In her introduction to this piece, Tufekci sets it up as an exercise in sharpening an argument, specifically a piece she wrote for The Atlantic that Trump’s now-monthlong assault on the 2020 election is a style of a coup we should be paying closer attention to. She invited Cegłowski to write the counterargument, a style I frankly love, and he argues the election actually went relatively smoothly, that Trump’s bluster is something we should ignore (or, in the case of the complicit GOP, exploit for their own purposes), and the real problem facing the country now is a political one where the GOP is actually positioned to win elections outright.

While the setup here is something of a debate, and at the risk of sounding like a dreaded triangulating centrist, I might suggest they’re both right. Tufekci’s argument that what Trump is attempting is a kind of coup, if not an according-to-Hoyle coup d’état, is a warning obviously worth heeding because of the Overton window-shifting nature of the GOP’s illiberalism. One way to think of American conservatism as a whole is a kind of slow motion coup, that has spanned ideologies and even parties since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (or back to the very founding).

Cegłowski’s warnings, though, are more urgent and dire.

The lower down the ballot you go, the more unpleasant the results. State house majorities that seemed ours for the taking in Iowa, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania instead got redder. We couldn’t even flip two seats in the Minnesota senate, where Democrats control both the state house and the governor’s mansion, and Walter Mondale roams the earth.

We didn’t lose these state races because of gerrymandering, or lack of money, or any kind of Republican tampering with the electoral process. Our failure was political, and all the more inexcusable because it took place in a year when the opposing party had failed at governing so badly that it had racked up a body count. And still we couldn’t make the case.

As Zeynep points out in her essay, these newly-elected Republican legislatures will now have the opportunity to redraw Congressional districts based on the 2020 census. Even with no change in the vote, this redistricting process would net the Republican party a House majority in 2022. And we know from history that the midterm vote is likely to favor them. So not only can Republicans expect to win a House majority in 2022, but they have a fair shot at winning it with a plurality of the national vote.

I do think Cegłowski is a bit quick to dismiss the anti-democratic features and outright voter suppression that have aided the GOP for generations now (and which they will surely begin to ramp back up with bullshit claims of voter fraud aided by Trump’s post-election bombast), but overall believe he’s correct about the political challenges ahead.

Cegłowski has spent years organizing what should be close but winnable campaigns for Democrats across the country and keeps coming up short — he knows better than most the political challenges out in the real world, beyond the sniping on Twitter. And while it may make plenty of us angry to know the GOP can get away with — be rewarded even! — outright lying, collapsing democratic institutions, flaming an endless culture war, and dismantling the post-New Deal idea of governance at every opportunity, it’s hard to deny they’ve succeeded on nearly every front. His conclusions are a complement to Corey Robin’s: the Left needs to get its shit together or risk annihilation.

Reading this piece, I was reminded of a certain despair¹ I felt in the immediate aftermath of this year’s election, when it was clear Biden had won but had not officially been called. Other than Trump’s loss, the outcome was actually pretty great for the GOP, which held the Senate, gained seats in the House, and expanded victories across state and local legislatures. The Trump-led GOP, despite four years of outright incompetence, failed governance, and blatant discrimination against literally every minority in the country, managed to actually improve their share of the vote among every demographic except white men. Imagine predicting in 2016 that Trump would would have lost support among men without a college degree and increased his support among Black or Latino voters. The realignment that 2016 hinted at seems to have solidified, into what Cegłowski astutely shows as a bifurcation into “two disconnected public spheres”:

One of these spheres comprises the world of Fox News, talk radio, the Sinclair media empire, highly ideological local papers, and the Qanon stuff your uncle watches on YouTube. The other sphere is the world most of us inhabit, the world of NPR, the New York Times, cable news, and what used to be called the mainstream media.

These two worlds are aware of each other (this is not an argument about “epistemic closure” or “filter bubbles”), but in the same way that rival religions or sports fans are aware of each other. You don’t get to mix between them—you have to pick a side.

These worlds are also not morally equivalent. Helped along by Trumpism, the Republican public sphere has severed its connections with reality in a way that is not true on the Democratic side. They have also adopted transgressive political norms, including loathsome incitements to political violence.

This is a stark renunciation of Obama’s hope and change politics, or even the more pragmatic belief that the shifting demographics of the country would mean a natural leftward shift. Instead, there’s real work to be done to bridge those divided spheres and build a better country while simultaneously fighting against a political party that has succeeded wildly by simply tearing down. Of course, that’s always been the work.