Opinion: Road through 2024 will require critical thinking, courage

In living rooms and at professional development workshops, on opinion pages and the halls of Congress, the people of the world’s only superpower are attacking one another. Fueled by disinformation, our representatives, party leaders, pundits, clergy, and other hyper-partisans have driven division so deeply into our collective psyche that many people — maybe most people — believe our political institutions’ actions are nearly lost.

It’s no wonder that veteran risk assessors Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan rank “The United States vs. itself” as the world’s top risk in the Eurasia Group’s “2024 Risk Report.”

As the 2024 presidential campaign takes shape, Donald Trump continues to attack every freedom-supporting institution in American life: elections, the press, and the courts. He continues lying about the 2020 election while insisting others also lie. He and his associates face scores of felony criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions for election interference and mishandling classified and top-secret documents. In two connected trials, Trump has been found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and then defaming her. Combined, the jury trial and the bench trial will force Trump to $89 million in damages to Carroll. He will have to pay $355 million for fraudulent business practices in New York. He threatens outlets that report these facts.

Partisan media tell very different stories about these events. Left-wing media hammer Trump’s legal woes, mock his legal team’s lack of preparedness, and cherry pick cases for sensational splashes. Right-wing media repeat Trump’s claims of being the target of a “witch hunt,” wholly ignore the substance of the cases if they cover them at all, and manufacture controversies to undermine results of elections they lose. Meanwhile, the Associated Press shows the U.S. is being torn apart by bad-faith actors — largely on the political right — while we have the fastest recovering economy in the world under President Biden.

Bremer and Kupchan predict it will all worsen this election year. “Republicans in Congress — and most conservative media, activist groups, and monied interests — will fall in line with (Trump).” To these semi-reluctant backers, it does not matter that he says he will be a dictator “on day one,” calls for anti-Constitutional “total immunity,” and “drives policy extremism, division, and gridlock.” Trump’s team will damage Americans’ abilities to tell truth from fiction.

If Trump wins, President Biden will concede. Democrats and many independents will still treat Trump as an illegitimate President, especially if he loses the popular vote again. The response will be even more protests than in 2017. Given Trump’s admiration for dictators like President Xi and Vladimir Putin, he will almost certainly crack down violently. He told his followers, “I am your retribution.” He will focus the entire American government on his opponents, real and imagined. Liz Cheney and the Republicans who once worked for him have already been targeted.

If President Biden wins, Trump will not concede. He is likely to use any and every tool — legal or illegal — to attack everything. His followers will attempt to procedurally and violently disrupt elections in different parts of the country, refining the 2020-21 playbook. He will use partisan media to manufacture more distrust in the elections and incite violence by amplifying anger he himself has already turned up. He will file frivolous lawsuits and cast more doubt on their findings should he lose more (he lost dozens in 2020). He will intimidate Republicans himself or through proxies.

Either way, chaos will be the means and the goal.

“The United States vs. itself” is real and present. We are the world’s least functional, most divided, and most vulnerable democracy. The road through 2024 will require all of us as citizens to adopt a new civic attitude of critical thinking, patience, presence, and courage. The future of our democratic republic requires it.

Peter Buck lives in State College and serves on the State College Area School District school board. His opinions do not represent any position by the board.