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Martha Stewart in Martha. | Courtesy of Netflix Halfway through the run of Martha, the new Netflix documentary about the former domestic goddess-turned-Sports Illustrated cover star, Martha Stewart lingers over the moment in 2004 when she received a guilty verdict at the end of her high-profile insider trading trial. Stewart’s lips purse viciously with disgust. She rolls her eyes. “Guilty guilty guilty on all these charges,” she says. “The New York Post lady was there, just looking so smug.”  Stewart, now 83, pauses reflectively. “She’s dead now,” she adds. “Thank goodness. Nobody has to put up with all that crap that she was writing all the time.” The past few years have seen a small boom in documentaries about the many wronged women of the ’90s and 2000s: Framing Britney Spears; Pamela, a Love Story; Lorena. Martha, directed by R.J. Cutler, is a different animal. It is not an apologia for its subject. It does not suggest that the public and its obsession with her foibles and legal troubles ruined her life. Martha Stewart does not admit to ever having her life ruined. Martha Stewart disdains self-pity. Martha Stewart refuses to be a victim. “Some people revel in this self-pity, etc., etc.,” Stewart remarks to the camera, when asked to reminisce about her divorce from the husband she describes as “a piece of shit” for having cheated. (Her own affairs, she explains to the camera in a now-viral clip, don’t count because her husband didn’t know about them.) She herself is different, she continues: “I just don’t.” She wouldn’t know how to wallow. @philstarlife American businesswoman Martha Stewart revealed that she cheated on her now ex-husband Andy in the trailer of Netflix documentary Martha. She said he “never knew” about it during their marriage that lasted for almost 30 years. #entertainmentnewsph #celebritynewsph ♬ original sound – philstarlife – philstarlife Martha Stewart is, in other words, exactly as much of a hardass as you always thought she was. She is exactly the mean perfectionist control freak all the tabloids used to claim she was.  What a perfectionist, what a control freak, what a mean lady. Cutler, who conducts the documentary’s single talking-head interview with its subject, interlaces it with plenty of archival footage. (In a neat touch, all the other interviews for the film are audio-only, so that Stewart’s face is the only one we see in the present.) As the interview evolves, Cutler seems to revel in needling Stewart. He repeatedly asks her the kinds of questions she clearly finds annoying — personal questions on subjects that deal with moments where she perceives herself as having failed. He pauses mid-interview, leaving her to sigh heavily as she waits for the questions to keep going. He brings out her Martha-ness, her irritability, her impatience, her dislike at being at someone else’s mercy, under circumstances that are not precisely under her control.  Those are all the things that used to make people hate Martha Stewart. What a perfectionist, what a control freak, what a mean lady. In Martha, they become the thing that makes her the most likable. They are human flaws, messy and endearing, in a woman who has worked for decades to try to make herself appear perfect. Stewart traces her perfectionism back to her upbringing. She was born in 1941, just on the far side of the Depression, to parents who couldn’t afford to feed their family. They set their six children to work tending the garden and beat them when they made mistakes.  Her father was exacting, an alcoholic whose fine tweed suits and leather shoes had to be pressed and shined just so. Stewart’s face lights up when she says she was the only one he trusted to tend to them, but she allows that the man himself was “mean, mean, mean.” She got out of that house every chance she saw: first by modeling as a teenager, then by going to college, then by marrying publishing executive Andrew Stewart. Characteristically, once she was married, Stewart tackled every ambition with ferocious discipline and took each failure as a personal crisis. She spent years as a successful stockbroker until one of her recommendations tanked, at which point she quit finance and moved her family to the farthest suburbs of Connecticut so she could remodel a house that was falling apart.  Eventually, Stewart parlayed her highly refined skills at homemaking and party-hosting into a career as an upscale caterer for her well-heeled friends. From catering came the lifestyle guide Entertaining in 1982, and then more books, and then a magazine, and then a TV show. By the 1990s, Stewart was the center of a multimedia empire, the embodiment of a massively lucrative brand that was all centered on a lifestyle so elevated that no one besides Stewart herself could ever possibly achieve it.  Martha Stewart thought snow peas individually stuffed with cream cheese made an elegant dinner party side. Martha Stewart modeled her fruit bowl displays off the paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Martha Stewart, like the cleaning influencers of today, wanted to store her laundry detergent in an aesthetically pleasing container.  All this could be a lot to swallow, both when Stewart was coming up and now. It’s easy to roll your eyes and wonder who has the time and energy to think that much about their laundry room.  “She got under men’s hair,” Paglia says, “this idea that you could be a homemaking expert who’s a bitch.” But Martha Stewart is a lot more interesting, it turns out, when she is presented to you not as someone you should aspire to be like but as a very strange and specific psychological case study.  Cutler presents Stewart to the audience as a portrait of a perfectionist scrabbling madly for something, anything, to mold in her own image, and then lashing out furiously at anyone she perceives as getting in her way. You don’t necessarily want to be her, but there’s something so compelling about watching her twist herself around to become this impossible-to-please empress of all she beholds.  One piece of archival footage shows Stewart lambasting an employee behind the scenes for using a paring knife to cut an orange for Easter brunch. “Well, isn’t that a stupid knife?” Stewart says impatiently, her tone sharp enough to cut the orange with voice alone.  In voiceover, the critic Camille Paglia explains the phenomenon that we’re watching. “She got under men’s hair,” Paglia says, “this idea that you could be a homemaking expert who’s a bitch.” In the 2000s, at the height of her empire, Stewart made an odd fit for the era. She was a woman with power in a moment misogynistic enough to humiliate powerful woman; a woman who made art and business out of home life in a moment just feminist enough to understand a focus on the home as regressive; a woman viciously committed to perfection in a moment that craved tabloid-friendly mess.  That was the fundamental paradox of Martha Stewart. On the one hand, she built her brand on presenting a vision of the home so exactingly idealized it was impossible for anyone to live up to it. She romanticized the domestic sphere that women had spent so many decades trying to escape. She was regressive, surely, a ’50s throwback who deserved to be mocked and ignored. On the other hand, Stewart used all that domestic acumen to make herself the first female self-made billionaire in the world. She took homemaking seriously as an aesthetic pursuit when the rest of the culture was minimizing it as unimportant women’s work. She had power and she had swagger and she knew it, and it put a target on her back. When Joan Didion wrote about Martha Stewart for the New Yorker in 2000, she noted that there was something telling about the way all those Martha Stewart parody books that flourished in the era were so bizarrely sexualized. The parodies, Didion wrote, were “too broad, misogynistic in a cartoon way (stripping Martha to her underwear has been a reliable motif of countless on-line parodies), curiously nervous (‘Keeping Razors Circumcision-Sharp’ is one feature in ‘Martha Stuart’s Better Than You at Entertaining’), oddly uncomfortable, a little too intent on marginalizing a rather considerable number of women by making light of their situations and their aspirations.” There was a vengeful, humiliating edge to all of it.  All that power, however, took quite a beating when Stewart was arrested for insider trading in 2002.  In 2004, Stewart was found “guilty guilty guilty,” not of fraud but of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and lying to federal investigators. She allegedly took an illicit tip from her stockbroker, perhaps in the same spirit with which she decided that her affairs didn’t count as infidelity. (The chief prosecutor against her was James Comey, of whom Stewart says in Martha, “Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high.”) In Martha, Cutler lingers in detail on Stewart’s trial and her time in jail. In his hands, the media circus around her conviction becomes a portrait of what it is like for a woman who built her whole identity on her sense of control to find herself rendered completely powerless.  In archival footage of the period between her trial and her sentencing, Stewart explained her preparations for her sentencing to an interviewer in a chipper Snow White voice, as though explaining how to fold a fitted sheet. “Well, you know, you go to the dentist. You go to the gynecologist,” she said. “You just make sure you’re in as best shape as you possibly can to let your body and your mind take whatever comes!” In the diary she kept in prison, she instructed herself sternly to learn something new every day: the control freak doing her best to reap something of value from even the worst of experiences.  Stewart served five months in prison, and today, she insists it wasn’t a major inflection point in her life. The scandal that came with it, though, forced her to rebuild everything. She lost control of her fiercely guarded brand, lost her TV show, and lost what she estimates to be about $1 billion. Her first project after her release, the flashy NBC talk show The Martha Stewart Show, she dismisses now as a failure despite its seven seasons on the air: She wasn’t, she says, able to control it the way she wanted to.  Eventually, Stewart managed to rebuild herself as a sort of ironic celebrity. She’s built a clever brand for herself now as the nice grandma who knows everything there is to know about rose gardens but also has done hard time and is friends with Snoop. (Endearingly, their relationship appears to be both authentic and organic — they were seated next to each other on Comedy Central’s roast of Justin Bieber and apparently hit it off.) She’s not a billionaire anymore, but she’s made herself relevant to the public again while apparently refusing to change her own behavior or personality in any meaningful way. She still wants power, and she is still grabbing for it.  Stewart managed to rebuild herself as a sort of ironic celebrity. In Didion’s essay, she suggests, in a passage Stewart describes as “very insightful” in the documentary, that it’s Stewart’s power that is attractive to her audience, not her unreachable exactitude. “The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity,” Didion writes, “but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”  What Martha suggests is different from Didion’s idea. It offers us a Martha Stewart who is attractive not because she played and won, but because she played so hard each and every time, even when she lost. She’s a control freak, a perfectionist, unreasonably demanding, and vicious when crossed — and what’s more touchingly, imperfectly human than that?

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Trump speaks at the Ellipse outside the White House on January 6, 2021. In the game Jenga, players take turns removing wooden blocks from a rickety tower and then stacking them back on the top. Each removed piece makes the base more wobbly; each block put back on top makes it more unbalanced until it eventually topples.   This, I’d argue, is basically how we should be thinking about the stakes of the 2024 election for American democracy: an already-rickety tower of state would be at risk of falling in on itself entirely, with catastrophic results for those who live under its shelter. We live in an era where democracies once considered “consolidated” — meaning so secure that that they couldn’t collapse into authoritarianism — have started to buckle and even collapse. As recently as 2010, Hungary was considered one of the post-Communist world’s great democratic success stories; today, it is now understood to be the European Union’s only autocracy. Hungarian democracy did not die of natural causes. It was murdered by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who seized control of nearly every aspect of state power and twisted it into tools. Not just the obvious things, like Hungary’s public broadcaster and judiciary, but other areas — like its tax administration and the offices regulating higher education.  Bit by bit, piece by piece, Orbán — whose support Trump regularly touts — subtly took a democracy and replaced it with something different. In this, he was a trailblazer, creating a blueprint of going from democracy to autocracy that has been followed, to varying degrees of success, by leaders in countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Israel, and Poland.  The central question of this election is whether voters will grant former President Donald Trump the power to resume his efforts to place the United States on this list. A predictable crisis Trump’s statements and policy documents like Project 2025 amount to a systematic Orbánist program for turning the government into an extension of his personal will. Their most fundamental proposal, a revival of Trump’s never-implemented Schedule F order, would permit the firing of upward of 50,000 career civil servants. This is the kind of thing that’s easy to dismiss as so much insider Washington drama, but the stakes are sky-high: Beyond hindering the basic functions of government that millions of people depend on, politicizing the civil service is a critical step toward consolidating the power needed to build an autocracy. Democratic collapse nowadays isn’t a matter of abolishing elections and declaring oneself dictator, but rather stealthily hollowing out a democratic system so it’s harder and harder for the opposition to win. This strategy requires full control over the state and the bureaucracy: That means having the right staff in the right places who can use their power to erode democracy’s core functions. Trump and his team have plans to do just that. They have discussed everything from prosecuting local election administrators to using regulatory authority for “retribution” against corporations that cross him — all steps that would depend, crucially, on replacing nonpartisan civil servants who would resist such orders with loyalists. How far Washington would travel down the Budapest road is very hard to say. It would depend on a variety of factors that are difficult to foresee, ranging from the competence of Trump’s chosen appointees to the degree of resistance he faces from the judiciary.  But even if there’s a reasonable chance that the worst case might be avoided, the danger remains serious. With specific plans for autocratization already in place, and a recent grant of criminal immunity from the Supreme Court, there’s every reason to treat a second Trump term as an extinction-level threat to American democracy.  This assault on democracy didn’t come out of nowhere. My recent book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, argues that rising political antagonism in America is a perennial outgrowth of its defining conflict over race and national identity — with the current round of conflict sparked largely (albeit not entirely) by backlash to Barack Obama’s 2008 victory.  The sense among some Americans that they were losing their country to something new, defined by a more diverse population and a more equal social hierarchy, made the idea of a strongman who could roll back change quite appealing to a significant chunk of the American population. These voters had come to constitute a plurality, if not an outright majority, of Republican primary voters — creating the conditions for Trump to rise. In 2016, Trump seized on this reactionary discontent and married it to a whole-scale agenda of backlash against the current political order. His policies and political rhetoric — on everything from immigration to gender to trade to foreign policy — were calculated to deepen America’s divisions and mainstream ideas once consigned to the fringes.  As potent as this politics proved, it’s likely Trump never really expected it to take him all the way to the White House. He had done very little transition work — nothing like Project 2025 existed. His team was scrambling from the second the contest was called in their favor. The president himself was unfamiliar with how American democracy worked and largely uninterested in learning the details. So in his first term, he haphazardly yanked at its foundations — flagrantly assailing basic democratic norms of conduct and installing an incoherent policy process that made it very difficult to rely on any expectation of neutral, stable governance. The results? Rising tensions between citizens and declining faith in government institutions, in part because government had become legitimately less reliable. There were several near-miss crises — people forget how close we were to nuclear war with North Korea in 2017 — and then two very real ones: a botched pandemic response and a democracy-shaking riot at the Capitol.  When critics warn about Trump’s threat, the constant rejoinder is that democracy already survived four years of Trump in office. In fact, democracy did not emerge unscathed from Trump’s first term. And, perhaps more importantly, there are many reasons to believe that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than the first — starting with the degree of authoritarian preparation that’s already gone into it. A toddler grown into a saboteur If the first Trump term was akin to the random destruction of a toddler, a second would be more like the deliberate demolition of a saboteur. With the benefit of four years of governing experience and four more years of planning, Trump and his team have concluded that the problem with their first game of Jenga was that they simply did not remove enough of democracy’s blocks. I do not think that, over the course of four more years, Trump could use these plans to successfully build a fascist state that would jail critics and install himself in power indefinitely. This is in part because of the size and complexity of the American state, and in part because that’s not really the kind of authoritarianism that works in democracies nowadays. But over the course of those years, he could yank out so many of American democracy’s basic building blocks that the system really could be pushed to the brink of collapse. He could quite plausibly create a political environment that tilts electoral contests (even more) in the GOP’s favor — accelerating dangerous and destabilizing partisan conflict over the very rules of the political game. He could compromise media outlets, especially government or billionaire-owned ones. He could wreck the government’s ability to perform basic tasks, ranging from managing pollution to safely storing nuclear weapons. The damage could be immediately catastrophic in ways we saw in the first term: political violence and mass death (from war, a crank-controlled public health system, or any number of other things). But even if the very worst-case scenarios were avoided, the structural damage to the tower of American democracy could be long-lasting — undoing the complex and mutually supporting processes that work to keep democracy alive. When government reliably and neutrally delivers core services, people tend to have more faith in all of its functions — including running fair elections. When they have more faith in elections, they tend to trust them more as a means of resolving major policy disagreements. When they trust election outcomes, they tend to grant a baseline level of legitimacy to the government that follows, making it easier for it to reliably and neutrally deliver core services. The steady house of democracy is built by the gluing together of these functions. John Rawls, the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, described this as a long process of trust-building that starts with a basic faith in democratic ideals. When people of all political stripes basically believe in the system, he argues, they start acting inside its rules — giving others more confidence that they too can follow the rules without being cheated. “Gradually, as the success of political cooperation continues, citizens gain increasing trust and confidence in one another,” Rawls writes in his book Political Liberalism. A second Trump term risks replacing Rawls’s virtuous cycle with a vicious one. As Trump degrades government, following the Orbánist playbook with at least some success, much of the public would justifiably lose their already-battered faith in the American system of government. And whether it could long survive such a disaster is anyone’s guess.

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