Human beings are terrible at judging risk. Either the sky is falling, or it isn’t falling at all. We have a difficult time handling the case where the sky is sort of creeping downwards gradually. It may happen unevenly in places or threaten to accelerate at a moment’s notice, but unless one of those chunks falls on our heads we default to thinking there’s no downward movement at all. Since risk assessments guide actions, the consequence is a tendency to over- or under-react to things.
The worst case of all, though, is when we’re told the sky is falling, nothing lands on our heads, and thus we conclude the sky is rigid.Governments are big, bulky things. Take, for instance, this part of Project 2025:
That executive order would set up a system, known as Schedule F, that would revamp the federal bureaucracy so that far more jobs could be filled with political appointees rather than through traditional merit rules. Trump’s supporters say Schedule F would cover about 50,000 federal employees, but unions representing federal workers say it would cover many times that. Currently, approximately 4,000 federal positions are subject to presidential appointment. Trump’s allies are said to have compiled a list of 20,000 loyalists who could quickly move into federal jobs in a new Trump administration.
That may sound like a lot, but the US federal government employs about three million people, and all governments across the USA employ maybe twenty million. A mass firing of, say, 200,000 employees in a single day would effectively halt the federal government and spark an uprising. It’s far more likely those mythical 200,000 will be gradually phased in over the span of years, and the remaining three million will take even longer to fall in line. That still leaves seventeen million that can’t be touched, at least directly. As a result, few government policies will change suddenly.
And yet, you were promised a fascist takeover. You expected government thugs to show up on the street, but your garbage is still being picked up. Debates will continue to happen in the House and Senate, despite all the warnings about a dictatorship on day one. People aren’t being rounded up into camps months after the election, so maybe all those promises of mass deportations were just empty bluster like “wall“?
This the terrible secret behind modern dictatorships: for most people, on most days, they don’t feel like they’re living in one. The freedoms they’ve lost are so distant and abstract that they’ve barely noticed their absence, and that loss didn’t happen all at once but over the span of many years. Turkey didn’t become a de-facto dictatorship overnight, it took two decades of gradual change to get to this point, and it still looks like a democracy at a casual glance.
Many international observers and Turkish commentators argue that the elections are a done deal and that there is no way President Erdoğan will lose either the presidential election or a majority in the parliament. Some argue that as an experienced politician he would not have called for early elections if he was not sure he would win. Others argue that the elections will take place on such an uneven playing field that opposition voices will not even be heard. Some even argue that what comes out of the ballot box will be very different from what goes in, or that President Erdoğan will not leave office even if he loses.
Some of these arguments have merit, but not all. Yes, President Erdoğan is an experienced politician, but some of the assumptions he made when calling for snap elections have already proven wrong. He calculated that İYİParty could not fulfill all of the legal requirements to run in the parliamentary elections, but CHP loaned İYİParty 15 deputies so they could run. President Erdoğan probably thought that the alliance law would only benefit him as the opposition parties — separated by huge ideological differences — could never come together to form an alliance. Well, they did. President Erdoğan probably expected that the CHP would nominate a low profile candidate and he would run in the second round against either a low profile CHP candidate or the leader of İYİParty, who would not get the Kurdish vote. Well, not only did CHP nominate a high profile candidate, but all opposition parties, including the pro-Kurdish HDP, have committed to supporting him in the second round.
What prompted this June 2024 snap presidential election were local elections in May that were a strong rebuke to Erdoğan’s control over Turkey. Opposition parties gained more control over the local level, they earned a plurality of the vote, and even some attempts to reverse the outcome were overturned in the courts. Given this information, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself Turkey is still a democracy, albeit with major problems.
In reality, Erdoğan won that election on the first round with 53% of the votes. In contrast, one year prior he got 49.5% during the first round and 52% in the runoff; in the prior 2018 election, he got 53% of the vote to win in the first round; and when he was first elected president in 2014, he got 52% of the vote to win in the first round. Erdoğan in 2024 got to claim more support than he had before, one extra year in office, and from that position of strength an ally has floated getting rid of term limits just before Erdoğan reaches his. Turkey may be going through the motions of being a democracy, but the practical outcome is that one person has retained control of the country for two decades and has only gained more power the entire time, despite barely earning half of all votes cast in the last decade.
That sense that things aren’t as bad as they could be is the biggest danger of a Trump presidency, especially after months of pundits yelling about fascism. Don’t let it lull you into complacency, Trump is well aware of the Turkish example.
There is, at least, an upside: if change is coming slowly, you have some breathing room. Get up and touch grass for a bit. Take some time to mourn. Rest. Recharge. Then, once you’ve wiped those tears away, hit the books.