Trump Versus Trump

Given all the talk of what a shit show and an unprecedented disaster it was, when that was always the obvious outcome, I am guessing that many Americans had a lingering faith that the the ritual of a presidential debate would somehow set limits on Trump’s depravity.  Maybe a lot of us expected that Trump would at least fake it.

Instead, what we got was a sort of summation of the last four years of our national life, stripped down to a stage set and three actors.  The president lied, blustered, bullied, interrupted, and essentially made it clear that he saw no purpose to the commonly accepted idea of a presidential debate - that the candidates would make the case for why they and their ideas deserve the support of voters.  Instead, he seized it as a forum to enact the bullying dominance rituals which he believes connote strength and appeal to voters who wish to see an authoritarian strongman in the White House.  His constant interruptions made it impossible to have any sort of linear conversation, just as his presence in our national life has distorted all discussions about our pressing needs, from an effective coronavirus strategy to fighting global warming. Joe Biden and moderator Chris Wallace stood in for the traumatized American people, occasionally speechless at his antics and frequently the intended victims of his narcissistic rage.

It was also as clear as ever that one of Trump’s basic political strategies is to try to drag everyone down to his level.  Political commentators have described this as a way to discredit both other politicians and democracy in general — if everyone else is also bad and corrupt, you may as well support the bastard who seems to have your back.  You could see this in the way he attacked Wallace and repeatedly tried to provoke Joe Biden to respond at the same schoolyard taunt-level on which he operates.  

It’s great for the country that there’s such a general consensus that this debate was very bad for Trump, but the enormous attention being paid (correctly) to the president’s refusal to condemn white supremacists when given the chance by Wallace reminds us of a crisis that transcends Trump.  Not only has the president already shown himself to be a white supremacist president for the past four years, but the larger GOP endorses his white nationalist policies like suppressing the votes of African-Americans and abusing Latin American immigrants.  It’s not nearly enough to call Trump our, and actually counter-productive to suggest that he’s some sort of outlier in his party.

That said, his shout out to the Proud Boys to “stand by” was an abomination.  Presidential validation of this white nationalist group is no abstract thing for those of us who live in Portland.  Members of this paramilitary organization have engaged in violence in this city on multiple occasions, and we will bear the brunt of it if and when members emboldened by the president’s endorsement spring into fascistic action.  Trump tried to score points against Biden for the former VP’s supposed failure to order Oregon’s governor to send in the National Guard against antifa protestors, but he actually got it half right — Biden should be encouraging Oregon to send out the National Guard, but against the illegal white supremacist militias that threaten violence against American citizens.

After Trump used the debate stage to amplify his self-serving conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots, essentially suggesting that the election is already corrupted and any outcome in which he isn’t the winner must be invalidated by the Supreme Court, it feels like a corner may have been turned in how the media is conceiving of this race.  It’s not really Trump versus Biden, but Trump versus the election, as Rachel Maddow put it.  Better yet, it’s Trump running against our democracy, as none other than Hillary Clinton tweeted.  No one could have made this case against Trump any better than he did himself last night.

Shine a Spotlight on GOP's Court Obsession

Like I said the other day, there are encouraging signs that Donald Trump’s apparently unstoppable placement of a conservative justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg has lit a fire under many Democrats to pursue a revitalization of American democracy, in which court expansion, abolition of the electoral college, voting rights protections, and statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico are all on the table.  And as Paul Waldman points out, polls show that significantly more Democrats than Republicans say that RBG’s passing makes it much more important that their candidate win the presidency than previously, reversing the traditional greater interest among Republicans in court appointments and their overall political importance.  But as Waldman goes on to discuss, this greater awareness is coming just at the point when it’s seemingly more or less too late for it to matter; with a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Democrats can expect to see the Court upend a whole host of legislation, affecting everything from the economy and women’s rights to protection of the environment and our ability to have our votes counted.

But while Democratic voters carry some responsibility for not prioritizing court issues more over the past few decades, and without discounting the Republican norm-breaking and corruption that has allowed them to appoint a majority of conservative justices, far more responsibility must rest on the Democratic leadership of the last 20 years who, in important ways, are the ones who lost this pressing fight.  In particular, the failure of the Democrats to use the GOP’s corrupt blockade of Merrick Garland’s nomination as an opportunity to turn the tables on the GOP must now be seen as much as a catastrophic miss for Democrats as a decisive win for Republicans.  The GOP’s prioritization of both the Supreme Court and the federal courts has been in part an admission that the party is not popular enough to win a long-term majority in this country, and the Democrats have long had a wide-open path to describing the GOP’s focus on the courts as an illegitimate way to impose its will on a majority of voters who otherwise reject the Republican Party.  The Democrats have also given a pass on publicizing more openly the retrograde conservative legal philosophies that, to all appearances, start with the anti-woman, anti-worker, and anti-democratic end goals of the Republican Party, and reverse-engineer legal doctrines that can justify them.

Obviously, there’s a tiny bit of tension between Democratic politicos pointing to the ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and declaring that the GOP now has a veto on progressive legislation for the next 30 or 300 years, and their appeals to Americans to vote for the Democratic Party to accomplish good things for the American people.  The Democratic Party must find a way to negate the right-wing dominance of the Supreme Court, not just if it wants to accomplish anything but simply if it wants to make basic sense as a party.

The Democrats’ failure to prioritize the courts as a political issue is inextricable from the party’s unwillingness to properly name the growing anti-democratic, minority rule end game of the GOP, and to fully assert its own role as America’s majority party.  Again, the statistic that needs to be drilled into everyone’s head: Democrats have won the majority of votes in all but one presidential election since 1992.  Despite GOP gerrymandering, they have managed to capture back the House.  And though they don’t control the Senate, millions more people voted for Democratic senators.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this basic failure to make the most of the undeniable fact of the party’s majority status since reading a 2018 interview with historian Rick Perlstein, in which he talks about Democratic leaders holding on to traumas from defeats of the 1960’s and 1970’s far past the point where it makes any sense:

The Democratic Party doesn’t even know how to take yes for an answer. They can’t even accept the idea that they are a majority party. There’s this great line, “He who seems most kingly is the king.” Unless you act like a leader, people aren’t going to treat you like a leader.”

Not to reduce the complexities of the Democratic coalition and American politics overly much, but this observation really resonates.  And not only have the Democrats not generally acted with the confidence of their majority and the popularity of their policies, they have failed to address head-on the currents of racism that have increasingly fueled the GOP political machine.  Even as the Republican Party repeatedly and openly engaged in openly bigoted behavior, such as gerrymandering and voter suppression that targeted minority voters, the Democrats failed to put front and center the GOP’s racism, anti-majority aims, and basic lack of popular backing.

But there is no choice now, not when the GOP’s slipping share of the voting public has led it into the undisguised authoritarianism and white supremacism of Donald Trump.  Not only is the Democratic Party on the right side of morality and history, their other, decisive advantage in this fight is that many more people actually support the Democrats.  Not to promote this fact at every opportunity would be a sort of political madness.  To bring it back to the Supreme Court and the GOP’s broader packing of the federal judiciary with right-wing ideologues — in the name of democracy, Democrats should go on the offensive now, not when the courts start blocking progressive legislation.  On abortion, protect Roe with legislation to pre-empt Supreme Court efforts to undo it, as many have pushed for, and make similar pre-emptive legislative efforts on other fronts.  Set the terms of the debate to privilege common sense and majority rule, so that when conservative judges start calling on crackpot theories to strike down popular laws, the ground has been set for a legitimate questioning of the bases on which the judges have ruled, and for a reform of the courts via expansion so that fair-minded judges can be appointed.  Keep in front of the public consciousness the prior appointment of so many judges by the corrupt Donald Trump, as a reminder that balance needs to be restored.

In other words, present a consistent, coherent narrative of how and why conservative judges rule the way they do, in order to educate the public and build support for reforms. Particularly as Donald Trump and the GOP face a wipe-out in November, yet press ahead with the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett as if they had an overwhelming electoral mandate, the Democrats can all the more easily describe the reality of a GOP so corrupt that it thinks the losing party should appoint all the justices.  The GOP is trying to scam the majority out of the power that rightly belongs to it.

Proud and Prejudice

As Oregon state troopers, Multnomah County sheriff’s deputies, and Portland police officers deploy today in response to a Proud Boys rally in north Portland, the big question is whether the state will begin using all the legal tools at its disposal to defend Portland residents against these far-right extremists whose seek to intimidate and terrorize city residents.  Governor Kate Brown has invoked emergency powers to centralize the law enforcement response, and some 15 Democratic elected officials in the state have released a statement criticizing the rally.  The letter’s reference to state laws against private militias suggests that Oregon officials are finally beginning to take the threat of right-wing militias as seriously as they should:

Oregon law prohibits paramilitary activity. Organizers of and likely participants in the September 26 event have openly discussed tactical operations and military-style formations that lead us to believe that they are operating as an unauthorized private militia. Many of them are crossing state lines in an attempt to cause chaos and disrupt the peace. One regular at far-right rallies wrote this week on social media, 'We have a unit large enough now that we have specialized teams inside our unit. Combat and support.' Another wrote last month, 'Like we do in other states, tactical ambushes at night while backing up the police are key.’

Significantly, the law prohibits both the use and the intent to use firearms or explosives; the ability to prove intent would seem to be the key to whether the state could use this law before actual acts of violence occur. Additionally, the Oregon constitution states that “the Military shall be kept in strict subordination to the civil power,” which suggests that private militias not under government control would violate the constitution or any laws that enforce this concept.

The rally organizers claim to be gathering to “end domestic terrorism,” which to them is embodied in the anti-racist protestors who have demonstrated in downtown Portland and other parts of the city for more than 100 days in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.  But their white supremacist rhetoric, weaponry of war, and prior record point to a different, obvious purpose: to intimidate Portlanders who oppose them by threats of violence, and to engage in violence.  They are an illegal armed militia.  Law enforcement needs to treat them like one. It is disturbing to see that the superintendent of state troopers was initially reluctant to send state police as part of the state response to the protest.  He cited Portland’s ban on using one type of tear gas against protestors as his reason, but you have to wonder what sort of signal it sends to white nationalist extremists when a high-ranking law enforcement official shows a lack of enthusiasm for a state-level response to such groups.

While law enforcement has legitimate and pressing reasons to avoid escalating situations involving armed groups, one would hope that the fact that the heavy weaponry and propensity to violence of the Proud Boys does not effectively nullify application of anti-paramilitary laws.  And if the current state laws are not sufficient to prosecute those who clearly use threats of gun violence to advance their agenda, then Oregon Democrats need to pass some new and improved ones. They will likely not be joined by their Republican colleagues, whose response to the Proud Boys rally has been at best muddled and at worst atrocious. The GOP minority leaders in the House and Senate released a statement denouncing “violence committed by any individual or group, no matter their perceived political affiliation.” GOP Representative Bill Post, though, was “less measured,” in the words of Willamette Week; he falsely asserted that the groups at the rally have no record of violence in Portland, and accused Governor Brown of not defending the city against antifa. (U.S. Attorney for Oregon Billy “not Billy Dee” Williams has a similarly Trump-inflected reaction, describing the violence of anti-police violence protests in Portland as the reason why Proud Boys have now descended on the city: “As a direct consequence of this criminal behavior and the media attention it generates, this community must now deal with the threat of even more outsiders traveling to Portland to participate in what they've been watching on social media and television for weeks.” Post and Williams demonstrate once again that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to get a Republican official to directly condemn violent right-wing extremists.)

But the inherently violent tactics and murderous ends of white supremacist paramilitary groups alone make any attempts to find equivalence with anti-racist protestors, even antifa, a false and pernicious one.  Groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer are the modern-day descendants of white terrorist groups like the KKK, only garbed in transparent attempts to legitimize themselves as militias.  They are in fact anti-militias, serving not the public defense but a violent, sectarian white supremacist vision that constitutes a deep offense against American government and the American people.

Given their paramilitary nature and clear history of seeking violence, it makes no sense for counter-protestors to show up to the Proud Boys rally.  If the goal is to illuminate the presence of these white nationalist vigilantes, then that goal has already been accomplished.  This rally is already national news.  Rather than advancing a sense of how dangerous such groups are, direct confrontation with them invites a sense of equivalency, of two factions of the right and the left battling it out.  Groups like the Proud Boys must be opposed by state and federal law enforcement, and all efforts need to be placed on our elected officials to turn this necessary strategy into a reality.  They are not enemies of antifa, as they would like to claim, but enemies of the United States of America.  Seeking confrontation with men carrying machine guns who are looking for an excuse to commit mass murder would be bonkers.

We can’t lose sight of the fact that groups like the Proud Boys are not simply responding to the existence of Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations involving antifa.  They are also responding to calls from President Trump for white vigilante violence, such as when the president excused the actions of the right-wing teen who killed two demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisconsin a few weeks ago.  As the election approaches, we will likely see bolder and more frequent actions by right-wing groups, and state officials not just in Oregon but across the country need to establish a strategy to foil their attempts at intimidation and mayhem.  This is not just a state issue; it’s a national one, with implications for the November elections.

Trump and GOP Demonstrate That Minority Rule Easily Evolves Into Rule By the Gun

If there is one positive thing that has come from the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it is that even mainstream Democrats can no longer look away from how the Republican Party has fought for decades now to secure itself in power against a rising Democratic majority.  An understanding that American democracy itself must be revitalized and expanded seems to have a good chance of becoming a central tenet for the party, from expanding the size of the Supreme Court, to federal laws banning gerrymandering and guaranteeing that every American’s vote will be counted, to extending statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, to doing away with the electoral college.

Democrats need to ensure that every American is fully conscious of the shocking facts that the GOP has won the popular vote in only one presidential election since 1992; that the Republican majority in the Senate represents many millions less votes than Democratic senators received; and that presidents who have lost the popular vote will have appointed the conservative majority on the Supreme Court (assuming Trump’s latest pick is confirmed).  Making the case that the Republican Party is wrecking American democracy in its effort to hold power despite being increasingly unable to win majority votes nationally and in many states should be central to the Democrats message at all levels of government.

But the case the Democrats must make goes beyond a vital but abstract defense of majority rule.  The particular minority that the GOP defends, and the character of the majority it seeks to thwart, are the heart of the story.  The Republican Party is fighting to maintain power for white Americans, and to restrict the power of non-white Americans.  In plain language, the Republican Party has dedicated itself to maintaining a system of white supremacy in this country.  These are the terms of our ongoing conflict, and the Democrats cannot be afraid to describe it as such.  

As writers like Jamelle Bouie have described, the Republican Party has tried to invert this reality, by constantly asserting that all their actions come down to trying to protect the will of the voters — such as when they point to their Senate majority and Trump’s presidency as proof they have majority support to appoint a new Supreme Court justice.  But of course the GOP majority does not represent a majority of voters, and Trump was elected by the electoral college, not the popular vote.  In this respect, alongside anti-democratic, iron-fisted efforts to suppress the Democratic vote, part of the GOP’s strategy has been to run an epic scam against the American majority, brazenly asserting that their ability to win votes in elections they’ve gamed in their favor truly represented the majority.  Small wonder that the party cottoned so quickly to the greatest conman of our time after he won the presidency.

Against this GOP strategy of claiming that its hold on power means that the power must be legitimate, the Democrats cannot avoid pressing an argument over broader democratic legitimacy.  But as encouraging as it is to see a broader pro-democracy agenda quickly beginning to gain traction, Democrats can’t lose sight of how quickly in turn the GOP’s efforts to maintain power despite the support of a minority of voters has slid not only into open corruption, but into threats of and actual violence.  The line between minority rule and outright authoritarianism is turning out not only to be paper thin, but increasingly meaningless.

The fact that President Trump is taking the lead on both the corruption and violence fronts should not blind us to the fact that he does so with apparently unflinching support from the vast majority of Republican elected officials — and Republican voters.  And nowhere is this corruption and violence more apparent than in his attacks on the November election.  Over the past few days, I have seen more and more commentators wake up to the fact that Donald Trump simply does not intend to abide by the results of the election if they are not in his favor.  This realization has come both from good reporting that has ferreted out new details of efforts to hold power no matter the vote, and from the president’s own open pronouncements.  On Tuesday, the president refused to answer whether he would assent to a peaceful transfer of power; as bad as this is, Greg Sargent makes the case that the president is already engaging in activities meant to ensure that he holds onto power despite likely adverse election results.  Perhaps most critically, the president is doing so by working to discredit the validity of mail-in voting, both as a concept and in individual states where GOP lawyers are working to ensure that a maximal number of likely-Biden ballots are disqualified.  The end goal, as Sargent and others have pointed out, is to ensure that the president can claim victory election night if he appears to be ahead, even if all ballots have not yet been counted.  Too many have referred to this as Trump’s war on mail-in voting, when it’s simply a war on voting.

Other machinations are already underway as well, including Republican efforts to determine if Republican-held legislatures can vote to award their electoral votes to Trump even if all the ballots have not been counted or Biden is leading in their states.  Alongside Trump’s other clear efforts to undermine the election, some observers are starting to refer to these various efforts as a Republican coup that is already in progress.

But even this summary fails to capture the full extent of how greatly the president and the GOP’s efforts to retain power have blurred the line between manipulating the mechanisms of democratic government in bad faith, and operating outside them in illegitimate ways.  For years now, the president has encouraged violence against political opponents and the press.  Even as right-wing nationalists and racists have been emboldened by his rhetoric, the Department of Homeland Security has sought to play down the threat posed by these extremists — even after they’ve engaged in multiple acts of violence around the country.  And after civil rights protests broke out nationwide following the murder of George Floyd, the president deployed federal agents to violently suppress demonstrations, and also encouraged militia types to fight back in the name of law and order.  Inciting such violence has been a key part of his election strategy, both to promote a sense of chaos in the streets and to strengthen his image as a strong leader who can turn back the liberal civil rights tide by any means necessary.  Now, as the election fast approaches, the president has begun suggesting that Republicans will need to guard against fraud at polling places — another open attempt to intimidate voters through physical force, as we have already seen happen during early voting in Virginia.

So while it is greatly encouraging that the Democrats have finally begun to grasp en masse that they are in a battle with Republicans to defend democracy in this country, and are articulating a grander vision for American democracy, that does not address the immediate danger — which is not a question simply of how to overcome minority rule, but how to overcome a minority party that now resorts to corruption and violence to hold onto power.  A long-term strategy to expand democratic rule is necessary, but so is a related, immediate strategy to counter current GOP behavior that without exaggeration can be termed as authoritarian and anti-American.

This is a dangerous and unprecedented situation for all of us, yet there still seems to be inadequate attention paid to how to counter a lawless GOP now as it moves to corrupt and steal the election.  I admit upfront that I don’t have any amazing raft of proposals — but then again, I’m not an elected Democrat!  But whatever concrete steps the Democrats surely need to take — including, crucially, exerting whatever moral suasion they can on media outlets to do their democratic duty and treat this coup in the making as THE story of the election, as observers like Will Stancil and Amanda Marcotte have contended — their approach must involve describing in plain language to the American people how very radical, and unacceptable, the GOP’s open embrace of not just corruption but violence actually is.  On top of this, they need to describe unambiguously that the Republican goal is to maintain an authoritarian system of white supremacy. Republicans will surely try to paint the Democrats as radical, as they talk of expanding the court and other democracy-strengthening policies, but the president’s increasing willingness to speak of made-up plots involving millions of ballots, and to egg on white-supremacist militias and other right-wing wackos to violence against their fellow Americans, all in the name of a deranged vision of white nationalism, must be used as a cudgel to de-legitimize and defeat both Donald Trump and the GOP.  If the president can incite violence without consequence, then our politics will fall apart.  You cannot have one party that uses violence as a political weapon, and another that is brutalized and even murdered.  And this, I believe, is a point that might sway even some substantial number of Republicans to turn against the president.

DOJ Looks to Criminalize Elected Democrats

We learned last week that Attorney General William Barr encouraged Justice Department prosecutors to consider sedition charges against anti-racist protestors who commit violence — a clear attempt to ratchet up the Trump administration’s campaign not only to portray, but to treat, civil rights protestors as enemies of the United States.  But equally horrifying are the reports that the attorney general also directed Justice Department officials to explores such charges against elected officials in cities like Seattle and Portland where such protests have taken place, on grounds that they did not take sufficient actions against demonstrators.  Barr appears to have been particularly interested in punishing Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan for allowing the existence of a protest zone free of police in the Capitol Hill area of the city; the reporting on Portland has not identified which particular officials were in the administration’s crosshairs, though President Trump has repeatedly pursued a verbal vendetta against Mayor Ted Wheeler.

Any prosecutions of politicians on such grounds need to be described as exactly what they are: the corrupt use of the Justice Department to criminalize political opponents of the president for purely partisan ends. There really is no way to overstate how shocking such Justice Department discussions are, or how great a perversion of democratic government they represent.  That the government has to date not proceeded with such corrupt prosecutions of elected Democrats is cold comfort.  This is a preview of the authoritarian nightmare that would be unleashed in a second Trump administration, where Democrats would be prosecuted as criminals if they disagree with the president on policy.  Once again, we see that Trump and Barr’s talk of law and order is just the opposite: a desire to pervert the law, and American government, into a weapon to use against political opponents.

The fact that multiple Justice Department employees were willing to talk to reporters about these discussions is a small silver lining, but opens the door to a related issue: the need for the Trump administration to receive the assistance of many, many lower-ranking federal officials and employees in the implementation of openly corrupt policies.  In the case of criminalizing elected officials for their political choices, there is no conceivable definition of legal ethics that should not result in the disbarring of any Justice Department lawyers who were to participate in such cases.  Those enabling the Trump administration in this and other acts of lawlessness and authoritarianism need to fear the professional consequences of their complicity in anti-democratic acts.

William Barr in particular is no longer hiding his true inclinations or goals.  The free press is the enemy; protestors are the enemy; and now, apparently, elected Democrats are the enemy.  His ideas and his language are from the far-right fringes of American politics; there is no need for officials who serve the American people and the constitution to follow him down this openly authoritarian path.

The Department of Justice's Declaration of Absurdity

Two can play at this game. If Bill Barr’s Justice Department can declare the City of Portland to be “permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction,” then the City of Portland can declare the Trump administration to be permitting state-sponsored racism, mass death due to the covid pandemic, economic ruin for millions of Americans, and the advancement of authoritarian rule at the behest of a corrupt and lawless president. If the Trump administration insists on putting the media spotlight on Portland for nakedly partisan purpose, then Portland city officials should use that spotlight to describe as thoroughly as possible the crimes and failures of this administration, which are orders of magnitude greater than anything they can think to accuse Portland of.

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.