A great conundrum of democratic politics is that elections are contests for power to set policy in the future, but it’s difficult to impress voters with ominous warnings about what might happen, and they are also prone to forgetting and diminishing recent events.

Every political junkie in America understood that Republicans would try to repeal Obamacare if they won the 2016 election. The GOP had devoted most of its legislative efforts from 2009-2016 to obstructing, sabotaging, and attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Democrats did their level best to warn the public that electing Donald Trump would imperil their insurance coverage. But it wasn’t until he became president in spite of these warnings, and took a run at the health-care law, that a mass movement formed to block him.

Something similar happened again, on a grander scale, in 2024. By election day last year, Trump had amassed a record of historic failure and corruption, while his party’s policy heads held firm to their agenda of financing tax cuts for the rich with cuts to regular people’s health care. Trump won nevertheless—only this time, his health-care agenda won the day in Congress. We can thus expect many millions of Americans to lose their coverage.

Beyond the narrow-ish confines of health-care policy, the public had available all the information it needed to suspect that Trump would corrupt the U.S. government and attempt to establish a dictatorship here, but it wasn’t until he took office and turned word into deed that the No Kings movement took shape to raise awareness of the threat to freedom.

This frustrating pattern militates for two things: First, for devoting greater effort to stopping or slowing the process of public forgetting. Second, for mobilizing well in advance of harmful policy changes, so that we stand a better chance of stopping them.

Which brings us to Venezuela.

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DUMBER THAN IRAQ

The last antiwar movement in the United States did not win the argument, but it won the battle for historical memory, and birthed a real progressive movement. It provided a moral foundation for ambitious and dissident politicians, one of whom would become America’s most unlikely president just a few years later. It is conceivable that absent mass, vocal, but unpopular opposition to the war, there would be no Affordable Care Act for Republicans to sabotage. ...