Wake Up For What?
One of the more surprising occurrences over the past 10 years of politics were friends and acquaintances who were pro Bernie Sanders and later became either Trump supporters or seemingly sympathetic to Trump.
Over the coarse of many conversations with on such friend I discovered that he believed that America is broken beyond repair and that the election of Trump might, in his words, “serve as a catalyst for the fall of the 2 party system.”.
This is a dangerous gamble for two reasons.
First, it misdiagnoses the problem. America was not broken beyond repair. Yes, we had serious challenges—inequality, the cost of housing, institutional distrust, a feckless congress—but we also had a functioning democracy, the rule of law, and a robust economy. Change was possible through the only good mechanism human civilization has invented: democracy. The complaint that “Americans care about things politicians don't act on” is not proof that democracy failed—it's proof that people weren't voting based on what they claimed to care about. Hoping Trump will shock the conscience into action is not using democracy effectively; it's abandoning it.
Second, it underestimates the risk. Trump is not a controlled burn. He can do enormous and irreparable harm—to our democratic institutions, to the rule of law, to a world order that created the most prosperous and free era in human history. Betting on catastrophe as a catalyst assumes you can walk up to the edge of the abyss, peer over, and step back enlightened. History suggests otherwise, the abyss often peers back into you.
For the sake of argument, let's hope that Trump does not lead us into the abyss, and that an overwhelming majority of Americans see the importance of “fixing our problems” as a result of walking up to the edge of authoritarianism, that they “wake up” as my friend says. Even if all of this comes to pass, we are left with a twist on the immortal words of Lil Jon, “Wake Up For What?”
The assumption that Trump will shock people into waking up and dismantling the two-party system misreads what his voters actually want. Research shows Trump's coalition is not a unified movement but a fragmented alliance of groups with distinct identities, competing priorities, and clashing worldviews. Their top priorities are concrete and personal—the economy (93%), immigration (82%), the cost of living, anti-woke, abortion, etc. There is no alignment on structural political reform. When pollsters ask Americans about third parties, 58% say one is needed, but this reflects frustration, not commitment: Republicans' support for a third party actually dropped from 58% to 48% once Trump consolidated power. People say they want change, but research consistently finds that they are not aligned on the type of change they want, and they often simply want their team to win more completely.
Trump is already doing irreparable harm to our country and our values, and it's unclear if enough people will wake up fast enough to stop him from doing even greater harm. But as the data shows, even if they do wake up, they won't wake up to the same vision. There is no unified “aha” moment waiting on the other side of this chaos—just millions of people, still wanting different things, still needing to be persuaded.
That's the part this theory skips over. Democracy is not a vending machine where you insert a sufficient crisis and out comes reform. It's the long, frustrating work of changing minds one at a time. That work was available to us before Trump. It will be waiting for us after—if we're lucky enough to still have the institutions that make it possible.
Hoping for a collective awakening is not a strategy. The only way out is the way we should have been going all along: showing up, persuading people, voting like it matters. Because it does. It always did.