There’s a concept in behavioral science known as “normalcy bias,” or the notion that we are prone to believe that status quos will more or less hold, and to underestimate the likelihood of worst-case scenarios. This was useful in granting us the evolutionary advantages of resiliency and optimism; human collaboration and creativity was powered to some extent by the expectation that things would pan out in the end, and no matter what, we’d prevail.
As beneficial as this has proved for our species, it has pitfalls, most significantly the fact that we don’t see the really bad things coming, or tend to ignore them. The last two decades have been a masterclass in the dangers of this cognitive quirk — our hubristic campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic meltdown whose clear signs we collectively ignored, the surging devastation of climate change after many years of warnings were not heeded, the preventable loss of life as leaders waved away the threat of COVID.
Now, there’s Donald Trump. With Super Tuesday powering the former president forward towards the Republican nomination and dispelling any last remaining grains of doubt about his eventual candidacy, we are again hurtling to a showdown between Joe Biden and Trump. Yet despite the rematch, this is not the same situation we had four years ago.
We know much more about the lengths to which Trump is willing to go to secure his power and subvert the rule of law. We know about Jan. 6, about how close we came to having sitting members of Congress and the vice president violently attacked and perhaps hanged during a violent takeover of our halls of power. We know how hard Trump tried to nullify the voters’ choices, and how he’s lionized the insurrectionist shock troops of his attempted coup.
More importantly, we know about what he’s planning if he’s ever allowed presidential power again. We do not have to speculate, because Trump has said it himself, that he would implement the “termination” of parts of the Constitution, that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.
He has promised rather explicitly to utilize federal law enforcement to pursue his political enemies on spurious grounds, an approach already pioneered by his MAGA followers in Congress with sham impeachments. His closest allies have spelled out, in detail, plans to deploy the military widely across the country, for immigration enforcement and who knows what else.
At least, we should know. Some recent polling makes clear that far too much of the country remains unaware of some of Trump’s most authoritarian impulses and comments. There is the sense that he can’t be serious, or that these are politically-motivated attacks even when they’re direct quotes from Trump and his MAGA entourage. Normalcy bias again at work, threatening to lull us into false security.
When Trump talks about subverting our government and shaping it to his own image, we should take him at his word. Most voters are relatively casual politics observers, tuning in occasionally as elections near and developing their views on sporadic information. Between now and November, it’s imperative to put front and center the dominant political story of our lifetimes, that of Trump’s open authoritarianism. Only the American public can stop him.
