Abraham Lincoln said in 1838:  "At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? … I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up among us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln spoke these words when American democracy was barely 50 years old. He understood that the greatest threat to a free society comes not from foreign armies or natural disasters, but from within, from those who would use democracy's own mechanisms to destroy it. Today, his prophecy reads less like a warning than a diagnosis.

We are witnessing democracy's assisted suicide. Not a sudden violent death, but a deliberate transformation orchestrated by those who understand that the most effective way to kill democracy is to hollow it out from within while keeping its machinery running. Donald Trump's return to the presidency represents not merely another election result but the culmination of a decades-long project to fundamentally alter the nature of our political life, to transform democracy from what philosophers call an infinite game into a finite one.

James Carse's distinction between these two forms of human activity illuminates our crisis with startling clarity. A finite game, chess, football, war, is played for the purpose of winning. It has clear boundaries, defined rules, and ends when someone is declared victor. An infinite game, language, culture, music, democracy, is played for the purpose of continuing the play. Its rules evolve, its boundaries are horizons, and it invites ever more players into its unfolding story.

Democracy, in its deepest essence, is an infinite game. Its purpose is not to produce final winners but to maintain a space where different visions of the good life can peacefully contest and coexist. The authoritarian impulse, by contrast, is quintessentially finite. It seeks to end the game by establishing permanent dominance, transforming politics from an ongoing negotiation into a settled hierarchy.

The suicide Lincoln warned against is precisely this: the voluntary surrender of the infinite game, the active choice to stop playing, to accept that some will be permanent winners and others permanent losers. We are not being conquered. We are being convinced to quit.

The Collapse of the Democratic Narrative

To understand America's crisis, we must first acknowledge that it is not uniquely American. As a Hong Kong official preparing to resign  in 2019, after the Chinese takeover, told journalist Ben Rhodes: "The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model." That collapse began with the 2008 financial crisis, when the promises of neoliberalism, that free markets and globalization would lift all boats, were exposed as myths that had enriched a global oligarchy while hollowing out communities worldwide.

Consider the synchronized emergence of authoritarian movements: Trump in America, Orbán in Hungary, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Putin's consolidation in Russia, Xi's assertiveness in China. These aren't isolated phenomena but variations on a theme. Each leader recognized that liberal democracy had lost its narrative power, that millions felt betrayed by a system that had promised prosperity and delivered precarity.

The playbook is remarkably consistent across continents. Win power by attacking "corrupt elites" (while being bankrolled by different elites). Pack courts with loyalists. Buy up or bully media outlets. Redraw electoral maps. Harass civil society. Wrap it all in an Us versus Them narrative: real Americans versus the deep state, real Hungarians versus George Soros, real Indians versus secular elites. The finite game requires clearly defined teams, and these leaders excel at drawing the lines.

Viktor Orbán articulated this vision explicitly, calling for "illiberal democracy"—a polite term for competitive authoritarianism where elections continue but the game is rigged. After losing an election in 2002, Orbán spent years holding "civic circles" across Hungary, building a parallel society that would eventually propel him back to power with a mandate to end the infinite game of democratic contests. He succeeded. Hungary is now a democracy in name only, a cautionary tale of how finite players can capture an infinite game.

The Architecture of American Decline

The American version of this global pattern has its own particular characteristics, shaped by our unique history and political economy. A 2020 RAND Corporation study revealed that economic changes since 1975 have resulted in a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. This isn't merely inequality—it's the economic foundation of oligarchy.

When three men, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, control more wealth than 165 million Americans, they possess the resources to transform the game itself. When Musk purchases Twitter (now X), he isn't just buying a company; he's acquiring the digital public square where democratic discourse unfolds. When hedge fund billionaires deploy hundreds of millions to shape single elections, they aren't playing within democracy; they're playing with democracy itself.

The numbers tell the story of a finite game in progress. In 2024, just 150 billionaire families spent nearly $2 billion to purchase political outcomes. Trump's billionaire appointees possess a combined wealth of at least $383 billion, exceeding the GDP of 172 nations. This concentration of power creates what we might call the oligarchic paradox: those with the most to lose from genuine democracy have the most power to prevent it.

The tactical execution follows three interlocking strategies, each designed to transform democratic politics from an infinite game into a finite one:

1. System Capture: Installing New Referees

The infinite game of democracy requires neutral arbiters—institutions that enforce rules fairly regardless of who is playing. The finite game requires referees who will ensure the "right" team wins.

The federal judiciary has been the primary target. The Supreme Court's current super-majority doesn't just lean conservative; it functions as a political instrument, overturning decades of precedent to enforce ideological outcomes. When the Court eliminated abortion rights in Dobbs, it wasn't interpreting law—it was changing the rules mid-game to advantage specific players. When it granted presidents unprecedented immunity for official acts, it was creating different rules for different players, the hallmark of a rigged game.

This extends beyond the Supreme Court. The systematic appointment of ideological judges throughout the federal system creates a judiciary that will spend decades ensuring that even if finite players lose elections, their version of the rules remains in force.

2. Rule Rejection: Flipping the Board

In a finite game, if you cannot win by the existing rules, you attack the rules themselves. Trump's persistent claims of a "stolen election" in 2020—maintained despite losing over 60 court cases—weren't about proving fraud. They were about undermining the legitimacy of the democratic process itself.

January 6, 2021, represented the ultimate finite game move: if you can't win, end the game by force. The attack on the Capitol was not a protest gone wrong but a logical culmination of finite game thinking. When Trump told his supporters to "fight like hell," he was calling for an end to the infinite game of peaceful power transfer that had sustained American democracy since 1789.

The genius of this strategy is that even failure succeeds. Every baseless claim of fraud, every refused concession, every norm violated erodes public faith in democratic institutions. If people no longer believe the game is fair, they stop playing by its rules.

3. Opponent Delegitimization: Eliminating Players

The infinite game treats opponents as fellow players whose participation enriches the game. The finite game sees them as enemies to be destroyed. Contemporary Republican rhetoric doesn't just disagree with Democrats; it casts them as existential threats to America itself—"communists," "terrorists," “Antifa,” or "enemies of the people" who must be "rooted out."

This isn't mere hyperbole. It's a systematic effort to transform political opponents from legitimate players into threats to the game itself. When you label your opponents as enemies of the nation, you justify any tactic to defeat them. When you convince your supporters that the other side is not just wrong but evil, compromise becomes betrayal and democracy becomes war by other means.

The Information Battlefield

For finite players to end the democratic game without provoking mass resistance, they must first fragment our shared reality. The collapse of 20th-century media gatekeepers created an opportunity to construct parallel information universes where different Americans inhabit completely different factual worlds.

Fox News pioneered this model, functioning less as journalism than as a political operation that happens to broadcast. Its genius lies not in what it reports but in what it omits, creating an audience hermetically sealed from inconvenient facts. When Fox paid $787 million to settle with Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly spreading election lies, it was a small price for maintaining the alternate reality their viewers inhabit.

Social media platforms have weaponized this fragmentation through algorithms that privilege engagement over truth. Studies consistently show that false information spreads faster and wider than accurate reporting, not by accident but by design. The platforms' business models depend on keeping users angry, afraid, and engaged—emotions that finite players exploit masterfully.

The result is what scholars call "epistemic chaos"—a condition where shared truth becomes impossible because we no longer inhabit the same informational universe. The infinite game of democracy requires what Habermas called a "public sphere" where citizens can engage in rational-critical debate. Without shared facts, there is no public sphere, only parallel propaganda ecosystems where the finite game's different teams prepare for total victory.

The Cultural Distraction Machine

While economic inequality reaches Gilded Age levels and the planet burns, American political discourse fixates on drag queens and library books. This is not coincidental. Cultural panic serves the finite game by misdirecting legitimate grievance away from economic exploitation toward cultural scapegoats.

The "critical race theory" panic exemplifies this strategy. A graduate-level academic framework became, overnight, an existential threat allegedly being taught to kindergarteners. The actual content didn't matter—the panic did. It transformed school board meetings into battlegrounds, neighbors into enemies, and distracted from questions about why American schools are underfunded while billionaires pay lower tax rates than teachers.

The trans panic follows the same pattern. While 0.6% of Americans identify as transgender, Republican politicians have introduced hundreds of bills targeting them, dominating news cycles and political energy. These cultural panics serve a dual purpose: they exhaust democratic energy on symbolic battles while providing cover for economic pillage, and they sort Americans into hostile camps that see each other as existential threats rather than fellow citizens being jointly exploited.

Democrats often take this bait, getting drawn into identity politics battles "on their terms." When progressives respond to bad-faith cultural attacks with elaborate defenses of complex academic theories, they're playing the finite game by rules set by their opponents. The infinite game would require reframing entirely—asking why politicians are obsessing over pronouns while insulin prices bankrupt diabetics.

The Democratic Complicity

Here lies the painful truth that Democrats must confront: they have often been unwitting accomplices in democracy's transformation into a finite game. By defending institutions that most Americans correctly perceive as failing them, Democrats position themselves as protectors of a broken status quo.

Democrats became the party of "competent technocracy" just as Americans lost faith in technocratic solutions. They celebrated GDP growth while families struggled with grocery bills. They pointed to job creation statistics while workers needed three jobs to pay rent. They defended the "rules-based international order" while that order produced endless wars and economic devastation.

The normalizing democratic campaigns of Bidan and Harris sent exactly the wrong message to an electorate hungry for change. The democratic response suggested that Trump is not a symptom of systemic failure or a true enemy of the state, but only an aberration from an otherwise functional system. The democrats were too civil, and now we pay a price. This is the infinite game's crucial mistake: defending an old status quo and the rules and institutions that go along with it, rather than evolving new ones.

The irony is cutting. Trump, despite being a billionaire who inherited vast wealth, successfully positioned himself as an outsider fighting corrupt elites. Democrats, despite genuinely attempting to address inequality, positioned themselves as defenders of the very institutions that perpetuate it. In the finite game's logic, perception matters more than reality.

Why the Finite Game Will Fail

The authoritarian promise is seductive in its simplicity: give us power, and we will end the exhausting complexity of democracy. We will designate winners and losers, settle cultural questions, restore order. No more messy negotiations, no more uncomfortable compromises, no more uncertainty. The finite game will be won, and you will be on the winning team.

But this promise is a lie, and not merely because authoritarians never deliver the prosperity they promise. The deeper lie is that human society can function as a finite game. Language, culture, economy, technology—all are inherently infinite games that require constant adaptation. Attempting to freeze them in place doesn't create stability but stagnation and eventual collapse.

Consider Trump's proposed solutions: mass deportation and tariffs. These are finite game moves—build a wall, exclude the other, protect what's "ours." But economies are infinite games of exchange and innovation. Tariffs won't restore manufacturing; they'll raise prices. Mass deportation won't raise wages; it will crash entire industries. The finite game promises simple solutions to complex problems, but complex systems don't respond to simple inputs.

More fundamentally, the oligarchic class backing Trump has no interest in actually solving the problems that generated popular fury. They need that fury as fuel for the finite game. Peter Thiel, JD Vance's billionaire patron, explicitly advocates for ending democracy because it threatens concentrated wealth. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 doesn't aim to help working Americans but to lock in oligarchic advantage permanently.

Reclaiming the Infinite Game

So how do we respond when finite players are winning? Not by playing their game better—that way lies defeat even in victory. Instead, we must remember what makes democracy an infinite game and work to restore those qualities.

First, we must recognize that Trump is no longer an insurgent but the establishment. He commands the presidency, the Supreme Court, vast wealth networks, and the most powerful propaganda apparatus in history. Democrats must stop positioning themselves as defenders of institutions and become advocates for transformation. The infinite game doesn't preserve old rules but evolves new ones.

Second, we must reconnect democracy to material improvement in people's lives. The infinite game isn't an abstraction but a lived experience. When Roosevelt created Social Security, he wasn't just passing a program but inviting millions more Americans into the democratic game by giving them security to participate. When the civil rights movement expanded voting rights, it literally added new players to democracy's infinite game.

This requires a new political vocabulary that escapes the technocratic jargon that has made Democrats sound like HR departments rather than popular movements. Instead of "defending democratic norms," talk about ending the rigged game where billionaires buy politicians. Instead of "protecting institutions," talk about replacing the corrupt referee. Instead of abstractions about "our democracy," make concrete promises: healthcare without bankruptcy, homes people can afford, work that pays living wages.

Third, we must rebuild the public sphere that makes democratic discourse possible. This isn't about fact-checking or media literacy—finite game tools that assume the game is fair. It requires structural transformation: breaking up media monopolies, regulating algorithmic amplification, creating public alternatives to private propaganda. It is no coincidence that Trump defunded NPR (National Public Media) and Voice of America. The BBC and CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) show that public media can work; we abandoned that model just as we needed it most. 

Fourth, we must refuse the cultural traps that divide natural allies. When finite players launch the next panic about pronouns or pedagogy, the infinite game response isn't elaborate defense but redirection: Why are they obsessing over this while poisoning your water? Who benefits when we fight about library books while they loot the treasury? The infinite game builds coalitions; the finite game destroys them.

Fifth, and most importantly, we must make the game worth playing again. The infinite game of democracy only works when people believe their participation matters. This requires structural reforms that seem radical only because we've accepted democratic decay as normal: (a more complete list can be found here.)

• End minority rule: Abolish the electoral college, eliminate the filibuster, enact proportional representation. In an infinite game, more players make the game richer.

• Democratize the economy: Tax extreme wealth, break up monopolies, strengthen unions. No player should be able to buy the game.

• Reform the judiciary: Expand the Supreme Court, impose term limits, create enforcement mechanisms for judicial ethics. The referees must be neutral.

• Secure voting rights: Automatic registration, universal mail ballots, make Election Day a holiday. The infinite game wants maximum participation.

• Limit money in politics: Public campaign financing, overturn Citizens United, require full disclosure of political spending. The game must be transparent.

The Choice Before Us

Lincoln understood that democracy's destruction would come not from foreign enemies but from those who would end the democratic experiment from within. "As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide." The choice he articulated in 1838 remains the choice before us: perpetual renewal or self-destruction.

Today's finite players offer a seductive bargain: surrender the exhausting work of democracy in exchange for the clarity of permanent winners and losers. They promise to end the culture wars by declaring victory, to resolve economic anxiety by blaming scapegoats, to restore greatness by ending the game. This is the suicide Lincoln warned against—not a violent death imposed from outside, but a voluntary surrender of our democratic agency.

But the infinite game offers something more precious than clarity: possibility. The possibility that yesterday's losers can be tomorrow's winners, that today's margins can be tomorrow's center, that the circle of dignity and prosperity can expand rather than contract. This is democracy's deepest promise—not that the game is fair (it often isn't) or that the good always win (they often don't), but that the game continues, allowing each generation to improve the rules.

The finite game's victory is always pyrrhic because it depends on structures and systems that only the infinite game can sustain. When democracy dies, it takes with it the innovation, dynamism, and adaptation that complex societies require to survive. Authoritarian states can maintain power, but they cannot generate the creative destruction that keeps societies vital. They win the game by ending it, but in ending it, they begin their own decay.

We stand at the precise moment Lincoln foresaw—when a free people must choose between perpetual renewal and democratic suicide. The authoritarians want us to believe the choice has already been made, that democracy has failed, that only strongmen can restore order. But finite games end; infinite games evolve. Our task is not to win democracy but to expand it, not to defeat our opponents but to invite them back into genuine democratic contests, not to preserve a dying system but to give birth to a new one.

The authoritarians are winning because they understand they're playing a different game than we are. They seek victory; we seek continuation. They want to end the conversation; we want to enrich it. But here's what they don't understand: there is freedom in the human spirit, it is infinitely creative, endlessly adaptive, perpetually rebellious against those who would end the game. Every authoritarian regime in history has eventually fallen because finite games exhaust themselves while infinite games regenerate.

Lincoln's genius was recognizing that democracy's greatest strength—that it derives its power from the consent of the governed—is also its greatest vulnerability. We can choose to stop consenting. We can choose suicide. But we can also choose what Lincoln called for: to live "through all time" as a free people, perpetually renewing the democratic experiment, perpetually expanding the circle of freedom, perpetually refusing the finite game's false promise of final victory.

This is our revolutionary moment: not to win power but to transform it, not to capture the state but to democratize it, not to end the game but to make it truly infinite. The arc of the moral universe doesn't bend toward justice by itself—we must bend it, generation after generation, in the infinite game of democracy.

Lincoln warned that if destruction be our lot, we ourselves would be its author and finisher. The authoritarians are offering us the pen. Whether we sign democracy's death warrant or write its next chapter is the choice before us. The game continues, if we choose to continue it. And the game of democracy is not over. It has barely begun.