GOP's Banana Republic Moves in the Midwest Are a Warning Sign to the Rest of Us

I’ve had the Midwest on my mind lately, on account of the post-election political fights afoot in Michigan and Wisconsin.  What’s happening there is riveting, but it’s a fair enough question to ask why non-residents should care.  After all, isn’t there that old saying, what happens in Lansing, stays in Lansing?

Well, actually, there is no such saying, and I will take that as an opening to argue that what is happening in Lansing and Madison is in fact well worth paying attention to, whether you live in Dubuque, Denver, or the Dalles (shout out to Oregon!).  In both Michigan and Wisconsin, Democratic candidates won the governorship — a particularly welcome outcome in the latter state, as it entailed the defeat of the execrable Scott Walker.  The response of the GOP-controlled legislatures in both states, however, in conjunction with their outgoing Republican governors, has been to advocate bills that limit the new governors’ power (now passed in Wisconsin, though still pending in Michigan).  Additionally, in Michigan, the governor has just signed a law that defies voter initiatives on minimum wage increases and paid sick leave. 

In isolation, changing the rules when a candidate from the opposing party wins the governorship would be unacceptably anti-democratic.  But the parlous effects go far beyond the basic affront of negating the will of the voters in a single election cycle, which would be bad enough as an instance of what the more pollyanish among us might refer to as “bad loser syndrome.”  Rather, as Zack Beauchamp argues at Vox, it amounts to a rejection of the premise of democracy itself as the way that we settle political conflict: when one side wins, the other side allows it to rule.  As Beauchamp describes it,

The post-election power grabs amount to Republicans declaring that they no longer accept that fundamental bargain. They do not believe it’s legitimate when they lose, or that they are obligated to hand over power to Democrats because that’s what’s required in a fair system. Political power, to the state legislators in question, matters more than the core bargain of democracy.

Beauchamp’s summary resonates not simply because it accurately describes what has just happened in Michigan and Wisconsin, but because the acts he describes come after a great number of similar moves by the GOP both in those states and elsewhere.  After all, Republican restrictions on a Democratic governor’s power strongly echo similar maneuvers two years ago in North Carolina.  More than this, these moves are happening after the GOP had already gerrymandered the living bejesus out of both states, in an attempt to attain a permanent lock.  The 2018 election results tell the sordid tale: in Michigan, Republicans retained the State House with a 58 to 52 majority, even though voters overall were in favor of Democratic candidates by 52% to 48%.  In Wisconsin, the effects of gerrymandering were even more egregious - there, the GOP holds the State Assembly by a 63 to 36 margin, even though voters preferred Democrats 54% to 44%.

It’s necessary, then, to see what is happening in these states in context: as the escalation of a move against democracy that began to take clear shape in the re-districting implemented in both states, and indeed in many GOP-controlled states, following the 2010 census.  Just as Beauchamp rightly zeroes in on the belief by GOP legislators in those states that political power matters more than the handover of government to the winners of an election, Jamelle Bouie makes a complementary point: that GOP legislators simply don’t see Democratic voters as legitimate.  Citing the remarkable statement by Wisconsin’s state Assembly speaker that “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority—we would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature,” Bouie concludes:

The idea that you could remove the state’s major population centers and still have an acceptably democratic result is a reasoning that gets to the heart of the matter. It’s not just that Democrats are poised to undo gains made under Walker’s administration, but that Democrats themselves are illegitimate because of who they represent. [Speaker] Vos isn’t saying that Republicans should do better in Madison and Milwaukee, he’s saying that the state’s major cities shouldn’t count. And if they do count, says Fitzgerald, they don’t count the same way [. . .] They are the wrong voters, and the Democrats they elect have no right to roll back a Republican administration backed by the right ones.

This observation is shocking, but I think it is also spot on, and helps get to the root of how we’ve arrived at this point, where one of our two major political parties has accelerated its embrace of an anti-democratic politics.  Racism is key to this issue of legitimacy — it is not too far of a stretch to say that there is a mindset held by some in the GOP that black voters are not real Americans, exhibit A being the preposterous birther campaign against Barack Obama.  And there is a way that this racism slops over to white Americans as well; as Bouie puts it, some Republicans view certain white voters as enablers of what they perceive to be an unwelcome defense of African-Americans, which in turn serves to undercut the political legitimacy of those white voters as well.

The latest ramp-up of the GOP’s assault on democracy in Michigan and Wisconsin deserves national attention because it represents the leading edge of the GOP’s anti-democratic animus.  It was not enough to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering to secure a majority; now that Democrats have won elections for statewide governorships that can’t be gerrymandered, the Republican response is to undercut the gubernatorial power.

But the need for national attention doesn’t end there: because, as David Leonhardt describes, the Republican effort in Wisconsin is being abetted by major corporations like Walgreens who back Republicans even as the party attempts to stifle democratic competition.  Walgreens has taken to exclusively backing the GOP in Wisconsin, apparently because the GOP has pushed through tax breaks for that company and others that, incidentally, have cost municipalities millions of dollars, and have led to rising taxes on Wisconsin in order to compensate for the resulting budget shortfalls.  But in doing so, Walgreens is also helping bankroll a movement to undercut democracy in an American state; the company is essentially giving its support to anti-democratic measures as the way to ensure a GOP majority that keeps tax advantages flowing to the company.  This is not business as usual; this is an unsettling and un-American fusion of corporate power with right-wing politics in the name of stymying democracy.

To recognize the role of corporate backers in funding state-level gerrymandering and the hobbling of Democratic governors is to recognize the scale of the threat our country faces, and to be in a better position to fashion remedies, whether it be outrage that drives voters to the polls and into activism, or efforts to boycott companies that have crossed the line into supporting backers of a one-party state.

It provides some grounds for optimism that Democratic activists in Michigan and Wisconsin appear fired up in opposition to these latest moves to deny Democrats the ability to exercise power.  One perspective might hold that the GOP has backed itself into a disreputable corner with its maneuvers to hobble democracy, and can no longer rely on voters not paying attention to traditionally abstruse issues like gerrymandering and voter suppression.  As I’ve written before, the Democrats have no choice but to embrace the mantle of democracy, both as a matter of basic morality and as a strategic move to make the GOP pay as high a price as possible for its antagonism to our democratic project.  Both as a disturbing example of where the GOP would take the country, and for the sake of supporting voters in those states, it seems to the Democrats’ advantage to nationalize what’s happening in the two states.

Focusing on the state-level machinations of anti-democratic forces is also crucial because it makes more concrete issues of democracy and voter rights that otherwise might feel abstract and abstruse.  In some ways, it is even more of an affront that a political sphere that should be even more within the control of voters, where their activism and votes should have the most impact, is where the GOP has decided it can really kick the shit out of majority rule.  For my own part, I know how viscerally I would react if the Oregon legislature were gerrymandered so that Democrats couldn’t win a majority of seats, not matter how much of the popular vote they won.  That would feel personal, in a way that hearing of the travails of Michigan and Wisconsin voters does not.  At the same time, I think it’s important that we do collectively grasp what’s happening to the citizens of Michigan and Wisconsin, both as a matter of democratic solidarity and because they could easily be us.

A Clear, Concise Story About the President's Wrongdoing is Necessary, and Within Reach

Adam Davidson at The New Yorker ends his most recent reflections on the state of the Russia investigation with an appraisal that cuts through the sprawl and still-redacted spaces of the whole sordid story.  Even if we were to learn still more than what we do now about Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, he says,

[W]e are already in an unbearable condition.  The President of the United States knowingly and eagerly participated in a scheme with a hostile foreign leader who he knew was seeking to influence the Presidential election. Trump sought to profit politically and financially, many of his closest subordinates executed this effort, and he then was aware of and, it seems likely, encouraged an illegal effort to hide these facts. His reckless, unpatriotic actions have left him compromised by at least one but likely many foreign powers and have left his election open to reasonable questions about its legitimacy. And, every day, he sets policies and makes decisions that have an impact on the lives of all Americans and the fortunes of the very autocrats who hold sway over him. It cannot stand.

Part of what’s striking here is that Davidson is limiting himself only to the known information about Trump’s efforts to build the Moscow tower, including revelations in Friday’s filings against Michael Cohen that they were more extensive and went on longer than previously known.  Equally striking is how concisely and plainly he sets forth a complicated set of circumstances into plain and morally urgent English that sets our political crisis in bright relief.  Trump’s efforts to hide the truth of what he did were not simply attempts to deceive a public that was deciding whether to elect him president, but also made him subject to coercion by other countries who were aware of his actions.  I think Davidson’s conclusion is irrefutable, which leads us to this question: Why aren’t Democrats making the case that this well-respected New Yorker writer already is?  What on earth is stopping them from making a concerted effort to accurately and effectively communicate the stakes of the Russia investigation to the American people?

Davidson isn’t the only one who’s made this point, but his clarity is hard to beat.  The inexorable conclusion is that talk of impeachment and further investigations by the incoming Democratic majority are in important ways simply efforts to avoid the more fundamental crisis staring us in the face, a crisis that hardly consists of this one thread of the Moscow Trump Tower but includes the president’s payoff of women in order to sway the 2016 presidential election, his campaign’s clear and documented willingness to accept assistance from the Russian government and not notify the FBI of such efforts, and the mounting evidence that there was coordination between Trump’s campaign and the Russians. 

Escalating the situation still further is the fact that the president’s own party has defended the president tooth and nail through the present — even when this meant hampering examination of the established Russian effort to interfere in the election, separate and apart from whether there was collusion with the Trump campaign.  That is, the GOP has made itself party to the president’s own unacceptable behavior, which means that they have an interest in continuing to protect him even in face of still more damning revelations to come.

The Washington Post’s weekend survey of how the GOP is taking the recent bad news on the Cohen front does not provide much ground for optimism.  Those Republicans interviewed seem to break into two camps: those who are in denial of the extremity of the president’s peril, and those who see the way forward in purely political terms.  One Trump-supporting Republic senator does draw the line at evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and the Russians, at which point “then they’ve lost me.”  But what, for the GOP, would constitute evidence, if even the results of an FBI investigation are dismissed by the president as the fictions of the “deep state”?

This gets to another key point that opponents of the president need to be making in a coordinated fashion.  All the talk of process and the president staffing up and hunkering down distracts from the horrific reality at the base of it all —the president appears to have secured his election by illegitimate means, both by breaking campaign finance laws (in the case of his payoffs to women he’d slept with) and (far more critically) by the assistance he accepted and cultivated from the Russian government.  That is, we’re not talking about whether the president broke a random law or two — we’re talking about a basic illegitimacy, compounded by the danger he’s put the U.S. in by placing himself under the influence of foreign governments aware of his unconscionable acts.

The irony couldn’t be greater: while Trump’s white nationalist staffers bleat on about how the United States isn’t really a sovereign nation if it can’t secure its borders against refugees, the entirety of the GOP has turned a blind eye to evidence that a foreign government helped pick the U.S. president, and now exercises malign influence on his decision-making: a lot of good that strong borders do, when you hand the White House keys to the authoritarians in the Kremlin!

Though the various threads and sheer volume of information are overwhelming, it is quite possible to construct and communicate a clear narrative of what Trump did wrong, what the GOP has done wrong in defending him, and that we face the question of whether Americans are to be citizens of a democracy or the dupes of a con man.  As I’ve said before, this is not an either/or in terms of the Democrats having a positive agenda for America; in fact, it’s entirely the opposite.  We will never have world-class education for all, and health care for all, and economic security for all, and a healthy climate for all, if our president and the GOP put personal and party interest over country.  There is no value that Republicans purport to defend that is not made into a sick joke by their defense of a president beholden to a foreign power, and so absurdly stuck on the notion of making money that he’s happy to sell his own country down the river.

This isn’t any sort of hyper-patriotism I’m arguing for; it’s more of a baseline but nonnegotiable position that our country is nothing without fair elections, and that the Democrats are nothing without making defense of democracy, including elections, central to their identity as a party.  The GOP stands in the way of the future Americans need and deserve.  Every day that they take the side of Trump and Russia over the United States is another day that climate change becomes harder to stop; is another day that we’re getting no closer to universal health care; is another day that we’re not talking about real reforms that could help people left behind by the 21st century economy.

Let’s not forget, too, that we’ve been frozen into a red-blue mindset for so long that too many people are convinced that this is the permanent state of things, rather than the product of limited political imagination.  That Washington Post story I cited notes that “The White House is adopting what one official termed a “shrugged shoulders” strategy for the Mueller findings, calculating that most GOP base voters will believe whatever the president tells them to believe.”  This is truly amazing.  The GOP’s voter-outreach strategy is now one of pure propaganda, relying on the idea that Republicans can no longer think for themselves.  But surely most Republicans would be enraged to learn they’ve been duped by the president.  What are the Democrats doing to reach those voters, or to channel their anger to good should matters reach a breaking point and they abandon the president en masse?

H.W. and Me: Epilogue

As a bookend to last week’s cathartic discussion of George H. W. Bush’s role in my personal political development and the unlikely debt I owe him, I want to flag two informative takes on his presidency.  Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine makes a perverse but persuasive case that, despite current praise from his co-partisans, Republicans learned all the wrong lessons from his administration.  They’ve doubled down on the racism and intolerant nationalism that the past week’s encomiums downplayed, while rejecting his willingness to compromise and act in a bipartisan fashion.  Meanwhile, Jeet Heer at New Republic has a concise rundown of the ways H.W.’s record has been whitewashed in recent days, partly out of a wish to highlight his differences from the current president, and revealing an elite longing for when the nation was ruled by. . . other elites.

Indeed, the idea that H.W. embodied the wealthy, Ivy League-educated upper strata taking their rightful place at the top of government may, in retrospect, may have been the single-most important early lesson I drew from the man.  That high office in a democracy is something that you should inherit because of your luck of birth, connections, and better sense of the common good struck me as bullshit back then, and there was perhaps no better person than H.W. to impart the lesson.  Beneath his noblesse oblige lay insecurity, intellectual and moral weakness (as demonstrated by the way he shifted from a pro-choice, anti-supply sider to Ronald Reagan’s anointed heir), and a nastiness that made itself known when his assumptions about the hierarchical nature of America were called into question.  He helped me learn early on to see through the pretensions of those who claim privilege in America, for which I feel a reluctant gratitude even today.

The Hot Screen Is Not Feeling So Hot About Recent Facebook Revelations

Last month’s New York Times’ exposé about Facebook’s failures around Russian interference in the 2016 election has been weighing heavily on my ongoing debate as to whether to continue posting The Hot Screen to the social network.  I’ve never been comfortable using Facebook to get my writing out — I despise its privacy-invading mission of reducing its users to sets of data points that it can exploit and profit from — and have always viewed my arrangement as a matter of expedience.

To read about Facebook’s failure to act in a credible manner against attempts to influence a U.S. election, putting profit over patriotism and greed over public responsibility, is utterly nauseating and unsettling.  The company is revealed to be a fraud — not in terms of its ability to make money, but in its portrayal of itself as a benign friend of millions of people who use it to connect and communicate.  Facebook sought to discredit those it saw as enemies by unethical and underhanded means, and preferred that foreign spies dupe Americans to taking action that might harm its bottom line.

This is not the only time that management has failed to apply the level of ethical thought required by the powerful and unprecedented nature of this technology.  Mark Zuckerberg may be a genius, but he’s proved himself a moral featherweight, unwilling or unable to grapple with the darker consequences of his invention.  I can safely say that if I had created an application that was used to facilitate genocide, I would probably never sleep again, but that’s just me.

I sense that there are a lot of people with increasing second thoughts about being on Facebook, and I do wonder if we are soon to see a mass exodus from the platform.  There are such amazing benefits to be able to connect with other people online, but I think we are at a point where we really need to think through the downsides and the ways that Facebook in particular has been hijacked by the enemies of a free and open society.

I have told myself that there is value in being a source of reliable information on a platform undermined by propaganda, instant gratification, and the cultivation of surface over depth.  The phrase “Occupy Facebook” sometimes comes to mind, but I have to admit that I don’t really know what that would mean beyond sounding cool.  At any rate, I would be sorry to lose any readers by signing off from this site, but at the same time, the miracle of the internet means that The Hot Screen would still be as accessible as always, a-hover in the ether, for those who care to bookmark the page.  And there are obviously other ways for me to get the word out: I am thinking of a weekly or monthly newsletter, and maybe engaging in the world of Twitter.

Believe me, I feel somewhat silly and hesitant to share these thoughts.  The Hot Screen is a speck of sand in the billions-strong world of Facebook, and my decision here is not going to make a dime’s worth of difference.  Millions of people had already rendered judgment on Facebook long before that New York Times piece came out, and turned their backs on its insistently cheery, claustrophobic electronic clime. 

Yet the only way big corporations will act as good public actors is if we force them to, at both and individual and collective level.  Their foundations in the quest for profit and the temptations of greed will always be ground to distrust their motives and their actions; somewhat ironically, the higher their claims to benefit the public, the higher the scrutiny and skepticism that are called for.  You can dismiss this attitude as anti-business or anti-capitalist all you want, but a more clear-eyed perspective see it as pro-democracy and pro-citizen, and based on a realistic view of human nature rather than an ingenuous ideology of the glories of the marketplace.

H.W. and Me

By coincidence, I’ve been thinking about George Herbert Walker Bush over the past couple of days, on account of being partway through Steve Kornacki’s The Red and the Blue, a history of 1990’s politics, and specifically in the midst of his account of the 1988 and 1992 elections.  Until I learned of his death last night, my thoughts were wholly divorced from the H.W. of our time, a man whose wife recently passed and who himself was reported to be in declining health.  Instead, I had only been considering Bush at the height and then sudden nadir of his power; a man who had achieved the highest presidential approval ratings in U.S. history in the wake of the Gulf War, only to find himself soundly rejected in a national election that subjected him to the one-two punch of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.  What I had been reading in Kornacki’s book provoked familiar feelings, of contempt for the man and pleasure at his comeuppance.  (One of my favorite political photos of all time is of H.W. and James Baker III in the latter days of the 1992 campaign, the strain and understanding of their coming defeat clear on their faces (though the joke would ultimately be on me, as Baker would subsequently head up George W. Bush’s legal efforts in the 2000 Florida recount)).

It was under the Reagan presidency that I began to be aware of politics, but it was with the election and presidency of H.W. that I became more fully conscious, beginning with following the 1988 election closely, being a (useless) elector for Michael Dukakis under a high school social studies project, and then running through the next four years of his dramatically arcing presidency.  H.W. was my first intimate Republican villain, partially against whom I began a lifelong process of developing my own political knowledge and framework.  In many ways, he was a great teacher; for instance, as a sometimes comic example of the unsuccessful image-making politicians engage in, as he tried to overcome the so-called “wimp factor” by cultivating an image of Hollywood toughness that simply did not match his character.  Yet this effort went beyond image to substance; as has already been pointed out countless times today through the miracle of Twitter, this rebranding effort led his campaign to issue the infamously racist Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis, a deeply flawed candidate who surely would have been defeated without it.

There is a strong case to be made, one that I largely agree with, that our nation is not well-served by greeting the death of major politicians with a white-washing of their records; to honor the dead by dishonoring history is not an exchange I’m comfortable with (for an effective and no-punches-pulled argument for this perspective, I recommend this thread by Amanda Marcotte on the afore-mentioned Twitter machine).  I am as self-righteous as the next guy, and have, though with mixed feelings, felt no small satisfaction in reading this morning’s accounts of H.W.‘s various political sins.

Yet this pressing need for speaking the truth must be balanced against acknowledgment of our common mortality, and of the fact that even people with whom we vehemently disagree leave behind loved ones and friends who are deeply affected by their passing.  This alone would call for some measure of respect and compassion in the healthy critiques of the deceased’s record; at a minimum, it seems inhumane to offer such critiques without pairing them with an acknowledgment of the inevitable sorrows of the man’s passing.

But beyond this, a particular obligation comes with how we mark the passing of a politician in a democracy.  Whatever his political failures, George H.W. Bush was elected president by the American people, and deserves some measure of respect for this.  And even more crucially to the argument I am trying to make here, he was then removed from office by the American people.  That is, in answer to those of us who believe in fighting for an accurate view of history in the face of efforts to lionize his accomplishments, the inescapable reality is that voters long ago already rendered a judgment on the man’s capacity to be president — and it was not a pretty judgment.  In a three-way race, he won only 37% of the vote; quite a thumping, as his son might say.  

Beyond this, the race subjected H.W. to various humiliations (including the mis-told story that he did not realize that grocery stores had bar code scanners (he had simply observed that he had not seen a new handheld scanner before) - a fable that captured his patrician distance from ordinary Americans, but that also told an untrue story of a completely out-of-touch and feeble-minded dolt who through the course of his presidency descended to the mental level of his absurd vice president, Dan Quayle), up to and including the final humiliation of losing an election after being the most popular president in the history of polling only a year or so before.  This is to say nothing of H.W.’s earlier flip-flopping on his “read my lips: no new taxes pledge,” which is still used as the default example of presidency-defining reversals of policy.

You would have to be a hard soul indeed not be moved, at least on the grounds of nostalgia for a seemingly simpler time, by the handwritten welcome note he left behind for Bill Clinton at the White House.  But there are other reasons to feel something about that note.  H.W. wrote it at a time when he was doubtless feeling anger at the president-elect and deep sorrow over his own defeat; you don’t have to agree with his politics to understand that he likely had real fears about the fate of the nation at that moment.  Sure, he may have been a saint who simply transcended such feelings; far likelier, he was a man who acted against some of his own most profound inclinations and did the right thing in a very difficult moment.

What I am getting at is that we gain nothing by closing ourselves off to the humanity of our political opponents, no matter how nasty we judge their politics, because we begin to close ourselves off from the possibility of persuasion and redemption that are at the heart of a democratic nation.  Beyond this, and against the necessity of pushing back against propaganda and the donning of rose-colored glasses about a politician’s record, we need to bear in mind that the political movement in our country dedicated to democracy, racial equality, economic fairness, and tolerance is powerful, and has the force of history and justice on its side.  Sometimes it is enough to defeat your opponents; other times it is necessary to kick them around a little when they’re down; but being in the right also means that there is rarely a need to engage in scorched earth put-downs 24 hours within their deaths, even of politicians whose actions had lasting and damaging consequences, as is surely the case with H.W.  Viciousness betrays a lack of faith not simply in the rightness of your cause, but in its power and persuasiveness.  Those who see the wealthy as the best Americans, who see minorities as not real Americans, and who see democracy as a game to rig and subvert are swimming against a tide more powerful than they can know.

Questions of how to balance political condemnation and righteousness with reconciliation will present themselves to us in force over the next couple of years.  An administration that has subordinated the national interest to private gain will have much to answer for, as will a Republican Party that has enabled obscene offenses against American security and democracy.  I recently read a critique of the term “the resistance,” and it has continued to resonate with me; the author’s point was that Americans who believe in the rule of law are hardly the resistance, but the true possessors and inheritors of our country’s highest traditions.  We are far more powerful that we think, and it does not help to tell ourselves story about the boundless evil of the other side; it makes them seem more powerful than they are, and ourselves, weaker.  We are certainly strong enough to strike the right balance between truth-telling and magnanimity, particularly in the face of a former president’s death. Many of George H.W. Bush’s actions surely merit our condemnation and criticism, but this doesn’t mean he also doesn’t deserve our compassion, respect for the good things he accomplished, and, if not now then eventually, forgiveness for the bad.

Corporate Shakedowns of Cities and States Attack Our Bonds of Citizenship

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a concise but thorough review of the public shakedown constituted by Amazon’s just-concluded “search” for a second headquarters location, which resulted in the on-line goliath picking Long Island City in Queens and Crystal City in northern Virginia.  The troubling dynamic involves Amazon settling on two locations — Washington, D.C. and New York City — that were glaringly top contenders at the start of its search, but with Amazon extracting billions of dollars of tax benefits from the two winners through its pretense of a competition.  But Thompson moves on to a larger point: that this practice of pitting localities against each other is both widespread and economically dubious. 

The numbers are huge; according to Thompson, “American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states” every year. These expenditures take money away from other government services, like schools and police.  Yet defenders argue that companies have a right to try to make money, and that states have a right to try to lure business in; and so is this behavior really a problem, or just an inevitable cost of the modern economy?

Thompson cites three enormous and damning refutations of this common practice.  First, companies often have already decided where they’re going to expand, and simply use the charade of looking to shake down their target location for money.  Second, companies don’t always follow through with their commitments.  But his third point is the most damning - even under the best circumstances, “it’s still ludicrous for Americans to collectively pay tens of billions of dollars for huge corporations to relocate within the United States.”

Another way I’ve been thinking about looking at this decisive third point: every year, American taxpayers are collectively throwing away $90 billion dollars that could otherwise have been spent on actually growing the economy.  This is staggering, yet it also seems so obviously wasteful.  So why isn’t this raising even more red flags (as Thompson damningly points out, the consensus behind this practice is bipartisan)?  The two broad reasons he cites — that companies have a right to make money, and that states have a right to lure in business to benefit their communities — seem correct, yet the logic and implications are worth exploring.

For corporations to be in a position to pit cities and states against each other speaks to the imbalance of private and public power in our time.  I’m struck by how natural this is to so many people, when the ultimate reality of an economy is that it should serve the citizenry, and not the other way around.  In this, there is an almost feudal element in such arranged competitions, our political groupings fighting it out for the pleasure of corporate overlords who win no matter what city or state ends up the victor.

This gets us to a fundamental upending of the free market capitalism that’s held to be at the heart of the economy, and which common wisdom would say is the most efficient system for producing economic wealth.  Rather than corporations engaging in competition that benefits the consumer, it’s our political system that is made to compete, against itself, for the benefit of corporations.  Corporations, it seems, are the new consumers, and consumers, the new corporations.  Alongside this, it becomes glaringly obvious the degree to which economic ideas have supplanted political ones in the realm of politics, and to which not only cities and states, but individual Americans, have been encouraged to see their fellows as opponents and competitors, rather than as fellow citizens and allies.

The alternative to cities and states competing for business, after all, is cooperation.  The possible solutions to this current pitting of all against all cited by Thompson lie in such a direction: federal laws against the practice, tax policies that nullify certain incentive structures, fiscal punishment of cities and states that steal jobs from other localities, and use of the presidential bully pulpit to call out corporations that set Americans against each other.  The fourth is obviously not going to happen under the current president, and Thompson doesn’t seem optimistic about the first three.

Yet this is an issue that will need to be addressed if we are to restore economic fairness in this country.  This is not just because forcing Americans to compete for jobs in such a wasteful way in inherently unjust, but also because of how it embodies the darkest developments of both our economic and political systems.  At a time when we need far more government intervention in the economy, whether it’s to break up monopolies, ensure all Americans can make a decent living, or transition our economy to a carbon-neutral future, state-sanctioned bribery of corporations constitutes a sort of anti-socialism or crony capitalism.  The urgency of a better way is amplified by how distorted economic outcomes have become, both in terms of inequality among individual citizens, and between those regions that benefit and those that fail to thrive in the current economy.

Here are some statistics that are essential to understanding our current predicament, whether it be the rise of Trumpism or why it’s so necessary to press the Democratic Party for real economic change.  First, as noted by Annie Lowrey in another piece on the Amazon headquarters search, “the wealthiest 20 percent of zip codes have generated more new businesses than the bottom 80 percent combined.”  Second, the economic power and growth of a small number of urban areas dwarfs that of the great majority of American regions: according to Lowrey, “[j]ust five metro regions, out of the nearly 400 across the country, produce more than a quarter of all economic output.”

These are staggering and upsetting numbers.  In light of this, the idea that already-successful areas of the country continue to lure even more business at the expense of other regions, in a way that ends up wasting money better invested in the American people, seems even more objectionable.  This also raises the possibility that there may be more support for an end to this useless economic arms race than most observers realize.

With Lethal Force Authorization Against Migrants, the President Embraces Violence As a Political Tool

President Trump’s decision to send troops to the border in response to a group of refugees making their way through Mexico was always part of an effort to foment hysteria among his base; insisting that military action is needed has helped him create out of whole cloth a narrative that the U.S. is about to be invaded by criminals and even terrorists.  Many have pointed out how these and other efforts to make the midterms about immigration have simply disappeared since, well, the midterms.  But the White House’s authorization this week for the military to use deadly force to defend border patrol agents suggests that presidential rage and a hard-line anti-immigrant stance may have combined into a very real national crisis that has now taken on a life of its own. 

Authorization of lethal force against migrants moves the series of inappropriate responses to those seeking a better life and shelter from harm out of the realm of black comedy, and into a more tragic sphere.  As so many times before, the president would have the most powerful nation in the history of the world quail before unarmed, impoverished refugees, many of them women and children, in the name of goosing his approval ratings.  But unlike before, the president is now apparently prepared to cross a line from hateful rhetoric to outright violence.  The Trump administration seems intent on committing murder in the name of repelling an imaginary invasion.

This is the opposite of defending America’s borders and sovereignty.  This is committing crimes in the name of illusionary political gain, by a man who has repeatedly proved himself unfit to hold the presidency.  In the name of defending our borders, he would kill our nation’s soul, re-defining us a country that preys on the powerless and has been convinced of its own victimhood.

One illogical notion follows another, all based on the premise that immigrants and refugees are an existential threat to the United States.  All manner of preposterous thinking flows from this premise, up to the notion that the military is needed to shoot immigrants rushing border posts.  Take this statement from a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, who tells us that, “we will not allow our front-line personnel to be in harm’s way.”  In other words, armed border patrol agents are actually incapable of defending themselves against these fantastic threats, and need the military to commit homicide in their defense.  By this logic, the president will next be calling in the Marines to defend the helpless National Guard, so formidable is the challenge from down south.

For Trump, the important thing is not to secure the border so much as to introduce violence into the American political discourse.  I think he has come to see his commander-in-chief role as something he can exploit to political advantage; he can order troops around, he can order them to kill, and he can use the troops as a sort of human shield, relying on Americans‘ widespread support of the American military to shield himself from horrific policy decisions.  What scares me is that the president and his closest advisors seem not to understand how easily the line between threat and actual violence can be crossed.  There is a bloodthirsty quality to this lethal force authorization.  It is one thing to make war against our actual enemies; it is another thing entirely to make war against those who don’t pose a threat.  It suggests a fundamental cowardice and unbalanced quality that we’ve seen many times before, and that we need to take seriously. 

How Do Democrats Go Big in a World of Necessary and Perilous Compromises?

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein each have articles out that address and widen some of the issues for Democrats that I mulled over in last week’s piece.  They dig down into the complicated dynamics of what confronting Donald Trump looks like now that the Democrats can pass legislation and conduct investigations in one house of Congress.  Neither states so explicitly, but both raise a central question of our political moment: what is the balance to be struck between stopping Trump and advancing a more progressive, affirmative vision for America?  It is not so simple as saying the first will accomplish the second — as Yglesias and Klein discuss, there are many ways in which vigorous pursuit of the first may backfire and undermine the second.  

First, Klein suggests a basic tension between, on the one hand, the Democrats’ desire and obligation to investigate the corrupt activities of Trump and his administration, and on the other, their interest in pushing forward legislation that improves the lives of Americans.  A basic cause of this attention is the way that Trump-related stories tend to dominate the mediasphere, which in the case for scandals might be fairly bad for Trump but also bad for Democrats in that it makes it easier to counter-attack them by arguing they only care about destroying the president.  Klein raises the possibility that this would be the case even if such an aggressive Democratic posture were matched by bold legislative proposals, with the media providing overwhelming coverage of the former at the expense of the latter.

Klein’s point isn’t that the Democrats are simply screwed, but that they have difficult choices to make and a need for discipline in the face of Trump’s ability to dominate the media and thrive off confrontation.  His suggestion for threading the needle is to take on Trump on the policy front, in a way that ends up driving the conversation and exploiting Trump’s temperamental weakness in thinking about policy details.  Yet dangers abound here as well; as MoveOn.org’s Ben Wikler tells Klein, Trump is an unreliable negotiating partner who may well reneg on any agreements reached, and force the Democrats into base-dispiriting compromises in the process.

Yglesias’ piece drills down to a particular piece of possible legislation — an infrastructure bill that might cost as much as $1 trillion — to highlight the conflict between stopping Trump and improving the country.  His premise is that a revived push for infrastructure contains great danger for Democrats, in that a successful bill would allow the president to claim a patina of bipartisanship and crow about boosting the economy straight through to election day 2020; the downside for Democrats would be compounded if the bill ended up pouring vast amounts of money into an environmentally-unsustainable and wasteful batch of projects.  Like Klein, he ends up arguing that the Democrats would benefit most from boldness; if they put forward a transformative bill, it would at least contrast their vision with the retro one of Trump and the GOP.  If Trump ended up supporting it, he’d get some credit, but the Democrats at least would have gotten something major passed that redounded to the party’s credit and long-term goals.

Yglesias and Klein make me think I was on the right track with my argument that the Democrats need to go big, even as their gaming out the legislative battles of the next two years make me wonder if I’ve under-estimated the dangers facing the party once we start grappling with what “going big” means at the nitty-gritty level of actual legislation, confronting a president with unparalleled ability to dominate the political conversation, and entertaining compromise at the price of handing Trump re-election-enhancing victories.

Ensuring Donald Trump is a one-term president is the highest priority in American politics, yet it really can’t be separated out from re-making the Democrats into a progressive majority and holding the GOP as a whole accountable for the authoritarian, white nationalist abyss into which we all find ourselves collectively peering.  At this point, we have seen what unified Republican rule means, and it has resulted in nothing that helps working Americans and a whole lot that hurts them; voters rendered a verdict on this by giving the Democrats their biggest electoral success in the House since the post-Watergate election.  Against chalking up meaningful victories that make Americans’ lives better, even at the cost of compromises that enhance the electoral prospects of an unfit president, must be weighed the larger goal of changing the overall terms of economic and cultural debate.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, one way forward for the Democrats is to make public and explicit their own efforts to figure out a way forward.  If the Democrats are to be the party of democracy, then they should embrace dissent and open dialogue.  And if and when they do compromise on legislation with the president, they must make the argument that such legislation is simply a downpayment on more far-reaching measures to be implemented once a Democratic president is elected.  The Democrats may not be able to unite on much, but it seems quite possible for them to hammer home the message that Trump and the GOP are simply getting in the way of improving the lives of all Americans.  The same is true for investigations of Trump administration corruption: the mission should be to hold the powerful accountable and ensure that no American is above the law, and the Democrats should be transparent about their goals and methods.

There is also no way forward without the Democrats bringing voting rights front and center, and perhaps no better means to set the terms of public debate over the next two years. Investigating GOP voter suppression efforts and proposing laws to ensure that voting is accessible to all Americans is both good politics and good for America. There are dozens of great ideas floating around for improving our elections, from making Election Day a public holiday to reinstating in the Voting Rights Act in states that still systematically suppress the votes of African-Americans. This is legislation that the Democrats would be fine not to compromise on, and could possibly balance out the possibility for compromise on matters less critical to the survival of American democracy. It would also paint the Trump and GOP further into a corner as opponents of one person, one vote. The midterm outcomes in Georgia and Florida have given national attention to what it looks like when the Republicans cheat their way into office; Stacy Abrams’ argument that Brian Kemp is the legal but not legitimate winner of the Georgia gubernatorial race is an example of the tough talk that combines the moral high ground, democratic accountability, and a road map to future pro-voter reforms.

Democrats Need to Go Big and Be the Party of American Democracy That the Country Needs

One of the rules The Hot Screen has tried to follow is to never offer a critique of Donald Trump and the Republican Party that doesn’t include at least some idea about a more constructive approach to the issue in question.  One constant danger of this deranged president is that opposition to him can easily crowd out positive visions of what our country should be like in place of his white nationalist and self-serving con job of a presidency.  Trump didn’t come out of nowhere, and a general insistence that we reject him in favor of some preexisting normalcy confuses the symptom for the illness.

Likewise, demonstrating the continuity between Trump’s deranged white nationalist, plutocratic politics and the modern GOP is incredibly important — we cannot let the GOP disown this monster that it created, and that it embraces — but begs the question of what better party Americans should support.  I’m obviously a strong backer of the Democrats, but as for many people, it’s a support ever contingent on an idealized, aspirational vision of the party as much as on its present state.  The Democrats’ failure to fight sufficiently hard for an economy that serves all Americans, and against the past decades’ worth of Republican voter suppression, are two prime failures of the party that have got us to this point where it is not at all absurd to worry about quasi-fascist rule of the United States by a perverted president and lapdog GOP.  The Democrats have failed to take corporate power seriously enough; they have failed to take economic inequality seriously enough; they have failed to take the immiseration of broad swathes of the American electorate seriously enough; and they have failed to anticipate and deflect the obvious backlash to the dramatic social and demographic changes re-shaping this country.

At some level, this critique might seem harsh.  After all, how many of even our country’s most pessimistic critics would have guessed that our country would have a racist plutocrat as president who gleefully incites violence against women, minorities, and the free press with no meaningful pushback from either his own party or the opposition?  Who would more or less openly embrace a white supremacist vision of America?  Sure, the potential might have been there, but who really argued that this was a real possibility?  If this is such a black swan event, why beat up on the Democrats?

For starters, harsh criticism would be valid even if things weren’t nearly as dire as they are.  Even if the imbalances of American society hadn’t led to one of our two major political parties becoming unmoored from American democracy, the mass suffering and unfulfilled human potential in our society is simply unforgivable, as is the unchecked destruction of our planet that is literally robbing all future generations of Americans, not to mention the rest of humanity, of the basic premise of a healthy planet conducive to happy lives.  And particularly after the 2008 financial meltdown, the failure of greater numbers of Democratic politicians to challenge the self-sabotaging status quo of our economic arrangements has meant that inequality has continued to rise, so that our country is increasingly a nation of haves and have-nots, with a desperately insecure and shrinking middle class in between.

Harsh criticism is also merited because of how the Democrats have handled the challenge of Donald Trump.  This is not to discount the decisions on strategy and tactics that led to their takeover of the House last week, as well as the massive number of state-level seats they won.  But as I wrote in my last piece, the Democrats’ victory in the realm of “normal” politics immediately came face to face with Donald Trump and the GOP’s authoritarian tendencies.  As just one example: The president and Republican politicians are falsely claiming fraud in the few elections (Arizona, Georgia, and Florida) in which ballots are still being counted in close votes.  This is shocking and unprecedented behavior that fits the blueprint of a failed state, not the United States of America.  The Democrats still have not got a handle on how to oppose an openly undemocratic president and party willing to suppress votes, deny the legitimacy of elections, and essentially brand the opposition as illegitimate.

In a paradoxical way, the question of legitimacy is in fact at the core of our current political conflict.  The GOP’s position is increasingly that any electoral wins by the Democratic Party are inherently illegitimate, the result of nefarious maneuvers like voter fraud.  Yet, in rejecting not only the principle of free and fair elections, but in embracing a white supremacist ideology as the core of the Republican Party, we could argue that it’s the GOP that is in danger of losing its legitimacy as a mainstream political organization.  Indeed, we could go a step further and say that it is the issue of how to respond to a party that has brought questions of legitimacy and the prospect of one-party rule to the fore that is confounding the Democrats.  This is not normal democratic politics, even if the GOP has been tending in an authoritarian direction for years.

The Republican Party might not be pursuing such an undemocratic direction if it thought it could win majority support in this country.  After all, the normal response of a struggling party in a democracy would be to figure out how to win more votes by changing its platform in order to attract more support.  The GOP, as the party of white nationalism and rule by plutocracy, is simply unable or unwilling to do so.  Hence, to maintain power, it must increasingly fight against democratic norms, and engage in all manner of vote suppression and court packing.  As keen observers have noted, they are seeking a way to perpetuate minority rule, not only through creative anti-democratic measures but also aided by the particularities of our political institutions, such as a court system they can stuff with far-right judges and a Senate that over-represents rural, and as things currently shake out, Republican-leaning parts of the country.

I understand why the Democrats ran on health care as their primary issue in the midterms, with the understanding that there was no need to overplay the reality that this election was as much about Donald Trump.  This approach worked, for now — but as I said, the immediate aftermath showed us that the president has the power to undermine our democracy faster than we have elections.  I would also say this: it is fundamentally dispiriting and enraging for the president to engage in racist, autocratic behavior and not be forcefully challenged on it by the opposition.  I am thinking, first, of his recent attacks on the press, which it is not up to reporters but to the Democrats to rebut and discredit.  Donald Trump would love nothing more than to demonize the media, and the media stepping into that fight helps him paint it as biased toward him.  I think it is impossible for the press to do otherwise, both at a human and a self-preservation level, but it is a no-brainer that the Democrats should interpose themselves without fail; there is no democracy, and no hope for the Democratic Party, without a free press.

I am also thinking of Trump’s overt racism and embrace of white nationalism, which is a moral abomination nearly beyond the power of words to describe.  Slate’s Jamelle Bouie recently wrote about the Democrats’ need to push back on this racism, noting that it proved itself useful in stemming GOP midterm losses and could serve to defeat Democrats’ quest for the White House in 2020.  White nationalism is a toxin in the body politic, poisoning the United States’ vision of diversity with an ideology utterly discredited by slavery, the Civil War, the state-sponsored terrorism of Jim Crow, and a basic incompatibility with human dignity and common sense.  Democrats didn’t win the House majority because their views on racial equality are obscured; they won in part because they’re seen as the party of sane racial views.  A president who expresses racist notions is unfit for office; and a Republican Party that places suppression of the African-American vote as key to its hold on power is a white supremacist party, even if it’s too cowardly to accept that logical conclusion.

This goes to a larger point I’ve been considering: there is no question but that the path to defending our democracy, and for the Democrats to gain back power, is for the party to unambiguously assume the role of defender of the rule of law and the constitutional order.  The Republicans fear a fair fight based on democratic principles, because they know they’ve lost the support of the majority and can never win it back.  The Democrats have both a pragmatic but also idealistic interest in assuming this role: they will never wield power if Republicans corrupt American government to their autocratic goals, and they will not be a party fit for anyone’s support if they don’t fight for the rule of law.

On the economic front, Democrats can no longer avoid making the hard choices that have kept the party too closely aligned with conservative economic thinking for too long.  They can either be the party of business, or of the people: they can’t be both.  It should be self-evident that it’s citizens, not corporations, who should be served by their elected representatives.  One suggestion: it’s long past time for all Democratic candidate to stop taking donations from corporations and corporate PACs; let the GOP complete its identification with big business, and see how well that goes for them in this era of inequality and grotesque corporate influence.  People are smart enough to know what it means when one party refuses corporate dollars and the other gobbles them up; they know who’s more likely to fight for them and who’s more likely to sell them out.  There are dozens of other ideas out there that would reform capitalism and give working Americans more control over their destiny; the best of these should become part of the Democrats’ vision.

In the dangerous years ahead, Democrats have the righteous but harder burden of our two major political parties.  Even as the GOP shows its willingness to tear the country apart and perpetuate minority rule, the Democrats must bring the nation together — not through papering over our conflicts, but by addressing them head on.  They must advocate for more democracy, but also more economic security for working and middle-class Americans.  And they must practice a politics of inclusion and forgiveness, and practice graciousness in victory.  We cannot expect every virulent racist to become a lover of diversity, but the Democrats can work to mitigate the social and economic fears that have led so many Americans to consider abandoning American democracy for a grotesque, white supremacist autocracy.  If Democrats cannot save the soul of every racist, then they can at least stop them from the sin of destroying our democracy. And if they don’t bother to thank the Democrats, their children still may.

Midterm Elections Offer Snapshot of Two Irreconcilable Political Realities

The results of the 2018 midterm elections made clear both the promise and the horror of our political moment.  The Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the largest gain for the party since the post-Watergate election of 1974.  They also won seven additional governorships and hundreds of state legislative seats, doing much to roll back the catastrophic losses of the Obama years.  It is impossible to read this outcome as anything but a repudiation of Donald Trump — yet it also arguably constitutes a clear majority of Americans’ rejection of Republican policies on such vital issues as immigration and health care.  It’s a result that rejects any argument that the American public had somehow shifted hard right in the wake of the Obama presidency.

These Democratic gains came in the face of deeply anti-democratic gerrymandering and voter suppression in GOP-dominated states, and against a flood tide of conservative billionaire dollars vectored into hundreds of races.  The organization and enthusiasm of Democrats made this victory possible, helping the party overcome deep structural disadvantages.

Some of the disappointments of Tuesday are also not so disappointing as they may have felt in the information overload of election night.  In Texas, Beto O’Rourke ended up within 3 points of unseating Ted Cruz in a state that has become synonymous with Republicanism, providing a template for future campaigns and exposing a reality that Americans are more receptive to more progressive governance that the common wisdom would have us believe.  The as-yet unresolved races in Georgia and Florida also signal tectonic shifts in American politics, with Stacy Abrams and Andrew Gillum at worst making incredibly strong gubernatorial runs in states not exactly conducive to Democratic success.

But these mixed disappointments open up the door to the darker side of what the midterms tell us.  In the Senate, Republicans have retained control, and will have increased their majority by at least one vote when the final votes from Arizona and Florida are counted.  The Democrats’ loss of seats in North Dakota, Missouri, and Indiana reflects a growing conservatism in red states that some say means that Democrats will never be able to elect senators from those states, and point to a perpetual GOP dominance of the Senate.

Widespread voter suppression (whether through voter ID laws or voter roll purges) and gerrymandering were also part of the worrisome backdrop of this election, undoubtedly costing Democrats additional house seats in otherwise competitive states like North Carolina (where Democratic House candidates collectively won 48% of the votes cast but only captured three out of 13 seats) and Wisconsin.  The Democrats may have won, but such anti-voter measures mean that the extent of public support for the Democratic Party is to some degree obscured by the results — an argument already being taken up by conservatives and mainstream pundits alike seeking to downplay the extent of the party’s success on Tuesday.

But the darkest note of all is that, after two years of the Trump presidency, the electoral pummeling suffered by Republicans was not even more dire; that there was not wholesale rejection of this awful man.  This upsetting fact could not have been made any starker than by the president’s ongoing reaction to the election results.  Obviously deeply upset by the election results (despite his protestations that the Republicans had in fact achieved a great victory), Donald Trump wasted no time in escalating his attacks on the free press.  Not satisfied with belittling and insulting reporters at large at his first post-election press conference, he singled out female African-American reporters for particular scorn, engaging in behavior that is clearly racist.  The fun didn’t stop there, though: Offended by his persistent questioning, the Trump administration revoked CNN report Jim Acosta’s White House press credentials, based on a lie that he had struck a female White House aide.  To support this claim, the White House endorsed a doctored video: a frighteningly totalitarian twisting of facts.  I will keep saying it because it is true, and it is a central fact of our time: attacking reporters for doing their job, with the purpose of creating public distrust of a free press, is authoritarian behavior, the stuff of Russian dictators and Hungarian neo-fascists.  For a U.S. president to engage in this behavior is a national disgrace, and a crisis for all decent Americans.

But were these acts against the media merely meant as a distraction from the Democratic wins, or were they what they seemed — an escalation of this presidency’s war on a free press?  As so often is the case with this presidency, they were both.  But within another 24 hours, even these obscenities were overshadowed by additional dangerous pronouncements from the White House.  First, we learned that Donald Trump had fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and installed in his place an unqualified lickspittle whose purpose is obvious: to allow the president to disrupt and derail the investigation of Russian collusion being run by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.  

This was hardly the end of it, though: it took only another day or two for the president to begin to attack, without any basis in fact, the legitimacy of some of the close races that appeared to be breaking against the GOP as more votes were counted, including in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona.  Against the reality that it can take longer than a day to count all the votes in an election, and that many late-counted votes tend to come from urban districts that favor Democrats, the president has invented Democratic conspiracies out of thin air.  It is no excuse to say that we have gotten used to this fear-mongering: it is unacceptable, and indeed impeachable, for a president to groundlessly attack the legitimacy of U.S. elections in the pursuit of his own hold on power.  

The distance between America’s two competing and irreconcilable realities could not have been starker: within days of millions of Americans exercising their collective duty to run this country, the president was once again taking actions that assert he is above the law and unaccountable to the American people, that indicate his hatred of a free press, and that he will undermine the legitimacy of our elections when his side loses. 

It is difficult to disentangle the president’s purely authoritarian impulses from his need to block all investigations into him at all cost; at this point, they appear to have fused into a singular drive.  His need for self-protection validates and impels the authoritarian tendencies past any point of restraint.  If he must provoke a constitutional crisis in order to protect himself from the Mueller investigation, then that is what he will do.

But while the president may be the most dangerous embodiment of the authoritarian inclinations arising in the U.S. and around the world, they are continuous with seemingly less extreme behavior by the GOP.  Donald Trump’s assertions of conspiracy around the Florida election were backed by Senate candidate and current Florida Governor Rick Scott — a reminder that while the president’s authoritarianism and assertions of being above the law are in some ways sui generis, in that a lawful president is already the most powerful person in the world, there is a line of continuity leading from  the web of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter roll purges that enable Republican political power to the president’s claims to be above the law.  That these practices make it difficult to constrain an out-of-control president in a time of crisis is argument enough against them.

I suppose what I am getting at it this: the Democratic victory is only meaningful so long as it is part of a sustained and successful push against the anti-democratic tendencies of both the president and the GOP at large — against a politics that favors millionaires over the middle-class, that incites hatred against minorities and women, that puts propaganda over facts, that denies the reality of climate change, that kneecaps the will of the majority through voting restrictions, and that encourages people left behind by the modern economy to resent the success of others and blame immigrants for their situation.  The majority must continue its grinding push to take back the levers of political power, but must also engage the more immediate fight of calling out and pushing back on GOP efforts to nullify American democracy.

As some have pointed out, Donald Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud in Arizona and Florida are a dry run for his behavior during a close or even not-so-close electoral outcome in the 2020 election.  We must continue to make the case against this authoritarian mindset and its attempts to undermine democracy, even as we fight for the concrete changes that will make our country a better place for all. One of the paradoxes of our time is that there’s a good case to made that we are in a more dangerous place than ever, because now the president is feeling cornered and the GOP vulnerable to electoral defeat despite their best anti-democratic efforts. In his ability to act quickly and grab media attention, the president still has unparalleled ability to undermine our country in ways that threaten to outflank the democratic opposition. Progressives would do well to figure out how to blunt this advantage, and regain the initiative in the face of his un-American impulses.

GOP Has Gambled Its Future on the Failure of American Democracy

There are many good and cynical reasons why the GOP has, until now, avoided a full embrace of a white supremacist agenda as the party line.  Plausible deniability limited racist appeals to the dog-whistle and indirect policy variety: Republicans were not willing to risk being labeled as overtly racist, for fear both of losing independent voters and provoking an unknowable backlash from the American media and business establishment. And as for its full embrace of authoritarianism in the form of Donald Trump, well, the potential has always been there in its emphasis on law and order politics — but this emphasis at least nominally involved respect for the Constitution and a balance between the three branches of government.  The party’s authoritarian tendencies have also been embedded in the party’s extensive, systematic, and norm-breaking gerrymandering of political districts and voter suppression over the past decade: a strategy designed to maximize the GOP’s power at the expense of American democracy, and which not incidentally embodied the party’s inherent racist leanings in the way it sought to minimize the voting power of African-Americans and other minorities.  These anti-voting measures reflect the way in which authoritarianism crept up as a dominant aspect of the party’s identity, as another way to look at them is not merely as a way to give advantage to the GOP but as a strategy that leads in the direction of one-party rule.  The GOP’s current stranglehold on American politics has less to do with Republicans’ appeal to a majority of Americans and far more to do with its comfort with using undemocratic means to secure power.

But we can plausibly make the case that the GOP has systematically been working towards this end point for many, many years, whether fully-consciously or not being besides the point.  White supremacism and authoritarianism go together hand in glove: if your guiding philosophy is the superiority of whites over other races, then you will inevitably go down a path that embeds non-whites’ political inequality in the law of the land, via gerrymandering and voting restrictions.  White supremacism can be brought fully into the open when the fears of electoral backlash are minimized, as is the current situation, where Democrats must win around 55% of the total vote to have a chance of taking back the House of Representatives.

As horrific as this crossroads in our history is, it’s worth thinking about the risks that the Republican Party is running as it embraces its full Trumpian identity.  At the most basic level, a racist and authoritarian agenda puts it at odds with a fundamental American commitment to democracy and equality, and to a broad understanding that no American is born superior to any other.  There is no majority support for the sort of race-hatred or voting rollback that is at the center of the GOP today (and we will leave for another day the equally compelling case to be made that its pro-1% economic agenda likewise has scant popular backing).  Let’s put it this way: the GOP has bet its future on a vision of America that is only a dark funhouse mirror version of what this country aspires to be, and has tied its identity to that bleak vision.  The GOP’s bet only works if the America that most of us have tried to live up to ceases to be, if America becomes a place where you can’t win an election no matter how many votes you get.  Once a party turns against democracy, it takes on a stain that really can’t be washed away.

Equally, the more the GOP’s anti-democratic, racist vision is espoused, the more it incites violence against not only minority groups but against members of the opposition party — clear demonstration of which we’ve seen over the last few, alarming weeks.  Violence is incompatible with democracy, and a party that encourages it is likewise incompatible with democracy.  

I suppose what I am saying is that the opposition needs to figure out, stat, how to make the Republican Party pay a price for a vision that may bring it maximal power but at the cost of being a credible adherent of the American democratic order.  The GOP’s support for Donald Trump constitutes a reckless power grab that would wreck American democracy to achieve an apartheid-level state of discrimination and inequality that, I have no doubt, will not stand for long, but would come with a terrible human and moral cost.

We are long past the time that the Democratic Party either act in a manner appropriate to the state of crisis Trumpism has brought to a head, or be superseded by a new party or new leadership that doesn’t fear a clear fight that places democracy over autocracy, equality over racism, and economic security over mass exploitation.  Whatever the outcome of the midterms, the opposition needs to put front and center the fact that we cannot have a democracy where the party that gets less votes still gets to rule; that we cannot have a democracy where states get to pick and choose who gets to vote and who doesn’t; and that it’s somehow acceptable for a president to incite violence against anyone he deems an “enemy of the people.”

Obviously, many things have gone wrong for us to have reached this awful point.  But while we have allowed our sense of collective responsibility and commitment to democratic processes to atrophy, we are fortunate to at least have powerful traditions on which to draw.  It’s not like we have to invent democracy out of whole cloth.  The basics are known to us all.

Why is Trump Letting Foreign Spies Listen In On His Phone Calls?

As usual with such news, the sheer volume of Trump administration scandals and un-American policies has provided cover for Tuesday’s revelation by The New York Times that Chinese intelligence is eavesdropping on the conversations Donald Trump conducts on an unsecured cell phone.  But it’s important that we don’t let this one slide out of public consciousness so easily, because it involves an infuriating and deeply disturbing practice by the president that should be objectionable to all Americans of whatever political inclination.

Although Donald Trump has access to a secure land line and two secure cell phones, he has nonetheless continued to use a third, unsecure phone for conversations with friends, apparently to avoid senior aides becoming aware that he’s had such calls.  The Chinese are able to gain access to the president’s thinking, and in turn are working to influence Trump’s friends through Chinese businessmen and other contacts who can be armed with arguments they believe might help persuade the president in the direction they desire.

Lest you think that Trump may yet stop using his unsecured phone now that we know the Chinese (and Russians, too!) are listening in, well, no.  U.S. intelligence officials have already informed the president that these rival powers are listening in to his calls. . . and he continues to use the phone anyway.  

Let that sink in for a moment. He knows he’s being spied on, but he continues to use the unsecured phone regardless.

We can speculate as to what combination of arrogance and wish for privacy from his aides may be motivating the president, but we can at least understand his priorities with great accuracy.  He would rather be able to hide personal calls from his own staff than hide information that could be used to compromise national security, not to mention his own policy goals, from hostile foreign powers.  Days have passed since I first read the NYT piece, and my mind still boggles at the dumb betrayal of both national and personal interest.  Yet it seems in keeping with what we know of Trump’s character — dismissive of experts, and unwilling to restrict his personal behavior.

In noting that the president uses his secure phones for more overtly official and classified business, the article suggests that no one knows whether Donald Trump lets slip classified information during calls on his unsecured phone.  His staff members have been trying to tell themselves that this is a small worry, based on reasoning that can uncontroversially be termed not reassuring in the least:

Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed that his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

But because the president is so incurious and incompetent that there is a vast range of secret details he simply does not know and so can’t let slip is hardly grounds for relief.  Secrets aren’t just constituted by bits of information; secrets also include strategy and tactics, and yes, how our president might be thinking about a particular matter when that thinking has not yet been made public.  Under any reasonable notion of classified information, Donald Trump has surely spilled the beans to his foreign listeners during these reckless calls.  But this is only the most optimistic take on what information he has let slip.  Is it really credible that he has not once shared classified information, even accidentally?  This accidental possibility, which gives the president maximum benefit of the doubt when evaluating his use of an unsecured line, is enough to render his current practice insupportable and insane.

There is nothing partisan about requiring the president to hide his private conversations from hostile foreign governments.  This is not a right or left policy choice embodying a dispute over basic values; it’s a violation on non-partisan procedures to make sure the president isn’t spied on.  It is, in other words, an indefensible practice on the part of the president.

The ironies and absurdities of Donald Trump letting America’s enemies listen to his private talks feel nearly limitless.  This behavior is in no way compatible with his promises to “put America first” or “make America great again.”  Rather, it’s a palpable expression of the president’s inability to put anyone’s needs — even the needs of the American people — ahead of his own.  It’s also the final proof that his attacks on Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured email server — which Trump believed justified “locking her up” — were totally bogus; how else to understand that the president is engaging in parallel but far worse behavior than he ever accused Clinton of?   And in light of his midterm election closing arguments about the dangers of our allegedly porous borders being penetrated by murderous Latinos, it’s worth noting his total disregard for essentially opening up the front door of the White House for any spy to waltz on through.

By allowing foreign intelligence to listen in to his conversations, Donald Trump is not just undermining himself — he’s undermining our country.  Like it or not, he’s the president, and even his most committed opponents can’t prefer the manipulations of a foreign power to the bad policymaking of Donald Trump.  Anyone with a single patriotic bone in their body should be outraged by this idiocy — and opponents to Trump should not be afraid to wield it as a weapon, both in the hope that the president stops engaging in it, and to make the case to Americans across the political spectrum that this is a man who doesn’t even share a baseline common commitment to keeping foreign spies out of the Oval Office’s business.

Have Democrats Sufficiently Neutralized GOP Attacks Around Immigration?

As the midterm elections have approached, and polls have shown that there’s a fairly high probability that the Democrats will take the House of Representatives, the GOP and President Trump have engaged in histrionic attacks on immigrants as a threat to the country, and a reason to vote for the GOP.  I have seen some suggestions that it is the dire straits of Republican prospects that have led them to embrace this extremism as their closing argument; though that may be so, it is just as likely that the racism and nativism that Donald Trump has brought into full expression as core tenants of the Republican Party would have been foregrounded under any electoral circumstances.

The most extreme example to date is the president’s obsessive focus on a large group of migrants making their way from south of Mexico to the United States border.  His attacks on the group as a threat to the United States, his suggestion that “unknown Middle Easterners” are part of the caravan, and his slander that the Democrats have some sinister role in the appearance of this immigrant procession make up a paranoid, toxic stew that hits all the hot buttons of Trump’s distract-and-rule approach to governance.  The opposition is filled with traitors; immigrants are evil and out to destroy the United States; Middle Eastern terrorists have formed an alliance with immigrants to destroy our way of life.

These arguments are so over the top, so divorced from observable reality, and, crucially, so very predictable, that I think we need to ask the question of whether our central problem is not simply Trump’s willingness to demonize and lie in order to win, but the bizarre and inexcusable inability of the Democrats to anticipate and refute such deeply stupid and immoral arguments.  Where is the coordinated effort to unpack what Trump is doing and so rob his rhetoric of its paranoid power?  Why have Democrats not laid the groundwork for why immigration is good for the country in order to change the terms of the debate, so that Trump’s attacks are seen for the foolishness and racism that they are?  And why is there not laser-like focus on asking the question of why Donald Trump is so eager to scare people about things that aren’t actual threats?

Part of my frustration is that this work of re-framing the immigration debate needed to have been done already, before the closing weeks of the midterms.  The last thing Democrats need is for this election to be about immigration, which is just about the worst battleground for Democrats to engage in.  This isn’t because the Democrats have worse policies than the GOP — far from it — but because it puts them in the deeply unhelpful position of defending newcomers and non-citizens at the very time they need to be appealing to actual citizens for their votes.  One of the main axes of American politics right now is a widespread perception that politicians don’t fight for Americans’ interests.  This makes the Republicans‘ immigration rhetoric all the more infuriating, and all the more needing of reframing, as the biggest challenges to our country are related to a more complex mix that includes super-sized corporations, globalization, weakened unions, a lack of democracy in the workplace and boardroom, and systemic racism.

Trump and the GOP attack immigrants because they don’t want to talk about these true challenges to America.  At its best, a successful strategy would remind Americans of this fact every time Trump or a Republican politician yammers or tweets about scary foreigners.  Mockery is justified and appropriate, as Americans are being asked to view their country not as the most powerful in the history of the world, but as somehow vulnerable to poor and desperate migrants.  Trump asks us to trade our common humanity and patriotism for a fake nationalism and the sugar high of cruelty, all so that he can continue enriching his family and conning Americans into thinking manufacturing jobs will be coming back.

It may be that I’m overstating the problem.  So far, I haven’t got the sense that the Democrats are being thrown off their game and getting sucked into a debate about imaginary northbound brown-skinned hostiles.  It may be that most Americans will see through these desperate accusations. At the same time, their relentless focus on kitchen table issues can feel unequal to the great passions of hatred and nationalism that Trump is attempting to summon.  It seems impossible to fully counter this racialized hatred without a sweeping, hopeful vision of unity and betterment for all Americans.  It doesn’t help, either, that there is inevitable widespread media coverage of the immigrant caravan and the president’s rhetoric because of the president’s inherent ability to direct the national conversation.

Bureaucratic Moves Against Transgender People Showcase Trump Administration's Upside-Down Morality

The shit show, as they say, must go on.  And so we learn today that the Trump administration is working on rules to, as this New York Times headline accurately puts it, “defin[e] transgender out of existence.”  Clearly driven by the ire of its religious supporters, but also fueled by a broader conservative moralism, a policy change under development by the Department of Health and Human Services would reverse recent civil rights gains made by the transgender community both through court rulings and actions taken by the Obama administration.

The new proposals embody far-right, retrograde views at odds with the reality of lived experience, and that favor ideologically-driven definitions over subjective human experience.  They are also a reminder that the unflinchingly patriarchal worldview embraced by Donald Trump and the Republican Party inevitably perverts reality to keep powerful men on top.  Transgender people who are subject to horrifically high rates of bullying and violence, with attendant pyschological harm, are to considered a threat to America, while presidents and supreme court justices are free to commit sexual assault without repercussion.  Our common lived reality is denied and turned upside down in favor of a plain immorality. 

Ironically, given conservative claims to oppose big government, they rely on the power of big government to impose abstract bureaucratic definitions on a contradicting reality; as the Times notes, the Department of Health and Human Services is arguing “that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined ‘on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.’”  This hypocrisy is compounded by the new rules’ inclusion of genetic testing as the ultimate arbiter of what a person’s sex is; the government would violate your physical person in a dispute over your claimed sex, with the outcome sure to go against the transgender individual.

The reality is that transgender citizens constitute a population long subject to abuse, violence, and discrimination.  But with the Trump crowd, saying that a policy helps protect a vulnerable minority against bullying and worse is incitement to dismantle the policy.  To the conservative mentality, bullying and other ways of keeping non-conforming individuals reminded of their second-class citizenship is a key to their perverse vision of social order.  

The logic being applied by the DHHS to transgender individuals can easily be extended to removing any recognition or protection for gays and lesbians.  If the lived experience of transgender people can be discounted as irrelevant, than so surely can the idea that a man would love another man in contravention of what the government decides as normal.  I don’t doubt that some in the Trump administration see this as their next move; but like bullies everywhere, they are weighing whether that community is strong enough, and supported by enough of the American population, to beat back such a move, or whether they might get away with it.

The Trump officials involved have made a judgment that they can single out the transgender population without significant political harm, and that Republican strategists view transgender rights as a wedge issue that will make Democrats appear more interested in the rights of minority groups than “normal Americans.”  Unfortunately, there is some possibility of such a gambit succeeding, and why it’s essential that the Democrats and other progressives lay out the case that this is an issue of equal rights, not special treatment; of tolerance over easy prejudice; and of human experience and compassion over reflexive moralism.

How Democracies Die Is Political Science Wonkery for Our Time

How Democracies Die may be ominously titled, but my heart may have skipped a beat or two when I first saw it.  Aren’t we all desperate for dark yet accurate explications of how we all woke up one day and found ourselves in TrumpWorld?  Co-authored by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, this book is in fact a shining example of truth in advertising, delivering exactly what its title promises: an exploration of how democracies deteriorate and fall, based on a broad historical overview that also focuses in on recent American politics.  Though its lessons are often grim, the intent of Levitsky and Ziblatt is an activist, optimistic one: they urge Americans to learn from an analysis of past democratic downfalls, with specific emphasis given to the challenges we face under the current president.

The authors argue that nowadays, democracies don’t just puddle down into anarchy or ineffectiveness, but transform into various forms of authoritarianism, typically at the hands of a strongman or a single party.  Various known elements of democracy’s decline, then, should not be viewed as simply a regrettable sign of things just not working so well, but as glaring warnings of its demise and its replacement by an antithetical form of government, with the rule of the many replaced by the reign of the one, and the rule of law replaced by the dictates of the authoritarian.

HDD carries a message that those of us feeling the surrealness and disorientation of our moment would do well to hear: that what we are going through in this country is in many ways not unique to the United States.  There is a dark side to this observation, in that it raises the possibility that the same forces that took down other democracies will destroy our own.  The flip side, though, is a positive one: this book removes any doubt that the United States is somehow immune to the evils of authoritarianism, and so indirectly makes the case that all Americans must make a choice as to how to defend our democracy.  It is also oddly liberating to realize that far from being uniquely cursed and thus uniquely, inevitably fucked, familiar dynamics can be observed playing out in American politics.  To be reminded that we are not alone, and that while other countries have succumbed to these forces, others have not, is to waken a little from a claustrophobic fever dream in which our problems feel uniquely awful and insurmountable.  

HDD’s perspective is fundamentally institutional and procedural: it looks at how democracies can fall apart both when one institutional entity — typically, the executive —gains too much power relative to other forces in government and society, and when politicians violate the rules and norms of democratic governance.  Early on, Levitsky and Ziblatt make a point that really can’t be overstated: although many of us associate the downfall of democracies in other lands, and thus in general, as the result of a sudden blow like a coup, there are in fact a range of slower, more gradual breakdowns commonly leading to democratic collapse, and that such a process has itself become the norm for democratic downfall in our times.  The fact that this deterioration is less obvious carries its own set of dangers, the primary one being that it can blind people from seeing the larger democratic decline happening before their eyes.

Reading their autopsies of democratic destruction around the world, the echoes in our situation today are glaring and undeniable.  One of the single most chilling charts that I’ve ever seen comes early, a table titled “Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior.”  It summarizes common traits of anti-democratic leaders, and it is only a small spoiler to say that our current president and his enablers in the GOP display them to the hilt.  From rejecting the democratic rules of the game and denying the legitimacy of political opponents, to tolerating or encouraging violence and supporting the curtailment of civil liberties, there is no area of the strongman playbook that President Trump has not embraced.

Similarly illuminating are the illustrations of how such maneuvers have been conducted in the real world.  From the rise and fall of Salvador Allende in Chile and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s institution of effective one-party rule in the heart of the European Union, we see the same de facto authoritarian playbook employed again and again, from the co-opting of “referees” like the media to re-writing the electoral rules to favor one’s own party.

This analysis of authoritarian behavior has helped settle a group of questions that have rattled around in my head since Trump’s election : how is it that in so many areas, Trump is attacking the structures of American democracy?  Does he have a specific plan?  Is he some sort of anti-democratic genius?  Reading HDD, you understand that, first, there is something of an inevitable logic to all authoritarian movements and leaders.  It is in their interest to discredit and undermine rival centers of power, and within the context of a democracy, there are certain approaches to doing this, since democracy establishes its legitimacy and exerts power in common ways.  This has helped me see that it is far less important to call Trump a fascist or agonize about discerning his particular ideology, and more to understand that he simply shares authoritarian impulses with others who have come before him, albeit in different countries.  This also helps explain how he knows what to do: as an avowed admirer of autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, he is simply applying the easy-to-follow lessons of what they’ve done in their own countries.  The notion of an unwritten yet very real “authoritarian playbook” has never felt so tangible.

HDD emphasizes that the signs of a slide towards authoritarianism can be seen early on, and must be taken seriously by those who wish to defend their democracy.  Their discussion of the use of inflammatory and criminalizing language to describe political opponents seems of particular importance to our current situation.  I’ve written about the president’s increasingly deranged language toward the news media, and our need to take it extremely seriously.  HDD describes an established pathway toward authoritarianism, in which terrible words prepare the way for evil and anti-democratic acts.

Although they don’t identify this distinction (possibly for reasons I’ll explore below), it has dawned on me that it’s helpful to divide Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument into two broad concepts.  The first is how a leader or a party can consciously attack the institutions and norms of democracy in order to subvert and ultimately destroy it in order to replace it with an authoritarian or dictatorial structure (this is the theme of the book that makes me think that it could also be titled How Autocracies Rise with no loss of accuracy).  But there’s a second set of dangers to democracy they explore that, while overlapping with the authoritarian angle, have more to do with how the politics and parties of a democracy might turn against themselves even without the influence of a malign would-be strongman.

This second argument focuses on the unwritten rules and norms of democracies, which they see as an essential supplement to the world of constitutions and laws.  Levitsky and Ziblatt identify two basic norms of American politics that capture some of the necessary attitude and perhaps spirit required for democratic life.  The first is forbearance, by which they mean that politicians refrain from using the full range of institutional powers technically available to them.  The second is mutual toleration, which they describe as the idea that politicians consider their rivals to be legitimate competitors for power.  If you’re like me, encountering these concepts almost immediately sets off a recognition of how deeply they’ve been violated in U.S. politics in recent years, which only reinforces how basic they really are to healthy democratic politics.  (In fact, these concepts are so basic that I’ve come to believe they should be included as part of any decent civics education, as an easy-to-understand, yet profound baseline for how to behave in our democracy, not to mention for how to assess its relative health). 

HDD raises a third internal threat to democratic governance that has in fact received increasing attention from various observers of the American scene: the polarization of political parties and political beliefs.  As the authors describe the situation, “Over the last quarter century, Democrats and Republicans have become much more than just two competing parties, sorted into liberal and conservative camps.  Their voters are now deeply divided by race, religious belief, geography, and even “way of life.”  Polarization can in turn help lead to the destruction of both forbearance and mutual toleration, as opponents are seen as both illegitimate and undeserving of restraint.

It’s a credit to Levitsky and Ziblatt that even in the midst of their diagnostic framework for democracy’s ills, they open the door to a deeper exploration of not just how but why a breakdown might be occurring.  In their discussions of mutual toleration and forbearance, they identify racial politics as perhaps the main driver of when these qualities have thrived and failed in American politics.  They note that following the Civil War, these two basics of democratic life only returned after both political parties agreed to table the question of rights for African-Americans; by limiting the scope of politics to areas where there were no profound disagreements, members of both parties did not see their opponents as holding views outside acceptable bounds.  You can also see how such an understanding would reduce polarization by taking the most vexed subject of American politics off the table.  The authors then note that the modern trends against mutual toleration and forbearance, and in favor of increased polarization, started up again in the wake of the civil rights era, suggesting that the return of fundamental disagreements over basic societal questions around race, including conflicts around an increasingly diverse country, were driving this sea change.  They also take note of how these issues have been aggravated by the slowing of economic growth for many Americans, particularly towards the lower end of the income scale.

I started off with a vague sense of the limitations of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s emphasis on how rather than why a democracy, particularly our democracy, might be in trouble.  My frustrations focused in part on their highlighting of polarization as a problem for democracy, which as I noted seems to be on everyone’s radar as a problem for our country, and which I’ve sometimes viewed as a milquetoast way to avoid saying that American society is divided by irreconcilable sets of values.  To decry polarization as an abstraction, without taking note of what actual issues are causing the polarization, risks failing to look directly at the causes of conflict, and thus to perpetuate and even worsen the polarization.  

Their approach also felt problematic where their discussion turns to the United States and an account of how political norms have eroded over the last few decades.  Their recounting of how the Republican Party has rolled back and attacked not only norms, but the actual structures of politics, via gerrymandering and voter suppression, is deeply chilling.  However, in their pointing out the ways that the Democrats have responded in kind — though they make clear that the GOP has engaged in the lion’s share of this activity — I can feel my hackles going up; it is a case of even-handedness threatening to obscure the larger story, which surely is that one party in particular has increasingly turned to anti-democratic means to pursue its goals, particularly when a case can be made that outright opposition to democracy itself is at the center of the contemporary Republican agenda.

Yet I have come to see such shortcomings of their case as inevitable and excusable.  The authors, after all, have chosen a particular frame for their argument, and their ability to make it necessarily requires minimizing certain aspects of reality.  My critique is also mitigated by the conclusion of the book, which makes clear that they recognize the problematic turn the Republican Party has made; they in fact go so far as to write that “Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded outright.”  If those aren’t fighting words in the political science community, then I don’t know what are!

Most exonerating, though, is that I realized that the very issues they diagnose were clouding my own ability to follow their arguments.  The purpose of the book is not to place blame, but to identify the strengths of democracy, and how intentional or unintended efforts may subvert these strengths.  My concern over whether the GOP receives the full share of deserved blame within its pages obscured a more basic and disturbing observation: that an anti-democratic spiral, once begun, creates incentives for even well-intentioned parties to break norms or otherwise act in ways that further undermine mutual agreement as to the rules of democracy.  The following passage captures the danger of our current moment:

Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic - for they would inherit a democracy striped of its remaining protective guardrails.  If the Trump administration were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce - and perhaps hasten - the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with.  As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump’s impeachment as the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy -maybe even as a coup.  American politics would be left dangerously unmoored.

This sort of escalation rarely ends well.  If Democrats do not work to restore norms of mutual toleration and forbearance their next president will likely confront an opposition willing to use any means necessary to defeat them.  And if partisan rifts deepen and our unwritten rules continue to fray, American could eventually elect a president who is even more dangerous than Trump.

This leads to what I think of as the democratic paradox - how do you fight a fundamentally undemocratic party without undermining your democratic form of government further?  The single largest solution, it seems to me, is for the Democrats to recognize and internalize this threat, and to place basic democratic procedure and transparency at the center of the party’s ideology.  Against the slippery slope that leads to authoritarian, one-party rule, we may yet find our footing via a democratic friction generated from demanding that every vote count, that power resides in the people, and that every citizen is equal before the law.