who crudely demeaned the press, the judiciary, and immigrants; who encouraged his supporters to physically attack protesters and to scream for his opponent to be locked up; who refused to release his tax returns; and who appealed in thinly veiled code to base racist sentiments.

I wasnt nave. I knew that lying, race-baiting, and dirty tricks had long played their roles in presidential politics. I knew that unscrupulous men had won the office. But Trump would be a wholly new and almost unimaginable low. Polarized and unsettled though Americas voters were, I didnt believe they could elect a man who, in the words of