This year’s US election has become a battle of nightmares: each side has warned that if the other wins, the country is finished. And the battle is at its height in the king of the swing states: Pennsylvania. A week ago, on 29 October, I found myself standing in Center Square in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with a monument to the Civil War behind me – while before me, Donald Trump denounced Kamala Harris as a communist, just as Harris had branded him a fascist. The rally was relayed from a big screen to a small crowd outside, who seemed to be enjoying it. When Trump called for the execution of any illegal migrant who killed a US citizen, they cheered. Later, I saw the owner of a taco store quietly removing the “Harris for President” sign from the window before the rally-goers came his way.
What was he frightened of? Beyond the souped-up crowd, there is plenty to fear about the American right: Trump, the MAGA ideology he surfs, and concrete changes to the rights and liberties of ordinary Americans, from talk of using the military against protestors to restrictions on reproductive rights. It’s possible these fears may not actually come true – the crowd that flowed out of that Trump rally were more focused on buying MAGA merch than perpetrating an American Kristallnacht. Nonetheless, the nightmares of these voters are absolutely real. And what they think might happen will help to shape whatever does happen after this election.
Republicans certainly harbour fears of a Harris presidency, but tellingly what I heard focused on a Trump victory – and on the country’s democratic predicament overall. When I met Larry, a black maintenance supervisor in Pittsburgh, he kept asking how Trump proposes to make America great again, and when exactly it was “great”. He fears the answer is the 1950s or before, when there were far fewer immigrants, and black people knew their place. Trump is “bringing out a lot that was buried”, he says; “he’s given everyone a voice that still feels that way”. A week or so before we met, he was racially abused by a woman with a Trump sticker on her car. A young caregiver named Amanda also told me that she is also worried that if Trump wins, he will empower racists – and ban abortion. Likewise, Robert, a restauranteur, is concerned about the rights of his daughters.
But the deeper fear is for democracy itself. In Beaver, I saw yard signs reading “Democracy or Dictatorship: Choose Wisely”, “In This House, We Vote for… Democracy over Fascism” and ‘‘Stop Project 2025”, a reference to the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term that would involve, among much else, purging the civil service. This document is preying on the minds of several of those I spoke to – even though, like a national abortion ban, Trump has publicly disavowed it. Ed Gerber, an organiser with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, worries about Trump’s talk of “punishing his enemies” and is “fearful” of what Trump’s Supreme Court-emboldened use of executive power would look like. Ben Felzer, chair of a Democratic committee in the crucial swing county of Northampton thinks a new Trump administration will “prevent there from being a free election in the future”. This, he says, “really scares me … I don’t know that a Democrat would ever win again at a national level.” He’s “worried about our country becoming like Hungary”.
Back at that Allentown rally, Trump could indeed be heard praising Viktor Orbán, the architect of Hungary’s illiberal democracy. And yet, in the square outside, I talked to Trump supporters who saw none of this. A New Jersey businessman was rhapsodising about Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. It featured racist jokes and drew comparisons with an American Nazi rally there in 1939, but this man sincerely saw it as a festival of unity. As he talked, he paused to emphasise his point by shaking the hands of a surprised black couple. Likewise, a young black content creator and Trump supporter called Tayshaun told me he was initially wary of Trump because his family owed a lot to the Democratic Party. When the former president was first elected, he “felt [himself] in fear – but I didn’t really know why”. But he did his own research and concluded Trump was actually an “amazing guy… the first person to make me aware of fake news”. He said he deplores the attack on the Capitol, but does not see it as Trump’s doing.
But what surprised me most was that even some of those seriously concerned about a Trump presidency won’t necessarily vote against him. Amid the election hurricane, it’s all too easy to hang onto sweeping demographic categories, ignoring voters’ individual stories. Robert’s approach to the potential death of democracy, for instance, is shaped by his childhood in the Bronx, surrounded by addiction and poverty, having to steal Kentucky Fried Chicken to feed his family. It was enough to make him sceptical of all politicians. He says he’ll respond to any democratic crisis the way he learned on the street as a boy, he’ll read the situation and adjust. Larry worries Trump wants to be a third world-style dictator, but three days out, he had not decided which way he’ll vote; he’s also concerned about “our borders and our taxes”. He’s so worried about what’s coming that, despite never having fired a weapon, he went to a gun show to buy ammunition. Whether Trump gets in or not, he thinks, America is “doomed”.
Perhaps, if the result is more decisive than expected, it will mark the beginning of a new settlement, and these fears will come to look like part of the scary process of democratic change. But as we wait, America seems frighteningly divided between those on each side who think the country could be reunified, if only the opposing side would see it their way, while others have lost faith in the system as a whole. On that Civil War monument in Allentown, the inscription reads “One Flag, One Country”. But if it’s a celebration of American reunification, it’s also a memorial to what restoring unity can cost.
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