It is endlessly easy to whip ourselves into a fury. Because so few imagined it would be this bad. The second Trump administration has been a catastrophe for America. Even if it ended today, it would take decades to repair the harm it has caused—first to America, but also to the world.
Yet if we don’t learn to discipline ourselves, we will lose this republic. Like every great nation, then empire, then collapse in history’s past, ours will collapse too. And if it does, it will be our weakness, the absence of a certain discipline, that historians in other places at later times will look to as the explanation for how this collapse happened. The collapse is not inevitable unless our weakness is inevitable.
That direction is an election just over six months from now. It may be that MAGA Republicans succeed in changing the rules for that election. The Save America Act may make everything that follows in this essay irrelevant. But assuming there is a roughly fair and free election in November 2026, that election is the only opportunity we have to change the course of this disaster.
The question is, How?
In any normal election, strategy is clear: though in theory the objective of politicians is to persuade the other side to come to them, in practice, the strategy of ordinary campaigns is to simply turn out a base: to rally us…
