By Chris Satullo

So, OK, 2021 pretty much sucked, from the jump.

Sorry to say, I have no good news to offer about the new year just dawning.

Please realize that 2022 will pose as big a challenge to the seriousness of your citizenship in the United States of America as any year you’ve lived. It will be a year when we Americans will either “keep the Republic,” as Ben Franklin (maybe) long ago challenged us to do – or lose it.

And a chief reason we might lose our messy, maddening, noble democratic republic is we’re struggling to get our minds around the fact that it is indeed in peril.

Understand: One of the major political parties in the two-party system that has kept this republic stable since 1865, if not always just, has lost its ever-loving mind.  You can’t overstate how destabilizing this is.

A healthy majority of the Republican Party’s members tell pollsters they believe the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the not-really-close 2020 election, with only massive fraud by Democrats keeping their hero from retaining office. More alarmingly, according to one survey-based estimate, as many as 21 million Americans believe the use of force would be justified to restore Trump to the White House.

The GOP is intent on restoring Trump to power in 2024. Desperately wanting to win the next presidential election is normal for any party that lost the last one. What’s not normal is when members of a party no longer believe they must accept the result of any election they lose.

The Republican party is busily executing, as you read this, a profoundly anti-democratic strategy with two main prongs:Use its command of many state capitols to tilt state voting laws sharply in Republicans’ favor. This tactic is old hat for the party, though being pursued with new ingenuity and fervor since 2020.

This part is new: The GOP is working to change election rules, in key swing states, so that if Trump somehow loses the actual tallies, red-led state legislatures can simply toss out millions of votes and declare Trump the winner of their states’ electoral votes.

That reading of the situation, as well as the 21-million estimate, comes from Barton Gellman, a writer for The Atlantic.  His recent cover story for the magazine bears this headline: “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun: January 6 Was Practice.”

Gellman writes:

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

You may be tempted to dismiss this as Chicken Little hyperbole from the fever swamps of the left. But know that Gellman is the same guy who wrote a piece for the Atlantic on Election Day 2020 that predicted almost down to the last detail the legal and political maneuvers that Trump and his MAGA acolytes would employ to try to overturn an unfavorable result.  (One exception to Gellman’s clairvoyance: the Four Seasons Landscaping press conference. Our pal Rudy retains the power to surprise.)

I’m usually inclined to roll my eyes at plenty of what I hear from progressive Twitter and MSNBC, from Abolish ICE! to Defund the Police! to Trump will be indicted tomorrow! But I believe every word Gellman writes in this piece. I believe the survival of American democracy as I cherish it is mortally at stake – and the elections being held this year are probably our last best chance to forestall the onset of anti-democratic rule in 2024.

 If we wait until the presidential year to pay attention, as Democrats are so tragically prone to do, it will likely be game over. This year is when the Republicans intend to position the assets – state legislative majorities, friendly governors, pliable election officials – that will enable them to execute their “tails we win, heads you lose” strategy in 2024.

So, in this season of resolutions, here are five I hope you’ll make – and keep on behalf of democracy:

1. Believe the slow-motion coup is real and understand how it’s unfolding.

In other words, be smarter about this than Joe Biden and a lot of Democrats seem to be. While enacting voter suppression tactics into law remains a part of the GOP strategy, please grasp that the new, more dangerous focus of GOP anti-democratic activism is to enable governors and legislatures to simply toss out any election result they don’t like as “fraudulent” and send pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College. As Gellman notes, by their recent words and deeds, Biden and many Democrats don’t seem fully to grasp this.

Also understand that the U.S. Supreme Court, as now tilted, is likely to endorse whatever anti-democratic chicanery that statehouse Trumpists come up with. 

2. Pay close attention to the races closest to home – and vote, come hell or high water.

The mid-terms this year are really the last chance to derail the coup train. (The Dems, for example, need a larger, Manchin-proof majority to end the filibuster and pass some pro-democracy bills.)  

In November, control of both houses of the U.S. Congress and many state capitols, as well as key swing-state governorships, will be at stake. If you, like me, live in Pennsylvania, you sit at the fulcrum of this drama – with a pivotal U.S. Senate seat, a governorship and control of a swing-state legislature all in the balance.

The people we elect this coming November will determine whether the ground rules for the 2024 vote will welcome the slow-motion coup with open arms or provide some resistance.

This year, if Democratic voters sleep on the importance of humble state legislative races, as they are wont to do while cheering on phantom heroes like Beto O’Rourke, we are doomed.

Let me recommend to you my new, No-Beto’s Rule: Save your precious campaign donations for the races where Democrats actually have a chance. Don’t focus just on Congress. If you have a competitive gubernatorial race, prioritize that. And save some dollars for the precious few state legislative races in toss-up districts. If you, like me, are lucky enough to live in a purple state, those contests could decide control of a statehouse chamber – and in turn decide whether anti-democratic, coup-friendly legislation ever comes up for a vote.

3. Line up Nov. 8 as a vacation day. Right now.

That’s general election day, 2022. You will be needed. Voters whose right to vote has been complicated by various laws might need your help getting to the polls and earning access to the ballot. Or you might be needed as a poll worker, checking people in and explaining how the machines work. A vicious campaign of intimidation and outright threats has led many of the often-elderly people who used to work the polls to drop out. A shortage of poll workers translates into long lines that discourage working folks who can only take so long to vote before they get in trouble with the boss.

Or: Sign up as a poll watcher for the one political party that still actually believes in free and fair elections. Polling sites will be lousy with MAGA recruits eager to make noisy protests against the right of certain people to vote, as well as other wild charges. Someone needs to be there to counter that nonsense and report any misdeeds to election authorities.

None of this will be pleasant labor. But neither will be life in America if this Republican putsch succeeds. (I do hate to sound so partisan, but again: The GOP has made its intentions vividly clear.)

4. Gird yourself and visit the right-wing fever swamps

You can’t counter a slow-motion coup unless you understand not only the strategy, but the lies and rhetoric it uses to gain recruits.  If you don’t, for example, know what “Let’s go, Brandon” stands for, you’re not really getting what’s going on.  Since MAGA runs on conspiracy fuel, in the fever swamps you’ll encounter closed-loop thinking that shows an alchemic ability to turn facts that disprove the conspiracy into more proof that the conspiracy is real. 

This is, of course, painful to encounter in a friend or relative, so most people avoid the conversation. And I grant that few attempts to change conspiracy-soaked minds prove fruitful. But the coup gains new adherents every day. If you know the key false claims, and the best ways to counter them, you might be able to prevent at least a few people you know from sliding down the rabbit hole before Election Day 2022.

Understand that the insufferable Tucker Carlson is only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. Familiarize yourself with at least one or two the MAGA talk radio or podcast hosts who test-market, then spew widely, the coup justifications. Check out Dan Bongino or Mark Levin or Charlie Kirk or the master plotter of them all, Steve Bannon. While you’re at it, also sample the Claremont Institute, the “think” tank of the coup.

Then you’ll be ready to fulfill my final, and sure to be least popular, suggested resolution:

5. Actually talk with someone who thinks the election was stolen

Not because you’ll change their minds. The chances of that are .000001 percent.

No, because this anti-democratic coup is founded on the idea that somehow Joe Biden and everyone who voted for him are America-hating socialists who will stop at nothing to win elections so that they can dominate the other side (note: projection is a powerful drug).

As conservative but stoutly anti-MAGA writer David French argues, the root of this kind of toxic polarization is isolation. If you don’t know or talk with anyone who sees the world differently, you and everyone with whom you do talk feels free to believe whatever grim stories they hear about how ruthless and evil the other side is. Which of course then justifies whatever steps, including violence, you might take to prevent “Them” from ruining America.

(Obligatory note of fairness: Progressives are no stranger to hyping the extremity of other people’s views.)

The only way to combat this toxic partisanship, French counsels, is to reach across the divide and form actual human, friendly relationships with people with whom you disagree politically.

Focus on what connects you, but don’t be afraid to mention what divides you – but not in the vein of seeking to prove yourself superior in virtue or knowledge. Simply to let the other person know that not everyone who voted for Biden has hooves and horns and hates America. Some, amazingly, are nice people who like some of the same music, sports teams, foods and movies that they do. Some of them, like me, even believe in God and go to church. Wow!

This is information that you can be sure Carlson or Levin or Bongino will never tell them. The only way they’ll get it is from you reaching out. The person will probably still vote for Trump.  But, thanks to knowing you, they might not favor committing violence against you – and the Constitution – if he loses.

I know it’s easier to post fierce partisan words on Twitter and get lots of retweets.  But if you do this well with just one person, it will do more to forestall the collapse of our democracy than any snarky tweet ever did.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia