RBG's Passing Sets Off an Overdue Reckoning for Democrats

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has come as a shock to many millions of Americans, and particularly to millions of Democrats.  In one saddening blow, Democrats saw President Trump suddenly able to cement into place an overwhelming conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and potentially revive his downhill re-election bid based on the political fight over RBG’s successor.

An early consensus seems to be emerging among Democrats that the party should embrace adding justices to the court if Trump and Senate Republicans move forward with a replacement, both as a way of rectifying the “stolen” seat of Merrick Garland and compensating for a late-term appointment of another judge.  As Josh Marshall summarizes the situation at Talking Points Memo, the Democrats can’t simply insist that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell follow his notorious rule from 2016 that no justices should be approved during a presidential election year; they need to have a clear action plan for what they’ll do if the appointment proceeds.

The RBG fight has absolutely backed Democrats into a corner, both in terms of the party’s ability to defend the interests of its voters and to protect the larger legitimacy of American democracy.  McConnell’s willingness to make up a set of rules that harms Democrats 100% of the time shows that he simply does not believe that the Democrats will ever turn the tables on him.  McConnell’s certainty is rooted in confidence that the Senate, because of the disproportionate power it gives to GOP-leaning rural voters and GOP voter suppression efforts, is far more likely to be controlled by the Republicans than Democrats into the foreseeable future.  Still, the threat that Democrats would move to expand the Court during the times they do hold the Senate — such as after the upcoming November elections — seems like a straightforward way to right the imbalance, if not deter McConnell from moving ahead with this current appointment.

The challenge for Democrats is that they must make the case for expanding the Supreme Court without appearing to be the mirror image of the GOP: power-hungry and unwilling to accept the will of the voters.  Supporters of adding seats point not only to the “stolen” Garland seat and the current potential appointment in defiance of the Senate leadership’s own previously stated rules on such appointments, but to the larger undemocratic nature of the Senate.  For instance, though the GOP has a 53-47 edge currently, Democratic senators received a staggering 12 million more votes more than did Republicans in the 2018 election.  And as Nate Silver discusses, the rural skew of the Senate basically makes it much more likely that a GOP Senate will be in charge when it comes time to approve Supreme Court justices nominated by a president.

This argument is in fact central to any effort to expand the court — to make sure it represents the American people more completely — and is more persuasive than contending that the court should be expanded simply because the Republicans have appointed more judges.  

But of course it is the specific decisions by a current and future GOP-leaning Supreme Court majority that is the real matter of concern.  The Democrats would need to argue that the conservative majority represents views and politics far out of the American mainstream and at odds with the interests of ordinary Americans — a fact borne out by rulings on issues ranging from gutting the Voting Rights Act to eliminating any sort of limits on campaign contributions by corporations and billionaires.  For Democrats, a future in which the Supreme Court, tilted to a 6-3 conservative majority by three Trump appointees, would strike down any progressive legislation passed by a Democratic president and Congress would very much be like the hand of Trump reaching out from beyond the political grave.

To build public support for a plan to expand the court, Democrats would need to make intertwined “idealistic” and “pragmatic” arguments.  The idealistic one would involve the issues of democratic legitimacy around the fact that too many justices have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote and were approved by a GOP Senate that reflects a minority of American voters. The pragmatic argument would involve pointing to the plethora of court decisions to date that kneecap worker rights, health care rights, and democracy.  Arguments for democracy are most powerful when they’re tied to the practical effects of what greater democracy means for most Americans.

I think Democrats will also increasingly recognize that expanding the Supreme Court will need to be part of a larger pro-democracy plan, that includes things like making Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico into states, banning partisan gerrymandering, creating automatic voter registration nationwide, and making election days into holidays.  This would foil arguments that the Democrats are making a partisan power grab, and strengthen their case that the primary interest is in expanding Americans’ power to rule themselves, with the clearly stated belief that more democracy means that more people will choose Democrats.  Matt Yglesias has made some common-sense suggestions for how the Democrats could maximize their public support by alternating a push for democratically-minded structural reforms with concrete health care, jobs, and tax policies that help the majority of Americans, thus providing what amounts to a real-world demonstration of the benefits of such democratic reforms while defusing criticisms that they were done for purely partisan ends.

Beyond expanding the size of the court, the Democrats would also need to look at passing laws limiting the terms of justices so that the fate of our political system no longer seems to depend on the longevity of particular justices and provide clear visibility into when a president would be able to pick a replacement. This would also be a key element of heading off a likely cycle in which Republicans and Democrats continued to expand the court indefinitely in order to gain an upper hand.

But while we desperately need a broad campaign to revive American democracy and defeat Republican authoritarianism, such a campaign comes up against the reality of our political moment: the overriding urgency of defeating Donald Trump in November.  In organizing a strategy to oppose Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, the effects on the prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats in November need to be the primary concern.  There seems to have been a lot of knee-jerk thinking that RBG’s passing would end up being a net benefit for the president, but this depends entirely on how the Democrats choose to proceed.  Whether or not Democrats have any chance of stopping this appointment — and I think the odds are slim — they have a strong need to oppose it tooth and nail as a logical conclusion to their argument that Donald Trump is not fit for office: as he is not fit for office, he has no place appointing yet another Supreme Court justice.  If the Senate ends up approving Trump’s choice, this will strengthen the Democrats’ case that the president has too much power and has been enabled by Senate Republicans all along.

The president and the GOP’s rush to appoint a new justice supports Democratic arguments for opposing this nomination.  We are shockingly close to November 3, and any review of a new nominee will necessarily be rushed both in terms of time and attention from a public and politicians distracted by the upcoming election.  The apparent need for GOP speed also bolsters the Democratic case that a Supreme Court justice appointed by a president who appears headed to electoral defeat will harm the court’s legitimacy and the interests of the majority.  After all, if Trump and his Senate allies really thought he was going to win in November, then why the rush?  Why not just use the pending nomination to energize Trump voters?  An air of desperation infuses this unseemly sprint to get another justice on the court.

At the same time, the Democrats can’t let this Supreme Court fight distract from keeping the campaign focus on Donald Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus epidemic and his increasingly authoritarian rule.  His incompetence and unforgivable inability to think only of what might benefit him politically has led to the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans; there are projections that this already-incomprehensible number could double by the end of the year.  And as defeat has loomed larger, the president has doubled down on undermining the vote and promoting a violent, authoritarian vision for maintaining power.  Donald Trump’s crimes against American health, prosperity, and democracy can barely be gauged, but our very survival as a country depends on his removal from office in November.  The Democrats should not shy from making clear to McConnell and other Republican officials their intention to undo the corrupt appointments of Gorsuch and the new nominee, but it would not be a great plan to allow the president to run not on his coronavirus record but on his opposition to a “Democratic court-packing coup.”  I am not sure where this balance lies, but Democrats will need to find it.

Bridge to Nowhere

A Washington Post analysis this week of how the Trump and Biden campaigns each plan to bridge America’s divides on matter of political polarization, racial division, and other issues across the socio-political spectrum could serve as a textbook case of the absurd “both sides do it” framing that has wreaked so much damage on our country, particularly in the age of Trump.  After setting out the undeniable premise that America is riven by all sorts of divisions, the piece relates the responses its writer received when he directly asked both the Biden and Trump campaigns what they would do to heal our differences.  Both campaigns, not surprisingly, issued milquetoast responses that they would work to unite America.  

The analysis makes slight nods to the possibility that Donald Trump’s avowed desire to bring the nation together has been contradicted by other things he’s said and done, and also suggests Trump’s role as president means he has “more power to resolve existing tensions than Biden.”  Still, the article arrives at this desultory conclusion: “Perhaps there aren’t good answers either candidate can provide.”

Yet, to any fair-minded person, such a conclusion only makes sense if you separate the Biden and Trump campaigns’ statements about their plans to heal America from any actual history or actual facts.  Donald Trump’s ceaseless, conscious effort to divide the country into those who support him and those who oppose him, largely on racial lines, from the day he was inaugurated through the present, has been the overriding feature of his term in office.  Receiving from the Trump campaign a statement about what he will do to bring America together, and not comparing this with his open declarations and policies of the past three and a half years — that he is only the president of those who vote for him, that Democrats are to be considered the enemy, that Muslims, Hispanics, and other minority populations are not real Americans, that protestors are enemies of America, that a Biden victory in November should automatically be considered illegitimate — is to engage in a nonsensical exercise that serves to confuse, not edify, the reader.  

If you exclude the fact that in reality Donald Trump has intentionally sown division as a key political strategy to an extent greater than any American president since Richard Nixon, then it becomes possible to suggest that Joe Biden doesn’t have any more credibility than Trump to tamp down America’s divides.  But if you allow this undeniable fact of Trump’s intentional divisiveness, then it’s as easy to reach the opposite conclusion: that simply by acting like a normal president, and not like a man who governs only for those who vote for him, Joe Biden actually does have a plan to heal America’s divisions.

Yet ignoring the basic and undeniable fact of Trump’s intentional efforts to sow division among Americans allows the reporter to assert that Biden’s very efforts to return America to normalcy would actually. . . be divisive:

Biden’s campaign rhetoric is heavy on the ways in which he would roll back the shifts to public policy and political norms Trump introduced. But that highlights a key problem. Trump’s focus on gutting what Barack Obama did as president was part of his appeal in 2016 and part of his process of further endearing him to his base. Biden suggests taking a similar but narrower approach to Trump’s administration. If you view Trump’s work as good and Obama’s as bad, you’ll see Biden’s pitch as divisive. If you view Obama’s work as good and Trump’s as bad, you’ll see what Biden proposes as necessary.

Now, it’s true in a very general sense that anything Biden does that is not supported by Trump’s voters will by definition be “divisive.”  But to say that a Democratic president attempting to pass policy and enforce norms after his election by a majority of voters is being “divisive” in the same way as a president who calls for Muslims to be banned, immigrants to be deported, women to be despised, and elections not to be trusted is to confuse the conflicts of ordinary democratic politics with the deliberate arousal of hatred and vengeance of Trump’s authoritarian politics.  These two things are not the same.  The Post’s argument falls apart even more when you stop to consider that some of the norms that Biden would surely attempt to restore include no longer engaging in politics that seek to divide American against American!  

As upsetting as this misleading equivalence between the Trump and Biden campaigns is, more upsetting still is the way the discussion obscures the very real and difficult questions of what it might mean to bridge America’s divides.  The piece gets closer to the real issues when the author writes that, “The divide is not mostly one focused on policy but on the intangible sense of what it means to be a member of either party and what cultural values that identity represents.”  But once we are in the realm of true conflicts over identity and values, questions as important as how to bridge them must include asking what “bridging” really means, as well as whether bridging such divisions is even desirable or possible.

Take an extreme but salient example: if some Trump voters would rather give up on American democracy than share power equitably with non-white Americans, because they believe only white Americans are real Americans, what would it mean to heal this division?  Those who love our democracy and its ideals of equality cannot compromise on either issue.  But if Trump voters are also not willing to compromise, then the divide is not one that can be “bridged” or “healed.”  Instead, it needs to be resolved by one side winning elections and promoting its vision in law and policy.  In such a case, in fact, there is great merit to making the terms of the division crystal clear, rather than letting the underlying fight be obscured by misleading talk about undocumented immigrants voting or Black Lives Matter protestors being un-American.

There is a separate issue of what politicians can do, in the realm of rhetoric and style, to promote certain values while attempting to persuade or assuage those voters who fundamentally disagree.  During his term in office, Donald Trump has used lies, propaganda, overt racism, and misogyny to promote his vision of the world.  This was undeniably divisive, in that it broke Americans into the camps of the protected and the attacked, the real Americans and the traitors.  Does anyone honestly believe that Joe Biden, or any other foreseeable Democratic president, would ever engage in anything similar to what Trump has done?  To return to the example above, would it really be divisive for a President Biden to talk about the importance of one person, one vote, and to argue for a diverse and egalitarian America?  A Biden being “divisive” by fighting for democracy and equality would be a universe away from Trump being divisive by trying to turn our country into a white supremacist autocracy.

Ultimately, the notion of healing or bridging divisions as an end in itself may not be nearly as helpful as it seems, even as it speaks to the natural desire of most of us to not be in conflict with our fellow Americans.  Crucially, some conflicts of fundamental values cannot ever be bridged, as with the irreconcilable gap between those who support democracy and those who don’t.  Conflict over whether the United States government should see whites as “real” Americans and everyone else as second-class citizen is another such divide.  Americans who hold such opposing views cannot be reconciled to each other; rather, they must argue and fight for their beliefs in order to persuade a majority of voters to support their side.  This is called democracy, and it is what this country should be committed to.

The central importance of openly arguing about our conflicts as a way to, if not bridge our divides, then to at least engage with them is yet another reason why putting aside Donald Trump’s undeniable record of using lies and propaganda to divide Americans makes absolutely no sense when attempting to compare our prospects for civic reconciliation under a Biden versus a Trump administration.  Whatever opposition Biden would inevitably provoke from Trump supporters, his clear commitment to the norms of American democracy in itself would be a quantum improvement over the current president.  Trump has encouraged his supporters to view his opponents as enemies to be defeated, not as fellow citizens to be negotiated with or persuaded.  Biden has shown no such illiberal attitudes.  In fact, quite the opposite; he’s been criticized by some Democrats for thinking too highly of his ability to find common ground with Republican politicians.

Look, there is a real and difficult question to be faced by a Biden administration over how to govern when a significant portion of the country has been primed to believe his election is illegitimate if not outright illegal, and that appears increasingly ready to throw out majority rule in favor of an autocrat like Trump who protects the interests of an overwhelmingly white base against those considered less American than themselves.  In fact, this is a problem that all believers in American democracy need to grapple with.  It may be the biggest question we face.

But suggesting that Biden and Trump are just two sides of the same problem ignores the fact that some of the most profound conflicts dividing Americans actually have a right side and a wrong side.  This unwillingness to make a moral or value judgment is part and parcel of why articles like the Post one I’ve been using as my own personal piñata today obscure far more than they illuminate.  As writers like John Stoehr have been arguing, this moral vacuum has had profoundly negative consequences for news coverage of Trump and for American democracy.  This Post article isn’t the worst example of its kind, but it’s pretty decent as a case study.

Partners in Political Mayhem

Over the last week, the unreality of Donald Trump’s continued ability to hold onto seemingly unflinching support from his base felt as if it had escalated to a whole new level.  I date the beginning of this new phase to the reports that the president had called World War I veterans “losers” and “suckers” for sacrificing their lives for our country.  Then came the excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” that among other things provided proof positive that President Trump knew about the vast dangers of the coronavirus from the start, and still chose not to take appropriate actions to protect American lives.  On top of this, a whistleblower at the Department of Homeland Security alleged that high-ranking officials in the Trump administration ordered that DHS officials downplay the threat of white supremacist violence and Russia’s attacks on America’s elections.  And on Friday, Politico reported how Trump appointees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.”  

And alongside these individual stories are ongoing reports of the president’s preemptive efforts to subvert the November election results, including inviting renewed Russian interference and a clear plan to declare victory election night before all votes can be counted.

In a pre-Trump world, any single one of these stories would very possibly have been a death blow to a presidency.  Contempt for patriotism, murderous incompetence, treasonous behavior: these should rightly be considered mortal sins in an American president. But all the necessary attention on Donald Trump’s unique brand of malevolence needs to be balanced, both in media coverage and by his Democratic opponents, by an equivalent indictment against the Republican elected officials who have enabled and abetted his misrule.  GOP senators and representatives have made themselves party to what can accurately be described, without exaggeration, as an assault on American governance and safety unseen in any of our lifetimes.  At Mother Jones, David Corn provides a model of this truth-telling approach as he identifies his candidates for the most serious offenses committed by the contemporary Republic Party:

Not since the Civil War—when leaders responsible for the enslavement and brutalization of millions of Americans sought to destroy the United States and took military action that resulted in the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens—has a group of politicians so profoundly betrayed the republic. And this band—Donald Trump and GOP officials—has done so on two fronts simultaneously.  They have failed to respond effectively to a pair of immense threats: a pandemic that has claimed the lives of close to 200,000 Americans, and a foreign attack on the political foundation of the country. What exacerbates this double tragedy is that Trump and his Republican supporters have done so purposefully. This has been no accident or act of unintentional incompetence. In each case, they sacrificed the public interest—including the well-being and the lives of millions of Americans—to serve their own interests. Trump and his crew have forsaken the United States of America.

Now, I understand that Democratic politicians have a great interest in appearing reasonable and measured as a way to contrast themselves with the hysteria of Trump and his Republican enablers; that they have an interest in appealing to persuadable Republicans and independent voters.  But there is something perverse in being unwilling to accurately describe both the full extent of the betrayal, and to openly making a case that it discredits both the president and his party from holding political power for the foreseeable future.

This is not to say that opponents of Trump don’t need to embrace and promote a positive, inclusive vision of America: this is necessary both for its own sake and because it’s an antidote to the retrograde, racist, back-to-the-1950’s (or maybe the 1850’s) vision behind Trump’s rhetoric and policies.  But in the face of the rage, hatred, and nihilism of Trump, his base, and the contemporary GOP, it is not enough to speak only of love and forgiveness and a better tomorrow, though those are all essential.  Democrats need to make it clear that there will be no accommodation with a Republican Party that embraces white supremacism, subversion of elections, and abandonment of a basic belief in science.  When our democracy is under attack, it makes no sense not to make that attack as explicit as possible, and define the terms of debate as between those who would turn the United States into something twisted and unrecognizable, and those who are carrying forward the fight for justice and democracy that generations before us have lived and sometimes died for.

If the Democrats are able to illustrate the stakes clearly for American voters, Trump’s authoritarianism and relentless drive to retain power no matter the election results has created a perfect storm of destruction for a GOP that remains silent and complicit before him. The Republican Party must be made to pay now and into the future for its abandonment of the basics of American democracy: free and fair elections, the rejection of violence as a governing or electoral strategy, and adherence to the rule of law.

Violent White Supremacists Find a Friend in Homeland Security

Acting secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf picked a bad day to resume his fallacious criticisms of Portland protestors and politicians as a threat to national safety and security.  Even as he again ignored the many, many accusations of abuse by federal agents deployed to the city — including the beating and assault of peaceful protestors, as well as the police state-like abduction of citizens off the street in unmarked vans — bombshell allegations by a former Homeland Security official added to existing evidence that Wolf and other DHS officials have been worse than derelict in their duty to keep the nation safe.    

According to former DHS intelligence head Brian Murphy’s complaint as reported by The New York Times, high-ranking DHS officials directed “agency analysts to downplay threats from violent white supremacy and Russian election interference.”  On the first issue, “the department’s second-highest ranked official, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, ordered Mr. Murphy to modify intelligence assessments to make the threat of white supremacy ‘appear less severe’ and include information on violent ‘left-wing’ groups and antifa.  The Washington Post notes that Cuccinelli “on various occasions instructed him to massage the language in intelligence reports ‘to ensure they matched up with the public comments by Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and ‘anarchist’ groups.”

Let’s put aside for the moment DHS involvement in downplaying interference by Russia, which obviously fits into a years-long Trump administration effort.  The idea that the Trump administration actively sought to downplay the threat of white supremacist violence means that they have taken a danger to the country and greatly amplified it.  Reports like this recent one in Politico had already reported on such a White House effort, but that a DHS official has made it the subject of a whistleblower complaint should help focus public attention on what an abomination this truly is.  As a rising tide of right-wing violence has swept across the country, the president and top security officials essentially chose to give these murderers and racists a helping hand.  Not only did they seek to downplay a true threat, they sought to elevate another, far less serious one in its place: that posed by antifa and anarchists, in an effort to support the president’s re-election efforts based on conjuring up an imaginary insurrection by the left.

As I described in yesterday’s post, Portland has already experienced what can happen when a president encourages his supporters and right-wing militia types to engage in violence against those with whom they disagree.  That the White House has essentially made it policy to downplay and de-prioritize the federal government’s role in keeping Americans safe from right-wing extremists is not just another scandal.  When the government pulls its punches against individuals and groups who embrace and enact insurrection, mayhem, and murder, it has failed in its basic duties.  The irony couldn’t be greater: even as DHS leader Wolf falsely accuses Portland’s leadership of encouraging violence, Wolf has overseen a department that has abdicated its responsibility to keep America safe from the actual domestic terrorists who seek us harm.  

Barbarians Inside the Gates

The weekend before last, depraved far-right Trump supporters played Mad Max in downtown Portland, shooting paintball guns at pedestrians, leaping out of their truck cabs to beat up hapless counter-protestors, and terrorizing citizens using their vehicles as weapons, al-Qaeda style. The event was doubtless overshadowed by the killing of a Patriot Prayer member by a local antifa protestor (that the shooter was subsequently killed by US marshals as they closed in on him days later means that we may never have a full account of the confrontation between those two violent men).  Here’s how Jonathan Maus described the downtown vehicular rampage at BikePortland:

As they powered through the streets, some of them sprayed bear mace and shot paintball guns indiscriminately on people in the street. In the clip above you can see drivers and huge trucks barreling through an intersection against a red light as people try to slow them down and/or scamper out of their way. Other clips showed a bicycle under the wheels of a car and a souped-up sedan driver who raced, full-throttle, through a busy street.

Yet the police stood by and did worse than nothing, at one point directing traffic on a nearby bridge to make it easier for these nut jobs to access city streets, and largely failing to intervene until the invading horde had departed.  If the Portland Police Bureau doesn't see its job as including defending the citizenry from right-wing assaults, then their problems are even more serious than I thought.  A police department unwilling to lift a hand against vigilante violence is a police department that has failed its public purpose.

These events of August 29th cannot be allowed to slide out of public consciousness.  Antifa may be a pain in the ass, but the violence left-leaning protestors have committed in connection with the Black Lives Matter protests is dwarfed by the scale, and more importantly, anti-democratic intent, of the right-wing violence we see around the nation; many of these right-wingers are looking to commit violence against non-white Americans, intimidate political opponents, and even instigate civil war.  If you can't tell the difference between these two threats, you don't belong in public service.  In the case of Portland, the fact that the vigilantes had first participated in a Trump car and truck rally that had headed into the city is also remarkable.  At this point, any false equivalences drawn with antifa fall away.  You cannot imagine armed bands of Biden supporters making violent raids into heavily Trump areas and assaulting folks on the street (though this is indeed the fantastic propaganda that right-wing media outlets have been ginning up for months now, with tales of buses carrying BLM protestors to beat up and burn down white citizens and towns).  In the reporting of what happened in downtown Portland, the fact that the violence spun out of a Trump rally has not garnered nearly sufficient scrutiny or condemnation.

Underlying this ominous Portland visitation is the high tempo of far-right violence that has accompanied the election of Donald Trump, and which the president has increasingly begun to actively incite as a key element of his re-election strategy to sow chaos and fear across the citizenry (among other things, he indicated his approval of the August 29 violence committed against Portlanders by the right-wing vigilantes).  Such far-right violence has shadowed the BLM protests over the last few months.  This Huffington Post article from a couple weeks ago found 497 incidents of “white vigilantes and far-right actors” appearing at BLM demonstrations, including “64 cases of simple assault, 38 incidents of vigilantes driving cars into demonstrators, and nine times shots were fired at protesters.”  Six protestors were wounded by bullets; three died.  There have also been “387 incidents of intimidation, such as people using racist slurs, making threats and brandishing firearms.”

A second key reference point is that such right-wing violence dwarves that carried out by left-leaning actors over the last decade and more (as far as I can tell, the death of the Patriot Prayer member in Portland was the first time a killing has been linked to an antifa member).   A Center for Strategic & International Studies report from June of this year summarizes the situation:

Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years. Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.

Some, like the October 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue slayings in Pittsburgh and the massacre in an El Paso Walmart in August 2019, are seared into the public consciousness.  Yet, in one of the greatest scandals of the Trump presidency, this administration has consistently downplayed the threat posed by right-wing extremists, choosing instead to conjure a phantom risk from antifa and anarchists.

Over at The Muckrake, Jared Yates Sexton points to the roving Trump caravans (they have now taken place in other locations, such as Los Angeles), alongside the right-wing media’s (and president’s) obscene defense of the vigilante murders in Kenosha by Kyle Rittenhouse, as a clear escalation of right-wing violence in the country.  Pointing to America’s history of sectarian violence, such as in the antebellum and Civil War periods, he writes:

[I]n one failing state after another, groups of men, armed to the teeth, carrying flags and markers of their affiliation, have brazenly and aggressively entered the territory of their “enemies” and slaughtered with little regard.

This may sound foreign. It may sound outlandish. But we are watching the beginnings of a sectarian violence the likes of which we have not seen in this country for centuries. In the recent past, the Right has pushed its followers to the point of violence, but leaders in the party have shied away from promoting widespread aggression. Donald Trump has not and will not pause to use any means to maintain his hold on power. 

In such a context, the failure of Portland’s mayor and police to respond to the Trumpist foray into Portland last week with appropriate urgency is a very bad sign of how effectively the city will protect its citizens from future incursions.  In fact, such inaction will likely embolden these right-wing vigilantes.  

All Unquiet on the Western Front, Part II

If the dread and nausea induced by an increasingly authoritarian Donald Trump aren’t enough for you to get your fix, might I suggest turning your attention to what’s been happening in Germany?  Back in July, The New York Times reported on far-right infiltration of Germany’s military — a problem considered so serious that an entire unit of the elite KSK was disbanded by the German authorities, and which I discussed here.  But further reporting makes clear that the threat of far-right extremism in Germany is even worse.  An article last month discusses how German politicians and others now worry that far-right infiltration of German institutions reaches beyond the military into other agencies of government.  The aims of these far-right networks appear to be violent, anti-democratic, and borderline apocalyptic: 

One central motivation of the extremists has seemed so far-fetched and fantastical that for a long time the authorities and investigators did not take it seriously, even as it gained broader currency in far-right circles.

Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X — a mythical moment when Germany’s social order collapses, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save themselves and rescue the nation.

The Times details how the German government is investigating and starting to prosecute a group called Nordcreuz.  Its members appear to have been catalyzed by the arrival of Muslim refugees in the country over the past several years, as Germany welcomed those fleeing the civil war in Syria.  Its members compiled lists of politicians they considered enemies, in apparent anticipation of a day when they might round them up and worse: the supplies they gathered included vast amounts of guns and ammunition, body bags, and quicklime, which the Times notes can be used to cover the smell of decomposing bodies.

An American reader cannot miss the parallels with the right and far right in the United States that have been emboldened by the election of Donald Trump.  One of the men charged by the German authorities in the Nordcreuz case, Marko Gross, says that:

Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”

Substitute the idea of putting Hilary Clinton in jail, being upset about taco trucks in American cities, and longing for a day when everyone’s last name was Smith, Schneider, and Miller, and this could be the spiel of any MAGA-hat wearing American.  It also appears that Gross and his confederates push this logic to its murderous extreme, anticipating and even wishing to hasten societal breakdown and conflict in which the old hierarchies will be re-established at the barrel of a gun.  

What is happening in Germany is no abstract concern for Americans.  Germany is a close ally of the United States, and a democratic Germany is an anchor of peace and stability in Europe.  The rise of right-wing, illiberal sentiment, as registered in the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, as well as the right-wing movements documented by the Times, show that America’s ally is at real risk.  The U.S. lost thousands of lives destroying Nazi Germany in World War II, and that effort as well as the re-building of Germany after the war involved vast sums of American expenditure.  To now see people who are such obvious moral descendants of Nazism plotting murder and destruction of the German government should be a red alert for any American concerned with our national security and the role the U.S. has played, however imperfectly, in advocating for democracy around the world, and in protecting the democratic society that the great majority of Germans have built over the past seventy-plus years.

Under Donald Trump, the conflicted record of the United States in supporting democracy around the world has been replaced by an open embrace of authoritarian leaders.  From Viktor Orbán in Hungary to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, to the OG authoritarian Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump sees in such illiberal rulers a template for his own preferred form of governance.  At the same time, the forces that seem to be propelling the German far right in this era appear similar to those that propelled the rise of Donald Trump: racial hatred, fear of demographic and cultural change, and a commitment to male dominance (I have yet to read of a single woman being involved with the German paramilitary and apocalyptic organizations; at any rate, men seem to be calling the shots).

And so, in another pass through the looking glass, right-wing Germans have begun to look to Donald Trump himself for inspiration in their opposition to a democratic German government and increasingly multicultural society.  Neo-Nazis approve of his white supremacism, while the AfD party has adapted his “America First” message into a “Germany First” one.   As the Times puts it, "Trump “is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene”; according to an expert on far-right extremism, the U.S. president “has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right.”  If the “savior” reference puts you in mind of the QAnon movement in the United States, it should: for QAnon’s second-largest presence in the world is now in Germany and Britain; in Germany, its crypto-racist and anti-Semitic beliefs have merged with the extremist tenets of the far right. (In yet another horrifying parallel to events in the United States, combined forces of neo-Nazis, QAnon types, anti-vaxxers, and others have banded together to protest against pandemic-related restrictions).  And in addition to the neo-Nazis, paramilitary types counting down to societal collapse, and QAnon adherents, an overlapping yet distinct group known as Reichsbürger “do not recognize Germany’s post-World War II Federal Republic and are counting on Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to sign a “peace treaty” to liberate Germans from their own government”; one prominent QAnon leader who supports this conspiracy theory organized the sending of some 24,000 tweets to the American and Russian embassies in Germany “calling on Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to ‘liberate’ Germany from Ms. Merkel’s ‘criminal regime’ and prevent ‘forced vaccination’ and ‘genocide.’”

The rise of the far right in Germany is much more than a harmless freak show; its adherents are already committing violence beyond the as-yet unexecuted fantasies of Nordcreuz and members of the German special forces.  The Times reports that, “Over the past 15 months, far-right terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau. Mr. Trump featured in the manifesto of the Hanau killer, who praised his ‘America First’ policy.”  It is not necessary to be an expert in the intricacies of German politics to recognize this basic fact: defeating Trump in the United States is a way to help defeat extremist far-right movements in Germany.

But beyond the “vote for Biden, foil a German neo-Nazi insurrectionist” angle here, the inspiration that extremist, anti-democratic forces in Germany draw from right-wing developments in the United States should focus attention on the fact that the battle to preserve democracy here in the United States is a major, but not the only, front in a broader authoritarian assault against liberal democracy around the world. And just as we see authoritarian forces drawing inspiration from each other’s movements, defenders of American democracy should draw sustenance from the fact that millions of like-minded people are defending their own democracies overseas. If retrograde movements around the globe have been energized by knowledge of a shared illiberal cause, then the great democratic majority around the world should draw sustenance and inspiration from its shared fight for democracy.

Brother From Another Mothership

The Atlantic has published a story by Jeffrey Goldberg, now backed up by reporting from multiple other sources, that President Trump has at various times insulted American veterans with language that is not only incomprehensible coming from a president, but really from most anyone.  There is no substitute for reading the Atlantic piece, as it threads together the president’s various slurs without drama but with deep moral force.  Among other things, the president referred to a World War I American cemetery near Paris as “filled with losers” and “suckers”; his feeling that there was no point in celebrating such men apparently factored into his decision not to visit the cemetery as part of honoring the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War (the other reason was that he did not want to mess up his hair in the rainy weather).  At another point, he asked that a military parade “not include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees.  ‘No one wants to see that,’ he said.”

“No one wants to see that.”  Trump’s own words are inadvertently the epitaph to his presidency, its coming demise and the condemnation of his misrule that will only grow as the years pass and our perspective on him and those who enabled his abuses of office grows sharper.  The president simply has no sense of patriotism or responsibility to his office.  As one four-star general told Goldberg, Trump “can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself.  He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker.”  In no instance was this clearer than when, with chief of Staff General John Kelley, Trump visited the grave of Kelley’s son at Arlington National Cemetery (1st Lt. John Kelley was killed in Afghanistan).  At the grave, Trump asked General Kelley, “I don’t get it.  What was in it for them?”  Such a comment not only goes to his transactional view of the world, as noted in the article, but reminds us of the deep ruin at the center of Trump’s psyche.  This goes far beyond his lack of patriotism; he lacks the very barest compassion or comprehension of the vast scope of human feelings.  If he were without power, this would make him an object of pity.  As president, and combined with his inclinations to racism and authoritarianism, this character makes him a monster.  Indeed, the article drives home how much Trump comes across as an alien among humanity, unable to comprehend the tears of these strange creatures who cry, the sadness of these weak humans who mourn.

When I first learned of the article and saw the vast commentary it immediately provoked, my impression that this was another Access Hollywood tape moment — something that in a normal universe could be assumed to end Trump’s political career, but in our upside-down new politics would fizzle out as enough people looked beyond it.  Certainly this can happen again; but we are nearly four years into this awful man’s term.  There is no ambiguity about what his presidency might be like, because we have all experienced it.  Nearly 200,000 of us have been killed by it.  As Will Stancil tweeted in reference to the article, “You truly cannot know [in] advance what straw will break the camel’s back, that’s why we have to keep dropping them on there even when it seems like nothing is happening.”  Trump’s psychotic contempt for American veterans is almost too crazy to be true; but of course, we have already witnessed it, in his calling John McCain a loser (the story contains new details about Trump’s outrage that McCain was honored by the U.S. government after his death, including by the flying of flags at half mast.); attacks on Gold Star parents; and, as the Washington Post reminds us, “dismissing brain injuries suffered by U.S. troops in an Iranian ballistic missile strike as “headaches.”  If many people voted for and continue to support Trump because at some level they consider him a patriot, such belief cannot survive contact with such damning facts.  If Americans who serve their country are “suckers,” and the president has no conception of a national interest beyond himself, then what does that make his supporters but actual suckers?

Joe Biden's Pittsburgh Speech Shows He Has Trump's Number

The speech Joe Biden gave in Pittsburgh this past Monday gives me some hope that the Democratic presidential candidate and his advisors grasp the threat of Donald Trump’s incitement of violence and encouragement of chaos as a path to re-election. Biden’s appearance in Pittsburgh appears to have been spurred by worries among some high-ranking Democrats that Trump’s efforts to convince Americans the nation is under attack by anarchists and left-wing radicals was beginning to take purchase among voters. In turn, Trump campaign officials have tried to spin the speech as a successful effort to distract Biden from his campaign focus on the economy and coronavirus. Yet, as John Stoehr argues persuasively, the idea that Biden’s speech was somehow a victory for Trump doesn’t really make much sense.

By directly addressing the president’s role in inciting violence, Joe Biden in fact engaged on a front that he cannot ignore, and on which the president is deeply vulnerable among the majority of voters. The speech is in fact as thorough and persuasive an indictment of Trump’s deranged cultivation of violence as I could have hoped for, alongside an enumeration of the ways in which Trump has failed at his job. These early lines are savage and spot-on:

This president, long ago, forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it. He may believe mouthing the words law and order makes him strong. But his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is. Does anyone believe there’ll be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?

As I mentioned yesterday, the Democrats need to make clear that Donald Trump’s incitement of right-wing militias to violence against their fellow Americans is an unforgivable and murderous attack on the safety and political rights of the citizenry. I would hazard that are even some Trump supporters who do not like the idea of the president and sympathetic police deputizing white supremacist militias to terrorize their fellow Americans. Linking such an appeal to the fact of Trump’s weakness isn’t just a way to rattle Trump’s cage; it’s a reflection of the reality that given his failures with covid, Trump now sees no other way to win than to foment chaos in the streets and hope he scares enough voters into his camp. Biden’s speech brings together Trump’s failures and these scare efforts:

I look at this violence and I see lives and communities and the dreams of small businesses being destroyed and the opportunity for real progress on issues of race and police reform and justice being put to the test. Donald Trump looks at this violence and he sees a political lifeline. Having failed to protect this nation from the virus that has killed more than 180,000 Americans so far, Trump posts an all caps tweet, screaming, “Law and order,” to save his campaign.

Exposing Trump’s claims to be a “law and order” president as entirely the opposite, Biden is showing that his campaign will not accept or compete on the false narrative of social chaos that Trump has promoted.

In the Stoehr piece I mentioned, he argues that the case Biden made is in fact so effective that the true major threat to it is the media’s unwillingness to let go of a general misunderstanding that Trump’s “chaos in the streets” narrative is the decisive one for voters. Rather, Americans are actually more worried about things like covid that affect them personally, as opposed to alleged violence in the streets in far-away cities, and Stoehr cites recent polling to back this up.

But beyond this point is another one that Stoehr and others have discussed many times before, but bears repeating because it is so central to our crisis. Donald Trump’s outrageous encouragement of violence as a means to gain votes isn’t just something that should be reported as a challenge that might trip up Joe Biden; it’s an actual offense against our democracy that should be the framework for all future reporting on Trump’s candidacy. No news story about the state of the race should leave out the basic overriding fact that the man running for re-election of our democracy has declared war on our democracy. This is not biased reporting, or putting the thumb on the scales for Joe Biden. News organizations in a democracy have a duty to protect that democracy; it is slur and self-serving tactic of right-wing political forces to call it bias when reporters refuse to accept as normal the destruction of democratic norms. Put simply: when a president encourages violence against Americans, that is the inescapable story, because that is an inescapable crisis for our country.

Trump's Right-Wing Militia Allies Are the KKK of 2020

Over the last week or so, the reality that Donald Trump is inciting violence as part of his re-election strategy has begun to be reported more openly.  In just the past few days, he has defended accused killer Kyle Rittenhouse of acting in self-defense when he killed down two people in Kenosha, and tweeted extensive endorsements of the terrorizing crime spree by Trump supporters through Portland this past weekend.  The purpose of inciting and encouraging violence is transparently self-serving; as Zack Beauchamp writes, “the president appears to genuinely believe that the chaos unfolding on American streets is good for him politically. The more violence there is, the more he can fearmonger about “Democrat-run cities” and “Joe Biden’s America” — distracting from America’s botched response to the Covid-19 virus.”

But the president’s incitement of violence by right-wingers cannot be separated from his parallel effort to exaggerate any violence associated with the Black Lives Matter protests as an organized, left-wing assault on the United States.  This is the violence he claims to defend American against, the basis of his fake assertion of being a “law and order” president.  And so the sad sacks of antifa are elevated into domestic terrorists, who the president accuses of actually being the armed wing of the Democratic Party that calls the shots of Joe Biden’s candidacy.  At the same time, evidence that much of the looting and violence we have seen are the result of opportunistic criminals, not protestors, is ignored.  And not incidentally, the grotesquely exaggerated descriptions of left-wing chaos work to undermine the reality that the Black Lives Matter protests represent the greatest civil rights upwelling of the last half century. 

This false narrative of left-wing violence is the phantom menace that now underlies Donald Trump’s praise and encouragement of right-wing violence as a means of stopping alleged malefactors on the left.  But the reality is that Trump is inciting the right in order to build a sense of a nation in chaos, not to bring either law or order.  After all, if law and order is really what he’s after, why not send in DHS troops or the National Guard, as he has repeatedly threatened to do, and actually did do in Portland?  Why tell citizens that they themselves need to take matters into their own hands, and dispense rough justice to looters and protestors?  Trump does so in order to feed the fears of the gullible, and to unleash the depredations of right-wing thugs.  A nation in fear, he reasons, will want a strongman president in place.  And just as importantly, because this is a man who clearly does not acknowledge American democracy any longer, right-wing vigilantes could come in handy if he loses in November and tries to retain power.  The US military may not follow him, but militias can be counted on to suppress dissent.

After all, if antifa is hardly the terrifying force Trump and the GOP would have us believe, then who exactly are the right-wing militias supposed to be committing violence against?  Well, you and me, basically.  If peaceful BLM protestors are slurred as domestic terrorists, and are seen as the real power behind the Democratic Party, then those requiring the infliction of violence very quickly encompasses all Democrats and others who oppose Donald Trump.

This is the point where general fears of political violence by Trump allies need to be connected with the white supremacist mindset that animates both Trump and the right-wing militias.  Groups like the III Percenters and the Proud Boys are obsessed with the idea that white people are losing their primacy in society, and are the targets of a deliberate campaign of “white genocide.”  This is bonkers, but is merely the psychotic, bleeding edge of the white supremacism that the president and the GOP now champion.  White people are losing their demographic, cultural, and political centrality in the United States, and this must be resisted by all means necessary, whether by voter suppression or covering up for Russian election interference that benefits the Republican Party.  Reinforcing and reviving white supremacy has been the overriding political project of Donald Trump’s term in office; from securing the border against brown-skinned “invaders” to banning Muslims from American shores, to calling the BLM movement a hate group, Trump has maintained his base by giving them what they want — government policies that treat non-whites as non-American, slathered over with great heapings of openly racist rhetoric.

The fact that right-wing threats and acts of violence cannot be separated from white supremacism means that our current crisis is not just another generic example of authoritarianism and even fascism attacking a democratic form of government about which all good people should be concerned — though it is surely that — but one formed out of a thousand specific details of American history, culture, and the daily lived experience of millions. Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s descent into authoritarianism and violence is inextricable from their deathly embrace of white supremacism.  The president is not simply racist, or “exacerbating racial divisions.”  He has worked consistently and savagely for the last three and a half years, and in increasingly violent fashion now, not only to ensure that white Americans remain the dominant racial group in America, but to attack and undermine the lives of non-whites in our country.  Every step of the way, he has been actively or passively assisted by the Republican Party.

So while it is extremely worrying that Trump’s incitement of violence for political ends puts him in the tradition of fascists and other strongmen like Mussolini, the salient detail about the right-wing militias that Trump is attempting to mobilize is that these violent and racist men are the modern-day equivalent of the KKK (a fact not coincidentally supported by the fact that in some instances they are actually members of the KKK).  Only now, instead of targeting mainly African-Americans, the majority of Americans have become the despised enemy — for the majority of American do indeed support the Democratic Party, with its ideals of racial justice and equality.  Minority Americans are surely in greater danger, but even white Americans find themselves in the crosshairs of these trigger-happy men, as evidenced by recent events in Portland and Kenosha.

But although we are at a frightening and dispiriting crossroads, part of how we fight back, non-violently, is to know these forces for what they are.  The president is king of the white supremacists and inheritor of the Confederacy, and by violence and propaganda works to return us to a past that the majority finds totally unacceptable.  The armed militias he incites to action are the modern-day incarnation of the KKK, psychos playing at being soldiers when in reality they are death squads in the making, fantasists of mass slaughter of those they consider less than human.  They are white nationalist trash who practice at terrorism and murder.

Because the chaos and violence spread by the president and his allies are inherently frightening and dispiriting to normal, law-abiding American citizens, it is necessary to see beyond them in order to gather our collective wits and understand the stakes, and our opponents, for what they truly are.  There is understandable fear among many Democrats and other opponents of Trump that he is going to steal the election, either by the violence we have been discussing, or via other means of subverting the vote, such as the ongoing attacks on the US Postal Service and vote by mail.  But apart from doing what we can to ensure a fair vote, we all need to understand that a president willing to encourage political violence against his opponents in the name of an authoritarian white supremacism has engaged in activity that citizens of a democracy can never accept or forgive.  What the president considers a brilliant tactical move by endorsing right-wing white nationalist violence, we must work to transform into the worst decision of his life.  Openly acting as a lawless president in his incitements, Donald Trump has exposed not only himself but the entire GOP apparatus to political destruction by an American majority committed to the non-violent contestation of power in the country.  An embrace of violence renders the GOP illegitimate as a democratic party, and by extension discredits what remains of the Republican agenda as mere appendices to a violent, white supremacist world view.  And central to this argument is hammering home, day and night, who these so-called patriots carrying guns really are: latter-day night riders, white supremacists who have picked up weapons of war to terrorize their fellow citizens of all races.  The response to them should not be fear, but fury.  This country cannot be a haven for such sick and immoral men, not in the Oval Office and not on the streets.

In the Line of Coronavirus Fire

Given that Donald Trump has ignored, downplayed, and grotesquely mishandled the coronavirus epidemic, it’s no surprise that even the Secret Service personnel who protect him and Vice President Mike Pence have been sickened by covid.  But this account from The Washington Post helps drive home the toll the president has inflicted on the agency.  It’s not just that Secret Service personnel have been sickened while protecting the president during recent rallies, but that the president’s disregard for basic safety protocols has raised the risks for his own security personnel.  To date, dozens of Secret Service agents have been sickened or forced to quarantine in connection with presidential visits to cities like Tulsa and Tampa.  The strain has been so great that a trip by Pence had to be delayed until a sufficient number of healthy Secret Service agents were available.  

The Post notes that some critics are asking whether agents who are already pledged to protect the president from a bullet should “be required to risk contracting a lethal disease — and infecting a loved one — to secure an event that does not follow health protocols?”  This question, of course, is moot, because they have been, and have been done so, by a president clearly unfazed by the horrific butcher’s bill of this virus.  One wonders, in fact, if he has spared so much as a second’s thought of how his indifference to even basic protocols at rallies threatens to sicken or kill those whose job includes a willingness to die for his own safety.  It is incredible to think that even Secret Service agents have become collateral damage in the president’s quest to deny the severity and persistence of the coronavirus.  There really is no part of American government or service that he shows the slightest regard for.

Portland, City of Presidential Dreams

In his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, Donald Trump gave our city a special shout-out that challenges the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity; forecasting the national doom sure to follow the election of Joe Biden, he warned that the “Radical Left” “will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon.”  Trump, of course, was not alluding to the illicit deployment of federal forces to the city in an effort to “quell” Black Lives Matter protests — deployments that resulted in widespread civil rights violations and serious injuries to peaceful protestors, and which are now the subject of lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration.  Instead, his appeal was to the propaganda effort of right-wing media and the administration itself to transform the junior league antifa fringes of the Portland protestors — adept deployers of fireworks and water bottles — into the most profound danger to American society since forever and ever.

Donald Trump’s inclusion of Portland in his acceptance speech is both sinister and absurd — sinister for the belief that he has the resources to conjure into at least media reality an utterly distorted vision of this city, and absurd for these very same easily disproven distortions.

To hang your re-election on maintaining the fiction that Portland is a city threatened by antifa armies is deeply weird — some might even say, Portland weird.  Props to The Oregonian’s Lizzy Acker for a rapid and tart response to the president’s remarks; in dedicated service to the public good, she enumerates the various warning signs that your city is becoming the next Portland (the presence of flowers and multiple rivers are two key ways to tell it’s too late to escape the transformation of your town into a communistic hellhole).

Contrary to Donald Trump’s desire to impose his self-serving visions on the rest of us, we are all free to draw our own conclusions about the nature of our current reality, and to vote accordingly.  Portlanders, and in fact most Americans, understand that they are under assault — not from yellow-shirted momtifa or protesting veterans who get their bones broken by police, but by a pandemic that the president’s incompetence has allowed to kill more than 180,000 of our fellow Americans; by a white nationalist movement headquartered in the White House; and by an accompanying movement willing to embrace authoritarianism and discard democracy if that means keeping non-whites out of power. All the propaganda in the world can’t hide a triple plague.

Power Wash

The United States finds itself as Exhibit A in a real-world political science experiment, but not a fun one like studying the correlation between city manager-style government and the effective provision of public goods.  As we watch the guardrails of democracy dissolve on a daily basis, and a president act more and more openly as an authoritarian leader, the question of how to stop the destruction of a democracy doesn’t so much loom as burn madly like a cross set afire by white supremacists.  A sense of disorientation, a civic nausea, choke our days, as presidential crime, immoral policy, and assertions of unchecked power recur without apparent consequence. A failed impeachment several months ago seems only to have emboldened the president’s worst tendencies, even as the coronavirus pandemic has rendered his incompetence and malice deadly on a mass scale.

So the November election looms as our chief opportunity to stop the slide, to return to the presidency to someone committed to American democracy, rather than intent on its destruction.  But as has been broadly noted, a Joe Biden victory would not shut down hard questions about how to repair the damage done to the political system.  As just one example — important norms broken by Donald Trump will need to be embodied in legislation, so that in the future, a president who attempts to break them will be not only breaking with tradition but also breaking the law.

But the single most vexing question about how to repair American government involves how to handle the past crimes and offenses of the Trump administration.  As observers like Jeet Heer and Josh Marshall have recently written, the country has an urgent need to expose the corrupt acts of the Trump administration to public view.  Heer quotes a government reform expert, Sam Berger, as saying that, “Ignoring the Trump administration’s attacks on the rule of law will only invite further attacks—and likely even more brazen and threatening ones.”  Jeer endorses the need for investigations, not only as a means of upholding the law, but also as a way to educate the public, “shame” those who engaged in bad behavior, and provide momentum for new anti-corruption laws. 

A basic challenge to such inquiries is that a new presidential administration investigating the previous one would seem to be just the sort of banana republic-style shenanigans that we’re trying to get out of.  I’ve described this as a sort of “democracy paradox” — in order to preserve the rule of law, a political party is forced to investigate its political opponents in ways that both set a bad precedent and may seem illegitimate to voters of the investigated party.  On the second point, it is a given that the Republican Party would in fact label any Democratic investigations of the Trump administration as politicized witch hunts, and would work to smear them as mere partisan attacks.

But such protestations on the part of the GOP should not be taken at face value as an honest defense of democratic values — not by the citizenry, the media, or the Democratic Party.  The GOP’s lack of credibility, though, as well as the overall project of holding the Trump administration to account for its corruption and crimes, is best served by making careful and accurate distinctions among the types of corruption it has practiced.  There has obviously been an enormous amount of financial self-dealing among Trump and his allies, from the president profiting off the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. to the steering of lucrative contracts to donors.  But alongside such offenses, the president has also employed and abused the U.S. government for illicit political ends.  These acts encompass subverting accountability for the Russian attacks on the 2016 election and undermining our ability to conduct free and fair elections in 2020; deploying federal troops against American citizens in Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon for re-election purposes; and making murderous decisions about the coronavirus pandemic in an effort to damage the political prospect of Democratic governors.  In other words, we need to distinguish between corrupt behavior that involved more mundane efforts to profit off the presidency, and behavior that amounted to an attack on both the government and the people of the United States.

Making such a distinction in what we mean by “corruption” can help navigate the inherent dangers to a new presidential administration and Congress investigating the previous president.  Ultimately, both “corruption” and “crime” are general terms that obscure the specific offense for which Donald Trump most needs to be held accountable: his full-scale assault on American democracy and the American people.  And this is the point at which Democrats also cannot avoid confronting a basic truth: such an assault has been aided and abetted by Republican senators and representatives for going on four years.  Through both active support and tacit approval, the GOP has enabled the president’s work at tearing down accountable government and faith in elections.  In turn, Donald Trump has overtly followed in the footsteps of previous Republican presidents and politicos, following the logic of white supremacism, voter suppression, and prioritization of oligarchic interests to their inevitable authoritarian ends. 

The GOP’s enabling of Donald Trump was put on display most vividly when all but one Republican senator voted to acquit him in his impeachment trial, despite incontrovertible evidence that the president had used the power of the U.S. government to threaten an ally to gin up a fake narrative about his then-likely opponent in the 2020 election.  Efforts by Republican senators to spread a false narrative about Joe Biden and Ukraine, based on Russian disinformation efforts, continue to this day.  This is certainly corruption, but it is also an abuse of power, an attack on free and fair elections, and an effort in tandem with the president’s own work to undermine the November election.

Acknowledging that the United States faces not just a Donald Trump crisis but a Republican Party crisis, in which the corrupt acts constitute an existential threat to democratic rule, clarifies how we need to think about post-Trump administration investigations.  The Democrats need to internalize this basic fact: the point must be not simply to restore some abstract “rule of law,” or punish generic “corruption,” but to inflict maximum political damage on a political party that has set itself in opposition to democratic government in this country.  As I’ve written before, this is a case where the Democrats’ partisan interests and duties as defenders of the constitutional order fully align.  Continuing to behave as if the GOP is a party committed to fair political competition and democratic values would be delusional after its embrace of Donald Trump over the past four years.

To facilitate this take-no-prisoners approach, Josh Marshall’s argument for prioritizing a massive airing of the facts and extent of Donald Trump’s corrupt acts, rather that emphasizing investigations that lead to prosecutions, feels increasingly persuasive.  The crux of his argument is that the American people, given the full facts of what happened, will be able to render appropriate political judgments on Trump and the Republican Party that will be more consequential than whether those who committed crimes in the Trump administration go to jail.  The fact that such an exposure could be accomplished much more quickly than investigations, so that the political impact would be accelerated, also seems to be a major consideration.  

But a fact-finding approach will only be effective if the Democrats prioritize and provide a proper narrative to what they investigate and what they unearth.  The Trump administration has committed and enabled countless acts worthy of investigation; emphasis must be placed on those acts that most directly harmed American government and that disqualify Trump’s political allies from holding political office.  The American people have a unquestionable right to know what bad acts were done in their name; but the Democrats have a political imperative to specifically press the case that Trump and the GOP committed political offenses that are simply unforgivable if we want to call ourselves a democracy.  

Attacks on Vote-by-Mail Delegitimize Trump

Never lose track of the fact that President Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting are an attack on voting, full stop.  No legitimate president would ever engage in a full-on disinformation campaign to convince Americans to fear that their votes won’t be counted, or that they can’t trust the outcome of an election.  In this way, his attacks on voting are in fact disqualifying attacks on his own re-election campaign and legitimacy.  As many political observers have argued, he is clearly trying to cast doubt on the presidential election so as to illicitly claim victory before all the votes are counted.  He would not be doing this if he thought he’d win in November.  He expects to lose, and so is already deploying propaganda and the power of the executive branch to seize power illegally.  This plan is in plain view; the fake fears about mail-in voting are pure propaganda, unsupported by evidence.  The true fear, which is right out front, is that vote by mail, and voting in general, actually work.  The president already learned this lesson in a way few presidents do, by losing the popular vote in 2016 while squeaking out an electoral college victory.

There is really no overstating how destructive this presidential strategy is for our country, beyond the obvious one of a criminal president cheating his way to “reelection.”  As Jennifer Rubin reminds us, many in the Republican Party fear that the president’s war on vote-by-mail will hurt the GOP in elections across the country by suppressing the Republican vote.  Though this might superficially seem like good news for Democrats, it is still in service of the president’s obsessive interest in retaining power by muddling the outcome of the vote.  As Rubin writes, “It seems, however, that he does not care whether Republicans lose; instead, he cares about constructing a narrative in which he can undermine the results and claim to have had the election stolen.”

But it is easy to see that the same arguments the president would use to claim victory in an election he lost could also be deployed by members of the GOP who also lost their elections.  In fact, these GOP politicians would have a tremendous incentive to do so, both in order to bolster the president’s fraudulent claims to power and their own chances of holding on to office.  In other words, Donald Trump’s war on voting has an internal logic whereby his entire party has an incentive to call into doubt an election the party is generally likely to lose — a loss they will have made all the more likely by having embraced the president’s campaign against vote-by-mail.

Efforts to delegitimize legitimate votes can only have the effect of spreading chaos and uncertainty as to outcomes, and creating a situation where those who hold power — like the president — can simply refuse to relinquish it, no matter what the election results.  This is the president’s end game, and any Republicans unwilling to repudiate his strategy make themselves party to his war on self-government.

Faced with the president’s clearly-signaled strategy, Democrats, Republicans of good faith, and other defenders of democracy need to insist on the basic principles of our democracy, without compromise.  We must be absolutely committed to clear rules of voting, the most basic of which is that each person’s vote must count.  Such commitment, among other things, will highlight how far the president and his supporters have strayed from the basics of American government.  Propaganda and disinformation do not determine who gets elected; our votes do.

Crashing Support Among Women Shows That Reality Is Trump's Truest Enemy

There are so many dispiriting and frightening threads of our national story right now that hope can feel elusive, and panic just another headline away.  The coronavirus pandemic has killed thousands, sickened millions, and shattered the American economy, even as President Trump continues to insist it will just go away, and as the national response is crippled by his indifference and incompetence.  Meanwhile, the president and the GOP more and more openly engage in direct attacks on democratic governance, perhaps most chillingly in the president’s effort to subvert vote-by-mail and preemptively call into question the results of the November election.  

These are sound reasons to be worried — and also why it’s important to pay attention to reports like this one from The Washington Post showing that most Americans clearly do not accept these failures of governance.  The Post describes how Republicans face an overwhelming loss of support among female voters as the election approaches; this is reflected both in high-level statistics, such as Joe Biden’s current 23% lead over Trump (in comparison, Hilary Clinton won the female vote by 13%), and in evidence that many women who previously supported the president have now turned against him.  

Exacerbating this threat to the GOP is that the president has created an environment in which “many Republican women in Congress were reluctant to criticize Trump or party leaders publicly, fearful of triggering the president’s wrath.”  Another helpful way of putting this is that the president’s misogyny would lead him to denigrate and threaten women who called him out on his misogyny; the basic problem keeps Republican women in fear of talking about it — surely an abusive dynamic.  (The article also reminds us of the staggering fact that only 13 GOP House members are female.) 

And among ordinary Republican-leaning female voters, the pandemic appears to have played a decisive role in undermining previous support for the president:

The exodus of women has been particularly distressing to Republican strategists because many of the women are die-hard conservatives on issues such as abortion and police power who have reached a tipping point when it comes to Trump.

Once willing to overlook controversies because their families were doing well, the security these voters felt with the booming economy is now gone because of the pandemic, the pollsters say. Now they are worried about their children, their elderly parents and their livelihoods — and they don’t see Trump as a leader who can protect them.

In other words, the overwhelming realities of Trump’s misrule — his incompetence, his inability to perform the basic presidential function of protecting the American population against threats — have broken through to millions of women voters.  That this is occurring in the face of daily propaganda and misinformation from the White House and right-wing media is remarkable.  Particularly heartening is that these realities are reversing previously-held positions about the president: according to Republican focus groups, previous GOP supporters “were shocked by Trump’s performances [at news conferences], belying the image of a successful businessman they though they had voted for in 2016.”  Likewise, his “law and order” rhetoric appears to be failing, and GOP strategists see women “increasingly blaming him for the chaos and uptick in racial tensions, as well as the increasingly devastating pandemic,” rather than seeing him as a president who will protect them and the country.

The piece notes that the president recently tweeted, “Suburban Housewives of America. . . Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.  I will preserve it, and make it even better!”  Critics noted the anachronism of the 1950’s-retro “suburban housewives” phrasing, and indeed the tweet is illuminating for the wishful thinking it contains.  If only women were all passive homemakers requiring the support and protection of a man!  This was hardly the full truth in the 1950’s, and this is even less true today.  I wonder if it also provides a clue to a potentially fatal flaw in Donald Trump’s low-brow authoritarianism, which like other far-right movements seeks to impose a clear hierarchy of power in which men rank higher than women.  A majority of white women were comfortable enough with the implicit promise of such a worldview in 2016 that they voted for Donald Trump; but after four years of seeing this attitude in action, I wonder if many of them are no longer so ready to say goodbye to modernity and ideals of equal rights.

Understanding the Federal Violence in Portland

Zack Beauchamp at Vox has written an excellent primer that both conveys the authoritarian dangers of the federal presence in Portland, and connects them to a larger crisis of American democracy.  Beauchamp assumes, as have many others, that the deployments in Portland have been connected to Donald Trump’s “law and order re-election campaign,” but drives home how unprecedented such presidential actions are.  Shockingly, he notes that there appear to be no analogues in modern democracies where a militarized national response occurred without the assent of local authorities and, perhaps more importantly, in the absence of actual circumstances that would justify such a response (the single exception is possibly the troubles in Northern Ireland).  There has been no mass lawlessness in Portland; yet the Trump administration has pretended that there is.

But Beauchamp quickly pivots to a deeper story here: how the Republican Party, which “claims to be for federalism and states’ rights,” has fallen in line with outright authoritarianism.  For, as he writes, “To even think about this kind of deployment in Portland, let alone to see the brutal results and then to announce expansions to other cities, reflects a radical de-democratization of American politics: a sense, on the part of the president and his allies, that the residents of Portland [. . .] are the enemy.”

Beauchamp points to the polarization of American politics, and particularly the increase in “negative partisanship,” which he describes as a “political identity defined not so much around liking one’s own party as hating the other one.”  He continues:

But in a democracy, rising negative partisanship is playing with fire. For a democratic system to work, all sides need to accept that their political opponents are fundamentally legitimate — wrong about policy, to be sure, but a faction whose right to wield power after winning elections goes without question. But if political leaders and voters come to hate their opponents so thoroughly, they may eventually come to see them not as rivals but as enemies of the state.

The idea that we are at a point where one national party — the GOP — sees the other — the Democrats — as enemies of the state is key to understanding what has been happening in Portland over the past few weeks.  It helps us understand how it is not just Trump, and not just Republican politicians, but the widespread endorsement of the use of violence among rank and file GOP party members, that created conditions for the monstrosity of the Portland occupation to occur.  Even small-scale dissent in the president’s party could quickly undermine his authoritarian actions; instead, we are witnessing mass GOP acceptance of his strategy, all the starker for the utter violation of decades of GOP rhetoric about states’ rights and the limits of federal power, as Beauchamp notes.

But this is also where analytical concepts like “partisanship” and “polarization” also, paradoxically, begin to lose their utility, as they are notions that describe features of a democracy, a key aspect of which is the assumption of legitimacy of all participants.  Once a party acts as if its opponents are enemies of the state, it is no longer acting as a democratic party, but as an authoritarian one.  In such circumstances, to say that extreme partisanship is the issue misses the forest for the trees: if you don’t believe opponents should be able to compete for power democratically, you no longer believe in democracy.

In the United States, there has been a clear line between the Republican Party’s diminishing ability to win free and fair elections, and its increasing opposition to democracy and its incentive to demonize its opponents as illegitimate.  And this is where we can, in retrospect, see how terms like “polarization” and “partisanship” also served to obscure the crisis now upon us.  For the actual, substantive conflicts that underlay their rise were often conflicts that were always about democracy versus authoritarianism.  Most centrally, the clash between white supremacism and equality for all was never an issue in which two legitimate, democratic forces were in conflict.  The idea that non-whites should have less political power has always been an anti-democratic political belief; its substantive consequences can be seen in the GOP’s decades-long effort to suppress the voting rights of minority Americans, leading to increasingly strident measures to ensure the power of a diminishing white majority.

Indeed, Beauchamp makes an analogous point, when he writes that, “The extreme federal deployment there isn’t just about demonizing Democrats and antifa; it’s a means for the president to activate the kind of racial grievance politics that propelled him to power in the Republican Party. His mechanism for doing so is by leaning into the side of his political personality that admires foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, both of whom have notably suppressed protests by force.”

In these extreme and dire circumstances, the way forward for defending our democracy is to clearly identify what the stakes are and to be as specific as possible as to what the nature of that conflict is — including the abomination of one party treating its opposition as deserving of physical punishment.  As political scientist Lilliana Mason tells Beauchamp, “It’s not just about partisanship — it’s about who gets to be considered a ‘real’ American, with the full rights and privileges that entails. But it also clears the way for Trump’s push toward authoritarian rule.  It feels like the brakes are off.”  White fears about loss of power are driving authoritarianism; and Trump’s authoritarianism relies on playing on those fears.  Opponents of Trump and defenders of democracy must make explicit these drivers of Republican authoritarianism, must lay bare the true conflicts rending American society, with the aim of building a majority that can re-assert the primacy of democratic rule and values in this country.  This is not an abstract political exercise, but an all hands on deck moment.  From mass protests to Democratic officeholders raising legislative hell, all possible peaceful and legal means must be brought to bear to stop and roll back this authoritarian menace.  Knowing and articulating what we’re fighting against, and fighting for, are essential.