Boiling The Frogs
This is the first in a series of ten essays revisiting my book, Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy, which was released a year ago. I wrote about my goals for these essays here. If you’re just finding Civil Discourse through The Republic, Revisited series, I hope you’ll subscribe—it’s free—and read along with us. I’m sure you remember the story of the frog: Placed in the pot while the water is cool, he doesn’t notice when it’s brought to a boil ever so gradually. That was a reasonable explanation for what happened to our country during the first Trump administration. Then, he was reelected. Here’s how the frog metaphor lands with me now, two years into Trump’s second term in office: The danger isn't just failing to recognize what's happening. It's recognizing it and then gradually getting used to it. That’s what worries me the most right now, that we could become accustomed to it. If you read Civil Discourse, you’ve probably decided you won’t get used to it. You’ll keep feeling shock and outrage, and do something about it. But it’s likely that at least some of the people around you have acquiesced. Maybe they’re numb, maybe they feel powerless, maybe they’re just overwhelmed and they’ve given up. It can be frustrating to be around people who don’t understand how important it is to stay engaged right now. When I told you last week that I was going to write this series of essays, I asked you to tell me about things you’re seeing that would have been unthinkable previously, but now seem to be widely accepted and have come to feel normal. Your answers illustrated the point perfectly:
The excerpt from my book that I want to share with you this week starts like this: “Part of keeping the Republic is learning, and sometimes relearning, the lesson of the frog.” It’s frustrating that we seem stuck in that cycle, never fully learning the lesson and repeating it again. If the year since I released the book has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t afford to be frogs, and we have to keep trying to get the people around us out of the pot, too.
Here is this week’s passage from the book: “Unfortunately, shock and even horror don’t last forever. Some Americans left the pot and then voluntarily jumped back in. Surprise fades away and anger dims. Constant exposure to the heat creates a new normal. Sometimes the frogs fail to learn the lesson and are doomed to repeat their mistakes, until it finally sinks in. Here is the reality: By the start of the 2024 campaign, the bipartisan outrage that moved some Republicans to criticize Trump after January 6 had dissipated in many parts of the country. Trump made his intention to deconstruct American democracy plain during the 2024 campaign. He continued to claim the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him. It wasn’t much of a stretch to understand he might try to exact revenge on those he believed were involved—he said as much. Despite the clear evidence, many people refused to believe the water would really come to a boil if he was reelected. They’d forgotten what they’d lived through during his first term in office. Keeping the Republic means learning lessons like this, preferably the first time. We can start again, but the longer it takes to learn the lesson, the worse the damage and the longer it takes to correct the wrong turn away from democracy. In normal times, you would expect outrage from across the political spectrum over a candidate who repeatedly claimed American elections—but only the ones he lost—were fraudulent; a candidate who demanded officials “find” him enough votes to pull a win out of a loss. A candidate who wanted to overturn the will of American voters should have been untouchable and unelectable, a third-party pariah, even more fringe than a George Wallace or a Lyndon LaRouche. But that doesn’t happen when voters act like frogs. On November 5, 2023, The Washington Post ran an article about Trump’s plans if he won a second term. It started like this: “Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.” Project 2025 was written by a collection of people, more than one hundred of whom had worked for Trump or been part of his first administration, including cabinet secretaries and a chief of staff. It laid out explicit plans for his second administration. And yet, people were surprised when the revenge presidency went full bore, with Trump attacking newspapers, law firms, and universities, as well as government agencies and scientists. Project 2025 became so unpopular when it was aired in public that Trump took pains to distance himself from it. That maneuver largely succeeded. Then, upon his inauguration, Trump’s administration carried it out—almost to the letter. Despite the cautionary tale of Trump’s first term in office, a lot of frogs managed to ignore the rising temperature. Trump floated the stuff of banana republics, but voters focused on the price of eggs. Once he was back in office, implementing a startling array of antidemocratic plans, the surprise was that living through a constitutional crisis had a patina of normalcy to it. It didn’t necessarily feel like we were in one, especially for people who lacked the interest in or ability to pay close attention to what was transpiring. At dinner or over drinks when I’d raise the news, I experienced reactions like, “Don’t be a drama queen,” or “You’re overreacting, it’s not as bad as you think it is.” That’s what happened at first if you think back to late January or early February 2025. A lot of people still dismissed the concerns as “just talk.” At first, nothing much changed in most people’s lives. Maybe a friend or two lost a job. But there were no dramatic events, nothing like a January 6. No one was tearing up the Constitution in the streets. Nobody was hung on the Capitol steps. There wasn’t a dramatic moment to focus on when you could clearly say democracy was lost. It was easy, or at least easy enough, for the frogs to go on being frogs.” It turns out that the “drama queens” were right. There was no shortage of warnings, but people persuaded themselves that Trump wouldn’t really do the things that were mapped out in Project 2025, that our institutions would stop him if he tried. And he was voted into office, again. It’s hard to sustain full-bore outrage every day. But we do need to retain the capacity to not only know, intellectually, that something is wrong, and also be shocked by it. We can’t let any of this become “it’s just Trump.” We need to hold onto that feeling of shock and to the moral compasses that tell us what’s right and wrong. And we should never be quiet about it, even if—perhaps because—it makes people uncomfortable when these truths are spoken out loud. Knowing what’s coming doesn’t necessarily prepare you to live through it. It’s exhausting to watch the attacks on democracy unfold every day, especially if you spend much time around people who behave like nothing horrible is happening. I hope you know it’s not just you. It’s all of us. We know that what’s becoming increasingly familiar isn’t normal and we don’t have to pretend it is. That’s why I returned to the frog. We’re right to keep recognizing the danger we are living with, even when it’s no longer a new danger. The passage of time doesn’t make what Trump is doing any more acceptable. Let’s keep speaking out together. We don’t have to be the frog. Thanks for being part of the Civil Discourse community. We’re in this together, Joyce |
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