This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, host of the New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Thomas Zimmer. He’s a historian, he grew up in Germany. He spent some time in the States a few years ago—we got to know each other—he’s back in Germany now. He’s a really great historian and has done a really great job writing about this period of American Trumpism and this question of democracy. But he asks it in a much smarter way, which is: We’re not always debating democracy as such, we’re really debating how much democracy, and for whom. That’s a phrase he’s used a lot, and I’ve borrowed it from him. Thomas, welcome.
Thomas Zimmer: Thank you so much for having me—and again, apologies for keeping people waiting.
Bacon: That’s all right. So what we’re going to do today is talk about the democracy-versus-authoritarianism question, but I want to talk through it historically, because you’re a historian. I want to go through this first year of Trump, look at some of the things that have happened, and think about them in this democracy context.
So much has happened—so much bad has happened, is what I would say—and I want to think through some of it. I want to start at the beginning and ask [about] DOGE and this general layoff of federal workers, the destruction of USAID. What did you think about that at the time, and ... I’m sure you thought it was bad at the time, but is there anything different about it now?
Zimmer: Yeah, DOGE, that started immediately. And the first two to three months after Trump took power is when I was generally speaking the most concerned, the most alarmed, the least optimistic about the fate of the republic. Three things stood out to me.
One is the speed and the scope of the DOGE destruction. It was so aggressive—a historically completely unprecedented level of self-sabotage. No country has ever done that to itself.
Bacon: No country has laid off its federal workforce in this way, you mean?
Zimmer: No country has ever just deliberately, for absolutely no external reason whatsoever, gone on this kind of rampage to completely destroy its own state capacity. Because that’s basically what’s happening—completely unprecedented destruction of state capacity. I think the consequences of that will be felt in the United States for decades. For decades, really.
The second thing that stood out to me: It was not just Elon Musk and the DOGE boys—it was also Stephen Miller, it was also Russell Vought. All of these different MAGA factions, basically a feeding frenzy from all the different corners of MAGA world, all unleashed at the same time. Go destroy the system. It was a complete unleashing of the destructive energies of MAGA, which I don’t think necessarily had any cohesiveness to it, but it added up to this vast destruction.
At the same time, we didn’t see any kind of systematic pushback—at least not from America’s civic institutions or America’s civic elites. There were protests from the ground up, but on the civic-institutional level, there was this pervasive tendency to acquiesce and align with the regime. That all happened within the first eight to 12 weeks or so.
So by the end of March, early April 2025, I was thinking: Wow, they seem to be actually succeeding with this strategy. They had this strategy going in: We’re going to go quick ... we’re going to overwhelm the system quickly. For those first two or three months, it looked like they would actually succeed.
But if you ask me today, I’m feeling less pessimistic. I think this initial strategy of overwhelming the system and overwhelming any resistance has largely failed. The societal resistance has hardened. We’ve seen a significant counter-mobilization from American society, and now, in terms of how close they got to actually consolidating authoritarian rule across all spheres of American life, they’re further away from that than now they were after those first 10 to 12 weeks.
Bacon: Let me follow up to ask: One thing that happened immediately was that Elon Musk was very involved in the government for about two months and then walked away. Was that because of the protests, or was it because he got bored? What’s your sense of how that happened?
Zimmer: I think what happened is that: If you look at the different factions of the MAGA coalition—Trump is basically a representative of this tech feudalism, these weird tech-feudalism that they want to install. And then you have the Christian nationalists, you have the America First nativists. If you really think through what kind of America they are envisioning, they’re not all envisioning the same thing. There’s actually quite significant tension between the different visions they’re pursuing.
Now, initially, in the first few weeks, it all worked out because it was all about what they always called a counter-revolution—they weirdly think there’s been a left-wing revolution and now they are the counter to that. So initially it was just about: Go destroy the system, do the counter-revolution, don’t even think about what comes after. So initially that worked.
But quite quickly they realized they were not all on the same page. What Russell Vought wants to do with the administrative state—which is not just destroy it, but also use it to impose a reactionary order on American society—that’s not what Elon Musk was doing, that’s not what DOGE was doing. So these tensions quite quickly got to the point where Elon got a little pushback from within the MAGA coalition.
And then he got all annoyed about it—all these people have incredibly thin skin. The least amount of pushback and they’re like, OK, I’m out. That probably didn’t have much to do with the protests. It had more to do with [the fact that] Elon had no idea what he was doing. He thought he was going to go in and do what he did when he took over Twitter—destroy everything, lash out, and declare victory. And that wore thin pretty quickly. Then you had someone like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller saying, Maybe this is not exactly what we want to do. So Musk quickly lost interest.
Bacon: I want to move to the second thing, which I’m going to call the great capitulation—which is that you saw these law firms, universities, the moment Trump threatened federal funding, they immediately close their DEI office or stop representing various liberal clients.
You saw this in law firms and universities particularly, but a lot of sectors of American life, corporations, were just bowing down very quickly. That was the most disheartening part early on, where it seemed not only was the Democratic Party not resisting, but the whole civil society was not, either. Talk about how you felt about that then, and where we are now.
Zimmer: Absolute disaster. That really was the thing that initially made me most pessimistic—really made me feel like they’re going to succeed with this authoritarian project. Because any assumption of democratic resilience in the United States—which a lot of very smart observers thought—was that there’s no question that the Trumpists want to install authoritarian rule, but they’re dealing with a system with relatively strong [civic institutions], at least on the level of civil society: a lot of institutions with a lot of resources at their disposal to push back against this kind of authoritarian project.
Universities with billions and billions of dollars. Rich law firms. The most powerful media companies in the world. A lot of observers, I think quite reasonably, assumed that Trumpists would struggle when up against these types of civic institutions—which a country like Hungary just didn’t have when Orbán came to power. The United States did have them, at least on paper. And so you thought they [would] struggle with this.
But then you realize: No, they’re not struggling with this. Because all of these elites who are in charge of these institutions showed this pervasive tendency to just acquiesce and align with the regime—for different reasons. Some because they felt the pressure was so high. Some because they fully bought into this idea that Trump really represented the “will of the people.”
Bacon: That’s an important one.
Zimmer: Right, absolutely. [It’s] the key assertion behind the MAGA assault. It’s all built on: We represent the will of the people, we can do whatever we want, because the will of the people is ultimately above the law, above the Constitution. A lot of these people in charge of these institutions bought into this whole thing. And then finally, I think there were also a lot of people—someone like Bezos at The Washington Post—who were quite glad that Trump got back to power, because they really thought all this “woke radicalism” of the Biden era had just gone too far, and you needed to push back against it.
All of this combined to produce this pervasive tendency to acquiesce. And that was so disheartening initially—because on paper you can have all these powerful institutions, but if the people in charge just don’t do anything to push back against authoritarianism, then you get authoritarianism.
Bacon: And now I feel like the capitulation has declined a bit. Do you agree that these institutions have gotten—not where I’d want them to be, but they’ve gotten back their muscle a little bit? How do you see that from where you are?
Zimmer: I agree. You see it with universities, for instance. Initially you had the complete surrender of Columbia. But not all universities have followed the Columbia model—Harvard has not. So Harvard was like: No, we’re not just going to surrender. They sued the administration, and everyone who sues succeeds in court against this administration.
Bacon: Yeah.
Zimmer: It’s a very mixed bag, still. But that’s still better than what we had in the first eight to 10 weeks, where it wasn’t a mixed bag—it was just pervasive surrender. Now, on the university level, it’s a mixed bag. On the media institution level, it’s a mixed bag. What all of these institutions are starting to realize is that this whole “will of the people” thing just isn’t true. They’ve got enough data points now to realize that this whole lasting rightward realignment of American society just didn’t happen. It was a myth—it was never true. And so they are more reluctant now to go along with Trumpism than they were initially.
Bacon: But it’s not great that our civil institutions had to wait for the poll numbers. That’s what you’re hinting at—when Trump went from 49 to 42 in approval, they were like, OK. You want your institutions to be strong regardless of what the president’s poll numbers are. Even if he were in the seventies, you’d want them to resist authoritarianism. They might not do it—but this is not a good sign for our institutions.
Zimmer: It’s a disaster.... On the level of pushback from below, like the mobilization of people, the American people in the streets have been protesting right from the start. There was always this myth that there were no protests, but that was never true. There have been protests all over the country, much more sustained than during the first Trump administration. The people from below were like: No, we don’t want this. But the specific institutions—on the level of the people in charge of these civic institutions—just a disaster of a performance.
Bacon: So when I think about authoritarianism, I think about dictators, I think about military in the streets. And there was definitely a period where they deployed the National Guard to L.A., had the National Guard and ICE all over Chicago. D.C. had the National Guard—I used to live there—and there were troops on the D.C. Metro, where I spent a lot of time. That was the part that really bothered me most.
That’s ... the simple way to think about authoritarianism.... It wasn’t military deployments all over the country, but it was in major cities. How did you see that then, and how do you see it now? We’ll come to Minnesota later, but I want to talk about these other cities right now.
Zimmer: When, in June, they deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, there seemed to be a clear path toward straight-up autocracy. They would use aggressive immigration raids to basically provoke violent confrontations in the streets.
Then they would use the violent confrontations in the streets as an excuse to say: Look, this is an emergency, we have to send in the troops now. At the time it really felt like: This is just another escalation on the path toward authoritarianism. But we also have to remember that didn’t quite happen—because the regime’s strategy of deploying the National Guard reached an impasse quite quickly. The courts said, You can’t do this. They wanted to send the National Guard to Portland.
They wanted to send the National Guard to Chicago. The courts said: Nope, can’t do this. The administration wanted the Supreme Court to override the lower courts, but the Supreme Court—even this Supreme Court—said, No, we’re not going to let you send the National Guard to Chicago. Trump basically ended the year by announcing he would no longer be attempting to send the National Guard into Chicago and Portland.
What you see there is a dynamic where—look, absolutely no question about the authoritarian intentions of this regime. Limitless authoritarian intentions. But their ability to impose their authoritarian desires on the country, that has run into limits and obstacles. That’s where we see this dynamic play out.
Bacon: I remember him saying we’re not going to deploy the guard very much, and I guess the court rulings ... but the court rulings were somewhat limited. I’m relieved he hasn’t used the National Guard in other places, but I’m not totally sure why. Is it unpopular? Is it legally complicated? Some of the governors were objecting. Is it a combination of those things? What do you think is stopping him?
Zimmer: Definitely a combination, but what stands out here is that while the Trumpists have basically been talking about not needing to follow court orders—We have a right to ignore the courts, because we represent the will of the people and the courts have no right to interfere—they explicitly, even in court, the DOJ started making that argument in court about a year ago, in late March and early April, when it was all about the Alien Enemies Act and the disappearing of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.
All of a sudden, in court, they argued: We don’t have to follow court orders, we represent the will of the people. Now, they said this, but they’ve not actually done that. They’ve not actually started ignoring the courts. They try to go to the Supreme Court to get it to overrule the lower courts, but it’s not true that the Trump administration completely ignores the courts.
The federal district courts, which are overwhelmingly deciding against the Trump administration, they are slowing this administration down.... Here, again, you had a district court say: You cannot deploy the National Guard to Chicago or to Portland. And the Trump administration felt obligated to kind of accept that ruling.
Bacon: Let me interrupt to ask a question.... We’ve mentioned Orbán already. Is Trump not as authoritarian as him?
Because they do seem to actually care about court rulings most of the time, and I’m surprised by that. Were Bolsonaro and Orbán ultimately accountable in the same way too? Or is Trump, while a terrible person, not quite as authoritarian as other people are?
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, no—he’s definitely at least as authoritarian. I think his authoritarian desires are limitless; on that level, no question about it. But he’s in a much weaker position than someone like Orbán. When Orbán came to power in Hungary in 2010, he was extremely popular. He had overwhelming support. Like 75 to 80 percent of the people supported what he was offering. Whereas Trump—and sometimes I encounter this [objection]: Who cares about public opinion? Trump doesn’t care about public opinion. But he does. He has to care about public opinion. Even if he thinks he can ignore it, it’s just not true. Even the most staunchly authoritarian regimes in history had to care about it.
Bacon: Help me understand that. Why do they have to? You can impose policies on people as long as an election isn’t close by without losing the election. But why do authoritarians care about public opinion? I actually don’t know the answer to this question.
Zimmer: First of all, America still does have competitive elections—they’re not free and fair, but they are still competitive, as we just saw in November. That’s the first thing. The second thing is: In a complex modern society, every government just has to rely on a certain level of, not complicity—but a certain level of people going along. They need millions of people to do their jobs, otherwise society collapses.
They rely, to a certain extent, on people going along with the regime. Theoretically, an authoritarian regime could ramp up oppression dramatically, to the point where by pure oppression they get the people to go along. But the Trumpists don’t have the necessary apparatus to do that. The American government does not have an apparatus of millions of ICE agents that can just occupy every city—that’s just not where we are.
They tried in Minneapolis—a midsize American city—and they mobilized most of ICE’s and Border Patrol’s operative capacities, and yet still, they couldn’t get the protests to stop. They do not have an apparatus vast enough to just occupy the whole country. They need people to go along, to some extent. If you are vastly unpopular, at some point that does become a massive problem, even for the most authoritarian regime. Even the Nazis cared about their public standing. You have to care about public standing.
Bacon: I think it was in August—there was a period in the summer where they started getting U.S. attorneys—Trump would fire whatever U.S. attorney was in an area, and then they would file indictments. They indicted Letitia James, the attorney general of New York. There was an indictment of James Comey, the former FBI director.
We were seeing ... the government using its prosecutorial power to take on its political enemies. That is definitely a sign of dictatorship and authoritarianism. That was very worrying to me in August and in the fall. Talk about what you thought about that then and what you think about it now.
Zimmer: Absolutely. Again, something that in the moment definitely looked like they’re taking the next step on that escalation ladder that ultimately leads to full-on autocratic rule. That’s what autocrats do. Trump specifically sees the DOJ entirely as his instrument to go after his enemies.
In the moment, extremely worrisome. But you have to not just look at, Oh, they went after James Comey, but also what becomes of that—because they didn’t succeed. In all of the cases you just mentioned, either some judge threw out the charges—
Bacon: Or the grand jury wouldn’t indict, in a couple of cases.
Zimmer: Either the grand jury wouldn’t indict in the first place, or a judge would throw out the charges. I think that happened in December. It’s the same with, for instance, when in January they arrested Don Lemon—former CNN journalist—they arrest him clearly on bogus charges. Again, you think ... This is so dangerous, the regime is now arresting journalists. Yes, that is true, and it is absolutely an indication of how staunchly authoritarian their desires are.
But then you look at what becomes of that, and it just doesn’t work. What they’re trying to do is make Don Lemon or James Comey into a warning to everyone else: This is what’s going to happen to you if you don’t stop resisting. But it hasn’t worked. Journalists like yourself have not stopped covering this administration critically—because everyone looks at the Don Lemon case and thinks: That’s bogus, they’re not going to get through with this.
It’s really important ... not to buy into the idea that the authoritarian regime is omnipotent. They’re lawless—absolutely lawless—but that doesn’t make them omnipotent. They still have to deal with the realities of a very complex modern society and a complex political system. I believe, if you look back at the James Comey indictment now, it is more indicative of the limits of the authoritarian assault than of the authoritarian assault succeeding.
Bacon: I’m going to move to a fifth topic. This is a more challenging one. The 2025 elections, where the Democrats won in New Jersey and Virginia by a lot, and won a lot of other places.... Throughout 2025, Democrats did really well. I want to talk about that, because I remember in 2022 there was a midterm election and the Democrats did well, and a lot of people said: Democracy saved, everything’s fine, Biden’s going to be fine, Trump is going to be dethroned by Ron DeSantis.
You and I were doing a podcast back then and you were like: Too much celebrating—Trump is fine. Then, two years later, Trump won the presidency. So I’m curious what you made of the [2025] elections—what you thought about them then, what you think about them now. Was there too much celebration? The right amount of celebration?
Zimmer: It doesn’t change the fundamental reality of American politics, which is [that] one of the two major parties is in the hands of a staunchly authoritarian movement. That means in every election, it’s basically democracy itself on the ballot.
Bacon: Can I interrupt to ask one question? Is one of the parties controlled by an authoritarian—I think that’s how you phrase it—or is one of the parties authoritarian? That’s a distinction worth thinking about, because if it’s JD Vance or Rubio or whoever ... I want to understand what you mean.
Zimmer: It is absolutely an interesting distinction. Although in practice I think it’s the same thing, because that authoritarian movement—broadly speaking, MAGA, or Trumpism—is now so fully in charge of the Republican Party that they have become one. But technically speaking, this was an authoritarian insurgency: the radical right flank of the Republican Party, which had always been part of the Republican Party but never so fully in charge. Now they are basically fully in charge. That problem doesn’t go away just because Democrats win some seats, or do well in a midterm election, or whatever.
But I do think these election results really mattered, because the main claim that the Trumpists have built their authoritarian assault on is that they represent the will of the people. We’ve seen just too many people on the ... center-right to center-left buy into this idea—that yes, there was this rightward [re]alignment in American politics, that Trump ... is the tribune of the people, that he does represent the will of the people. And the election results in November were an important data point to remind people who were inclined to buy into that idea that it’s just not true.
The numerical majority of the American people are not on board with this idea of white Christian patriarchal dominance across all spheres of American life. It’s not the case that a majority of Americans, if you ask them, “Do you think America should be a pluralistic society or a white Christian patriarchal homeland?”—it’s not true that a majority would say it should be the latter. It’s really important to remember that. To the extent that the election results helped people remember it, they really mattered.
Bacon: And you probably still feel that way today, right?
Zimmer: Yes, absolutely. It was an important moment, and I think that even more so now, because the data points keep accumulating. We had the “No Kings” protests in the fall—7 million people out in the streets. We had the election results just a few weeks later: “No Kings” was in mid-October, election results in early November. And then you had the mass mobilization on the ground in Minneapolis. And across the country, wherever ICE shows up, people stand up and say: We do not want you to kidnap our neighbors.
If you take that all together, we’ve now had a significant period of several months where, over and over again, the American people—I don’t want to sound too patriotic here, I’m German—are clearly sending a signal to their own elected officials, especially in the Democratic Party: We don’t actually want this, can you please fight against it? And that matters.
Bacon: Minneapolis—having two citizens killed on video—was a really searing experience. And seeing the Trump administration have all those federal forces descend on that city that’s—I’ll say it—not perceived as Black or Latino, like Los Angeles ... or Chicago, or ... D.C., too. Part of it is that he doesn’t like Tim Walz or Jacob Frey—but to see them crack down on that kind of place was scary. The killings ... were scary too.
Obviously the protests happened, and that was strong and good. But how did you see Minneapolis when it started, and ... how do you see it now?
Zimmer: I want to make sure people don’t misunderstand what I’m saying—I’m not saying things are fine. Because what you saw in Minneapolis—that is exactly what, unfortunately, we need to expect more of: a regime that will escalate its assault in the areas where it believes it still has the power to escalate.
That is immigration, and that’s also foreign policy—areas where the president has more power, or where it’s more difficult to curtail the power of the president. Traditionally, the executive has a lot of leeway on immigration and a lot of leeway on foreign policy. What you see now is a regime that is escalating and lashing out in those areas.
Bacon: We’ll come back to that, because that’s an interesting point.
Zimmer: Yeah, absolutely. That will cause tremendous harm and tremendous damage, and it will be bloody at times. So I’m not saying: Things are fine, don’t worry about it. I’m extremely worried.
But it is important—I felt this at the time, and I’m feeling it more strongly now—to realize that they failed to achieve any of their objectives in Minneapolis. Clearly this type of paramilitary occupation ... was intended to send a signal to the rest of the country: This is a warning, this will happen to your city if you don’t go with the program. And instead what they ran into was a local population that decided: We will not let you kidnap our neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of what gods they pray to. These are our neighbors.
You mentioned the racial dimension of this—Minneapolis, or rather Minnesota, is an overwhelmingly white state, and this was an overwhelmingly white protest, mostly because people of color were too threatened, too acutely endangered, to even go out and protest. The ICE agents faced white people in the streets. That is fundamentally just proving ... the MAGA regime theory of the case wrong. MAGA fundamentally believes that multiculturalism, multiracialism, pluralistic democracy—it’s all a lie, it doesn’t work, nobody actually wants it, and ultimately white people will side with other white people and with whiteness over pluralism.
On the ground in Minneapolis, they ran into a population that decided: No, that’s actually not the case. We will prove to you exactly the type of social cohesion that MAGA says is impossible in a pluralistic society. Social cohesion, if you believe them, only works in a racially, ethnically, and culturally homogeneous white society.... Then they ran into this mobilized protest where people said: We will not let you kidnap our neighbors. This is fundamentally a threat to the very theory of the case behind this white nationalist project. So it really matters.
Bacon: We can’t really do a “before and now” because it just happened—but: the overthrowing of Maduro, and now the Ayatollah, these unilateral invasions. You said something interesting I hadn’t thought of: Because they don’t have as much power domestically, they are lashing out abroad. That seems correct, even if we can never prove it.... But talk about these [wars]. I don’t want to celebrate the Iranian government or Maduro, but I remember the Venezuela day, my wife got up and said: “What happened? We overthrew the leader of another country? I didn’t know we were even thinking about that.”
Iran was more expected, I guess, but she was stunned. A lot of people were. I wasn’t surprised, because they had been hinting at these things. But I was outraged. I know we don’t think congressional authorization matters, but I think it does matter that the public at least nominally supports a war and that Congress has bought in. Here, neither of those things [is true]—these are wars fought by Donald Trump, and the Republican Party agrees because he said so. These are unilateral wars that the world doesn’t want where we overthrow leaders. I find this to be authoritarianism—not hitting me, but still very scary. Talk about it from your point of view.
Zimmer: To some extent this is unfortunately exactly what you would expect this kind of regime to do. When faced with frustrations and public pressure, they ramp up the demonization and persecution of vulnerable groups at home and throw themselves into “adventures” abroad. That’s just what authoritarian regimes do.
I think the more they run into hurdles, and they fail to overcome the protest or resistance at home, the more they will look for areas where their desire to dominate, to plunder, to punish is more easily put into practice. That is immigration and that is foreign policy, where unfortunately the president’s power is a lot harder to restrain than on the domestic front.
To me, illegal wars abroad and ICE concentration camps at home are kind of the same thing—escalations in areas where this regime can still escalate. And the big fear for me would be: Can they use this illegal war abroad ... as an excuse to ramp up oppression at home? Can they use it to escalate the crackdown against the domestic opposition?
However, what we’re seeing is that they have made no effort to justify this war at home—no effort at all to get the American people on their side. It’s extremely unpopular, what they’re doing. We have seen very little of the rally-around-the-flag effect that you would usually expect. There’s been no systematic effort so far to use this as an excuse to ramp up oppression at home.
What we’re seeing is escalation, and it is terrible, and it is causing tremendous damage—not just to the United States but to the entire rest of the world—but from the perspective of [whether] this is a plausible path toward consolidating authoritarian rule: they’re not doing it right. They’re too incompetent. This is too haphazard; there’s no planning, there’s no strategy.
I don’t want to tell people, It’s fine, don’t worry. What I’m saying is: A smarter, more competent, more nimble regime would do a lot more dangerous things at home with something like this, which they’re just not doing.
Bacon: Let me ask a hard question.... You’re in Germany—where in Germany?
Zimmer: I’m in Hamburg, in the north of Germany.
Bacon: Is there anything you think you’re seeing ... or people outside the U.S. might understand about what’s happening—that maybe those of us in the U.S. don’t see as clearly?
Zimmer: That’s an interesting question. I’ll say this: As you saw, there was the Munich Security Conference a few weeks back, where Marco Rubio gave his speech. What you saw there is that the rest of the world is still struggling to fully grapple with what’s happening in the United States. A few years ago, I would have said the rest of the world has a clearer understanding of the type of authoritarian threat that the United States is facing. Maybe they’re not so willingly buying into ideas of American exceptionalism, and [that] America, the soul of the nation is democratic, and freedom and liberty and whatever, and “it can’t happen here.” A few years ago, I would have said maybe foreigners are slightly more immune to that exceptionalist mythology about the United States.
Now I would almost say it has flipped—to the point where, when I talk to people here, when I write for German newspapers and talk to German media, I struggle with getting these people to fully grapple with who is in charge in the United States. That it really is a fundamentally authoritarian regime that wants to consolidate authoritarian rule and wants to destroy the liberal international order, whatever that may be.
What you see now is the rest of the world is just scared, because it is a scary proposition. The United States is too powerful—economically, militarily, culturally—for the rest of the world to not be immediately affected by whatever happens on the domestic front. It’s just not possible for anyone in the rest of the world to say: Whatever, if they want Trump, let them have Trump, what do we care?
We care because every collective action problem the rest of the world faces—climate change, or whatever you want to look at—nothing can be solved without a functional U.S. government that is somewhat willing to contribute to solving these problems. The rest of the world is beginning to understand what the world looks like if the one superpower that is left is in the hands of a government like this—which is, at best, fully dysfunctional, and at worst, a fully authoritarian regime. That’s almost too scary for the rest of the world to fully grapple with.
Bacon: Let me ask two questions about the Dems. We’ve talked about the Republicans and Trump most of the time.... Then we’ll close up here. The first is: When you and I first spoke, it was early on when Biden became president, and you used the phrase “how much democracy and for whom.” I don’t have strong views about Medicare for All versus Medicare for those who want it ... I think I understand both positions. But the place where what you said resonated with me is this: It seems to me that often the left of the Democratic Party is pushing for more democracy for people who are Black, or transgender, or gay, and leading on that—while the centrists in the Democratic Party are sort of going along with the right in allowing democracy to be for fewer people, and more for white people and fewer for these excluded people.... It’s not a binary of who’s for democracy and who’s against it.
Liz Cheney is better than Donald Trump, but in some ways is not calling for as much democracy as AOC. Whether AOC can win a general election is a different question, but that way of thinking about the center versus the left is different from thinking about who wants Medicare for All versus who wants Medicare for who wants it. I don’t have a question here, but I want you to respond to that.
Zimmer: A big problem in the broader understanding of America’s history is that everything in American history has been called democracy. America has called itself a democracy since the start. And depending on how you want to measure or define that, it’s not even wrong—by contemporaneous standards in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, America was quite democratic, if you happened to be a white man. It was something very different if you happened not to be a white man. So when we think about democracy, we have to think about what kind of democracy we’re talking about.
Pre-1960s America was a white man’s democracy—or a racial-caste democracy, basically—a system where the democratic promise was strictly limited to certain groups. Since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, there is at least the aspiration to extend the democratic promise beyond white people, and extend it into more spheres of life: into the family, into the workplace, into the public square—not just in terms of voting rights. The real question has been: Who gets to actually participate in this democratic project, and who gets to have, at best, a conditional status in [it]? It’s not so much a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on democracy. What we are actually fighting over is: Should the United States be a multiracial, pluralistic democracy, which basically means a society in which the status of the individual would no longer be determined by factors of race, gender, religion, or wealth?
Bacon: Race, religion, gender—“multicultural” gets into that—and then “pluralistic” means that the rich do not dominate the country.
Zimmer: It’s an egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy. Do we want this, or do we want something that’s not that—where, on paper, you can have voting rights for everyone, but the system is set up in a way that still maintains certain hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth?
Bacon: ... Michael Bloomberg and Zohran Mamdani probably disagree a bit, even though they’re in the same so-called party and they’re both for democracy.
Zimmer: Absolutely—100 percent. And depending on how you phrase the question, you get different coalitions. Because if we’re asking: do we oppose the authoritarian onslaught of Trumpism, yes or no?—then I find myself in the same coalition with Liz Cheney. But if we ask: Do we want this country to be a multiracial, pluralistic democracy, or a restricted democracy dominated mostly by white Christians?—then all of a sudden I’m no longer in the same coalition.
Bacon: She wouldn’t phrase it that way—she doesn’t prefer a white-dominant system, I get the point you’re making—but she doesn’t want to make the changes needed to make it egalitarian. That’s the real issue.
Zimmer: She has a long political record that we could look at. But this really matters, because it also matters in terms of right now. The immediate assault on democratic self-government in the United States, on the republic, on the very foundations of the rule of law: That has to be defeated for any kind of multiracial, pluralistic, egalitarian system to emerge. You have to defeat this authoritarian Trumpist onslaught. And in that struggle, it is important to have a broad coalition that says: We may not agree on everything in terms of our end vision for what this society should look like, but can we at least agree that this type of authoritarian assault on the fundamentals of democratic self-government has to be defeated? And so that’s useful.
I get frustrated sometimes with someone like Bill Kristol—the never-Trump conservatives, who aren’t even conservatives anymore. We need to get to a place where we can say: Someone like Bill Kristol has a lot of responsibility for getting the country to where Trump was even possible. The man was all in on elevating Sarah Palin in 2008. We don’t have to forget this.
But we can also acknowledge that since 2016 he has been pretty steadfast in his opposition to the Trumpist assault on the system. Both things matter—at the same time I don’t think we need to be stupid about this. We can all hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. And I think that’s the kind of situation we’re in.
Bacon: Last question—I’m glad you brought up Bill Kristol, because I was going to ask about this. In some ways, since the second Trump term started, people like Bill Kristol have been saying from the beginning: We have to stop this, this is serious. Whereas Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the leaders of the opposition, had to be goaded into saying: We have to have protests.
Talk to me about why the official Democratic Party has been so sluggish—why have they struggled to understand the stakes—whereas, as you said, regular citizens have been involved from the beginning, they’ve been protesting, and even some Republicans, if you read The Bulwark, have gotten there. The actual leaders of the Democratic Party seem like they can’t get there. Why do you think that might be?
Zimmer: To some extent, it has to do with the fact that a lot of these elected leaders on the Democratic side entered politics a long time ago, in a completely different era—when it was still a different Republican Party. If you entered politics in the 1970s or 1980s, all of these right-wing authoritarian forces were already part of the Republican coalition, but they were not in charge. That was not necessarily who you were meeting across the aisle in Congress or in the Senate. That is a different reality, and some of these elected officials on the Democratic side have really struggled to adjust to a completely changed political landscape.
The Democratic Party itself is split between those who really want to fight back and those who want to try to do politics as usual and get back to some kind of normalcy.
Bacon: And that’s not totally ideological. Bill Kristol is probably to the right of many Democrats on policy, yes.
Zimmer: It’s not ideological at all—it doesn’t really map onto a left-right spectrum. The people over at The Bulwark, which is the institutional home of the formerly never-Trump conservatives, are all in on fighting against Trump. They really want to fight Trump, and they’re still pretty conservative.
With the Democratic Party, there’s an institutional culture of: We need to be the adults in the room, we need to uphold the institutions, we need to uphold the norms and unity and all that. In a vacuum, that’s all perfectly fine—it’s even noble, sincerely, to have a party committed to norms and institutions in a functioning system. That is exactly what you would want. The problem is: If the system doesn’t function anymore, and if those norms and institutions are being weaponized against democracy and against the rule of law, then you can’t just sit there.
Take the Supreme Court as a concrete example. It’s all noble and fair to say: We need to preserve trust in the institutions. OK, perfect. But what do you do when one of the key institutions—in this case, the Supreme Court—is in the hands of people who are using it as the spearhead of a reactionary assault on pluralistic democracy? Then you can’t just keep saying: We want to preserve trust in the institution. You don’t want trust in that kind of institution at that point.
It’s been very difficult for a lot of Democratic elected officials to flip that switch—to say: Didn’t we always say unity, norms, trust the institutions, and now you want us to burn down the system? No, we don’t want you to burn down the system, but we want you to recognize that the system as it is doesn’t work and needs transformation. We don’t just need restoration. We don’t just need to turn the clock back to 2016, to some pre-Trump status quo ante. That’s not going to be enough. At this point, most people—certainly outside Democratic leadership—
Bacon: Most Democratic voters feel this way. I’m not sure if most politicians do.
Zimmer: Yes. The Democratic base overwhelmingly feels that we now have definitive proof that the system as it was until 2016 just wasn’t good enough. That was the system that gave rise to Trump in the first place. If we ever want something better to come out of this, we are going to need transformative change. We need transformation instead of just restoration.
If it ever comes to that—and again, I’m knocking on wood—if it ever comes to the point where we can say: We have fought back and defeated the immediate Trumpist assault on the system, now what are we going to do? The struggle will be between those who say we just need to restore the pre-Trump normal, versus those who, quite rightfully, say: That’s not going to be good enough. If we want something lasting, something properly democratic, we are going to need to achieve transformative change here—as difficult as that will be.
There have been moments in American history where that actually happened—where people decided: Look, restoring is not going to be good enough, we have to transform. That happened after the Civil War, with Reconstruction. It happened with the New Deal. It happened during the 1960s with the civil rights legislation. And I’m hoping that coming out of this, people will realize we need to think in those terms: big-picture, transformative change.
Bacon: Although the specifics might look different—ranked-choice voting, or other democracy reforms, rather than economic transformation. What transforming the system looks like at this stage is obviously different from the 1960s. I’m not sure I know exactly what it entails, but it has to involve transforming the system in certain ways: less influence from super PACs, that kind of thing.
Zimmer: It’s more about asking: What is it we’re trying to achieve here? Do we still think it’ll be enough to just pretend the past ten years didn’t happen, turn the clock back to 2016, and play so-called normal politics again? Or do we understand that the system evidently wasn’t good enough, because it gave rise to Trump in the first place?
Trump didn’t just fall out of the sky—he was not a complete accident, not a complete departure from what came before. So we need to grapple with this honestly and find a way to—again, I think the only realistic path at this point is to say: If we want a lasting democratic system, we are going to have to transform it, rather than just pretend we can turn the clock back ten years.
Bacon: That’s a great place to end. Tell people where they can read you, or if you’re doing any audio or video—talk about where people can find your work, because I think it’s really exceptional and really important. And if you’re on Bluesky or other platforms, talk about that too.
Zimmer: I am active on social media—that’s mostly Bluesky these days, so you’ll find me there. My handle is “thomaszimmer.” And most importantly, I write a newsletter about American history and politics called Democracy Americana, where I try to provide the kind of big-picture lens that we’ve basically been trying to apply here over the past 45 minutes or so: Stepping back from the day-to-day news cycle and reflecting on what it all means in terms of where we are in this broader struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in this country.
You’ll find it on Substack, though it is now mostly hosted on a platform called Steady. If you subscribe on Substack, I will migrate you over—no problem. So that’s where I send out these long-form essays every week, trying to reflect on the bigger picture and where we stand.
Bacon: That’s great. I hope everybody checks that out. Thomas, it’s great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Bye.
Zimmer: Thank you so much, Perry. Thank you. Bye.
