Paul Krugman Is Right Here - The Danger Of Trumps' Trade Plans Is The Reverse China Shock

Tim Worstall, CONTRIBUTOR

It should come as no great surprise that when Paul Krugman plays the trade economist, rather than the political commentator, he gets things right. His Nobel is, after all, for his part in the creation of new trade theory. So it is with his column today on the subject of Donald Trump's supposed ideas about trade. It isn't so much that trade with China, unbalanced trade, is damaging to the American economy, or that it is beneficial. Economists are all pretty certain that it is beneficial trade deficit or not of course, but that's not quite the point. It is the transition from one set of arrangements to another which causes the turmoil--and this will be true of returning to a pre-China trade economy just as much as it has to one that starts to incorporate China trade.

His blog makes the point:

That is, I’d argue, the way to think about the coming Trump shock. You can’t really turn the clock back a quarter-century; but even trying can produce exactly the kind of rapid, disruptive shifts in production that fed blue-collar anger going into this election.

The idea is expanded in the column:

What the coming trade war will do, however, is cause a lot of disruption. Today’s world economy is built around “value chains” that spread across borders: your car or your smartphone contain components manufactured in many countries, then assembled or modified in many more. A trade war would force a drastic shortening of those chains, and quite a few U.S. manufacturing operations would end up being big losers, just as happened when global trade surged in the past.

Just to set the scene here, I'm an unrepentant free trader. I see absolutely no difference whatsoever with my being allowed to buy, or not allowed to buy, as I wish from the guy in the same village and being able to do so with someone on the other side of the world. I do not see that those artificial lines called national borders make any difference at all to the gains from the division of labour, specialisation in it and the resultant trade driven by comparative advantage.

The vagaries of history have meant that Oregon is part of the United States rather than the part of Canada it could have been. And I see no reason at all why such vagaries should mean that Oregonians should have free trade with the 49 states and not with the Provinces, nor that they would have been better off the other way around.

So, just so you understand, I do not, in the slightest, believe that trade with China has been bad for the American economy nor its workers. Further, I hold to the standard economists' line that trade makes no difference at all to the number of jobs in an economy--only to which jobs are done, not the number of them. In this quite clearly I disagree with large portions of the incoming administration.

However, the shock which Krugman refers to is based on the recent paper about the China shock. While we (that is, all of us out here, not those in the administration) agree that trade is overall beneficial we do agree that some people are hurt by it. Who depends upon the pattern of trade and how much rather on the speed of the changes. Recent empirical research seems to tell us that such damages are more persistent than we had thought:

China’s emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences. These impacts are most visible in the local labor markets in which the industries exposed to foreign competition are concentrated. Adjustment in local labor markets is remarkably slow, with wages and labor-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences. Exposed workers experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income. At the national level, employment has fallen in U.S. industries more exposed to import competition, as expected, but offsetting employment gains in other industries have yet to materialize. Better understanding when and where trade is costly, and how and why it may be beneficial, are key items on the research agenda for trade and labor economists.

The full paper is here and do note that even after all of that they do regard the overall effect as beneficial. The gains to everyone else are greater than the losses to these workers. In that sense trade is just like a technological change.

The point being that it is the unravelling of the current arrangements and the time it takes to adjust to the new which causes the losses. For the adaptation is not as fast as we thought it was nor as quick as we would like.

Krugman's point, and one with which I fully concur, is that unravelling the present arrangements is going to cause exactly the same problems all over again. It will take years, if not decades, for the system to stabilise. The Trump trade shock would be just like the China trade shock itself. Except, of course, that by trading with China we are making ourselves richer at the cost of the disruption, the Trump shock would make us poorer at the same cost of the same disruption.

That is, even as Autor et al are correct about the China shock to US employment patterns, trying to return to the previous pattern will just give us the same shock all over again and to no good end. Thus, of course, we shouldn't do it.

A scholar of Islamist extremism makes a prediction: Europe’s problem will get worse

French police patrol the entrance of the Christmas market in Strasbourg on Dec. 20. (Patrick Hertzog/Agence France-Presse)

By Adam Taylor - December 21 at 7:35 AM

In recent years, Europe has been rocked by a series of catastrophic terrorist attacks either organized or inspired by Islamist groups. The attacks have left the continent fearful and divided, fundamentally changing the political discourse about Islam and immigration.

This week's incidents — the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey and a deadly truck rampage at a Christmas market in Berlin — seem likely to compound the problem. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Berlin attack on Tuesday, and the gunman who killed diplomat Andrei Karlov shouted a slogan used by Islamists after he fired his shots. Shortly after the attacks, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that the problem “is only getting worse” and that the “civilized world must change [its] thinking.”

The incoming Trump administration is at odds with many experts when it comes to Islam and extremism. But some share his pessimism, if nothing else. In the latest issue of Perspectives on Terrorism, an academic journal published by the Terrorism Research Initiative, Thomas Hegghammer offers a worrying prognosis for the long-term future of Islamist extremism in Europe: things will probably get worse.

Hegghammer is a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI) in Oslo, and he is often cited as a leading expert on violent Islamist extremism. In his article, he notes that while there has long been terrorism in Europe, there has been an undeniable surge in Islamist-extremism-related activism and violence over the past few years. To quote just one indicator Hegghammer cites, 273 people were killed by “jihadi” attacks in Europe between 2014 and 2016 — more than the all previous years combined.

In the short term, Hegghammer suggests that a variety of countermeasures, including increased budgets for security services and attempts to root out recruitment networks, will likely produce a decline in activity from Islamist extremists in the next two to five years. But he sees little reason to be optimistic in the long term, writing that there are a number of trends that “point to a future with even larger radicalization and terrorism challenges than today.”

First, there is the growing number of economically underperforming Muslim youths in Europe. This is traditionally a pool from which extremist groups recruit, and Hegghammer writes that this population looks set to continue to grow dramatically thanks to immigration and higher birth rates. Entrenched economic disadvantages will likely stop many young Muslims from gaining the full benefits of modern European societies.

The second, more important trend is the growing number of “jihadi entrepreneurs” — returned foreign fighters and other activists — who could inspire and recruit a new generation of European extremists. Hegghammer conservatively estimates there are now at least 2,000 radical Islamists in Europe with foreign fighter experience, time in prison, or both. While some may turn away from jihadism in the future, a small proportion will not.

The third and fourth factors relate not just to Europe, but to the broader world. Hegghammer suggests that persistent conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia look “set to supply European jihadis with both rallying causes and training opportunities for the foreseeable future, as it has in the past.” Many experts believe that the conflict in Syria may still have a long way to go and that groups like the Islamic State will be very hard to fully defeat. The group could be training and blooding potential European attackers for years to come.

Compounding this problem is the final factor: the Internet. The Internet has considerable benefits for extremist groups, Hegghammer suggests, serving as a tool for “propaganda distribution, recruitment, fundraising, reconnaissance, and operational coordination.” The rise of encrypted communications and social media have made it harder for authorities to keep up.

If these trends continue, Hegghammer predicts that Europe could well see higher levels of Islamist extremism activity in the next five to 15 years depending on how European authorities are able to respond to new threats, this could well mean more terrorist attacks.

It's a worrying prediction, but things can change in ways that aren't foreseeable right now. Hegghammer admits it's certainly possible that any one of these trends could shift and change the scenario completely. Governments may prove more adept at fighting extremism and policing extremist networks than he has predicted, or there may be a broader shift in the Islamic world that draws the already tiny minority of Muslims who might engage in terrorism away from it.

Hegghammer also sees how the debate about the future of Islamist extremism could have a negative affect, too. As he notes, even terrorism scholars themselves have a “well-earned reputation” for alarmism, which can bleed over into the broader political debate. And if fears and anti-Muslim xenophobia shift into terrorism against Muslims in Europe by the far right, he writes, things will become far worse for everyone.

IVANKA TRUMP’S TERRIBLE BOOK HELPS EXPLAIN THE TRUMP-FAMILY ETHOS

In her 2009 self-help book, “The Trump Card,” Ivanka Trump employs an audacious strategy: she portrays all of her advantages as handicaps. Photograph by Damon Winter / The New York Times / Redux

Jia Tolentino - November 29, 2016

Ivanka Trump’s 2009 self-help book, “The Trump Card,” opens with an unlikely sentence: “In business, as in life, nothing is ever handed to you.” Ivanka quickly adds caveats. “Yes, I’ve had the great good fortune to be born into a life of wealth and privilege, with a name to match,” she writes. “Yes, I’ve had every opportunity, every advantage. And yes, I’ve chosen to build my career on a foundation built by my father and grandfather.” Still, she insists, she and her brothers didn’t attain their positions in their father’s company “by any kind of birthright or foregone conclusion.”

The cognitive dissonance on display here might prompt a reader who wishes to preserve her sanity to close the book immediately. But “The Trump Card” is instructive, if not as a manual for young women interested in “playing to win in work and life,” as the subtitle advertises, then as a telling portrait of the Trump-family ethos, an attitude that appears quite unkind even when presented by Ivanka, its best salesman, in the years preceding her father’s political rise.

Ivanka spends much of “The Trump Card” massaging the difficulty in her premise. What can a woman born with a silver spoon in her mouth teach people who use plastic forks to eat salads at their desks? To answer this question, Ivanka employs an audacious strategy: all of her advantages have actually been handicaps, she says. When she was appointed to the board of directors at Trump Entertainment Resorts, at age twenty-five, the situation was “stacked all the way against me.” Her last name, her looks, her youth, her privilege have all colluded to make people underestimate her. And when she is overestimated—when people believe that she has an “inherent understanding of all things related to real estate and finance,” because her father is Donald Trump—this, too, “can be a big disadvantage.”

This messy argument comes with correspondingly messy metaphors. “We’ve all got our own baggage,” Ivanka writes, before explaining what she means by baggage: “Whatever we do, whatever our backgrounds, we’ve all had some kind of advantage on the way.” Ivanka compares herself to a runner positioned on the outside track, whose head start at the beginning is just an illusion. “In truth, the only advantage is psychological; each runner ends up covering the same ground by the end of the race.” Soon, though—by page nine—she has grown tired of pretending to be her reader’s equal. “Did I have an edge, getting started in business?” she asks. “No question. But get over it. And read on.”

Ivanka is now thirty-five, and she has evolved since the days of “The Trump Card.” She got married to Jared Kushner and gave birth to three children; while she is as blond and beautiful and patrician as ever, her personal aesthetic is now less socialite and more life-style-blogger-cum-C.E.O. Through her “Women Who Work” brand, she has marketed herself as a cross between Gwyneth Paltrow and Sheryl Sandberg. (Her second book, “Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success,” is slated for March, 2017.) Throughout her father’s unhinged Presidential campaign, she was easily his best surrogate; she is so poised that she could soften her father’s persona just by standing near him. A number of news items that might have clung to other women in the same position—old lingerie photos in men’s magazines, peculiar hearsay having to do with comments about “mulatto cock”—never stuck. Ivanka is white, wealthy, and beautiful, and these attributes often pass as moral virtues. “Classiness” does too, although it’s often just a kind of gracefulness deployed as a weapon or a shield.

Ivanka’s aesthetic differences from her father are often parsed as political differences, and she has made the most of such misperceptions. A friend of hers told Vogue in February, 2015, that the half of America that hates Donald Trump loves Ivanka—“because she’s not him!” In a November 2nd piece for BuzzFeed titled “Meet the Ivanka Voter,” Anne Helen Petersen identified a type of suburban white woman who supported Trump in vague alignment with his daughter. The Ivanka voter, she wrote, “does not think of herself as racist,” and “describes herself as ‘socially moderate.’ ” She shops at department stores that carry the Ivanka Trump Collection, and she didn’t put a Trump sign on her lawn. The Ivanka voter wasn’t comfortable explicitly endorsing Trump’s rhetoric, but, then again, neither was Ivanka. And if Ivanka stood to benefit from a Trump Administration, then surely the Ivanka voter would benefit, too.

But Ivanka, like her father, is concerned with personal profit. Her alignment with him on this matter is the basis of “The Trump Card,” in which she writes, in one section, “Gosh, I sound like my father, don’t I? But that’s what you get from this particular daddy’s girl.” The book is unmistakably aimed at women—the title is written in hot pink on the cover, which also features a blurb from Anna Wintour—but its few gender-specific sections aren’t pitched in the empowerment-heavy tone one might expect. In fact, they sound like Donald Trump. In a section about sexual harassment, Ivanka recounts the catcalls she got from construction workers growing up, then explains that these men would catcall anyone “as long as she was chromosomally correct.” She advises “separating the real harassment from the benign behavior that seems to come with the territory.”

It’s been decades since a President has come into office with adult children, and, at least among modern Presidents, none of those children had Ivanka’s public profile. (In 1976, the twenty-six-year-old Chip Carter left an eight-thousand-dollar mobile home in Georgia when he stumped for his father on the road.) Ivanka will likely continue trying to project some distance from her father’s politics—recently, she separated her own social-media accounts from the accounts of the Ivanka Trump life-style brand. But the illusion will be imperfect: her jewelry company sent out a press release about the bracelet Ivanka wore on “60 Minutes” after her father’s election; she was photographed meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister the week after the election; and she sat in on a call with the Argentinian President. She will have, and presumably use, every opportunity to enrich the family company, of which she remains an executive vice-president. This is the definition of corruption, but as laundered through Ivanka—who’s been tweeting about banana bread and posting photos of her children—it won’t look so bad.

For anyone who still finds Ivanka to be a cipher, “The Trump Card” provides a surprisingly clear indication of her instincts, particularly when she discusses her childhood. She offers a story about being forced, by her mother, to fly coach to the south of France as the moment she realized she needed to make her own money. She has a sour sense of humor: she describes attending the élite prep school Choate Rosemary Hall as an opportunity “to look at the world from a whole new angle. Even if it meant living in a building named for someone else!”

When Ivanka was a kid, she got frustrated because she couldn’t set up a lemonade stand in Trump Tower. “We had no such advantages,” she writes, meaning, in this case, an ordinary home on an ordinary street. She and her brothers finally tried to sell lemonade at their summer place in Connecticut, but their neighborhood was so ritzy that there was no foot traffic. “As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard that summer,” she writes. They persuaded their bodyguard to buy lemonade, and then their driver, and then the maids, who “dug deep for their spare change.” The lesson, she says, is that the kids “made the best of a bad situation.” In another early business story, she and her brothers made fake Native American arrowheads, buried them in the woods, dug them up while playing with their friends, and sold the arrowheads to their friends for five dollars each.

“The Trump Card” contains other illuminating surprises. Chapters are separated by short essays called “Bulletins from My Blackberry,” featuring advice from Ivanka’s mentors. One of these, “On Being Positive,” is by Roger Ailes, who was recently ousted from Fox after being exposed as a serial sexual harasser. “If you listen to negative people, you’ll get a migraine,” Ailes writes. In a passage about technology and distraction, Ivanka writes that her father “has no patience for . . . electronic gadgets.” She advises her readers to behave on social media: “It’s only a matter of time before some political candidate or high-level appointee is bounced from contention because he or she has been ‘tagged’ in an inappropriate photo.” And then, in a line that’s somewhat shocking to come across now: “My friend Andrew Cuomo, New York’s great attorney general, tells me that e-mail is the key to prosecuting just about everyone these days.”

For my money, though, the book’s most revealing remark arrives after Ivanka recalls a boxing match in Atlantic City, in which Mike Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks in ninety-one seconds. The crowd, having paid a lot of money and expecting more action, grew angry. Donald Trump got into the ring to calm them down, impressing his seven-year-old daughter. “That electric night in Atlantic City made me realize that it isn’t enough to win a transaction,” she writes, all these years later. “You have to be able to look the other guy in the eye and know that there is value in the deal on the other end, too—unless, of course, you’re a onetime seller and just going for the gold.”

The book does not have an acknowledgments section.

THE ROAD FROM SADDAM HUSSEIN TO DONALD TRUMP

While the connection between the war to depose Saddam Hussein and the election of 2016 is indirect, it is etched in history. PHOTOGRAPH BY POOL / GETTY

John Cassidy - December 20, 2016

As the members of the Electoral College gathered across the country on Monday, to elect the next President, there was another rash of articles seeking to explain how an untested candidate, whose approval rating stood at 37.5 per cent on November 8th, had managed to defeat an opponent who was a former First Lady, U.S. senator, and Secretary of State. But the piece that caught my eye wasn’t directly tied to the election. It was a gripping review in the Times of a new book by John Nixon, a former C.I.A. officer, who was the first agency official to interview Saddam Hussein after American forces captured him hiding in a hole in the ground near the Iraqi city of Tikrit, in December, 2003.

Bear with me, though. While the connection between the war to depose Saddam and the election of 2016 is indirect, it is etched in history. Without the invasion of Iraq, and the disillusionment with the U.S. political establishment that its terrible aftermath created, it is hard to see how a demagogue like Trump could ever have gained traction in national politics.

Yes, many factors played into his rise to power: deindustrialization, stagnant wages, racial resentments, class resentments, sexism, a craven broadcast media that gave him huge amounts of free airtime, strategic blunders by his opponent and her campaign, and the last-minute intervention of James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. Indeed, the problem with trying to explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat is that it was overdetermined: all sorts of arguments can seem persuasive. But the popular perception of a world gone haywire, a perception that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan helped to create, was also an important factor. You can tell the American people all day long that isis is on the retreat and that, statistically, the threat of getting killed in a terrorist attack is very small. But when Trump said, during the campaign, “We don’t win anymore,” it resonated. When he promised to “smash” isis, he was telling people what they wanted to hear.

Trump also criticized the war in Iraq as a pointless venture during his campaign, although he had expressed support for it at the time. Nixon’s book, “Debriefing the President,” gives more ammunition to the skeptics; indeed, some of its contents can only be described as sensational. It asserts, for instance, that by the time the invasion took place, in March, 2003, Hussein wasn’t really running Iraq anymore. “Hussein had turned over the day-to-day running of the Iraqi government to his aides and was spending most of his time writing a novel,” James Risen, a veteran intelligence reporter for the Times, writes in the review. “Hussein described himself to Mr. Nixon as both president of Iraq and a writer, and complained to Mr. Nixon that the United States military had taken away his writing materials, preventing him from finishing his book.”

Saddam could have been lying to try to save his skin, of course. But Nixon believed him, and he was in a better position than most to assess the truth. After studying the Iraqi regime in graduate school, he had spent five years as a C.I.A. “leadership analyst” on Iraq. Nixon knew so much about Saddam that, after the capture, he was brought in to confirm his identity. (A scar and a tattoo gave the Iraqi strongman away.) In Nixon’s telling, by 2003, far from preparing to unleash a flurry of weapons of mass destruction against U.S. allies in the Middle East, Saddam was busy deferring to his Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan. “Was Saddam worth removing from power?” Mr. Nixon writes. “I can speak only for myself when I say that the answer must be no. . . . He was no longer running the government.”

It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the disaster that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair, Powell, et al. unleashed. Between 2003 and 2011, according to a 2015 study by a team of academic researchers from the United States, Canada, and Iraq, the war and its aftermath caused almost half a million deaths among Iraqis and people who fled the country. Not all these fatalities were the result of gunshots or explosions—they were also due to ingesting contaminated water, or conflict-related stress, or the fact that hospitals had been overburdened or destroyed. But they were still deaths that could have been avoided if the invasion hadn’t taken place, the researchers concluded.

That is just the toll on Iraq. Close to seven thousand members of the American military have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, in overthrowing Saddam and then failing to pacify Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition ended up destabilizing the entire region, with tragic consequences that are still playing out in Syria, Egypt, Libya, Turkey, and lots of other places. To be sure, the Iraq invasion didn’t create Islamic extremism or the Sunni-Shiite schism. However, as I noted in 2014, as isis cemented its grip on Mosul, the invasion “opened Pandora’s Box.” Which brings us back to Trump.

He hasn’t got any real solutions to offer, of course. A classic demagogue, he offered up reassuring slogans and few specific proposals. In putting together his foreign-policy team, he selected (or seriously considered) people with strong a-priori views, clear ideological biases, a disdain for careful intelligence work, and a willingness to demonize individual regimes—people like retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn (Trump’s pick for National Security Adviser), David Friedman (his pick for Ambassador to Israel), and John Bolton (who is reportedly being considered for a top job at the State Department).

We are all too familiar with where these types of attributes and individuals can lead a country. After 9/11, Nixon’s book says, Saddam, a secular dictator who feared the rise of religious fanaticism, hoped Iraq and the United States could come together and coöperate against Al Qaeda and its offshoots. “In Saddam’s mind, the two countries were natural allies in the fight against extremism . . . and, as he said many times during his interrogation, he couldn’t understand why the United States did not see eye to eye with him.” The reason was straightforward. The Bush Administration, for reasons of its own, had decided to overthrow him in an international show of force.

In Iraq and Syria today, the United States is tacitly coöperating with another dictatorial regime, Iran, in the war against isis. While progress has been slow, it has also been steady, and isis fighters have been forced to give up a good deal of ground. Trump will have to decide whether to continue on with this course or follow the advice of some of his advisers and adopt a much more confrontational stance against Tehran.

It is to be hoped that he chooses the first option. In any case, though, he won’t be able to escape the poisonous legacy of March, 2003, which now looks like one of history’s turning points. And he’ll quickly find out what President Obama must surely have impressed on him during their recent conversations: simple solutions are chronically lacking.

TRUMP’S CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

The President-elect may not be Hitler, Mussolini, or even Putin. But Trump is Trump—and that, in itself, presents a real danger. Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty

By John Cassidy - November 29, 2016

Over Thanksgiving, I read up on some history: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Berlusconi, Putin—“Strong Men 101.” I’d been meaning to do this for a while, and my resolve was strengthened after coming across an article on the risks of democratic erosion by Jeff Colgan, a political scientist at Brown University, who warned, “In light of Donald Trump’s illiberal tendencies, we have to take seriously the (unlikely) possibility that democracy and rule of law could weaken in the United States.” To help guard against this possibility, Colgan offered ten “warning signs of democratic breakdown.” They included attacks and restrictions on the press, vilification of foreigners and minorities, the intimidation of legislators, and the use of crises to justify emergency security measures.

Colgan isn’t the only one worried. If my Twitter and Facebook feeds are anything to go by, many Americans and non-Americans are convinced that Trump’s victory heralds the imposition of Putinesque authoritarianism, and maybe even full-blown fascism. Such concerns are understandable. During the Presidential campaign, Trump casually incited violence; promised to “lock up” his Democratic opponent; refused to release his tax returns; gave a dystopian Convention speech in which he promised to restore “order”; proposed banning Muslims from entering the country and reinstituting the use of torture on terrorism suspects; and vilified his opponents and critics. And what of today? Trump is surrounding himself with sycophants, ranting on Twitter about how he really won the popular vote (he did not), and boasting that the federal conflict-of-interest laws don’t apply to him.

Bad as it is, this doesn’t mean that Trump is Hitler, Mussolini, or even Putin. He’s Trump, but that, in itself, presents a real danger. Everything about him suggests that when he enters the White House he will continue gleefully transgressing democratic norms, berating his opponents, throwing out blatant falsehoods, and seeking to exploit his position for personal gain. That’s what he does. If anything, the isolation and pressures of the Oval Office might further warp his ego and exaggerate his dictatorial tendencies. Surrounded by yes-men, he could well be tempted to try to expand his powers, especially when things go wrong, as they inevitably do at some point in any Presidency.

The big unknown isn’t what Trump will do: his pattern of behavior is clear. It is whether the American political system will be able to deal with the unprecedented challenge his election presents, and rein him in. Especially with a single party controlling the executive and the legislative branches, there is no immediately reassuring answer to this question.

History, as always, is less a guide than a series of warnings. Fascism was built on the ruins of the First World War, the collapse of the interwar economy, and the failure of democratic political systems to come to terms with these catastrophes. Fascists were also able to exploit a widespread antipathy toward democracy in important institutions, such as the military, the government bureaucracy, and big business organizations. To some extent, Hitler and Mussolini were pushing on an open door. When the ultimate crisis arose, the German and Italian establishments persuaded themselves that they could bring the enemies of democracy into government and hem them in. Of course, once the fanatics gained control of the state apparatus, or parts of it, they used it to consolidate power and eliminate their opponents and erstwhile allies.

The United States, thank goodness, isn’t Weimar Germany or early-twentieth-century Italy. The country hasn’t been invaded, the economy has grown for seven years in a row, and the commitment to democracy is deeply rooted. All this suggests that what we know as the American system is unlikely to be felled in one blow.

The real danger, as Colgan and others have pointed out, is that we will witness a gradual uprooting of the system’s foundations. Broadly speaking, this is what we have witnessed in Russia and Turkey during the past fifteen years. When Putin was elected, in 2000, following a decade of chaos, he claimed a mandate to restore order. It was only over time that he concentrated power in his hands, harassed and imprisoned his opponents, and cracked down on many forms of dissent. Using a rationalization for repressive measures that dates back at least to the French Revolution, the Russian President cited national-security imperatives, such as the need to confront Chechen terrorism.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was elected President of Turkey in 2002, presents a somewhat different trajectory. In the early years of his rule, Western governments hailed him as a conservative democrat and modernizer. Gradually, though, he began to exert control over much of the military, the judiciary, and the press. Following a failed coup attempt in July of this year, he introduced a state of emergency and launched a nationwide crackdown on his opponents and his perceived opponents. Thousands of people were arrested, more than a hundred media publications were shut down, and tens of thousands of public employees were purged from government agencies.

Thankfully, the United States isn’t Russia or Turkey, either. On his first day in office, Trump is unlikely to ban protests or abolish a suspect’s Miranda rights. Other dangers loom, however, beginning with how he runs the Justice Department and other key agencies. He has said that his nominee for attorney general will be Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, a loyalist and a supporter of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Trump reportedly has not decided whether to replace James Comey as the F.B.I. director. An eagerness to assert control over the police and intelligence services is often a sign of trouble ahead. It will be up to Congress, the courts, and senior-agency staff members to resist any such efforts, but they will also need public support in their efforts.

Then there is the issue of how Trump will deal with the press, which, for all its faults, remains a bulwark of American democracy. As he showed last week during his interview with the Times, the President-elect can butter up the Fourth Estate when he wants to. But, as he demonstrated during the campaign, he is also perfectly willing to attack journalists personally, boycott shows that run segments he doesn’t like, and bar entire news organizations from covering him. Through his Twitter and Facebook accounts, he has a personal “fake news” network with enormous reach, which he can use to circumvent the mainstream media. And in Steve Bannon, his former campaign C.E.O. and now his chief strategist, he has a skilled and unscrupulous propagandist.

“Trump sailed to the presidency on . . . lies and exaggerations, and there’s no reason to think he’ll discover a new commitment to the truth as president,” Stephen Walt, the Harvard foreign-policy realist, writes in a new article in Foreign Policy. “The American people cannot properly judge his performance without accurate and independent information, and that’s where a free and adversarial press is indispensable.” Will the press be up to the challenge? The early signs are mixed.

Thirdly, and most urgently, there is a question of what to do about Trump’s business empire, and the glaring set of conflicts of interest that it represents. A couple of weeks ago, I argued that kleptocracy, rather than autocracy, is the most immediate threat. Since then, a number of ethics specialists and law professors from both parties have called on Trump to sell all of his businesses and place the proceeds in a blind trust. If he doesn’t do this, some of them say, he will be in violation of the emoluments clausein the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9), which bars Presidents from taking payments of any kind from foreign states.

But who will hold Trump to account if he fails to reduce his business entanglements? Richard Painter, a former counsel in the Bush Administration, has argued that the Electoral College, which will vote on December 19th, should refuse to choose Trump if he doesn’t agree to obey the Constitution. Right now, that seems unlikely to happen. Most likely, the task of persuading, or forcing, Trump to distance himself from his business interests will fall upon the next Congress, which will convene in early January. But, of course, both legislative chambers will be under the control of the Republicans. And so far the Grand Old Party, under the guidance of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, has shown no enthusiasm for standing up to Trump, instead intimating that, with its assistance, he will make a fine President.

Which brings us back to the darkest of histories. Referring to Franz von Papen, the conservative German politician who, in January, 1933, persuaded President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, Hans-Joachim Voth, an economic historian at the University of Zurich, wrote recently, “the Republican leadership sounds awfully like former Vice Chancellor von Papen and friends. They famously thought of Hitler as the ‘drummer’—a populist whose appeal was useful to them but could be controlled easily.”

By their nature, populist authoritarians aren’t easily managed. “Autocracy is coming,” Voth went on to warn. “Something somewhere between Putin and Berlusconi, if we are lucky; something worse if we are unlucky.” That view, it should be acknowledged, represents a pessimistic reading of the situation. But proving Voth wrong will fall on American democracy, the institutions that claim to embody it, and the people who say they value it.