"We are at an inflection point."
Director James Cameron said his film Titanic was "like a great novel that really happened." Ditto Trumpism the Sequel, as Trump is now plausibly hopeful of being the next GOP president as well as plausibly fearful of conviction and incarceration.
“The Inflection Election: Democracy or Neo-Fascism?” aims to warn busy and credulous Americans that 2024 will be an inflection election between a Party of Progress and a Party of Dangerous Extremism that, as this book explains throughout, is built on four cornerstones: lies, lawlessness, violence, and racism. To help stop that new threat, anxious Democrats could use a new vocabulary to aggressively decode MAGA radicalism in order to woo "soft Republicans" and undecided Independents.
This is not a "both-sides" analysis by a journalistic spectator, but is instead a " one-sided" guide by a progressive partisan-for Democracy and against the Far Right.
While neither side has a prohibitive advantage as of mid-2024, the stakes are no mystery. If the GOP should now win both the White House and Congress, with a revanchist Supreme Court already in its column, a numerical minority of Americans would then enjoy a temporary governing majority that could cancel a century of progress and make the world's oldest democracy no longer democratic. There must be a word that binds together such crazy-talk but it sure isn't "conservative" in the way Eisenhower, Reagan, or the Bushes would have understood it. For if all the radical policies and threats described throughout The Inflection Election were aggregated into a pointillist painting, the portrait would resemble Orban far more than Obama.
This is extremism posing as patriotism. It's tempting merely to shout, in the words of John McEnroe, "You. Cannot. Be. Serious!" That would be satisfying, but reckless. Instead, crushing it in 2024 is the best way to return to a healthy two-party system where losers respect the choice of voters, like in the good old days of 1789-2020. In a likely close 2024 national contest, “The Inflection Election” will be an entertaining and informative manifesto suggesting fresh language and narratives to keep Democrats on offense and Trump's MAGA party on the ropes. By Nov. 3, either a progressive majority believing in laws and elections or a violence-prone Neo-Fascism will likely steer the country for decades to come. It's either/or time.
