How bad is it going to get?

Pretty interesting discussion (gift link) among four NYT columnists about what Trump II is going to look like.

Lydia Polgreen: For me, the most significant development is what seems to be a broad infrastructure built to ensure fealty, not just to Trump but to a broader hard-right agenda that goes deep into the guts of government at many levels. Last week there was a report in ProPublica that the state of Georgia had disbanded the committee that examines maternal mortality, apparently in response to ProPublica reporting on women who died as a result of the state abortion ban. At the same time, the House just passed a bill that could quite easily result in nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica being targeted as “terrorist” organizations. It is a neat trick to ensure there is less information about the impact of abortion bans and less investigative reporting exposing that impact. Yes, the picks for several of his cabinet positions are terrifying, but it is also the way policy cascades through people’s lives that is really pretty alarming.

Jamelle Bouie: Those cabinet picks are revealing, though. Trump’s decision to nominate a set of cranks, charlatans and apparatchiks for key positions — and his threat to force them into office through essentially extra-constitutional means — is a clear indication that he intends to govern as a strongman. I would add that the elevation of men accused of varying degrees of sexual assault and abuse is a signal that this administration will be even more culturally reactionary and hostile to basic ideas of equality among citizens as was his first one.

Healy: Masha, you wrote a recent column about Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban in which you argued: “Trump’s first term, and his actions in the four years since, tracked the early record of Putin and Orban in important ways.” And then: “Looking closely at their trajectories,” you wrote, “gives a chillingly clear sense of where Trump’s second term may lead.” So I want to ask you: How do we know that things in America are really getting as bad as all that? That we are slipping in the direction of authoritarianism, if not autocracy? Where are the lines? What should we watch for?

Gessen: Funny you should ask about lines, Patrick. I always think back to an incident, I guess about 10 years ago now, when yet another Russian publication had its editors fired and replaced with people loyal to the regime. When they met with the staff, the new editors explained that the change was inevitable, because the old team had “crossed the hard line.” One of the staff members asked where exactly the line was. “It’s always shifting” was the response. And that’s the honest truth. It’s always shifting.

Consider this: Think of autocracy and democracy not so much as systems of government but as vectors — at any given point, a society is becoming more democratic or more autocratic. And we are on an autocratic trajectory already. The other day, for example, I heard the head of a major foundation say that they’d started communicating with grantees by phone rather than email, to avoid leaving a FOIA-ble trail on topics (such as critical race theory and D.E.I.) that will get them in trouble with the new administration. Boy, is this familiar, as are the threats to which this foundation is responding: the threat of having its nonprofit status revoked, the threat of being declared a “terrorist” organization, as Lydia mentioned. I’ve lived through this. It’s the same sense of familiarity I felt when The Washington Post and The L.A. Times yanked their presidential endorsements just before the election.

Ross Douthat doesn’t think it’s going to be that bad, and of course if you’re a reactionary crypto-integralist Catholic it probably won’t be.