Pulling Back the Camera

Even as President Trump’s grotesque coup attempt splutters and stalls, moving from the realm of long-shot possibility to impossible fascistic dream, the country stands to amplify the damage done if we collectively downplay the reality of this failed attempt.  Chief among this damage would be a failure not only to hold the president accountable for his attack on America, but much more importantly, to hold accountable the larger Republican Party for its role in encouraging and benefitting from his dead-ender claims that he has actually won the election.

The president has without a shred of evidence claimed massive fraud in swing states that he lost.  In other words, the president is attacking the basic operations of our democracy, pretending that the election can’t be trusted.  Beyond this, by asserting that he should be president while quite obviously being aware that what he says about vote fraud is a lie, the president is trying to seize the presidency illicitly.

Hence, a “coup” is the right term to describe this effort — yet many of us have felt for the past two weeks that the clearly authoritarian ends have been at odds with the incompetent means, perhaps exemplified by the infamous press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.  Many in the media have debated how to balance their coverage of Trump’s machinations so as not to give them too much credence and unnecessarily lend credibility to an attempt likely bound to fail (which, incidentally, reinforces the degree to which Trump’s hold on power has always depended so much on how the media chose to normalize his outrageous behavior).  The Democrats, too, have struggled with a proper approach, largely opting to follow Joe Biden’s lead to laugh off the president’s attempt as something that would be overwhelmed by reality (i.e., the continued counting and certification of votes that Trump claimed to be fraudulent).

But this double quality of the attempt — half sinister, half Three Stooges — shouldn’t distract us from the crucial support Trump has received from the Republican Party and the great benefits the GOP has received from the attempt, even as it has fallen short of reversing the election.  Nothing was ever going to stop Trump from decrying the election results, but his sustained project since November 3 to discredit them would not have been possible without GOP politicians giving cover for his lies and propaganda.  Indeed, in some respects, such as the way that Pennsylvania Republicans ensured an appearance of Election Day fraud by not allowing the counting of mail-in ballots until November 3, larger GOP complicity in his plot to subvert the election results has existed since before the election.   

At the federal level, even as elected officials like Mitch McConnell have seen that Donald Trump’s attempt to illicitly hold power was very likely not to succeed, the benefit from the president effectively undermining Joe Biden’s legitimacy in the eyes of Trump voters has been simply golden for them.  And so McConnell and others in Congress simply had no objection to a president’s unprecedented attempt to undermine faith in voting, both to advance their war on Joe Biden and their larger war on a Democratic Party that has won the majority vote in 7 of the last 8 elections — a record of success, as Ronald Brownstein writes, that is historically unprecedented for an American political party.

Though cannier operators like McConnell have couched their support in pseudo-legalistic language like the president having every right to pursue his options, they are completely aware of the larger damage done to the public trust from the president’s false claims.  McConnell and others could also have easily shut down the hopes of the president and some of his advisors that they might persuade state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan (meanwhile, some Republican politicians, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, are more actively encouraging such a strategy).  Once again, the GOP is letting the president do the dirty work of sticking a shiv in democracy, providing them with plausible deniability while reaping all the benefits of further driving the Republican base into a frenzied belief that the GOP must be empowered to do literally anything to stop the corrupt Democrats from gaining power.  As has been the case throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, the long-term beneficiary of his overt attacks on democracy has been the Republican Party.

A big part of why Trump’s lies about voter fraud are so powerful in riling up the GOP base is that they’re inseparable from the white supremacism that has been at the center of his appeal.  As Jacob Weisberg put it in a Trumpcast podcast last week, there is a “racist subtext” to Trump’s accusations when the fraud is about heavily African-American cities like Detroit and Philadelphia — it is essentially saying “that black people voting is illegitimate or cheating.”  The absence of any GOP criticism of this underlying racism is no surprise, given that the Republican Party has gone all in with placing white grievance politics at the center of its electoral appeal. 

Of course, Trump himself also clearly stands to gain from the same polarization and discrediting of democracy that benefits the larger GOP.  As The New York Times reports, the president himself seems to be giving up on hopes of reversing the election results:

There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Mr. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base.

There is also the crucial fact, as many have pointed out, that the president has a great interest in maximizing his ability to avoid the various legal actions coming at him once he leaves the presidency. To his addled mind, creating ambiguity about whether he might still be the president even after Joe Biden takes office might be viewed as a last-ditch strategy to protect himself.

But the fact of the matter is that President Trump has been defeated, while the GOP retains power in the Senate and in governor’s mansions and statehouses across the country.  It is the ranks of GOP politicians, not Donald Trump, who have gerrymandered themselves into nearly-invincible minority rule in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, who implement voter suppression policies in states like Texas and Georgia, and who clearly see that majority rule and democracy have become their enemy.  These Republicans are the true, long-term beneficiaries of Trump’s attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote.  Being able to “win” without majorities, by arguing that some people’s votes should not be counted, is the Republican Party’s path forward, a way of faking democratic legitimacy while destroying democracy in practice.

A few weeks back, I wrote that once the election was over, Democrats would be well-served by roasting Republicans for their pre-election efforts to subvert the outcome.  The same recommendation applies to their post-election efforts, which are if anything even more transparently anti-democratic.  But what’s now much clearer to me is the way in which Democrats need to consciously pull themselves away from keeping Donald Trump at the center of the political universe, and level these critiques at the Republicans who will be their opponents going forward.  Trump has served as a distraction from the necessary broader indictment of anti-democratic intent that animates the current GOP, and this is all the truer today now that he’s lost re-election. The larger issue, though, and perhaps the most pressing question for our country, is how not simply to call out but to curb the GOP’s anti-democratic turn.

Last week, historian Sean Wilentz told New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall that Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s legitimacy as president-elect “would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the southern secession in 1860-61, the ultimate example of Americans refusing to respect the outcome of a presidential election.” But how is Wilentz’s bleak assessment any less true for a Republican Party that accedes to or abets the president’s attempts to hold power against the will of the voters? In the face of such treasonous impulses, critiques by Democrats will soon fall far short: for the sake of the survival of American democracy, they will need a concrete strategy to rally the public and roll back the Republicans’ increasing secession from democracy. Anything less would itself constitute a separate, unforgivable betrayal of the American people.

Covid Badlands

Late last week, The Washington Post reported that, “Democratic leaders accused Republicans [. . .] of refusing to confront the dramatically worsening coronavirus pandemic and instead acquiescing to President Trump’s false insistence that he won last week’s presidential election.”  As I argued a few days ago, this is exactly the tact that Democrats should be taking — only turned up to 11, and also leveled at GOP state leaders who continue to unforgivably sabotage the pandemic response.  There is no defending the public health at this point without exposing and discrediting the many ways in which Republican politicians have failed to support common-sense policies to reign in the pandemic.  Tying the worsening coronavirus situation to the president’s anti-democratic assault on the election results is correct — these two things are connected, in a way that’s easy for the public to grasp, including for many people who voted for Trump but are concerned about the coronavirus.  Once again, the president is setting aside his responsibility to govern in favor of his personal obsessions, and the GOP is going along for reasons of its own.

There is no risk of overstating the catastrophe that the GOP’s support of the president’s coronavirus incompetence and denialism has inflicted on the country.  Across the nation, coronavirus is surging in states led by GOP governors who have refused to take the virus seriously enough, putting the interests of business and ass-backwards ideas of personal liberty ahead of protecting public health and the long-term health of the economy.  Because of these governors’ bad decisions, hundreds of thousands of citizens have become sick, and thousands have died.  Holding them to account for their murderous policies isn’t politicization — it’s democratic politics, plain and simple.  When politicians’ actions lead directly to mass death and suffering, it is the other party’s responsibility to hold them to account.  This is literally the substance of democracy.  In this case, good politics and just politics go hand in hand.  Those in the Republican Party who oppose mask-wearing, basic social distancing precautions, and life-saving restrictions on business occupancy and operations are not just in the wrong, like on a question of tax policy, but in the wrong on a matter of life and death.  They deserve no courtesy or second chances.

News from North and South Dakota hammers home the deadly toll that bad policies by bad governors have wrought on the populations of those states.  North Dakota had a record 2,270 new cases on Saturday; The New York Times reports that the state “has critically understaffed hospitals and the highest rates of new cases and deaths per person in the nation.”  How can this be happening?  Well, among other things, Republican Governor Doug Burgum refused to order lockdowns the last time the state was seeing a surge of cases, back in the summer; he had continued his malpractice until Friday, when the horror show unfolding in his state finally moved him to implement various restrictions he clearly should have ordered weeks or months ago.

You may remember Governor Burgum from a Hot Screen post last month; he’s the one who shed tears during a press conference at the thought of all the people who might die from covid, even while he asserted that ordering restrictions exceeded his authority as governor.  His about-face is an admission not only that he was wrong before, but dead wrong, in the literal sense of the term — his incompetence has meant unnecessary deaths and illness have plagued his state.  His adherence to badly confused ideas of what constitutes personal liberty and the limits of government’s responsibility has proved murderous.  It does not matter that he’s finally made the right decision; the point was always to keep things from getting so very bad (as yet another indication of how belated his moves are, there is such a shortage of nursing staff that he has declared that “medical workers who test positive could stay on the job to treat Covid-19 patients as long as the workers show no symptoms.”)

Then there’s South Dakota, which yesterday hit a new seven-day average case count of 1,458; the seven-day average positivity rate has crossed 20%, meaning one-fifth of people tested actually have the coronavirus (as a reference point for the severity of this figure, New York City is considering closing its public schools if this rate rises above 3%).  Along with North Dakota, it has the highest covid death rate in the nation. Yet, as in North Dakota, the state’s Republican Governor, Kristi Noem, has been adamantly opposed to the basic approaches that have saved lives in other states.  As USA Today reports, “Noem has cast doubt on whether wearing masks in public is effective, saying she would leave it up to the people to decide.  She has said the virus can’t be stopped.”  Let that sink in for a moment.  As anyone paying attention to the news could tell Noem, the virus can indeed be stopped, by basic measures like mask-wearing and social distancing.  It is a virus, not the Terminator.  North Dakota is paying the price for her decision to effectively surrender to the virus.  One health expert told USA Today that, “The rates of infection and deaths per capita in South Dakota and previously restriction-free North Dakota are what [he] would expect to see in a war-torn nation, not here” in the United States (the article has other refreshingly outraged commentary from health professionals thoroughly appalled by the mass suffering taking place in the Dakotas).

Remarkably, Noem has been considered a rising star in the Republican Party, a strong reminder that the inane ideology leading directly to mass illness in South Dakota is hardly an outlier, and how very low the bar now is to be considered up and coming in the contemporary GOP.  If this is the best the GOP has to offer us after Donald Trump shuffles off the stage, god help us all.

I understand that politicians like Noem and Burgum are from highly conservative states, but even if their respective publics are more inclined to resist government guidelines and mandates, this hardly means that their governors need to indulge inappropriate resistance to life-saving measures in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. Just the opposite — leadership in this case could well involve doing something that’s unpopular. Instead, like Donald Trump, they bring out the worst in their citizenry, giving free reign to deranged ideas about personal responsibility and the reality of science itself.

One of the Democrats’ main roads to reasserting the primacy of democratic rule in the United States runs through exposing, berating, and holding accountable those GOP politicians whose incompetence renders them unfit representatives of the American people. Nowhere today is that incompetence more glaring than in the willingness of GOP politicians to defy science and babble about the sanctity of personal liberty while watching passively as thousands of American die and permanently lose their liberty. There are no gray areas when a Republican politico casts doubt on the efficacy of masks, as Noem has. This is talk of a fool and a fraud, not someone deserving of high office in the 21st century United States of America.

Masters of Disaster

As covid cases hit new records across the United States, we are beginning to cross into the dark winter that so many medical experts have warned us about for months now.  According to The New York Times, the “average number of new daily infections topped 116,000, average daily deaths neared 1,000, and Covid-19 hospitalizations hit a record high of 61,964" yesterday.  Yet, as the Times goes on to detail, the Trump administration has all but abandoned responsibility for trying to contain the coronavirus pandemic.  This isn’t a surprise, given nearly a year of lying, gaslighting, and disinformation from the president; chief of staff Mark Meadows’ admission a few weeks ago that the administration has given up on trying to control the virus; and the president’s loss to Joe Biden last week, freeing him to no longer even pretend to give a shit about the pandemic.  As the Times notes, even Pfizer’s announcement of a vaccine with a 90% efficacy rate could not be celebrated by the White House; instead, it became another opportunity for the president to rage about how he had been personally wronged by the coronavirus, now due to an alleged conspiracy between Pfizer and his own health officials to withhold the vaccine announcement until after the election.

It is not simply that the coronavirus has been allowed to run more or less unchecked across great swathes of the country because the federal government failed to promulgate adequate regulations and restrictions that would have slowed or stopped its spread.  After ample time to prepare for what would inevitably be an uptick of cases in the winter, the United States has failed to do so:

[S]hortages of personal protective equipment are back, especially among rural hospitals, nursing homes and private medical practices that lack access to the supply networks that serve larger hospital chains.

Dr. Shikha Gupta, the executive director of Get Us PPE, a volunteer effort that matches available supplies to health care providers, said 70 percent of those requesting help from the organization last month reported being completely out of one type of critical gear. Masks,  gloves and disinfecting wipes topped the list.

In other words, given plenty of time and incentive, and while refusing to rally Americans to obvious, life-saving measures like social distancing and mask-wearing, the Trump administration has simply failed to marshal the resources necessary to at least secure supplies to treat the waves of illness that were the unavoidable outcome of its refusal to take the virus seriously.  And this double failure has been amplified by GOP state governors, who have refused to take the preservation of American lives seriously, and instead have insisted on various degrees of business as usual.

The fact that we are stuck with this leadership void for two more months inspires dread.  I have seen estimates that as many as 400,000 will have died of covid-19 by the time Joe Biden takes office.  The 230,000 and counting who have already passed must be counted as martyrs to our effort to drive him from office; it seems all too possible that without the horrible toll to date, the president may have eked out re-election.  But all the American dead are rightly seen as martyrs to the Trumpist-GOP mindset that prioritized the president’s re-election prospects over full-scale measure that admitted the seriousness of the pandemic, and that placed short-term business continuity and profits over the preservation of human life and long-term economic prosperity.

Letting Trump and the GOP off the hook now that the president has been defeated would be absolutely the wrong choice, morally and politically.  Even in defeat, the president’s total abdication of responsibility to protect the American people will haunt us, both during this deadly interregnum and when Joe Biden is finally empowered to address this escalating catastrophe.  The fact that so many millions of Americans voted to re-elect this president, in light of such American carnage, changes nothing about the imperative for continuing to ensure that the president, and more importantly at this point, the party that enabled his murderous coronavirus policies, are held accountable.  

Our democratic political system, and our society, will sustain extreme damage if one of our two major political parties pays no price for making itself complicit in the spread of mass death throughout the country.  Denying the scientific reality of how the coronavirus spreads; propagating insane ideas about how mask-wearing infringes on personal freedom; suggesting that older Americans are expendable; refusing to criticize a president who unites and propounds all these hideous threads of malpractice: together, they compose an indictment of a GOP that has kicked free of adherence to the common good, protection of human life, and the subordination of business interests to those of the public health.  In their entirety, the failures of Trump and his Republican enablers amount to such an abomination and offense against the American people that to let the offense pass is indistinguishable from inviting more of the same, now and in the future.  

The fact that so many people chose to vote for Trump despite his obvious failure to take the coronavirus seriously, or to address it with a minimum of competence, does not mean that Democrats and others should cease holding the GOP accountable — it means they need to redouble their efforts to persuade the American people of the Republican Party’s culpability and its wholesale inability to navigate this crisis.  Among other things, it’s possible that the horrific death toll we are likely to see in the coming months will turn at least some portion of public opinion against the GOP, strengthening Biden’s hand to take the common-sense measures necessary to save American lives. And at the level of basic political pragmatism, it’s clear that once Biden assumes the presidency, Republicans will attempt to turn the coronavirus into the “Biden virus,” to hold the new president retroactively responsible for the illness that preceded his time in office and that will surely dominate the early days of his administration.  Against such predictable rhetoric, there is no point in Democrats letting up on critiques of Trump or the GOP in the name of “moving on” or “coming together.”

It is not through random chance that Republicans elected officials, from the president on down, largely embraced self-defeating policies around the pandemic.  It is not just that they are incompetent administrators (though this seems to be the case with the basic failure to procure supplies in advance of the imminent winter acceleration of cases).  There is a direct link between the Republican small government/pro-business philosophy and the failure to take adequate action to mitigate the spread of the virus.  For many Republicans, it was simply unthinkable that the government should act decisively for the public good if that demonstrated the efficacy of government action.  It was also unthinkable that businesses might be made to suffer through lockdowns and other measures in order to protect the public health, as was the notion that we might pay workers to stay home while we allowed real lockdowns to curb the virus’ spread.  The indifference to the fact that the virus has disproportionately hit lower-income workers and people of color adds a distinct racist aspect to their gross negligence.  And to top it all off, an un-American subservience to their strongman leader, not matter how foolish and insane his pronouncements, helped ensure that they would never arrive at sound coronavirus strategies.  The coronavirus exposes the emptiness of the GOP governing philosophy, such as it is, in one grotesque, deadly package.  It is inconceivable to me that the Democrats would fail to keep making this case when reality has already made it for them, at the cost of thousands of preventable lives lost.  This should be not just a matter of outrage, but of rage, of political fire and public condemnation and contempt that leaves the GOP exposed and roasted for the failure that it is.

America Takes Out the White Nationalist Trash

After four years of a president who has made war on American democracy, the American people have unambiguously shown Donald Trump to the door.  Joe Biden’s electoral college haul is likely to be 306, and he has a four million-plus and growing lead over Trump in the popular vote.  The public reaction, at least among those who supported Joe Biden, has been described as akin to the outpouring of joy when a war ends.  People have been cheering, crying, bumping elbows if not hugging outright, forming spontaneous dance parties in the streets.  

Joe Biden and the American people have won a great victory today, and we should celebrate the full meaning of this triumph.  Debate over whether or not Biden has won big enough to claim a “mandate” is absurd, as it ignores the many ways in which this president has abused his power to remain in office and sought to corrupt the election itself, not to mention the inherent powers of an incumbent president.  Any victory in the face of such a president, let alone in a nation in which political polarization and partisan loyalty is so very high, is remarkable.  Donald Trump has spent his time in office waging a disinformation campaign against the American people: from the get-go, he lied about receiving more votes than Hillary Clinton; he has exaggerated his contributions to the country’s pre-covid economy; he has lied about the supposed threat posed by Muslims and Latino immigrants; he has attacked the free press; he has downplayed the threat of white supremacist violence while praising the modern-day successors of the KKK; and, most fatally, he has attempted to deceive us about the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. 

This disinformation campaign was, for Trump, necessary because it sought to prevent the American people from forming a proper judgment of the reality of the Trump administration: specifically, the incompetence, authoritarianism, corruption, and white supremacism at its core.  For The Hot Screen, the president’s white supremacist policies and agitation have been the worst of his offenses.  Racism has been the nation’s great sin and burden, and the president firmly placed himself on the side of white supremacism in a way that arguably no modern president has done.  His offense in this respect is all the greater given the reality of America’s ongoing transformation into a multi-ethnic democracy — a transformation that promises both a redemption for this country and a shining example for other nations around the world.

And this is where the president’s placement of racism at the center of his political appeal intersects with a Republican Party that adapted to him with a rapidity that left many people puzzled.  The GOP has been fighting an ongoing battle to preserve the power of white people against demographic change, and Donald Trump simply turned this battle into an open declaration of war against an egalitarian America.  The president made explicit what the GOP has preferred to keep at the level of dog whistle politics.

For the The Hot Screen, Trump and the GOP’s placement of government at the service of white supremacism — whether in restricting immigration by brown-skinned newcomers, or suppressing the vote of African-Americans — is the single greatest reason to celebrate Joe Biden’s victory today.  The treatment of all Americans as equal, no matter who they are, is where the rubber hits the road when we talk about what American democracy means.  Every American gets to vote.  Every American has something to contribute to our society.  For Republicans, racism has been the gateway drug into authoritarianism and treason.  In the name of protecting white privilege, everything is on the table, from vote suppression to supporting an authoritarian leader who promises to protect “his” voters.  And so to see a multi-ethnic coalition drive Donald Trump out of office is a glorious sight indeed.

Winners Write the History Books

After the topsy-turvy first 24 hours of this this election, after a predicted Red Mirage confounded even those prepared for initially better results for the president, then dissolved into the haze, and it began to become increasingly probable that Biden would win this thing, a new source of gloom closed over progressives — it appeared the Democratic effort to take back the Senate had fallen short.  The inevitable result?  Biden’s presidency was surely over before it had even begun.  Mitch McConnell would devote himself to making Biden a one-term president.  Forget about getting judges through the Senate — it would be a miracle if he were even able to appoint cabinet members over implacable GOP opposition.  A McConnell-led Senate would kneecap the Biden presidency to set up a red wave in 2022 and a Republican president in 2024.

While I’m not immune to these same fears, treating a log-jammed outcome as some sort of inevitable likelihood is too politically cynical by half.  We now see that both Senate races in Georgia will proceed to runoffs due to no candidate receiving more than 50% of the vote, which means that the Democrats still have a chance to re-take the Senate.  The very real possibility that the election outcome will leave Trump-less GOP voters less than inspired to show up at the polls next month should help Democrats preserve a little faith.  But even if this hail Mary solution does not come to pass, realpolitik talk of the gridlock to come is premature and self-defeating.  Perhaps worst of all, they share a cynical take on the Biden victory, viewed as the result of a close election showing that the country is deeply divided and gridlock the necessary result.  It all wraps up into one big shit sandwich: Biden could barely even win because almost half of all Americans wanted an authoritarian monster as president, and of course we won’t be able to get anything good done with a GOP senate standing in the way.

But Democrats need to recognize and celebrate Biden’s impending victory for all that it is, including the defeat of the greatest presidential threat to American democracy since our founding.  This is a huge win, and over-emphasizing what a close run thing it is constitutes a masochistic refusal to acknowledge its importance, for both the country and for the Democratic Party.  It is hard to beat an incumbent — this has only happened four times in the past 100 years — and even harder to beat an incumbent when he repeatedly breaks the law and makes corrupt use of the perks of his office as part of his re-election campaign.  The Democrats have every right to consider themselves the party that saved American democracy from a white supremacist authoritarian, and should damn well start acting like it.  The party has defended core American values of the rule of law and free and fair elections, in the face of a GOP that has embraced the failed authoritarianism of Donald Trump. Kicking Donald Trump out of the White House is a public service for all Americans, no matter their political affiliation — just think of all the Trump voters who have died because the president betrayed their trust. In a way that history will recognize, Democrats have saved these Republican voters from themselves.

While I don’t have any great theories for how Democrats might leverage this confidence into persuading Republican senators in a GOP-majority Senate to support legislation that protects our economy, our democracy, our health care, and our environment.  But any possible paths to doing so certainly do NOT involve downgrading the magnitude of the Democrats’ victory, or the corruption of Donald Trump that these same Republican senators happily enabled.  If there’s any chance of getting a couple of GOP senators on their side, it’s going to have to involve maximizing the fallout from the Trump years as a possible threat to their re-election chances, and impressing on them the reality that Trumpism has passed its high water mark.  The Democrats need to proceed with the mindset of a majority, winning party that has driven white nationalism, authoritarianism, and obscene corruption from the halls of the White House, and whose Republican opposition has forfeited any moral authority by its complicity with this failed president.

Democracy's Turn

Opponents of Donald Trump find ourselves on the eve of an election that we’ve desperately wanted and worried about going on four years now.  Because he has turned out to be more monstrous a president than most of us feared, many are legitimately concerned that this awful man will manage to corrupt and steal his way to a second term.  These efforts have in fact been underway for some time, from Trump’s efforts to discredit mail-in ballots (at least when they’re mailed by Democrats) to his apparent plan to declare himself the winner of the election if he’s ahead in the vote count on November 3 (this might be termed the “counting votes is stealing votes” gambit).

But it’s self-defeating to the point of masochism to worry that Trump is actually doing the very things that have driven so many million of Americans to loathe and oppose him.  Of course he is going to try to cheat his way to a second term.  Trump is going to what he does.  So while we inevitably worry about Trump being just as bad as we know he is, and do everything possible to publicize and foil what could accurately be termed a slow-motion coup attempt, we’d also be well served to take a step back and recognize the harsh reality of our political crisis.  

First, it’s not simply Donald Trump who seeks to deny Americans the basic recourse of kicking him out of office.  There should be no gauzy takes that keep us from seeing how dire our situation is.  Trump has managed to retain power because many millions have continued to support him even as his irredeemably authoritarian and racist character revealed itself in fresh and revolting ways during his term in office.  At least 40% of the country appears fine with not allowing the opposition party’s vote to count; many millions no longer recognize bonds of citizenship with those from across the political aisle; the obviously racist views of so many of Trump’s supporters is a painful and dispiriting reality of our country.  

But a politics that sees our fellow Americans as the enemy is a Trumpian politics.  Our anger instead should be directed at the vessel for this rancid movement.  At this late stage, no ambiguity remains as to the complicity of the Republic Party in the president’s corruption, racism, authoritarianism, and incompetence.  Donald Trump adopted the worst of what Republicanism offered, and the party has repaid him in kind.  Senators quake in fear at a harsh word from their leader; representatives disseminate Russian propaganda to aid him; bootlicker governors model themselves as mini-Trumps, dispensing at the state level the same murderous ignorance about the coronavirus pandemic that the president propagates nationally.  They have embraced his white supremacist instincts, whether by support of immigration policies that aim to halt the influx of brown-skinned newcomers, or by unquestioning support of racist policing that has left a butcher’s bill of slain African-Americans and other minorities as its inevitable outcome.  They have stood loyal while he first denied the deadliness of the coronavirus, then fumbled the response so badly that more than 230,000 of our fellow citizens have died through his homicidal ineptitude.  They have devolved into a strongman-worshipping group of yes-(mostly) men that is familiar to scholars of failed democracies. Their fealty to a sociopathic president is literally killing us.

So while there is much to worry about going into Election Day, we can’t discount the one great gift Donald Trump has given us: the gift of clarity.  We can accept the demolition of our political union, our right to vote, our collective health, and our economy — or we can band together to reject and repudiate democracy’s enemies.  Hearteningly, a majority rejected Trump in 2016, and an ever larger majority looks set to reject him in 2020.  But whereas we were to some extent not fully awake to the dangers in 2016, we certainly are now — and to the need not just to reject Trumpism, but to reaffirm and revive our democratic government and society at all levels.  It can be difficult to conceive of the grandness of what has been happening over the last weeks, trapped as most of us are in semi-lockdowns and the often solitary act of casting a ballot, but don’t let appearances fool you.  Democracy’s army is on the march, and we need to recognize and celebrate our collective power: a show of strength that will begin with a tidal wave of votes for Joe Biden and the Democrats on Tuesday, but hardly ends there.  Just as Donald Trump and the Republicans have tried to change the rules of the game, substituting hate for debate, ballot suppression for earning votes, and incitement of violence for peaceful discussion, democracy’s march will not end on November 3, or after Joe Biden is declared the winner of the election.  There can be no letting up, now that we know the lengths to which Trump and the GOP will go to force white supremacist, authoritarian minority rule on the country.  There is no point in underestimating our collective power, the righteousness of our cause, the contempt in which Trump and his enablers must be held, or our absolute claim to self-government and leaders who not only adhere to, but actively promote, a greater democracy in every state, in every county, in every city and town. Against the barbarism of white supremacy, against a president who thinks he’s a king, against the men with guns who act like they own the whole damn place, against a pinched and retrograde idea of taking what you can get and screw everyone else, we will give no quarter. We are done with the con that steals our future.

Letting the Fascist Freak Flag Fly

Jeff Sharlet has posted an incisive thread about the Blue Lives Matter flag that has moved from anti-Black Lives Matter symbol to a common staple at Donald Trump rallies.  I’ve been increasingly unsettled by this sinister rendition of Old Glory as it crept from the fringes to centrality in the president’s re-election campaign, and have found it clarifying to hear an expert on the American right offer his take on what this flag has come to signify.  I’ve generally been thinking of it as a fascist inversion of the American flag, but Sharlet offers a more nuanced take; noting its increasing dominance within Trumpism, he argues that it represents something he calls "police nationalism,” an “identity founded on fetishization of an explicitly brutal & implicitly racist idea of policing”:

Police nationalists are white supremacists (including occasional non-white ones; it's an infectious disease) who don't want to think of themselves as such. The police nationalist flag now means many things: anti-Black Lives Matter (which is how it began), Trump, &, yes, a martyred memory of officers killed in line of duty. It's like Trump: it twists [. . .]  Police nationalists now call their flag "Back the Blue"--a statement they experience not as non-partisan but as transcending partisanship. It's an assertion of ultimate authority. But worse implicit in the slogan "Back the Blue" when used by police nationalists is the fantasy of a coming conflict (which aligns neatly with QAnon's idea of a "storm") in which "backing the Blue" will mean choosing a side in a civil war not so much feared as anticipated.

[. . .] Police, for all the profound & fundamental problems w/ American policing, often do good things. One can recognize that & still see police *nationalism* for what it is: The replacement of civil authority w/ armed power.

Sharlet’s points about how the flag and the beliefs behind it are meant to transcend partisanship in the name of an “assertion of ultimate authority” are particularly illuminating.  By putting the idea of the thin blue line front and center - the notion that society would descend into chaos were it not for the order maintained by the police — police nationalists (to run with Sharlet’s term) promote an idea of American society that supersedes our common, unifying ideas of democracy, government by the people, separation of powers, peaceful co-existence, and constitutionality.  In its place, they re-imagine America as a land ever on the knife’s edge between order and chaos.  This two-dimensional conception of the United States sees force as the arbiter of American life, rather than the rule of law or the peaceful conflict of democratic competition; as Sharlet puts it, it’s “the replacement of civil authority w/ armed power.”  Given the rise of the “Back the Blue” flag in the wake of BLM protests, it’s difficult to avoid reading the thin blue line not as a divide between chaos and order, but as the line between equality for all Americans on one side, and the continued brutalization of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement in the name of a white supremacist social order on the other.   

It is remarkable to me that the Trump campaign, and so many on the right, have abandoned wholesale the actual American flag which they fetishized even a short while ago: football players were considered traitors if they kneeled before it; school kids were considered communists if they did not say the pledge to it; demonstrators deserved imprisonment and worse if they dared to burn it.  The replacement of the American flag with this washed-out facsimile —as if white-supremacist vampires had battened on and sucked the color and life out of it — has happened so swiftly as to create the distinct impression that they were never actually as loyal to the actual flag as they pretended to be.  Symbolically, it is immensely telling that they have essentially given up the American flag — the flag of all the people, of democracy and freedom — to their opponents in the center and left of the political spectrum, in favor of a flag that represents not all of America but its law-and-order, racist rump.  To re-configure the America flag into a symbol of exclusion and raw power is to create a parody of American values so repugnant that by comparison, even setting fire to Old Glory as an act of protest now feels tame. It is as if they have given up on America itself.

Don't Underestimate How High Risk the GOP's Election Strategy Truly Is

As November 3 nears, the strategy of a White House and a Republican Party relying on vote suppression to eke out an Electoral College victory in the face of a likely landslide loss has come into undeniable view.  Get GOP-appointed judges to throw out ballots in Democrat-leaning areas on the flimsiest of pretexts; send out Trump supporters on Election Day to intimidate voters at the polls; and declare victory if Trump is ahead by the end of November 3.  Throw in the president’s willingness to incite violence if it serves his interests, and the possibility of Election Day assists from hostile foreign powers who want to screw with our election, and there’s no denying the dark scenarios that haunt this election.

But as I argued a couple days ago, there is no point in getting psyched out by anti-democratic and corrupt tactics that signal above all desperation and renunciation of the United States as a country that relies on free and fair elections to determine its collective fate.  Americans are voting in unprecedented numbers, and Democrats have deployed legions of lawyers to counter Republican efforts to persuade sympathetic judges to keep people’s votes from being counted.  What can be done, is largely being done.  Citizens and the opposition are hardly sitting around passively being abused by an unstoppable Republican monolith.  And there are hopeful signs that, barring an extremely close election, attempts to secure the election via the power of GOP-majority courts will come to naught. And while articles like this one persuade me that Trump will try to spread confusion and chaos about the results, this will prove persuasive only to those who already support him, not to the majority voting him out of office.

And so I feel safe in re-upping what I said a few days ago: the GOP’s enactment of such an openly anti-democratic and un-American strategy to hold power and secure the re-election of a man seen by a solid majority of Americans as unfit for office can do enormous damage to the Republican Party. For the (increasingly improbable) short-term gain of winning this election, the GOP has greatly increased the odds that it loses its longer-term war on American democracy.

Two specific points from the past few days demonstrate how deep a hole the GOP is digging for itself.  As the latest iteration of the push to convince the public that the vote count at midnight on November 3 is the definitive one, we now see Trump advisors taking this line to its absurdist, logical conclusion.  On ABC, Trump advisor Jason Miller said this morning that, “President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral somewhere in that range, and then they're going to try to steal it back after the election.”  As many have already pointed out, by “steal it back,” Miller is referring to. . . counting all the votes.  This equation of counting votes with stealing votes has been tacit in all the Trumpist emphasis on shutting down the election once Trump is ahead, but now they are actually saying it out loud. (There is also the minor accompanying point that electoral votes are not awarded until citizens’ votes have been counted and the results certified — another measure of how deep into an alternate fantasy land Trump’s advocates have ventured.)

This sort of absurdity might work in a country that has never had elections before, but continuing to count votes after the day of a national election has been the experience of literally every American who has ever voted in a national election.  My point is not that Trump loyalists might buy into this illogic in an act of collective partisan amnesia; my point is that resorting to such anti-democratic performance art provides Democrats with ample ammunition to paint the Republicans as a party that has given up on democracy.

The second example from the last couple days is also one that in the present moment is ominous enough: the apparent willingness of GOP-appointed judges to essentially make up legal justifications to favor Republican efforts to suppress and discount Americans’ votes in order to increase Republican election chances.  Again, I’m not saying this isn’t a danger to Democrats in the current election cycle.  But looking at the larger picture, Republican judges are making a rock-solid case for Democrats to reform the courts in order to preserve democracy itself.  The most-striking recent instance is the attempt by the Texas GOP to have a judge throw out 100,000 ballots in Democratic-leaning Harris County.  Josh Marshall summarizes the danger and solution neatly:

Here we have yet another opportunity for a corrupted federal judiciary to rig the election in favor of the Republican party. It’s akin to the kind of things we see in broken democracies like Russian and Turkey, where notional democratic procedures are backstopped by courts which intervene if the elections are going in the wrong direction.

People need to open their eyes to the reality of what has happened. The federal judiciary has been thoroughly corrupted. The issue is not principally one of ideology. It is that a large number of Republican judges see their role as backstopping the electoral fortunes and policy choices of the Republican party. For this they are willing to use states-rights federalism or federal intervention depending on situational convenience. They manufacture new interpretive theories wholesale to achieve these ends. This can sound hyperbolic. But it’s not.

For democracy to survive the federal judiciary must be reformed. 

 Unable to put together a national majority, and increasingly unlikely to do so in the future, the GOP is now openly defining itself as the party that opposes democracy as Americans commonly understand it.  While its strategy of relying on absurdities like “counting votes is stealing votes” may rile up its base, most Americans will not be fooled, and will, in fact, be horrified that this is now the mainstream position of the GOP.  Likewise, I am certain that Americans will not tolerate open corruption of the judiciary in the name of nakedly partisan advantage.  For the sake of American democracy, after the election Democrats must systematically and relentlessly remind voters of how the GOP tried to subvert the election via the various measures that are in plain view today. Left with no option but to promote absurdities and transparently authoritarian reasoning, the GOP itself is now hastening its imminent immolation at the hands of American voters, and the Democrats are duty-bound to add fuel to the fire.

GOP's Public Embrace of Mass Voter Suppression Will Haunt Party After Election

I’ve avoided discussing the various nightmare election scenarios that have been suggested by various observers, in which the country enters a state of constitutional crisis or worse due to various vote suppression efforts by the Trump administration before and after November 3 (Thomas Edsall has a good run-down of them in his latest column).  Mostly this has been for lack of anything to add to the conversation — but I’ve also had a personal disinclination to do so at a time when opponents of Trump need to maximize their case and turnout against the president; expending energy on such scenarios has felt like bad juju, a way to psych ourselves out (“no matter what we do, Trump will manage to steal the election”).  It’s not denial, but an inchoate optimism that I’ve felt — even in a worst case scenario, the American people would simply not let Trump get away with stealing the election; we would find a way.

And as Joe Biden seems to have maintained and even increased his strong lead in the polls, including in crucial swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin, and put into play states like Georgia and even Texas, spending too much energy worrying about such scenarios has seemed even more counter-productive.  But in these closing days of the race, it’s become overwhelmingly clear that the Republican strategy to re-elect Trump and maintain a brittle grip on the Senate has everything to do with ensuring that not every vote is counted, and that every preference be given to counting those ballots more likely to belong to Republican voters.  With their multiple efforts to limit how long after the election a mail-in ballot may be counted, to limit the number of polling places, and to nullify votes allegedly cast improperly, an effort to steal the election is arguably already well under way.

All of this is sickening, an attempt to twist the mechanisms of voting so as to manipulate the results in favor of the GOP; as this Plum Line post makes clear, there is a real risk that such tactics may intentionally sow confusion and open a path to a power grab in a hotly-contested state like Pennsylvania.  Every time a GOP majority court agrees that it has no brief to intervene on behalf of voters who might need more time in the face of covid and mail delays, it’s like a judge has stuck a shiv into our democracy.  Every time a Republican governor feigns innocent intent in restricting populous Democratic-leaning counties to the same single ballot drop-off site as tiny rural, GOP-leaning counties, it’s an attack on the principle that every vote should be counted.

But in the face of the greatest assault on our right to vote, and have those votes counted, in our lifetimes, we collectively have the benefit of clarity.  The news coverage of these GOP efforts is like nothing I remember from previous elections.  And so, despite the very real dangers of these suppression efforts, the Democrats have an unprecedented opportunity to make crystal clear to the public that the GOP sees voting as the enemy of the party.  No exaggeration is necessary; simply pointing to the facts on the ground in multiple Republican-governed states, like Texas and Georgia, goes a long way to making the case.  We can’t lose sight of what a high-risk strategy voter suppression has become for the GOP, when it’s being done in the plain light of day for all the world to see, or ignore what a cudgel it can be against the Republican Party.

More than anything, the Republican attack on the most fundamental right of American democracy shows the GOP’s glaring weakness, not strength.  Even as Democrats need to fight tooth and nail to make sure every citizen can have their vote counted, they can’t overlook the extremely vulnerable position the GOP has put itself in, particularly if, as seems reasonably likely, Joe Biden wins a decisive victory over Donald Trump.  At that point, efforts that currently seem threatening to a democratic outcome will look many times more so. Should they continue past Election Day, they will appear as brazenly overt efforts by losers to reverse the judgment of the people.  In such a situation there would certainly be danger for the country and the Democrats — but also immense opportunity to publicize to the American people how completely pathetic and off the rails the GOP has become, and to turn a rout into a searing indictment.  If events develop in such a direction, the Democrats need to be unsparing in fighting a broader war — not just to win the election, but to discredit the GOP’s last remaining pretensions to belief in American democracy.

The GOP-heavy Supreme Court, with its fresh 6-3 conservative majority, is especially vulnerable to the appearance that it is going all in for the Republican Party.  In the wake of the Barrett appointment, which has already pushed even centrist Democratic senators to contemplate expanding the Court, open appearance of partisanship could give the Democrats the public support they need to reform the court in the coming months.

Democrats Are Legitimizing the Legitimacy Debate, and That's a Damned Good Thing

As Amy Coney Barrett ascends to the Supreme Court, it seems that Democratic politicians are singing from the same hymn book about the meaning of this dire occasion.  Not only is there discussion of righting the imbalance in the Court, now that conservatives hold a 6-3 majority, there is open talk of how the Court’s very legitimacy is at stake.  This is as it should be, given that since 1969 Republican presidents have appointed 15 of the last 19 justices, despite that party having won the presidential popular vote a single time over the last 28 years and seven elections, and in light of the fast-tracking of nominations like those of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett that robbed Americans of their ability to assess whether those justices are qualified or fit for their positions, followed by their approval by a GOP Senate majority that collectively received millions votes less than the Democratic Senate minority.

Foregrounding the concept of “legitimacy” in the discussion is essential because it’s crucial not only to Supreme Court appointments and rulings, but to the coherence of the American political system more generally.  For instance, it’s easy to see how talking about the legitimacy of Supreme Court appointments by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote logically leads into questions around the legitimacy of the electoral college, which permitted minority GOP presidents to make such appointments.  Beyond this, it puts up for public discussion the extremely important notion of legitimacy in a democracy.

But what does “legitimacy” specifically refer to?  I’ve repeatedly written of the need to de-legitimize the GOP because of its embrace of racism and political violence during the Trump years, but haven’t spent a lot of time explaining what I mean by this.  Recent discussions around the Barrett nomination have helped clarify my thinking, including a surprise assist yesterday from none other than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

As he often does, McConnell has been engaging directly but misleadingly with the arguments his Democratic opponents have been making, most recently in response to the rising Democratic fury around the Barrett appointment.  According to Bloomberg reporter Steven Dennis, McConnell remarked that Democrats “repeating that confirming a justice was ‘illegitimate’ doesn’t make it so,” and that ‘legitimacy’ is not the result of their feelings.”  McConnell is essentially making the case, most strikingly embodied in his handling of the foiled Merrick Garland and successful Kavanaugh and Barrett nominations, that as long as the Constitution allows something, it is legitimate.

But Democrats who talk about legitimacy are referring to something broader than just whether the constitution allows a certain action; they are also talking about whether an act or situation is characterized by democratic fairness.  In this sense, talking about legitimacy is another way of talking about what should be considered fair and acceptable in a democracy.  Mitch McConnell would have us believe that there is no distinction between what is constitutional and what is legitimate, while Democrats are making the case that there are indeed important distinctions between what is allowed by the constitution and what should be considered as legitimate in American democracy.  

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted yesterday, to illustrate the distinction between what the constitution allows and what would be generally considered permissible (i.e., legitimate), it would be entirely constitutional for a president to order his chief of staff to murder a political opponent, then use his pardon power to pardon that chief of staff — yet such a move would be very widely recognized as grotesquely illegitimate, both in terms of the murder and in terms of a clear abuse of the pardon power.  It’s an extreme example, but effectively shows why McConnell’s effort to conflate constitutionality and legitimacy is a way to forestall discussion of the latter concept.  

McConnell wants to avoid such a discussion around the Supreme Court because he fears, rightly, that the GOP will very likely find itself on the losing side once we start talking not of constitutional legitimacy but a broader democratic legitimacy of recent court appointments.  If legitimacy is conferred not simply by blind obeisance to the letter of the constitution, but also depends on the degree to which a certain action reflects the will of the majority, then it matters very much that the three most recent appointees were named to the Supreme Court by a president who did not receive a majority of votes.  

Ironically, then, we find that legitimacy actually IS dependent on people’s “feelings,” to use McConnell’s own language — or, to put it in less inflammatory and insulting terms, is dependent on people’s feelings of justice, right and wrong, democratic accountability, and other reasonings and intuitions that citizens agree should be taken into account when political decisions are made.  McConnell’s attempts to distort our traditional, if not always fully articulated, ideas of democratic legitimacy have backfired, leading to a necessary discussion about what is considered legitimate in American politics.  

This is a conversation that is likely to lead to a discrediting of McConnell’s self-serving constitutional literalism.  Once you agree that things outside the constitution matter, then you are in the realm of majority politics and debate, an area of contention where minds can be changed and consensus built.  McConnell, as a leader in a political party that is steadily losing supporters, should well dread such a process, just as Democrats are right to embrace it.

What makes me disinclined to board the gloom and doom bandwagon that some are on, in which the Supreme Court is sure to strike down any progressive legislation passed by a future Democratic president and Congress, is that the debate currently underway about legitimacy, particularly regarding the Court, is one that is not easily put back in the bottle.  In fact, it’s a debate that the Democrats should have advanced long before now.  And a discussion of democratic legitimacy hardly ends with the Supreme Court; it’s a framework for talking about, and undoing, various other anti-democratic measures the GOP has implemented to maintain power despite growing minority status, such as voter suppression and gerrymandering.

But I’m not just buoyed by the prospect that this is an argument Democrats can make to the public and win.  Talking about legitimacy means talking about a bedrock principle of democracy, which is healthy for our political system in a general sense, in that it is always good to understand and re-affirm first principles.  Beyond this, though, when Democratic politicians talk about such a basic idea, one that every voter can understand and offer an opinion on, it has the effect of making it difficult for those politicians to then turn off such rhetoric and settle for compromise with the status quo rather than pursuing a difficult but necessary fight to rally public opinion to their side, whether it’s expanding the court system or passing new voting rights legislation.  Talking about legitimacy creates a higher likelihood of a feedback effect, in which energized citizens press their elected representatives to make good on all their reasonable, high-minded, and motivating talk.  It is not something that can easily be switched off once the election is past, and the urgency of getting votes and donations has abated.  In a very real way, Democrats are locking themselves into a path to action.  This is a very hopeful development.

Meadows' Comments on Not Controlling Pandemic Should Haunt GOP After Election

With his statement this weekend that the United States is “not going to control the pandemic,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows further clarified the harrowing stakes of the upcoming election and made a case for Joe Biden likely worth tens of millions in equivalent advertising dollars.  Alongside his accompanying declaration that “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas,” the message is clear: the Trump administration takes no responsibility for advocating or coordinating measures like social distancing, strategic closures, and mask-wearing that might mitigate and even control the spread of the coronavirus, and has effectively embraced a “let them eat covid” strategy of allowing the virus to run its course while blaming Americans for their inclination to fall ill and die.

This dovetails with something people like Paul Krugman and John Stoehr have been writing about — the Trump administration’s approach to the pandemic has been “strongly influenced by the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto on behalf of herd immunity that grew out of a meeting at the American Institute for Economic Research.”  The AIER has connections to the Charles Koch Institute, famous for promoting libertarian (i.e., anti-worker and anti-government regulations) approaches to the economy, which means that the White House’s public health policy appears driven not by public health concerns, but by powerful business interests who fear above all the loss of a single cent of profits.  Among other things, this further validates the motivations I suggested were propelling the various GOP governors who have thrown up their hands about being able to do anything about the spread of the virus; the notion that workers simply need to hurl themselves into the breach of an ailing economy, and take one for the team (even if “taking it” means getting seriously ill or dying), while checking their expectations about whether the government can or should play a role in protecting public health, is of a piece with the libertarian claptrap coming out of an organization like the AIER.

(In a gratifyingly direct connection, Krugman notes how the AIER “published an article lauding Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose refusal to take action against the coronavirus has turned her state into what the article called “a fortress of liberty and hope protected from the grasps of overbearing politicians.””  Noem, you may recall, was possibly the most odious of the GOP governors I wrote about; among other things, as the Washingon Post described, “She is one of the few governors who refused to issue a stay-at-home order in the spring, has repeatedly questioned the validity of using masks to reduce viral spread and hosted the president for a massive, tightly packed Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore.”)

I think when we look back at the disaster of the coronavirus response, this malign confluence between conservative business interests that literally do not care if workers live or die, and a president who feared above all else the appearance of a crashing economy in an election year, were key culprits.  But the fact that a cruel, profits-first mindset appears to provide the intellectual grounds (such as they are) for conservatives’ backing of the president’s approach needs to be kept front and center in the public mind, now that it looks increasingly likely Donald Trump will be defeated in the upcoming election.  Without Trump’s personal incompetence and mental illness clouding the picture, it will be more important than ever to zero in on the deadly policies and immoral thinking of his current abettors and future successors — those fellow Republican elected officials who will doubtless take up the baton of fighting against reasonable measures to protect the public health, arguing that it is government tyranny to tell people to wear masks and social distance and close non-essential businesses if that’s what’s necessary to save lives.  Mark Meadows this weekend wasn’t just enunciating Trump’s view, but the view of businesses and conservatives who horrifically believe that no number of lives is too many to lose if there is a chance that profits may be made without interruption.

If they want to maximize the chances of a Biden administration successfully implementing a science-based coronavirus response, Democrats will need to remain on the attack against those in the GOP who holds such twisted values and want them to guide the government’s pandemic response.  The attacks around incompetence and selfish self-preservation that worked against Trump will need to be replaced with a more direct attack on such murderous, pro-business ideology.  Democrats can’t rest if Trump is defeated; they will also need to discredit and drive from office all those who serve up in more sophisticated form arguments that elected officials have no role to play in protecting the health of the citizenry.

Thoughts on the Debate

At last night’s second and final presidential debate, Joe Biden and Donald Trump both played it safe in their separate ways.  As the front runner, Biden seemed uninterested in doing anything to shake up the race, and maintained a sober tone that stuck to his major campaign themes, without any particularly savage attacks against the president’s horrific record.  The president was restrained in comparison to his first performance, refraining from the constant interruptions that turned the first debate into a showcase for his narcissism and aggression.

But Trump’s calmer delivery made his torrents of lies and slander last night all the more horrifying.  His calculation and amorality took literal center stage.  Most striking were his attempts to paint not simply Biden but his entire family as a crime syndicate, a predictable move, but so clearly an act of pure malice and projection.  All the untruths he leveled at Biden’s exploitation of government for personal gain are descriptions of Trump and his own family’s betrayal of the public trust by exploiting their White House power for personal gain.  What I was struck by again and again was how Trump not only lies constantly but seems to feel not an ounce of compunction or doubt about doing so — the shamelessness that so many people have long described was almost tangible.

I don’t think the lies, existing without clear referents or evidence in the real world for most people, helped Trump’s cause, and his continued unwillingness to articulate responsibility or a plan for the coronavirus were obvious to anyone paying attention. It’s a bit crazy that some people are referring to how substantial the debate was compared to last time. Joe Biden may have brought substance, but Trump brought lies in such vast quantity that his performance was an enactment of propaganda against the American electorate.

But unlike the first time, where Trump’s bull in a china shop behavior made him seem stylistically and substantively unpresidential, this second showdown was a good demonstration of how Trump can be legitimized and propped up by a presidential debate, even one in which he’s asked critical questions by a highly competent moderator.  Whatever Trump’s plans or lack thereof for handling the coronavirus pandemic, fixing the economy, or providing Americans with health care, he is also a president who has incited violence against political opponents, refused to say if he will step down if he loses the election, and called for the incarceration of his opponent literally the day before the debate.  When his direct attacks on democracy itself are removed from such a fundamental public conversation, the president is given a pass on the very issues for which the public most requires an accounting.  In this respect, part of the blame lies with Joe Biden, who passed up opportunities to press home that Trump is not just a failed president but an authoritarian who has already vowed to retain power no matter what the voters say.

With Great New Jersey Power Comes Great Responsibility

It’s good that Chris Christie has recovered from his bout with the coronavirus, and even better that he has done that rare thing among politicians, and in particular Trump allies, and admitted he was wrong not to have worn a mask during his recent interactions at the White House leading up to his illness.  If this helps save even one life, it’s a good thing. Credit where credit is due.

Yet, in an op ed published today in the Wall Street Journal, Christie avers that after wearing a mask consistently for seven months, “I let my guard down” while at recent events at the White House — the Supreme Court nomination event for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, and Donald Trump’s debate preparations.  But this is not the entire truth, is it?  Christie didn’t just randomly let down his guard at the Barrett event, but joined in a televised parade of propaganda orchestrated by the White House to present mask-free images of Republican leadership meant to reinforce the president’s re-election message that the pandemic has largely been defeated and that covid-19 is nothing to be feared.  This spectacle ended up being self-defeating and grotesque, a super spreader event that sickened senators and White House staff.  

Christie also steers well clear of the contradiction between serving a key role in prepping President Trump to debate Joe Biden, and Trump’s centrality in spreading misinformation and denial about the virus — including, most saliently, the president’s long-standing contempt for mask wearing.  To put it again in the terms in which he chooses to frame his decision not to wear a mask at the White House — Christie didn’t just let down his guard because the White House was supposed to be a safe space.  He let down his guard interacting with a man who berates and belittles staff members who wear masks, and who has done unparalleled damage to the effort to get Americans to wear masks, all for the sake of increasing his re-election chances so that President Trump can keep on with his anti-mask, pandemic-denying insanity.  

The clincher is that in his op ed piece, Christie has the gall to offer the following observations:

We are asked to wear cloth over our mouth and nose, wash our hands and avoid crowds. These minor inconveniences can save your life, your neighbors and the economy. Seldom has so little been asked for so much benefit. Yet the message will be broadly heeded only if it is consistently and honestly delivered by the media, religious leaders, sports figures and public servants. Those in positions of authority have a duty to get the message out. 

One of the worst aspects of America’s divided politics is the polarization of something as practical as a mask.

No American politician has been more responsible for denigrating these “minor conveniences” as the very same man that Christie treats as a close ally, a man who has singled-handedly created the “polarization” that Christie decries.  In refusing to name names while professing to be on the side of the angels, Christie is caught in the awkward act of attempting to flee a sinking ship while pretending he wasn’t one of the captain’s best mates.  You cannot support President Trump’s re-election, cannot help him debate and defeat Joe Biden, while also pretending to denounce politicians who don’t take the coronavirus seriously.

Bearing Witness at the Black Mass

A recent Plum Line post by Greg Sargent makes an argument that complements the case I tried to make yesterday about the perfidy of Republican governors who have stood down from their coronavirus responsibilities.  Sargent writes that even as GOP politicos panic over the president’s desultory re-election trajectory, they still can’t bring themselves to actually talk about the coronavirus pandemic, or to urge the president to change course for the sake of saving his presidency:

For these Republicans, the very existence of Trump’s authorship of this catastrophe cannot be acknowledged. So public revulsion over this sick and dying elephant in the room — and the role that’s playing in Trump’s travails — also cannot be conceded.

The clincher is that both President Trump and the GOP are ignoring public sentiment: 

Majorities don’t believe the virus is under control now and want more government action to rein it in even if that slows the recovery, rejecting Trump’s central story of the moment. Voters think Biden will better handle the virus by large margins. Approval of Trump’s handling of it is at a near-low, rivaling where it stood amid the last coronavirus peak.

Trump’s failure is echoed by the failure of GOP governors to do their duty and respond to the public’s desire for more action. Yet, across the GOP, we find a conspiracy of denialism and downplaying, all out of tacit recognition of what a disaster the pandemic is and that the president’s handling of it, being indefensible, must simply be ignored.

Sargent rightly points to the president’s ongoing in-person rallies as attaining an emblematic significance in the light of all this denial of reality:

Trump’s own rallies — the most visible manifestations of his case for a second term right now — unfold largely without masks and social distancing, themselves dramatizing this pathology as vividly as one could imagine.

Indeed, these late-stage campaign rallies in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century, which effectively act as potential super-spreader events among Trump supporters, are the supercharged Trumpian analogue to those GOP governors who tell citizens they are responsible on their own for dealing with the coronavirus.  The particular responsibility of his supporters is to enact in rally-size miniature the covid-free world he claims is imminent, to bask in a sort of immunity-by-mass-denial.  Yet just as average citizens have become victims in a GOP war to discredit a meaningful role for government in their lives, so Trump’s strongest fans — those who show up — are willing victims in his quest for power and approval.  But even more than victims, they are modern-day sacrifices to the orange demon god, giving up their lives so that his campaign might live another day.  

We joke, but only to cope with the terror of a national spectacle whose substance may still consume us — politicians willing to not only tolerate but actively abet the spread of a deadly virus in the name of proving that they have not failed us, that if we get sick it is our own fault for not having the proper attitude or genes or medical care.  And the willingness of so many of our fellow citizens to go along, or to join in the ritual of Trump rallies, orgies of hatred, racism, misogyny, and fascistic appeals, is dizzying and disheartening.

Tears of Rage

Watching North Dakota’s Republican Governor Doug Burgum choke up while describing his state’s covid crisis is to witness a seemingly decent man brought face to face with the immorality of his own cruel political ideology, but still insufficiently moved to make a leap of conscience and actually take the measures within his control that would save some of the lost lives that drive him to tears.  Bergum tears up as he describes a vulnerable child who could be saved by wearing a mask, yet his sadness cannot move him to mandate simple measures that might save that theoretical child and help turn those tears of sadness into tears of joy.  And so he limits himself to recommending masks and social distancing, while denying that the state government has any role in backing those life-saving recommendations with the force of law.  

“It’s not a job for government,” says Bergum.

Yet Burgum appears as possibly the least heinous of the lot of GOP governors discussed in an article out Sunday from The Washington Post. Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds “has refused to revisit her decision to lift most restrictions on businesses and to allow students back to class without masks” despite new state coronavirus records this month; she even echoed President Trump’s steroid-addled pronouncement that “We can’t let covid-19 dominate our lives.”  Texas Governor Greg Abbott is re-opening bars even though they’re ground zero for coronavirus transmission.  And South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem parrots Trump’s propaganda that increasing numbers of cases are due simply to more testing.  The Post also notes that Noem shares Trump’s antipathy to scientific knowledge, writing that, “She is one of the few governors who refused to issue a stay-at-home order in the spring, has repeatedly questioned the validity of using masks to reduce viral spread and hosted the president for a massive, tightly packed Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore.”

The common thread among these governors is that they “preach the mantra of “personal responsibility,” insisting that government interventions such as mask mandates or business restrictions are either unnecessary or harmful, and that people should be trusted to make their own decisions about how to keep themselves — and each other — healthy.”  What’s especially insidious about this “personal responsibility” over government action line is that of course personal responsibility is essential to stopping the spread of the coronavirus.  Of course everyone needs to do their part in slowing and stopping the spread of this virus.  This is a point that no one of good faith would question.  The problem, as experts interviewed for the article point out, is that a pandemic requires government coordination, not just individual efforts, including stronger rules about what people should and should not do.

The proof of this is the failures unfolding under the watch of these do-nothing governors.  North Dakota, with a population of 900,000, has been seeing 900 new cases a day (for comparison, The Hot Screen’s home of Oregon, with a population of 4.2 million, has recently experienced an average of 324 new cases a day over the last week). The other states discussed are likewise seeing their coronavirus situations deteriorate.

And so, as coronavirus spreads in GOP-governed states where personal responsibility is supposedly all, the convenient conclusion is that the people themselves have failed.  And this is the point at which Governor Burgum’s tears become not moving, but enraging.  He cries at the thought that North Dakotans are not doing all they can to stop a young cancer patient from being infected by the coronavirus.  And yet, if those people are constantly hearing from the government that there is no government role in fighting the coronavirus, and if that government does not put in place measures that would help them help themselves, a fair-minded person is in danger of reaching the conclusion that it is actually Governor Burgum, not the ordinary citizen, who has failed to live up to his personal responsibility.  He has not done his job; he has failed his state; like Donald Trump, he takes no responsibility.

The reason Burgum and his fellow Republican governors refuse to govern in the matter of the coronavirus is in large part because their conservative ideology refuses to see such governmental activism as within the realm of the possible.  After decades of the GOP proclaiming that a democratically-elected government is always the enemy of those who democratically elect it, they must now stand by their word and ensure that their actions make their twisted rhetoric into reality.  Because in states like North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Texas, the governors have become, if not enemies, then de facto antagonists of their populace and unintended allies of the virus itself.  How else to describe the actions of politicians who have the power to save lives by the most benign of actions — say, by mandating the wearing of a mask in crowded public places — but declare that such actions are not within their power?

And so Republican anti-government ideology has reached it logical conclusion, the murderous end point of what turns out to have been a suicide mission all along.  To prove that government can do no good, they withhold the most basic governance amid a pandemic, even if it costs lives.  In fact, because a pandemic proves the necessity of competent government, that is exactly when government’s role must be rejected at all costs.  In this case, “all costs” means the mass death of innocent Americans who have been failed by those they elected to serve them.

There’s also a perfect fit between Donald Trump, who denies the seriousness of the pandemic so as to maintain the illusion that the economy is strong and he should be re-elected, and Republican politicians at the state level who are fine with pushing their nonsensical ideology to the breaking point.  And just as Donald Trump has failed in his duty to protect the American people from harm, and should face voters’ retribution for his failure, no governor has the right to perpetuate mass death in his or her state.  When Americans elect governors, they seldom think that they are making a life and death decision.  Part of the reason for this is a baseline expectation that governors, when faced with a pandemic, would follow the advice of epidemiologists and other medical professionals. That baseline expectation has now been shown to be inoperative when a governor belongs to the GOP. Such politicians lack the most basic understanding of their responsibilities in a democratic society, and by all rights should be driven from office by an outraged and betrayed citizenry.

The incompetence of Republican governors, and their complicity with President Trump’s failed coronavirus response, has resulted in mass death, suffering, and disruption unseen in the United States within our lifetimes. This needs to be the final chapter of a party that’s made opposition to democratic, competent government its guiding star. If Trump and the GOP are dealt the defeat they deserve in November, it will have been bought at an indescribable price, literally paid for in American lives and incomprehensible suffering. The 200,000-and-counting American dead are not just victims of a virus, but martyrs in the fight to render the anti-democratic GOP null and void as a major American political party.