Rachel Maddow’s To-Do List for Defending Democracy Against Trump

This is an adapted excerpt from Wednesday’s MSNBC special report.

If it was elections It wasn’t just a choice between two candidates, but a choice between preserving the American system of government or trading it in for a strongman authoritarian system, then Tuesday’s decisive result gives us a big to-do list.

If you are an American who doesn’t want to trash the American system of government, who doesn’t want a system where the entire government is made up of one man and everything else exists only to serve him, if this is not the country you want, then that means you need to do more for your country than ever before. We can’t just flip a switch and have American democracy disappear. That’s not how it works.

First, let’s look at things: we are now just another one of those countries that decided to try being a strongman and see what happens. Many other countries in the world are controlled by such a system what ours are controlled by. We are the world’s only multiracial pluralist democracy, 248 years old. So, do we leave it at that? Many of our fellow Americans say we shouldn’t do this. But many Americans, tens of millions, say we should do it. And this means that the time has come to fight for it.

Yes, Americans fought for this, working in these elections, trying to get across the finish line a candidate who was both a Democrat and a Democrat with a small D. She couldn’t do it, and the strongman candidate won instead.

We have the advantage of knowing how it works in every other country that has gone through an authoritarian transition. We know the more land they take, the harder it is to take it back. Therefore you must prevent them from occupying any uncontested territory from the very beginning.

We know from the experience of other countries that they will soon test how far we allow them to go without resistance and protest. Part of this is because it is psychologically beneficial for them to do it now. They are counting on the half of the country that doesn’t want to give up our system of government to become disheartened, feel powerless, defy them, and let them do what they want.

What they don’t really want is for the half of the country that voted against them to wake up tomorrow feeling fucking defeated. Of course, we feel regret about the election results, but frankly, we are relieved of the need to spend all our time working on the elections. Now we can work full time to become a thorn in the side of anyone who intends to turn this country into some kind of tin tyranny.

The story didn’t end on Tuesday. Time didn’t just stop. We have just received orders from the Universe and the world. Electoral college so that American citizens who want to preserve democracy know exactly what we are going to spend the next days, weeks and years doing.

The work that needs to be done now applies to every aspect of our society.

The US military must give the people of this country mandatory assurances that they will not deploy military force against civilians.

The free press must guarantee that they will not become state television – that they will stand and fight together when these guys inevitably start targeting individual journalists, individual publishers and individual news organizations.

If Democrats take the House of Representatives, expect Article I of the Constitution come under attack, expect attempts to weaken the power of Congress and turn it into an institution just for show, with powers transferred to the executive branch.

Depending on whether the courts can provide a check on the administration, expect Article III of the Constitution also be attacked. It has become a fetish on the right to boast that court rulings mean nothing and that it is physical force and violence that ultimately decides what is permitted.

We will need plans and steel among elected officials in Washington and members of the judiciary to stop them. We will need the entire country to recognize these risks early on, call it out for what it is, and actively resist them.

Civil society is one of those things that I consider to be soft food for authoritarian rulers: often they don’t even have to bite hard enough to crush it. Everything in organized life and culture that is not business and government is civil society. Authoritarians need to suppress this because it is none of their business. Strong leaders tend to become not just dictators but totalitarians because they cannot allow anything to happen in the country that does not concern them or for them.

A strong civil society empowers people to think for themselves, organize for their own interests, and speak out using the power of more than one person.

We need assurances from civil society leaders that they are not going away and that they too will fight for our democracy. We all need to be more involved in civil society now than before. Join something, it doesn’t matter what it is, but you should do it if you want to be connected to other Americans and not isolate yourself.

Are there any burned bridges in your past? Light them up. Reconnect with people. Your family. Your block. Your city. Your old school friends. This book club. Reconnect or connect for the first time.

If this election had one candidate who stood for the American form of government and another who stood for getting rid of it – because “I alone can fix this” just give me all the power and I will do it – the consequences of this election will be an attempt on his part to put it into practice, and on the other hand an attempt to make him understand that it will not be easy.

Over the next few days and weeks, if they do try to overthrow the American government, they will be testing what they can get away with without resistance. This is where the American people come to the rescue. We work not only for the good of our country and our democracy in elections. We work for the good of our country and our democracy against anyone, anywhere, anytime who seeks to harm it.

On Wednesday morning, millions of Americans woke up and realized that although you worked as hard as you could to try to get the election result you wanted, you didn’t get it. So now there’s a whole new set of things to do. It’s time to save the country.

Allison Detzel contributed.