T The Enlightenment had a good run. Over 400 years ago, an audacious idea emerged among scientists and philosophers that a single shared reality existed that could be measured and predicted using fundamental laws of nature. All the trappings of modern life, every technological convenience and scientific breakthrough flowed from the radical realization that truth exists — not in the proclamations of the powerful, but in underlying nature itself.

The re-election of Donald Trump is a harbinger that the Enlightenment may now be on its last legs. Bored and weary of having to accommodate facts we don’t agree with, many are retreating into bespoke realities served up by social media algorithms. Our ubiquitous devices and online platforms — themselves a product of Enlightenment thought — are ironically becoming its undoing.

Embracing a shared evidence-based reality is hard work. It requires dialogue and compromise among people who disagree and respecting the rights of those we might not respect. Many people seem sick of it. Popular cyber-platforms paired with artificial intelligence provide a convenient off-ramp from a confusing and frightening world that increasingly requires our attention and agency.

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari notes that “most information is not truth.” Our social media feeds are a firehose of addictive and largely useless images and videos, curated by online algorithms designed not to inform but to keep us engaged.

These information streams are also increasingly polluted with AI-assisted disinformation in an effective effort to weaponize ignorance and undermine the very concept of truth. Why? Because disinformation works. In the words of Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, “post-truth is pre-fascism.... To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”.

But many children chafe at the limits put on them and imagine themselves happier if only they didn’t have to obey their parents and teachers. Some never grow out of that attitude. Negative freedom is, according to Snyder, “freedom from” some external barrier — freedom from government on our backs, from tedious regulation and red tape, from expensive groceries and unwanted immigrants and refugees.

But negative freedom has consequences. When we think we’ve freed ourselves from our imagined burdens, we soon miss them. We feel the absence of government services; if our groceries are cheaper because they’re no longer inspected, they may also infect us with listeria. Or the groceries may be more expensive than ever because the immigrants and refugees who grew them, packed them, shipped them and put them on our supermarket shelves are now gone forever.

Snyder cites Freedom House, an organization that ranks over 200 countries by their people’s access to political rights, civil liberties and internet freedom. It ranks the United States as “free” with a score of 83, like Romania and South Korea.

Canada’s score is 97, just behind Sweden’s 99 and Finland’s 100.

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He goes on: “Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants. Both a philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to.”

It is precisely the reason I’m so impatient with the Merrick Garland whinger industry, which has flourished again since Trump’s win: because they replicate precisely the impotence that got us here. They always asked that Garland do the work, singlehandedly, of making Trump go away, without considering the political groundwork that was necessary to any successful legal case.
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He addresses SCOTUS’ actions in four paragraphs close to the end of his rant. He ignores how their interventions on the Colorado case and Fischer also affected DOJ’s options, and never mentions precisely how long they stalled the case: eight months, with a guarantee of more on the back end. Once you address SCOTUS’ delays and rewriting of the Constitution, it’s not clear a case could ever have been brought before an election, even ignoring how COVID stalled everything for a year, to say nothing of bringing an insurrection charge that would be (per the Colorado decision) the only thing that could disqualify Trump from office. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t matter whether Garland or a gun-toting Adam Schiff, as prosecutor, were in charge. SCOTUS’ intervention, assuming it would have been the same whether it happened in 2021 or 2022 or 2023, was decisive. Trump’s judges made a prosecution of him before the election impossible and further ruled that the only thing that could disqualify him was an insurrection charge.
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More importantly, WaPo focused on Steve D’Antuono’s hesitancy to turn to the fake electors, even as DOJ was pushing to do so. Which is to say that D’Antuono — someone no longer at DOJ — was the key cause for delay, not Garland.
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Donald Trump is about to do a great deal of outrageous things at the start of his term to reverse the treatment of January 6 as a crime. The response cannot be to say, ho hum, if only that awful Merrick Garland would have yelled louder, and give up, especially not when no amount of yelling was going to change what SCOTUS did.

The response is to stop hoping for a sparkle unicorn to do this work for us. The response is to take some agency for making the case about Donald Trump. And a first step in that process is to stop blaming Garland for things — the public record shows — he didn’t do, and especially to stop blaming Garland for things that more important villains, like John Roberts, did do.

The first step to effective accountability is to identify the actual villain.

Decided to go through this systematically. Incumbent government performance in wealthy democracies since March 2022, when Ukraine invasion really spiked things upwards:

South Korea President (March 22) – incumbent term limited, incumbent party lost
Malta (March 22) – incumbent Labour party re-elected, gains seats
Hungary (April 22) – incumbent Orban govt re-elected with larger majority
Serbia (April 22) – incumbent Pres re-elected but loses Parliamentary majority

France (April/June 22) – incumbent Pres re-elected with reduced share, loses majority in Nat Assembly
Slovenia (Apr 22) – incumbent govt defeated
Australia (May 22) – incumbent right wing govt defeated
Sweden (Sept 22) – incumbent left wing govt defeated

Italy (Sept 22) – far right coalition led by Meloni sweeps aside previous governing parties LN and M5S
Bulgaria (Oct 22) – largest party in governing coalition falls sharply, change of govt
Denmark (Nov 22) – centre-left govt re-elected, PM party gains seats

Israel (Nov 22) – messy result, but sees incumbent PM replaced and Netanyahu return
Estonia (Mar 23) – messy result, party which topped poll previous time falls, party of PM Kallas (who took over mid term) gains
Bulgaria (Apr 23) – messy, far right and populists make most gains

Finland (Apr 23) – centre-left govt coalition defeated, right and radical right opposition parties make strong gains
Greece (May/June 23) – centre-right govt re-elected
Spain (July 23) – centre-left govt clings on despite big gains for centre-right oppo, rad rt falls sharply

Slovakia (Sep 23) – incumbent govt defeated by populist opposition
New Zealand (Oct 23) – centre-left incumbent defeated by centre-right opposition
Poland (Oct 23) – rad rt incumbent defeated by centre-right opposition

Switzerland (Oct 23) – rad rt gain seats, greens and liberals lose seats
Netherlands (Nov 23) – governing coalition parties fall sharply, rad rt tops the poll
Portugal (Mar 24) – centre left govt defeated by centre right oppo

Croatia (Apr 24) – incumbent coalition re-elected, greens gain most seats
European Parliament (Jun 24) – Greens, Liberals and centre left lost ground, radicals of left and right gain ground
Belgium (June 24) – PM’s party loses most of its seats. Belgian govts are messy

France (June/July 24) – incumbent President’s party gets a pasting, far right and far left make gains
UK (July 24) – incumbent centre-right govt wiped out in a landslide, but with big vote gains for Greens, rad rt and rad left independents

Austria (Sep 24) – big losses for gov coalition of centre-right and greens, big gains for rad rt
Lithuania (Oct 24) – big losses for largest party in govt coalition
Japan (Oct 24) – LDP, near permanent party of govt, defeated
US (Nov 24) – centre-left incumbent Dems defeated

We’ve also had a bunch of bad to historically bad results in poorer democracies too, including ANC losing majority in S Africa, BJP losing majority in India, governing party defeated for the first time ever in Botswana, incumbent Pres defeated in Brasil, etc. Tough time to be an incumbent!

Three big lessons here IMHO – (1) voters have been punishing incumbents everywhere, regardless of political orientation, length in office etc (2) Voters have been switching to all kinds of opposition, regardless of political orientation but…(3) radical anti-system parties (of right and left) have done well in many places, again regardless of who’s in govt

Trump benefitted from all three trends – he’s running against the incumbent, as leader of the only opposition, and he’s seen as radical/anti-system