Do we have to think the unthinkable?

Leading American news media platforms have recently launched a flood of reports anticipating Donald Trump regaining the presidency in the 2024 election. The parade of horrors associated with a second Trump administration is so shocking it numbs the mind. They range from claims of “dictatorship” on Trump’s first day in office to threats of “retribution” against domestic enemies, including the free press (which Trump continues to characterize as “enemies of the people”). There are also threats of Trump withdrawing from NATO, using federal military forces to quell domestic disturbances (like the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police), and staging the “largest deportation operation in American history” to stop illegal immigrants from “poisoning the blood” of the country.

And this list doesn’t even touch upon mounting anxieties regarding civil war. Any doubt about the truth of Marshall McLuhan’s famous epigram that artists are “the antennae of the race” (picking up interior realities if not external ones) may be put to rest by a quick look at mainstream entertainment. From the Obamas’ recent Netflix hit “Leave the World Behind” to Alex Garland’s forthcoming blockbuster “Civil War,” visions of a violent, fractured, dystopian America are rattling our collective imagination.

Will these stories keep us diverted, comfortably seated on our sofas as we pass the popcorn, or will they prompt the kind of awareness acute political judgment requires?

There are those who welcome the recent flurry of illiberal tidings as a vital warning to the voting public. The central point being: What choice do we have but to think the unthinkable?

But others worry that a steady stream of horror stories recounting the imminent end of democracy in America will normalize the unthinkable, leaving us in a narcoleptic screen daze, filled with memes, TikToks, deep fakes and deceptive infographics, paralyzed perhaps by fear, gripped by a sense of helpless impotence, when what is called for is clarity of mind and action.

Wakeup call or soporific? Heedless of the apparent contradiction, political horror stories about Trump’s return to power are likely to play both sides of the coin.

Effective political speech and exchange require vigilance not only against deliberate disinformation, but also against the contagion of paranoia as well as the false comfort of simply tuning out. Consigning the unthinkable to the margins of consciousness reflects a collective failure of nerve that we can ill afford to indulge when real dangers hover close by. Threats we refuse to consider cannot be lucidly and strategically countered. This includes scenarios of a post-election implosion and the possible breakup of the United States.

For example, it is conceivable that a large liberal state, like California, might seek to break away on grounds of irreconcilable political, social, economic and cultural differences. But the threat of destabilizing a newly illiberal Trumpian America from offshoot nation-states championing more equitable social democratic policies, anti-imperialism and an end to white supremacy, might prove too much to bear. The same violent federal response as occurred in 1861 to suppress the exodus could follow.

Less likely, but not entirely implausible, is secession from the right. For example, what if in the spirit of Texas state Senator Mayes Middleton’s claims that “there is absolutely no separation of God and government,” Texas decides to establish an independent Christian nationalist libertarian republic?

Would President Trump commit armed federal forces to prevent it? Perhaps not, particularly if Texas oil and fracking billionaire Christian activists like Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn promised to make it worth Trump’s while to let their state go.

It’s true the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the aftermath of the prior American

Civil War (1861-65) that secession violates the Constitution. But Trump has already expressed disdain for fundamental constitutional law. The more likely consideration would be: what’s in it for him? In this respect, Trump’s record of wrecked corporate ventures offers a reasonable indicator of how he might use (up) what he deems his for the taking. After all, why should Vladimir Putin’s plutocratic fortune exceed his own? Texas could become the real estate deal of the century.

The fact that different scenarios of disunion, violent or not, illiberal or emancipatory, can be plausibly imagined alongside other Trump-related horrors attests to the radical uncertainty Americans now face. Whether this normalizes the unthinkable or simply forewarns of it leaves intact the darkness gathering on the horizon. That reality must be confronted — courageously, and strategically, in the service of freedom, so long as we are able.

Predicting the future may be a fool’s errand, but in this case, it is not a game. It reflects a concerted effort to wrestle against mind-numbing terror in the hope that visions of political apocalypse in America never become real.