Imagine I sent you back in time to July 2015 with the goal of saving liberal democracy in America. Donald Trump announced his candidacy a month ago, the polls are showing him with a narrow lead, and the media—while noting his extreme rhetoric—are mostly treating this as a fun diversion.
You can’t prove you’re from the future, and you’re limited to broadly legal means. Can you persuade enough people to take it more seriously?
After all, you know what’s coming—January 6, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, checks and balances failing, massive open corruption, troops on the streets, abductions by masked men, and concentration camps. But when you warn of these horrors, it sounds outlandish. People won’t believe you. If you insist, you’ll be dismissed as hysterical. Despite knowing the future, you won’t be able to prevent it.
This is not that far from the position many ordinary Americans found themselves in at the start of the Trump era. They weren’t time travelers but saw what was coming clearly enough. They called Trump’s movement fascist from the very start, and often predicted specific milestones of our democratic decline well in advance. They were convinced they were right—and often beside themselves with worry. Accordingly, they did everything they could to get others to listen.
But not enough people did, and many attacked them—even as events proved them right, again and again. As late as February 2025, respected legal commentator Noah Feldman was casually asserting our constitutional system was “working fine” and Jon Stewart was scolding people who used the word “fascist,” claiming all they had done “over the last ten years is cry wolf.”
There is an ancient archetype at work here. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy—of seeing the future—but cursed that she would never be believed. Her name is sometimes used as a pejorative for an overacting alarmist, which, appropriately enough, misses the point. Cassandra was, after all, right. When the Greek army seemingly abandoned the siege of Troy, leaving behind the Trojan horse, she pleaded with the Trojans not to bring it into the city. They did so anyway, and armed men burst out of it, dooming them all.
Why did we see this story again? Why did some immediately see America’s dark future, while others fought them so long and so hard?
As part of my research for this article, I interviewed 37 Americans who meet the profile of a latter-day Cassandra—a descriptor that I do not attach any negative connotation to. While there are some Cassandras among professional commentators, my focus here is on those in the Democratic base. I spent around half an hour with each, trying to get a sense of both their views and who they are as people. Many are quoted in this essay.
Who Are Cassandras?
The first thing to say about fascism’s Cassandras is they’re usually women. Not all women are Cassandras (most aren’t), but most Cassandras are women. My sense is that Black Americans, of either gender, are likelier than whites to be Cassandras, and trans and nonbinary people are heavily overrepresented within the group.
Cassandras live across America; from coast to coast, in urban, suburban, and rural areas, in red, blue, and purple states. The assumption that Trump Derangement Syndrome, to use the right’s mocking phrase, is a malady peculiar to big, blue coastal cities could not be further from the truth. I met Cassandras from Brooklyn, but I also talked with many in smaller towns and cities across the South. A very, very common trait—even for big blue city Cassandras—is having lived in a heavily Republican, deeply conservative area for a long period of time.
Universally, Cassandras have a strong sense of their own values. In contrast to some politics enthusiasts who pinball between different tribes, they tend to be lifelong liberals. Many of those raised by conservatives recall arguing with their parents about politics as children.
It’s also worth noting what Cassandras do not share: income level, social class, or type of occupation. I talked with janitors and Wall Street bankers, lawyers and landscape designers. People out of work, retirees, and food delivery drivers. Army vets and animal vets. Software engineers and mechanical engineers. And, yes, college professors. Much has been made of the cross-class nature of Trump’s strongest support. That the same is true of his strongest opposition is far less discussed, if it’s even considered worthy of discussion at all.
And they sound different. Some are confident speakers, some are more nervous. Some carefully think through every word, others simply launch in. Some are bubbly, some somber; some have that metallic dryness in their voice that comes from being afraid for long periods of time.
But what they said was the same.
The Cassandra Song
I started by asking when they started feeling alarmed by Trump. “Around the summer or maybe late spring of 2015,” Marcia, a 54-year-old Korean American woman who works in software in Texas, told me. “Yona” (a pseudonym, due to fears of violent retaliation), a white nonbinary 38-year-old, also in Texas, echoed that: “From the beginning ... when he was in the Republican primary.” Cassandras clocked that this movement was truly dangerous early. “When he announced he was running for president, when he came down the [escalator],” recalled another Texan—Kristin, a white, 58-year-old college professor.
What were they afraid of? Authoritarianism, political violence, racism, sexism, corruption, as well as threats to bodily autonomy and LGBT rights, were the common themes. Everyone mentioned at least one of those, and the vast majority mentioned multiple. “All the implications that I knew the election would have that have all come true, essentially,” as Emily, a 38-year-old white female writer in Chicago, put it. Cassandras are defined by seeing in MAGA not just policies they disagreed with but a loaded gun pointed at the heart of our politics and culture. “It just felt to me like we were the Weimar Republic; the lying press, the way he was weaponizing American people ... the othering of people—Hispanics, they’re rapists, and all of that,” said Sonia, a 52-year-old white woman who works in marketing in Los Angeles.
Why were they afraid of this? Or, put better, how did they correctly see all this coming? Virtually all the Cassandras would make the same points. They used different examples and discussed them in different ways, but the bones of the argument were the same. The experience for me, as interviewer, was like hearing the same song played by different musicians—once by a folk guitarist, then sung by an opera singer, then played by a heavy metal band, then a string quartet, and so on. Very different styles, but clearly working from the same sheet music.
I started to think of
this as “The Cassandra Song.” It plays as follows:
- Trump (or senior people in the movement) said (insert bad outcome or values).
- We had good reasons to think he/they meant it.
- We had good reasons to think his base wanted it.
For any of the outcomes Cassandras feared, they could cite rhetoric from Trump. For example, Ryan, a 43-year-old white professor in Texas, mentioned “his refusal to accept an election, if lost ... that’s a moment where, OK, this is someone who’s antidemocratic.” This had been clearly stated both in the 2016 primary “and in the debates with Hillary.”
The common understanding at the time was that all of that was political theater, or rhetorical excesses—that Trump had no real convictions. But Cassandras didn’t see it like that. “I kinda think people have it reversed,” Joe, a white 30-year-old from upstate New York, who now teaches at a university in the U.K., said. “Lots of people don’t detect that he’s lying about what has transpired, but they think he’s full of hot air about what he wants. But in reality, he’s a total liar about what has happened, and he’s deadly sincere about what it is he wants.”
Daniel, a 35-year-old Black Army veteran who is now a student in Michigan, recalled how Trump had led Republican primary polling as early as 2011 “based on his [then] recent embrace of birtherism”—the claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. “This was telling me that the Republican Party was open to racism as a fundamental part of the attitude and the thinking of their leadership,” Daniel said. “But because the vehicle for that was such a ridiculous claim, to me that meant that the party was also open to ridiculous claims about other groups of people, about politics. Essentially a non-reality-based politics. And that kind of politics is of course going to be an authoritarian politics.”
All the Cassandras, in their own way, would lay out these elements—he says it, he means it, the base will back it. They didn’t condescend at all, but clearly felt they were reviewing fairly obvious facts about the world.
And looking back, it was all obvious. The mythical Cassandra hardly needed divine gifts to sense that the enemy army vanishing and leaving behind a giant horse statue was—to paraphrase the ancient Greek sources—“a bit sus.” Her modern counterparts were not uncovering some carefully concealed secret, but simply using their eyes, ears, and basic reasoning.
So why did so many fight them so hard?
“I’m Not Being Hysterical”
Americans associate, often subconsciously, our two main political tribes with gender stereotypes. Conservatism is presented and understood as male, liberalism as female. Republicans are the “Daddy Party,” Democrats the “Mommy Party.” This affects how we hear the claims made by either side, and how seriously we take them.
We tend to discount or dismiss female fear and pain. Because women are seen as less rational and more emotional, we are more likely to assume they are exaggerating or to dismiss them as “acting crazy.” I talked with Professor Yolonda Wilson of Saint Louis University, an expert in bioethics (and herself a Cassandra), who told me: “There’s good, documented literature that women’s pain is not regarded with the same level of seriousness” as men’s. We can see this in health care outcomes, such as doctors dismissing female pain or under-prescribing—giving women over-the-counter painkillers instead of prescription drugs.
“As someone who was socialized female, you do get told a lot that you’re overreacting, that you’re being ridiculous … that you can’t take a joke, all of those things,” said Lars, a mixed-race, gender-fluid 35-year-old from New York. “Once you have that label of woman or girl or female on you, people kind of discount what you say ... [that] definitely was something I experienced at the time and even as recently as last autumn.”
Consider the difference with how we talk about male-coded institutions and ideas. “January 6 was the enshrining of an election being lost … yet people traveled for miles to essentially throw a tantrum. And Republicans were not cast as hysterical,” Yolonda observed. In fact, great media effort has gone into “understanding” the right’s rage. “That certainly doesn’t happen with women ... and it doesn’t [happen to] female-coded institutions.”
This is not to say no one in the media shared the Cassandras’ fears: During Trump’s first run, opinion writers such as Dana Milbank, Jamelle Bouie, and TNR editor Michael Tomasky (writing in The New York Review of Books) called him a “fascist” or “neo-fascist.” But the major newspapers and TV news providers seemed less convinced. They would pay lip service to concerns, but the focus and nature of their coverage showed they didn’t take them that seriously.
And then there were those who were openly angry with the Cassandras. Trump couldn’t become a dictator, Zachary Karabell told us in Politico before the 2016 election. We should think of all the checks and balances “before we get too breathless about impending fascism and the end of America as we know it.” Those who called Trump supporters racist should “stop the hysterical moralizing,” British journalist John Harris wrote.
And even as we entered the Trump era proper, many could not shake the sense that the Cassandras were getting it wrong. “Hysteria and sanctimony are proving to be a terrible strategy for dealing with Donald Trump,” wrote William Watson in 2017. Simon Jenkins concurred in The Guardian: “With every sneer, liberals just make Trump stronger.” The solution, according to Josh Barro, was to just shut up: “Liberals Can Win if They Stop Being So Annoying.”
Annoying. Sneer. Hysteria. Hysterical. Moralizing. Breathless. I call commentators like this, who are not pro-Trump but are very against the Cassandra read of him, anti-alarmists. They are encountering the Cassandra song as female; that annoys them, and they dismiss it on that basis.
What Makes a Cassandra?
Anti-alarmists invariably conflate talking in a calm tone with being rational. Any expression of fear or anger from Cassandras is proof they’re not to be taken seriously.
But in some circumstances, fear and anger are the rational reaction. Imagine you’re woken up late at night, you hear a crash and strange voices. You correctly realize this is a home invasion. Every aspect of your psychology and physiology changes in an instant. Adrenaline pumps, you are stronger, time seems to move slower. When you go to your child’s room your voice has steel in it. They instinctively wake quickly and follow quietly, without fuss, as you lock yourselves in a bathroom. It feels like you’re shaking, but you’re actually very still. Your body is preparing you for what you might have to do.
Now imagine your partner happened to be in the bathroom. As you explain what’s going on, he dismisses you: “You’re being ridiculous, you need to calm down.” Listen, you can hear them, you say. And you can. But he’s not paying attention. “You’re always so hysterical,” he says, as he moves to unlock the door.
A fascist dictatorship is much more dangerous than a home invasion. And this is how Cassandras experience our politics. It has occupied their minds over the last decade in a way that is scarcely fathomable to semi-engaged voters. Erin, a white 57-year-old vet in New Orleans, described how she “cried with my daughter the day after the [2016] election.” This was a common experience. Emily described not being able to eat or sleep for weeks after Trump’s second win.
Cassandras are not reasoning on the basis of fear; rather, their reasoning has led to a conclusion that is frightening. Indeed, I would say being a clear, critical thinker is the first of the things that make someone more likely to have “got it” early—and it’s how Cassandras often understand themselves. “My mother used to say that even as a young child I was a born skeptic,” Connie, a 68-year-old white retired banker living in Pennsylvania, told me.
Let’s note some basic facts: Donald Trump is, according to numerous women, a lifelong sexual predator. A New York judge said he committed rape against E. Jean Carroll, “as many people commonly understood” the term. Even as I was finalizing edits on this article, a new slew of documents further linking Trump to (pedophile and human trafficker) Jeffrey Epstein was released. “Any woman who has gotten to a certain age has been exposed to predators. You develop an alarm for predators. And this man [Trump] is definitely a predator,” Melissa, a 58-year-old white lawyer from Kentucky, told me. And this was obvious from “when he first ran for office.… He ... talked about grabbing women without consent ... so all that was out there.”
As always, the Cassandras’ reasoning here is clear but not complex. Less “pattern recognition” and more “recognizing that there is a pattern.” More Cassandras are women, but it’s less that women have been especially able to see something that is hidden. Rather, that men are more willing to ignore, or obfuscate about, the bad behavior of other men.
Likewise with race, nonwhite Americans proved more willing to connect the dots. “Look, I’m a Black woman from the South,” Yolonda said. “I’ve been Black all my life, at this point 50 years. There are ways of having life experiences and navigating the world that sometimes—certainly if one is self-reflective—give you an insight into behavior, and behavior to take seriously.” Daniel also stressed the history of Black people in America: “You’re constantly going over that history, constantly talking about it”; as a result “you start to look for things you think will lead, or could lead, to the suppression of others.” Even if the others being targeted aren’t Black, “if there is a list, and people are being put on the list, Black people are on the list. Might not be at the top of the list ... but we are always on the list.”
Finally, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming Americans were more likely to get it early. The nature of the direct attack on their existence made them much more likely to see patterns others ignored. “It’s hard for me to be sanguine,” Alex, a 34-year-old Cuban American trans woman working as a food delivery driver in Florida, told me. “You’re very cognizant of how ... politics will affect you.” None of these groups are monoliths, of course—there are apathetic, left anti-alarmists and even conservative members of each group—but they seem to correlate with being a Cassandra.
There’s Nothing Like Seeing the Elephant
You read about elephants in books. They tell you how big they are, and you believe them. And yet, when you see one in the flesh for the first time, the first thing you think is, “Jesus, that thing is huge!” At some level, your “used to people-and-dog-size things” brain had to see the great beast to get it.
Fascism is really bad. You think you know that. But the thing itself is so much worse. If you’ve led a life that is—by the standards of history and the world—stable and comfortable, your brain is going to have a hard time truly getting how depraved people can become unless you see it directly.
Cassandras have seen the elephant. Obviously, being a woman, or Black, or trans makes it more likely that one has experienced explicit bigotry or predatory behavior. Beyond that, Cassandras tend to have lived in very conservative areas for long periods of their lives.
Chloe was the youngest of the Cassandras I interviewed, at 22. She’s a tutor in New York now but grew up in the South. She recounted being alarmed by Trump for as long as she’s been politically aware, at seeing “those around me … defending things that he did.” Specifically, she recalled her reaction to the Charlottesville rally in 2017, in which fascists had marched with tiki torches shouting, “Jews will not replace us,” and grasping for the first time that “this is a movement that has real support in this country.” Directly seeing this led her to conclude that Trump “wants to bring the worst parts of fascist Germany to the United States.”
Difficult relations with deeply conservative family was another common theme among those I spoke with. Yona’s family, concerned about their (Yona is nonbinary) progressive views, had staged something of an intervention. Yona told me they “thought I had gone down this demonic path.” Did they use the word “demonic,” I asked. “Oh yeah.” They believe that “the entire machinery of the Democratic Party ... was, in part, designed to traffic children, designed to torture children, to harvest a chemical they call adrenochrome from their brains ... and that, for many of the Democratic elites, it was due in part to demonic beliefs, or membership in satanic societies.”
These are not well-founded beliefs. But we shouldn’t assume they’re numerically fringe—the modern right’s activist base is very, very conspiratorial. This is one of many “seeing the elephant” elements in the right’s radicalization. I can tell you that 28 percent of Trump’s 2016 voters believe demons “definitely exist.” Or that half of born-again Christians believe people are possessed by the devil “very frequently,” “frequently,” or “occasionally.” But unless you’ve had the conversations yourself, I suspect those numbers won’t feel real to you.
Likewise with racism. You’d never know it from the way the Republican base is covered in mainstream media, but empirically, in terms of the social science research, the “is it racism or economic anxiety?” debate is over. And it’s been over for quite some time. It’s racism that drives them to Trump. Yet many just can’t bring themselves to accept that.
How Anti-Alarmism Became Cool—and Masculine
We might note how different actual Cassandras are from the picture painted of them by anti-alarmists, a core tenet of whose worldview is that progressives generally, and Cassandras in particular, simply haven’t understood Trump voters.
As is so often the case in heated political debates, this is projection. Here’s a list of everyone I’ve quoted making anti-alarmist arguments, in this and another article on them: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Brett Stephens, Corey Robin, Jon Stewart, David Brooks, William Watson, John Harris, Simon Jenkins, Zachary Karabell, Josh Barro, and Noah Feldman.
Not an exhaustive list, but enough for a quick sketch. All of them grew up in very blue areas of either California, New York, or Massachusetts (excepting Watson, who is Canadian, and Harris and Jenkins, who are British). All have spent the vast majority of their careers working in media or academia in either big blue cities or college towns. All are college grads, and many have an elite education: Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and so on. Many are the children of significant academics. All are men. I’m sure you can find exceptions, but this does seem to be the basic profile of a mainstream media anti-alarmist.
To be clear, I don’t think being an educated coastal elite makes you less of a “real” American. What’s weird, however, is they seem to think that. There’s a desperate insecurity here, and I suspect it comes from our gendered politics. Because we think of men as more authentic, that quality of authenticity carries over to male-coded entities. “There’s this thing where Republicans … are the real people ... we’re [liberals] not real,” as Megan, a 60-year-old white woman from Atlanta, put it.
Men can be precious about gender identity. When challenged, they feel the need to prove their masculinity, often by lashing out at women. Media anti-alarmists are uncomfortable being feminized. They want to show that, yes, they’re anti-Trump, but they’re not one of those sanctimonious, hysterical, annoying, cringe liberals.
The result is a preposterous dynamic in which (non-elite) Cassandras, who often live in red areas and talk to MAGA zealots every day, are lectured on understanding them by columnists who may have never talked to one, on their own turf, in their entire lives. The columnists’ experience of the modern right is of their sanitizers: of pseudo-intellectual apologists; of having Ross Douthat on their podcast. They have not had to fear for their lives coming out as gay or trans in a deep, dark-red community. They have not had family stage an intervention because they believe progressivism is literally demonic. British journalist John Harris, quoted above, felt confident to tell terrified liberals—in the most condescending language—they’d misunderstood MAGA, after spending “the best part of five days” in the States.
Cassandras make their arguments in simple and straightforward ways. They’re earnest. They don’t bury their politics in 12 layers of eye-rolling irony or pad it out with jargon or clever-sounding phrases. All this sincerity would become negatively associated with femininity throughout the Trump era. There would be a trend toward “considering earnestness cringe,” to use Alex’s words. She told me: “I got a little sinking feeling when ‘cringe’ became a common epithet. It’s like, ‘Do we like the alternative?’”
Many in the media have a cynical, mercenary, “we all know this is bullshit, so let me let you in on the con” attitude that, ironically, makes them less able to understand the world, Alex observed. I think most anti-alarmists don’t have strong values, so they assume no one else does, either. To them, political commentary is a gig, it’s a game. Within that, they have preferences, certainly, but not deep principles. People who really believe something—liberal or illiberal—are alien to them.
“I think they like to feel savvy,” Alex said. Anti-alarmists instinctively reject the simple, female-coded narrative that we’re in a battle over core liberal principles. They think they’re seeing through the professed values of the Republican base, its commentators, Trump himself, to the grift, political strategy, economic anxiety, and “legitimate concerns” with liberalism underneath. Again, they have not seen the elephant. But even just logically, those pieces cannot hang together. If Trump is just “performing for the crowd,” the crowd must want the thing he is performing. Anti-alarmists thus imagine that the country is becoming literally fascist without there being a single sincere fascist among us.
When they picture Cassandras, they imagine we’re letting gender get in the way of our thinking. That we (delicate liberals/women) are so appalled by Trump’s crassness (his maleness) that we’re overreacting, not being rational. Again, this is projection. In fact, it’s the anti-alarmists who are driven by their gender hang-ups. The Cassandras’ case seems feminine to them, so they find them annoying. More than that, they desperately want the approval of male-coded groups, and the way they make their arguments reflects that. They want to be clever, savvy, and cynical, and this makes them very poorly placed to understand a world increasingly driven by deep values.
Anti-alarmists love to use highly gendered language—“hysterical,” “cringe”—evocative of sexist stereotypes. Immediately after the 2016 election, Corey Robin launched into a furious attack on Cassandras from the left: “I loathe this kind of politics. At a very deep and personal level. I loathe its operatic-ness, the way it performs concern and care when all it really is about is narcissism.”
It didn’t seem to matter that he had been wrong in thinking Trump could never win. Robin would continue dismissing those who feared the worst, even as events proved them right, again and again. Ironically, perhaps, given their constant suggestion of sexist stereotypes, the anti-alarmists were the ones putting their emotion before their reason.
“The Fences Fail”
This male insecurity–driven irrationality would persist for a decade. It would die down a bit after the most egregious attacks on our politics. After January 6, “a lot of reporters were genuinely shaken up about it,” Alex observed, “but it very clearly didn’t last.” The usual anti-alarmist framings would just creep back in.
It was commonplace in the 2024 election to hear talk about checks and balances, about how the guardrails would hold. Go back to the home invasion story. The intruders are now trying to break down the bathroom door, throwing their full weight against it. And they’re succeeding; the hinges are coming loose. All the time, they are screaming the vilest death and rape threats at you and your family. Yet your partner seems more aggravated by your fear. No, they won’t call for help. The door will hold. Stop being hysterical. They don’t really mean those things, maybe you should listen more to them, find common ground.
This seems utterly absurd—and it is. Yet it is no less absurd than our last election.
It’s not that the media was entirely complacent. There are, as we have seen, some Cassandra commentators. And there would be plenty of stories on Trump’s failings, or even the odd editorial that did seem to get it. But the overall picture shows that most in the industry, at some level, bought the anti-alarmists’ case more than the Cassandra one. They just weren’t taking it seriously, as Alex observed: “Going back to the 2016 election, just compare the endless amount of ink that was spilled over Hillary’s emails or, more recently, how many words have been typed on ‘Biden is old’ and so little on what are the actual stakes.”
It was obvious, in advance, that the fascists would aggressively work to destroy the guardrails in which so many placed so much faith. Trump spent his entire first term looking for ways around or through them. “Like a velociraptor testing the fences,” as Jennifer, a nonbinary, white 38-year-old from North Dakota, put it. This metaphor has been around for a bit, and Sonia also referenced it. Cassandras seem to like Jurassic Park, perhaps because the original movie has, in Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm, one of the best depictions of a Cassandra in modern fiction. His “Boy, do I hate always being right,” as the T-Rex broke though the barrier, perfectly encapsulated how many of us feel. I’ve also heard Ellen Ripley from Alien (Sigourney Weaver) mentioned in a similar vein.
The fences are now down, the alien loose on the ship. The bathroom door is off its hinges, and you’re face to face with the intruders, your child behind you, husband cowering in the bathtub. What do we do now? The Cassandra’s answer is a single word: Fight.
“Fight”
Democrats “need to make specific changes to fight fascism,” Megan said, mentioning Supreme Court expansion. Ryan wanted “full opposition.” Cassandras were clear that Republican bills or nominees should not get a single democratic vote unless normal constitutional governance was restored. Sonia summed it up as, “I’d like them to fight for their voters, and I’d like to see them fight for this country.”
Were they not? I asked. Some, somewhat, some of the time, seemed to be the prevailing feeling. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker was praised by seven interviewees for his robust response to the administration sending the National Guard to his state. Legislative leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, much less so. Cassandras want much more aggressive rhetoric and actions to match. “People need to see Democrats literally putting their bodies on the line,” said Irina, a 37-year-old Hispanic woman who worked in immigration advocacy in New York for most of the Trump era and recently moved to Edinburgh, Scotland (and, disclosure, my wife). If this was fascism, and it is, then that was what was required.
To the extent that Democrats controlled law enforcement or had judicial power, they needed to be arresting ICE agents who broke the law, or GOP officials who took bribes. Not securing a quick conviction against Trump following January 6 had been a catastrophic failure, they felt. “No more water, the fire next time,” Alex said, quoting an old spiritual.
And it isn’t just the Democratic Party; the entire institutional apparatus of liberalism has yet to fully go on a war footing. “The right has this great ability to rally around the people they think are righteous warriors,” Irina observed. They’ll praise them, elevate them, fundraise for them, close ranks to protect them. When someone shows courage on our side, we can often “leave them standing there by themselves.”
Finally, Cassandras understood our current circumstance as one of total war—across all aspects of our culture. All of us need to be in the game, and they certainly were. Many mentioned volunteering to help elect Democrats or advance other progressive efforts. They would also try to persuade those around them. Erin’s husband was more apolitical and, initially, had something of an anti-alarmist reaction. She had challenged, pushed back, and had many long conversations. “He’s getting there ... I think he’s way more aware than a lot of people I know. That’s because he has three kids and a wife who won’t shut up about it.”
What of the reactionary centrist strategy of making policy concessions to attract swing voters? Cassandras just didn’t think it would work as an election pitch. “What that has actually led to is no messaging, like there’s no values, there’s no morals, there’s no thing we belong [to] and believe [in] anymore,” said Melissa (a second Melissa), a white 46-year-old who works in health care in Baltimore.
Several of the Cassandras mentioned Ezra Klein as an example of someone pursuing the wrong political strategy, so I paraphrased a line of his back to them: “We are going to have to live here with each other, believing what we believe, disagreeing in the ways we disagree.... I think we also have to be looking for what we can recognize in each other.” What, I asked, was wrong with compromise and trying to find common ground?
“That statement assumes we want to eradicate them the way they want to eradicate us ... it’s disingenuous and frankly a bit badly intentioned,” Irina replied. “I don’t find civility a virtue when people wish me ill,” Melissa (from Baltimore), who has a trans teenager, said. “You’re asking me to be civil to people who are, in public, on TV, daily, discussing why I should be, if not jailed, investigated for child abuse for supporting medical care affirmed by major medical institutions and societies for my kid.” The Cassandras’ political strategy flows directly from having seen the elephant, from having understood that those on the right believe what they are telling us they believe. They are not against finding common ground in principle, but don’t think it’s possible with fascists. As Melissa put it, “I’m not opposed to discussion, I’m opposed to having a discussion with people whose beginning point for the discussion is the deprivation of my liberty.”
Fight. You may not win, but at least fight. This is now the dominant view among core Democratic voters. The Cassandras’ numbers have grown. Let’s say there were—and I’m just spitballing this—three million of them when Trump first ran: 1 percent of America; 10 percent of the Democratic primary electorate. Subsequent events created more. Let’s say Charlottesville, January 6, and Project 2025 each created that many again.
And they’ve not been universally ignored. If each Cassandra pulled two or three people around them from not liking Trump to strong opposition, that would mean there are 36 to 48 million Americans who want full opposition from their leaders and are ready to take significant actions themselves. That’s the whole Democratic primary electorate, and more on top. This would match polling showing most Democratic voters want more aggressive opposition. Not a majority of the country, but at least equal to the size of the deep MAGA zealots—and similarly distributed through all levels of society.
This has led to one of the weirder dynamics of the Trump era: When we picture a disaster scenario, we imagine those in charge trying to alert an apathetic public. But this seems to be the reverse; liberalism’s leaders seem unsure, while the rank and file are screaming at them to fight. Some seem to be getting the message—there’s a clear incentive to do so, in the form of primary votes—but it’s still strange. The troops are giving inspiring speeches to the general.
You’re Not Alone
It’s often overlooked due to the pervasive sexist assumption of female weakness, but Cassandras are not merely bewailing bystanders. Cassandras fight. When it counts, they show courage.
The mythical Cassandra, in one version of the story, grabbed an ax in one hand, a flaming torch in the other, and rode a (real) horse toward the wooden one in an attempt to destroy it. Ripley in Alien works better as a female character, but she’s no damsel in distress, outthinking and eventually outfighting the predator her crew mates so foolishly brought onboard. Jurassic Park’s Grant and Malcolm are academics, not action heroes, and they have many of the foibles of those who lead an intellectual life. But then the fences fail, and to protect other people’s children, both will run into the rain to face a monster from another world.
I realized this is the final thing that predisposes someone to being a Cassandra, and allows us to complete our personality sketch: Cassandras are clear, critical thinkers who can connect the dots between different types of bad behavior. They have encountered the modern far right directly. They are earnest and have strong and consistent political values. And they have a quiet courage.
Courage isn’t part of Cassandras’ self-conception—again, they do not understand themselves as doing or saying anything exceptional. But there is a resoluteness to them. They don’t aspire to be cynical, savvy operators, they aspire to be good people. Some have demonstrated physical courage—Yona received threats of violence from their family. The Cassandras who came out or started transitioning in deeply red regions did so at some risk to themselves. Many Cassandras are parents, and their fears for the country are tied up in what they want for the next generation. When they talked about this, their voices took on the direct, declarative tone of those who would, without question, walk into traffic for their children.
We all like to think of ourselves as someone who’ll tell hard truths, or go against our groups’ consensus, but it’s much rarer than people imagine because it’s much harder than people imagine. Humans are hardwired to look to others for a model to follow. Just look at the anti-alarmists: Being a critical thinker with the courage to say unpopular things is at the heart of the justificatory myth they tell themselves. But these are virtues they have spectacularly failed to demonstrate over the last decade.
It’s easy to be angry about this. But at the end of the day, it’s all too human: taking the path of least resistance at every turn, even if that road ultimately ends in disaster, especially if that’s what everyone else in your tribe is doing. Going along, keeping your head down, is contagious.
But so is courage.
It is hard to say something that other people don’t want to hear, to be looked at like you’re crazy. Or to speak up in an environment where free speech can no longer simply be assumed. But it becomes so much easier when you have others with you. “I’m very fortunate in that some family members kinda took a similar journey ... we’ve had each other, and that’s been exceedingly helpful” Ryan told me.
We owe the Cassandras a great debt for being the first among us to raise their voices. It is largely because of them that we are not alone when we do; that there remains a critical mass of people, at all levels of society, resolutely opposed to our authoritarian drift. An army ready, eager even, to fight, if liberalism’s generals can only find it in themselves to actually lead it.
It is because of them there is hope.
