1/ There is a difference between due caution or salutary fear, on the one hand, and self-confirming and -fulfilling paranoia, on the other. Whether we stray from one to the other is up to us.

2/ Compliance with the framing of journalists and obedience to cues are choices. Events should compel our mobilization for sure-but a lot depends on how to frame them and seizing the initiative in doing so rather than living in the contrived reality of our enemies.

3/ True: Premonitions of a chilling end can activate and mobilize. A lot of democratic work has been inspired by the surmise that, without rhetorical and real endtimes thinking, democracy would end.

4/ But the reverse is also possible. Such framing can lead to demobilization, even resignation. Doomscrolling isn’t a democratic practice. If it is spectatorial, it is harmless. But it can participate in the dynamics on which it focuses, and help bring about what it opposes.

5/ One might almost wonder if there is a kind of pleasure in terror-a kind of unseemly desire for doomsday-not merely to confirm one’s chosen frame (there really are monsters under the bed!) but to lend nobility to one’s mode of politics.

6/ Constant talk of the end of democracy, it would seem, has led many to skip the election in order to presume its loss or theft-almost as if saving democracy is about what happens if the counting of votes turns out to be too close, not what it takes to earn them.

7/ Is it possible that the concern with the survival of democracy has led away from democratic practices, especially engagement with fellow citizens: figuring out why they would greet its fall while offering them a vision of the future instead that changes their minds?

8/ There are times to mobilize to save democracy. But we should be attentive to the genuine risks of helping our enemies fulfill their plans in mobilizing the oppose them in the wrong way.