Donald Trump's conspiracy mongering is a serious political emergency

Donald Trump's horrendous October is continuing apace, with one new sexual assault allegation after the next. He is now down by nearly 8 points in the national poll average. Hillary Clinton's victory seems assured, as seen by her characteristically cautious stepping back from the race to let Trump implode on his own.

Trump has responded to this by furiously doubling down on every deranged conspiracy theory at hand. An international cabal of financiers are conspiring to help Clinton, he says, along with members of the media who come in for enraged denunciations from Trump supporters at his rallies. Aside from the increasingly overt anti-Semitism on display, perhaps the most alarming development is Trump's constant assertions that the election is being stolen. His top surrogates, including Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, are echoing the message.

All this deranged ranting seems unlikely to help Trump electorally — if anything, it will have the opposite effect. But it has convinced nearly three-quarters of Republicans that Clinton is likely to steal the election. Assuming a Clinton victory, some two-fifths of voters may believe that Clinton was not rightfully elected president.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

So how should Democrats react? They must be vigilant about right-wing terrorism, but also must double down on quality, effective government.

The most important immediate task is to ensure the integrity of the election in November. Trump's election talk is only the loudest entry in a long conservative tradition of alleging massive Democratic fraud to provide psychological cover for their own electoral shenanigans. To wit, several Republican states are flagrantly violating federal court orders to stop disenfranchising Democratic-leaning demographics. If Republican state officials will not obey the law, then federal law enforcement must force them to do it.

After the election, the worst possibility is that disgruntled Trumpists will form a militia and attempt open war on the United States government in an attempt to install Trump by force. Given the generally elderly demographics of Republican voters, and the fact that the U.S. economy is not nearly so brutal as, say, Germany's in 1932, this seems rather unlikely — and regardless, a handful of lightly-armed "tactical" obsessives are not likely to present a serious challenge to armored cavalry and drones.

However, I would be quite worried about right-wing terrorist cells attempting to assassinate federal officials, or right-wing mobs lynching somebody, and I hope the FBI is taking such possibilities seriously. Trump has given unprecedented credibility to extremist politics — two armed Trumpists recently stood outside the office of a Democratic candidate for Congress for 12 hours, in a obvious attempt at intimidation (naturally, they excused their actions by pointing to "possible persecution" on the part of Democrats). To the extent that right-wing forces actually plan or engage in terrorism in an attempt to undermine America's democratic institutions, federal law enforcement must suppress them, as President Grant did to the KKK.

However, the fact that stuff like this even has to be considered must be regarded as a serious political emergency. It is evidence of a serious crisis of legitimacy, which can only be tamped down — not permanently solved — with federal police force.

So in addition to the FBI, Democrats must redouble their efforts to provide clean, efficient, and just government. This could start by rationalizing and unifying electoral systems across the states, many of which are chaotic and disorganized. Part of the loam in which conspiracy theories grow is the actual reality of election systems being a janky mess. (Also, it should go without saying that, should Democrats take Congress, legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act must be passed immediately.)

Second, Democrats could stand to clean their own house. Justin Elliott of ProPublica recently wrote about an effort by the Obama administration to block an airline merger that was eventually abandoned due to a frenzy of lobbying from amoral Democratic Party hacks like Rahm Emanuel. That kind of thing contributes to a (largely correct) perception that the government is run by and for the rich and well-connected. Cozy insider dealing is not only unfair, it's undermining the foundations of the state.

Finally, any new social welfare benefits should be considered in the light of how it might bind the nation together. One of the great attractions of universal social insurance, aside from the direct benefits, is how it builds on the basic idea of citizenship — every member of a nation, regardless of other characteristics, gets exactly the same benefit. Rigidly means-tested benefits, like Clinton's new child tax credit, do not have this quality, no matter their other benefits.

There aren't many such programs that a relative cheapskate like Hillary Clinton might support — but I've got one idea: Put all children on Medicare. That's not exactly a universal benefit, but it's pretty close, and will be quite cheap. Aside from the value of having good care for children, this will give Democrats a simple and easy-to-understand new way to demonstrate the benefits of the federal government for theoretically everyone, as following generations will have grown up on the program — as opposed to the annoying and complicated jalopy that is the ObamaCare exchanges.

Ultimately, I doubt any of these will do that much to dissuade the really hardcore Trumpists. But they might somewhat deflate the anti-government hysteria. More to the point, there's really nothing else that can be done. As Steve Randy Waldman argues, the U.S. polity has been fraying for decades. Carefully knitting it back together will take time — but we must start now.