The Battle for Democracy Ahead of Us

For more than a month now, President Trump has not only rejected the outcome of the 2020 election, but has actively sought to overthrow the results.  These active measures have included both a broader disinformation campaign to persuade Americans that the election was stolen from him, founded on completely fabricated lies about millions of illegal votes, and pressure on election officials, state legislators, and judges to throw out or reverse election results.  Though we can quibble about the correct terminology for what is happening (is it a coup?  An autogolpe?), there is no avoiding the fact that president is working to subvert the U.S. government and constitution, acting like a tinhorn dictator in a banana republic.  If he had his way, that banana republic would be us.

Trump’s behavior was totally predictable, signaled far ahead of time without any pretense that he was anything but a dictator in waiting.  As some have noted, even in 2016, he refused to say whether he’d abide by the election results if they went against him.  And after he won then, he still claimed the election had been rigged, and that he’d actually won the popular vote as well as the electoral college.  Going into 2020, he repeatedly asserted that the election would be rigged and that mail-in voting was corrupt, and, again, that he would not agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost.  His open opposition to democracy was in fact a profoundly motivating reason to throw this hideous man out of office.

But the very event that seems to have put a nail in the coffin of Trump’s treasonous efforts — the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a suit by the Texas attorney general to essentially throw out the election results in four states that went for Biden — also drives home that an even greater danger to the country lies in the Republican Party.  Some 126 House Republicans and 18 GOP attorneys general supported this bonkers lawsuit, which was an unambiguous effort to replace the will of the voters with the will of Republican judges and state legislatures.  Such widespread backing of the lawsuit was the culmination of elected Republicans’ complicity in Trump’s treasonous attempt to stay in office, from a general denial that Biden won the election to a refusal to call out the president’s lies about the results.  As The New York Times puts it, such support means “that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side.”

The idea that the results of elections are not to be determined by receiving the most votes, but instead by the will of the party that holds enough levers of power to impose its victory no matter the results, is not American democracy, but anti-democratic authoritarianism.  And a party that embraces this idea, and works to deny voters the representation to which they’re entitled, is engaging in treason, not democratic politics.  Such is the point the GOP has reached.  There is every reason to think that challenging each and every election loss will be GOP policy going forward, as will be making up fantasy narratives of how Republicans were robbed by illegal votes cast by immigrants, African-Americans, and other alleged undesirables.

As we’ve said before, this full turn has been a long time coming, embodied previously in strategies like Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression to assure that likely Democratic voters do not have a fair say in selecting their representatives.  In a way, Trump’s awfulness offered them a final choice: to proceed to the logical conclusion of this anti-democratic path, or to repent.  By supporting his many offenses against the constitution while in office, including and up to his open subversion of the 2020 election, the party has clearly made its choice.

Given this dark transformation of the Republican Party into the U.S.’s authoritarian party, the overriding question of our politics is how to defeat this menace and strengthen American democracy.  This is obviously a complicated and difficult question, as it involves not just overtly political questions, but getting at the roots of economic and social crises that have led a major American political party to increasingly embrace an authoritarian, white supremacist agenda.  But as with many challenges in life, the first step is acknowledging the extent of the problem.  And nowhere is the need for such acknowledgment more important than within the Democratic Party.

By the admission of its own elected officials, the Democrats as a whole have not been engaged full-scale with Trump and the GOP’s post-election attempts to subvert the election results.  For sure, they have met just about every Republican court challenge successfully, which is no small thing, as it’s been key to holding off Trump’s deranged coup attempt.  But there has clearly been a strategy of avoiding giving any extra oxygen to the president’s objectively outlandish claims, and to run out the clock to the official certification of Biden’s victory today.  While this strategy has been successful insofar as Biden’s electoral college victory looks assured at this point, it has done little to counter the fact that GOP politicians have had a clear field to infect Republican voters with the belief that it is the Democrats who are actually the ones who have committed treason.

As Greg Sargent writes, “It appears that untold numbers of elected Republicans are trying to inspire in GOP voters a state of what you might call permanent warfare against our democratic institutions and the opposition’s voters alike.”  Polls show the success of this effort; according to a Fox News poll from last week, 68% of Republican voters “believe the election was stolen from President Trump,” while some 77% of his voters believe he won the election.  It is crisis enough for GOP politicians to lie about the election results; that crisis becomes even deeper when millions upon millions of Republican voters believe those lies.  The partisan disparity is stupendous: even as the GOP whips up its base into a frenzy against the Democrats and democracy itself, based on fictional treachery, the Democrats calmly proceed as if they have won the election — but at the cost of making the crucial case to their supporters and other persuadable voters that it is the GOP’s current behavior, not theirs, that presents the true attack on American government.

There is also the basic fact that Joe Biden will soon be assuming the presidency, to deal immediately with a health and economic crisis perhaps unparalleled in American history.  The message of unity and togetherness that this moment calls for is at odds with the need for a partisan indictment of the Republicans’ authoritarian spiral.  Yet it is an indication of the bottomless descent of GOP elected officials that they exhibit no interest in such solidarity.  The Republican-led Senate still balks at appropriate levels of financial relief at this late date, while many in the GOP parrot Donald Trump’s murderous lie that the coronavirus is not a big deal and that we have long turned the corner.  More to the point, they almost to a person refuse to either recognize Biden’s victory or to condemn Donald Trump’s illicit efforts to deny him the presidency.  

The Democrats’ cool, calm, and collected approach may be the best they can do in a bad situation, but at bottom it offers an olive branch to the Republicans that they don’t deserve, and that will very likely be knocked away the moment Joe Biden takes office.  I have seen multiple people argue that the Republicans will very likely continue with the attitude that Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected president, including and up to a refusal by a Republican-led Senate (in the event the Democrats fail to win the two Georgia seats to be decided by run-off elections in early January) to approve any of Biden’s cabinet choices or other Senate-approved positions.  The time is soon coming when they will need to arrive at a strategy designed to defeat the authoritarian GOP — and it will need to go far beyond practicing politics as usual.

Among other things, this means not simply competing with the GOP in the “normal” realm of economic, social, environmental, and defense policy, but by making support of democracy itself a central element of all discussions of politics and policy.  In the most direct sense, this means that out the gate of a Biden presidency, the Democrats’ highest priority must be to pass legislation ensuring that every American can vote, free from the depredations of Republican legislatures and judges keen to make voting into the privilege of Republican-leaning voters, rather than a basic right not to be denied to a single citizen.  Josh Marshall has written about this recently, and it’s all the more pressing as Republicans clearly intend to leverage their fictional “stolen election” narrative into renewed efforts across the country to suppress voter rights.  In this clash between two incompatible political views — voting as inherently suspect and subject to as many restrictions as you need to maximize your side’s appearance of victory, versus assuring that every person who wants to vote can do so and have their voted count — there can be no avoiding the fight at hand, and no point in not seizing the initiative when justice and democracy are so clearly on the side of Democrats.

Closely aligned with this “pro-democracy agenda,” as some have termed it, is the need for Democrats to articulate clearly and plainly the anti-democratic turn of the GOP, both in terms of the last few decades and culminating with their embrace of open authoritarianism under Donald Trump.  This is a fraught and complicated path when bipartisan cooperation is still the holy grail of many Democratic politicians and million of Americans, and when efforts must be made to cultivate non-insane GOPers like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins.  Yet continuing to behave as if the GOP as a whole were committed to the same baseline assumptions of our shared life — such as free and fair elections, one-person, one-vote, and majority rule — means conferring a sheen of legitimacy to the GOP it no longer merits.  Doing anything to legitimize a GOP that no longer supports free and fair elections is all the crazier when you realize that the GOP has already adopted a stance that elections of Democrats, and the votes of Democratic voters, are not legitimate.

To describe what the GOP has become, Democrats also need to start openly describing the GOP as a white supremacist party.  What else to call a political organization that seeks to retain not just outsize influence but outright dominance for predominantly white, rural voters at the expense of the multiracial American majority?  What else to call a party that explicitly targets black and brown voters as part of its vote suppression and gerrymandering schemes?  What else to call a party whose leader encourages white nationalist militias to commit violence against their fellow Americans?

But beyond these broad approaches, the Democrats can work to diffuse GOP authoritarianism by making sure that government actually improves people’s lives in concrete ways.  I heard political writer Ann Applebaum make this point in a recent interview, and Adam Serwer argues for it in an essay published shortly after the election:

If Biden is to restore faith that democracy can serve all people and not just the powerful, he must show that government is capable of meeting the challenges ordinary Americans face. It will not be enough to resurrect an economy in which the average American is a bill or two away from bankruptcy, and the engine of economic growth is consumption by the wealthy. That means keeping families in their homes, preventing state governments from going bankrupt, and safeguarding businesses crushed by the pandemic, but it also means ensuring that the benefits of a recovery are available to all Americans and not simply the wealthy and upper-middle classes.

Paired with a positive agenda for making the economy work for ordinary people is a parallel need to paint the GOP as the party that coddles the rich, promotes crony capitalism, and embodies corruption and incompetence.  There is no better example of the latter than the coronavirus pandemic that is currently killing a 9/11’s worth of our fellow Americans every single day; every day, the deaths that a psychopathic Osama bin Laden inflicted on our country is inflicted again due to the incompetence and negligence of our own American-born psychopath in the White House and his Republican enablers.  I realize that the need to assign blame is at cross purposes with a Biden-election desire to promote unity, but it is incredible to me that the Democrats would let pass a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make the case of the GOP’s sycophancy and ineptness in the face of this virus.  It is not just Trump or federal GOP politicians who deserve blame; state leaders like governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Brian Kemp of Georgia should live in infamy for their staggering indifference to mass suffering and death. 

But alongside an unforgiving and relentless strategy to democratize America and roll back GOP authoritarianism, Democrats need to be careful to draw a bright distinction between the Republican Party’s betrayal of American values and those ordinary Americans who sometimes or always vote for the GOP.  Unlike the Republican Party, Democrats must not divide Americans between those who are true citizens and those who are not.  In fact, ironically enough, it is the Republican embrace of real (white) citizens and denigration of everyone else that better than anything makes the case for rejecting such tribalism.  In the Greg Sargent piece I noted above, he writes that,

Philosopher John Dewey wrote that democracy is sustained by “faith” in the fundamental worth of other human beings, faith that is demonstrated in all sorts of routine ways. This faith is rooted in a “generous belief” in the “possibilities” of others, in their “capacity” for “intelligent judgment and action.”

What we’re seeing now in this ongoing support for election subversion is at bottom a form of very profound contempt for those possibilities — a very profound contempt for other human beings; for fellow Americans.

This contempt that Sargent describes is a big part of the reason I’m optimistic that a large majority of Americans will sooner or later rally against the authors of our authoritarian crisis, and in favor of greater democracy across our politics and economy.  While talk of democracy and voting rights can sometimes feel abstract, I think even the least-politically aware Americans know when they’re being treated with contempt; being treated as if they have no role to play in their own country; being treated as if they cannot be trusted with making decisions about their own and the country’s future.  The anti-democratic nature of the GOP will ultimately betray the interests of many Republican voters — as indeed it has already, in the death and misery due to the pandemic — since a party that feels insulated from judgment at the ballot box has little incentive to serve any but the interests of politicians and the powerful.  In this dangerous time, Democrats need to respond forcefully and unambiguously to a GOP that now openly flouts the constitution and the premise of mutual respect that underlies democracy. There can be no compromise with authoritarians.

Getting to the Root of Our Coronavirus Catastrophe

One of the long-running themes of this blog is that as horrific a president as Donald Trump has been, his malice, incompetence, and racism have been supported by Republican elected officials nearly every step of the way, and that in key ways his particular behaviors and policies were simply accelerated versions of long-running tendencies within the GOP.  For instance, there’s a direct line from decades of increasingly blatant GOP attempts to deny the vote to African-Americans, to Donald Trump’s explicit white nationalism and racism.  Another important continuity lies between years of growing Republican resistance to democracy —as evidenced in voter suppression efforts, partisan gerrymandering, and attempts to pack the federal courts to serve as a bulwark against a Democratic Party that has now won 7 of the last 8 national elections — and Trump’s open authoritarianism, which has culminated in undisguised and unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Over nearly the past year, the confluence between the attitudes of Donald Trump and the GOP has appeared most destructively in the catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic.  Apart from an unwillingness to challenge the president’s coronavirus denialism, and a frequent willingness to embrace it outright, the GOP has also followed the president in a general attitude of rejecting an ongoing governmental responsibility to fight the pandemic or to assist Americans harmed by the accompanying economic downturn.  Yes, the CARES Act passed Congress and was signed into law by the president in March — but as the months have gone by, the GOP has broadly rejected any sort of systematic approach to mitigating the virus and resulting economic harm in a meaningful, nationally-unified way.  Among other things, the idea that the United States should essentially pay people to stay home while we institute severe measures to bring the virus under control has been completely off the table, leading inevitably to our current rout in the face of the pandemic, with the nation hitting new highs in infection and death rates almost daily.  The American people are being slaughtered by this wholly avoidable failure of governance.

Much to the Hot Screen’s relief, Michael Lind and Sammi Aibinder have written an analysis that systematically lays out the connections between the conservative ideology of the Republican Party and this failed coronavirus response by the president and his party.  While acknowledging that Donald Trump’s personal failings have played a part in our ongoing crisis, they argue that conservative ideology itself has proved incapable of dealing with this pandemic and its attending challenges:

[F]ocusing solely on the ousting of this particular president and his friends — and on their considerable failures as leaders — risks missing a deeper, more fundamental point: that though Donald Trump lost reelection, the ideology and belief system underpinning so many of the debacles of his presidency prevails, and was always doomed to fail the country in the face of a disaster like this one. A response to COVID-19 and the economic crisis it triggered guided by and grounded in a conservative worldview would always have failed us, regardless of who was in the White House. At base, conservative ideology itself was just as responsible for the failure to appropriately and effectively respond to this crisis as Trump’s personal failings were. And that ideology will still be present — rife, in fact — in our government long after Trump is gone.

Lind and Aibinder identify three particular elements of this conservative ideology that have fated the United States to an ineffectual coronavirus response: 

First, conservatism posits that that government itself tends to cause more problems than it solves, and that free markets — unencumbered by government intervention — are always best positioned to allocate resources and improve society.  Second, modern conservatism argues that the economy is primarily driven by capital and its owners, and as such, the interests of capital owners are paramount; related to this is then mistaken idea that if the stock market is rising, the economy is unquestionably doing well.  And third, conservatives tend to see differences and disparities along racial and gender lines as either irrelevant, temporary, or — in the most pernicious form — deserved.

As you sit with these three points, and read through Lind and Aibinder’s supporting evidence, you begin to realize that even having just one of these concepts structure the U.S. response to the coronavirus would lead to disaster.  Certainly the idea that government in and of itself is a problem, and that the free market can solve all challenges, would alone have corrupted efforts at a robust pandemic response.  But when it synergizes with a bias towards business owners and against workers rights, and an indifference to or even embrace of structural racism? Such a horrific outcome is now before our eyes.

Among other things, Lind and Aibinder’s framework goes a long way to explaining why the United States couldn’t simply pay Americans to stay home for a couple weeks early in the pandemic so that we could get the virus back to a baseline and then return to more or less normal living in conjunction with a regime of contract tracing, social distancing, and other preventative measures.  A virus that soon seemed to be disproportionately affecting lower-wage workers, and particularly minorities, summoned no particular sympathy from a Republican Party that views workers as secondary to economic health, and sees no particular societal obligation to recognize disparities due to race.  Likewise, such an activist role for the government, in which it fundamentally replaced the market even for a mere matter of weeks, would be unthinkable to those who see no positive role for government in comparison to the free market.

A couple particular points the authors make resonate strongly with some of The Hot Screen’s recent obsessions.  Elaborating on basic conservative thinking around a free market, rather than democratic government, being the better determinant of what the public really wants, they note how “conservative economic and social ideology puts its premium on the individual above all else — the world is defined by individuals acting in their own self-interest, in the market society alike.  Communal welfare is borne not out of collective action, but out of each individual ‘pursuing his ambition or her desire, whatever, with excellence,’ in the words of Rush Limbaugh.”  Lind and Aibinder connect this emphasis on individual rather than collective action and responsibility with the “‘personal responsibility’ ethos” propounded by conservative politicians and activists in the face of the pandemic.  They point to “conservative state legislators in Texas declaring it each ‘individual Texan’s responsibility’ to keep themselves safe,” but this is also clearly the belief system that has led the Republican governors of North and South Dakota to repeatedly argue that the government has no responsibility to mandate measures to fight the coronavirus, since individual citizens can be relied on to make the correct choices.  (It is also, not incidentally, a mindset that works to persuade people that their only power is as individuals, not as citizens acting together to assert their collective power — a perspective that essentially robs Americans of the power and meaning of democracy itself.)

The two authors also tie this mindset to “conservatives’ passing the buck to the “free market” — insisting that the only way for the American people to survive is to ‘reopen the economy,’ when in fact it’s just that that gives the virus the reins.”  For anyone who has felt that their head might explode when they heard this prioritization on reopening the economy above all else, there is some relief in Lind and Aibinder tracing back to where this flawed logic originates.

They also help clarify the determined resistance of conservatives to the advice of scientists and medical professionals as to the appropriate response to the pandemic.  They note that the cigarette and fossil fuel industries have long made it a priority to discredit scientists to protect their profits, and that conservatives, being deferential to the interests of business, have adopted this same pose of hostility to expert opinion.  Such hostility, we now see, has resulted in a wholesale effort to disregard the advice of health professionals in favor of businesses’ desire to keep the profits flowing in.

But Lind and Aibinder also make a related point that has stuck with me: in the case of attempts to discredit climate scientists, businesses and conservatives weren’t just worried about reduced profits, but about the larger threat posed by acknowledging the validity of real-world climate concerns; doing so would expose actual market failures, which in turn “required one to concede the need to reform capitalism.”  The two authors don’t apply this same point to the conservative response to the coronavirus pandemic, but I think it’s safe to say that something of the same fear is operative today; acknowledging the need for government intervention in a time of pandemic makes clear that markets aren’t the perfect self-regulating and society-fulfilling machines that conservatives claim.  It is as if any opening of the door to the idea of government intervention threatens to send the whole edifice of conservative political and economic ideology tumbling down.  To defend this fragile structure, which is arguably built on a fantasy of human nature and how markets operate, conservatives in the Republican Party now seem more determined than ever to hold the line against a more humane and effective government, even at great real cost to an economy they claim to revere.

To give conservatives a little credit here, though, I actually think they’re correct in this intuition — the more Americans see that government can actually protect them from the coronavirus and protect their jobs, and, for example, demonstrate that protecting workers’ health and livelihoods is more important than a business’ ability to generate maximum profits, then the more everything is indeed up for debate.  Why not universal health care to protect us all against this and future pandemics?  Why not have the government pay for every American who wants it to attend college, if it helps overcome educational setbacks due to the coronavirus?  But the fact that their intuition is right doesn’t make their failed ideology any less wrong; in fact, it makes their stubborn resistance to common-sense democratic intervention in the economy and in health care appear all the more murderous and deranged, born less out of principle and more out of an unbridled belief that there should be no limits to the ability of the rich and powerful to aggrandize themselves, even if the cost to the public at large can be measured by a body count in the tens of thousands and countless livelihoods and individual potentials avoidably lost.

I wrote last week about the difficulty of witnessing “the individual choices that millions of American have made to participate in a mass denial of science, common sense, and common responsibility,” a spectacle that almost seems like a society-wide insanity. Having read the Lind-Aibinder piece shortly afterward, it’s clearer that what we’re seeing is not simply craziness but a society permeated by the conservative ideology the two authors describe, which in its inappropriateness to our current moment has proven itself tragically detached from reality.

States of Alienation

As the economy continues to stagger along, and federal relief passed early in the coronavirus crisis runs dry, we are increasingly getting a sense of the deep damage being inflicted on state and local governments around the country.  Reports like this recent one from The New York Times describe states losing big chunks of revenue, as the economic downturn affects the amount of taxes they’re able to collect.  Whether it’s states like Alaska and Wyoming hit by the drop in oil prices, or Florida and Nevada hobbled by dwindling tourism, the damage seems to have spared no state in the union. Economists warn that we increasingly run the danger of doing long-term damage to our economic growth.  

As the Times story takes pains to highlight, the downturn is affecting states governed by both Democratic and Republican governors and legislatures.  This point is crucial, as Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has framed his opposition to further aid to states as wanting to avoid a so-called “blue state bailout” that would unfairly benefit profligate Democratic-led states.

The logical and time-tested next step at this point would be for the federal government to send money to the states to compensate for their tax losses.  This would not only stave off cuts in vital services, but equally importantly would support the national economy by ensuring that state spending continues to help fuel the economy even as the private sector struggles with economic headwinds.  Since states can’t run deficits, the federal government has a necessary role to play in stabilizing their finances.

Yet we are still seeing opposition from Senate Republicans to a fuller rescue of states, even as their argument that it would disproportionately benefit Democratic states has been shredded by reality.  There’s a gathering consensus among many on the left that McConnell and other Republicans would be more than fine with crippling the economic recovery by withholding spending that would prop up the economy, so that Democrats take the blame in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election — a destructive strategy that already worked out for them in Obama’s first term in office.  Based on the evidence to date, this certainly seems to be McConnell’s plan.

The question about how to counter not just this, but other manifestations of GOP obstructionism, will obviously be central to the success or failure of the Biden presidency, and thankfully I have already seen some strong ideas floated for how to do so that I hope to discuss soon.  But to stay with the question of aid to the states for now — one thing that jumps out at me is how the Republican Party tries to make it seem as if the states are actually units of an entirely different country, to which the federal government owes no obligation.  This rhetorical alienation is most profound when Mitch McConnell specifies certain states as “blue states,” in which the fact of Democratic leadership sets them outside the bounds of national responsibility.  Yet, the obvious truth is that people living in such states are as much American citizens as anyone else.  If an American state needs a bailout, why shouldn’t the federal government help?  Underlying the Republican sleight of hand is that, where federal spending is concerned, Americans are no longer to be thought of as Americans, but as Californians, or Nevadans, or Minnesotans.  Mysteriously, through the misfortune of living in actual states, we learn that our status as American citizens is in fact a shadowy, tenuous thing.

This attempted nullification of citizenship is closely related to a second Republican sleight of hand — the idea that federal money that might be sent to the states is more or less the same as the United States sending aid to a foreign country.  Vigorously obscured is the fact that when we talk of sending money to a state, it is actually. . . our money.  It is money paid to the federal government by taxpayers from every state.  For a party that makes such a big deal about being opposed to taxes, the Republican Party is awfully quick to forget that congressional appropriations are not drawn from a Private Congress Bank account, but are distributions of public money.  The same idea goes for any disbursement made possible by deficit spending — as in fact much federal spending relies on at the moment — in which it is ultimately the prospect of the American people’s future taxpaying that makes such spending possible in the first place.  Instead, the GOP pretends that the country can’t afford to spend the money when, in fact, it is our money to collectively spend as we see fit.  While much of politics does in fact revolve around what or what not to spend money on, the Republican insinuation that the money is not ours to begin with is a particularly annoying trope.

A third bit of obfuscation strikes me as so glaring that it is less a sleight of hand than a sort of clumsy grope at concealment.  Republican reluctance to compensate states for revenues lost through no fault of their own is often couched in language that suggests the money would not be well spent, or would not serve any particularly important purposes.  Such a cynical and misleading pose is harshly contradicted by the reality of state spending cuts.  The New York Times notes that “an overwhelming majority of state and local job losses have been in education"; meanwhile, other states are contemplating cuts in such supposed Republican priorities as law enforcement. I am curious what moral or political principle would guide Republicans to argue that schoolchildren should somehow be held responsible for an economic downturn, or, more pragmatically, that we should sacrifice future economic growth by allowing the education of the next generation to falter.  Meanwhile, some states fear they may need to cut back on childhood vaccination programs, an especially noxious possibility in view of our current pandemic.  Yet those in the GOP opposed to aid for states would rather not talk about such obviously painful and destructive cuts, preferring instead to mutter on about wasteful state spending, as if states were in the habit of collecting taxes so that they could then pile cash in great liberal, satanic bonfires. In a time of national crisis, both on the economic and health fronts, continued Republican efforts to alienate the American people from the proper powers of their own federal government, and to casually act as if states are no better than foreign nations asking for handouts, is truly breathtaking.

Weakest Links

It is an obvious point that hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves — lax coronavirus regulations in some states are contributing to cases in neighboring states, as citizens travel freely between them.  This recent ProPublica article is the first piece I’ve read that explores this point in detail; it drives home that our coronavirus catastrophe can in many ways be linked back to the lack of a national strategy, allowing for inconsistent rules between states that amplify the virus’ spread.  In fighting a pandemic, we are only as strong as our weakest links, as data from the Washington-Idaho and Illinois-Iowa border regions demonstrates.

In eastern Washington, officials in cities like Spokane believe higher rates in the state are due to Washingtonians traveling to cities and towns in Idaho with far looser or non-existent coronavirus restrictions.  Ironically, it appears that many of these visitors are looking for a vacation from coronavirus restrictions, but fail to internalize the fact that areas with less restrictions are more, not less, dangerous places to be.  And in both Washington and Illinois, insult is added to injury as locals shop in neighboring states, sapping local businesses while also vectoring the virus into higher-restriction areas.  

The ultimate example in virus exportation appears to be this summer’s biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota.  Attended by nearly half a million people, more than 80% of whom were from out of state, epidemiologists view it as a massive super-spreader event with such vast and tangled webs of contagion that thorough contact tracing efforts are impossible.  While hundreds of cases in states like Minnesota can be traced back to the event, “experts say that tally represents just the tip of the iceberg,” according to The Washington Post.  And apart from exporting the coronavirus far and wide, the event is also viewed as having sparked a massive surge in cases in South Dakota itself, which in recent weeks has vied with North Dakota as the state with the highest infection rates.

In the Propublica account, as well as other stories of those who attended the Sturgis superspreader event, you encounter deep strains of denialism, magical thinking, and paranoia.  Again, the idea that people might seek escape from coronavirus restrictions by visiting places where the virus is both more prevalent and more easily caught feels reckless and illogical.  It is not so simple as the lax states and localities being in the wrong — in resort locales in Idaho, their errors have been amplified by outsiders crowding in and pretending as if they had entered magical covid-free zones.  Again and again — and particularly prominent in accounts of the Sturgis rally — you also find people who are “willing” to “risk” covid, without registering the fact that their becoming infected means they might pass it on to others who aren’t so willing to risk it — a fact that’s glaringly important with a virus that only appears to sicken half of those infected with recognizable symptoms.

You know I’ve been unsparing in holding Donald Trump and his Republican enablers responsible for the mass death visited upon America for the past nine months.  From the start, Trump set the tone and scale of the governmental response by downplaying the virus’ risk and the need for decisive countermeasures.  As various observers have noted, his interest in fighting the pandemic took back seat to maintaining the appearance of a healthy economy, as well as shifting responsibility for fighting the virus onto the state level so as to avoid accusations of failure.  The door was opened for unscrupulous, ignorant, and immoral elected officials around the country to parrot his denialism and pretend that the virus was no big thing.  With such failure at the top propagating downward, a broader dereliction of duty in protecting lives became inevitable.

As sickening as this level of brutal cynicism at the level of GOP leadership is, in some ways more disheartening are the individual choices that millions of American have made to participate in a mass denial of science, common sense, and common responsibility. It is a denial that I still find impossible to fully grasp.  Alongside the pandemic, it is as if the nation has experienced wide-scale insanity, a related but wholly separate affliction.

A Not So Rootie-Tootie Thanksgiving Plan

God help Clackamas County.  That was my first thought on reading that newly-elected chairwoman of the Board of County Commissioners Tootie Smith had declared her opposition to Oregon Governor Brown’s latest coronavirus restrictions, and her intention to turn her Thanksgiving into a covid super spreader event by inviting as many guests as she could.  At the time of Smith’s bold announcement last week,  intensive care units in the Portland metro area were at 89% capacity, with other hospital beds at 93% capacity, due to a surge of covid cases, according to the Oregonian.  Yet Smith, who will play a key role in Clackamas’ County’s response to the coronavirus, “said she can’t speak about Oregon’s hospital capacity” — whether out of simple ignorance or an understanding that doing so would make her look like a fool, the Oregonian does not clarify.

Smith quickly took her rebellion roadshow national, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program to re-iterate her opposition to the governor’s restrictions.  On the show, reports the Oregonian, “Smith bemoaned the state requirements to wear masks in public places, as well as social distancing and other state-issued COVID-19 guidelines.”  Sit with that one for a moment.  At this late stage, to hear an elected official claim government overreach in enforcing mask-wearing and social-distancing is not surprising, but it’s still shocking every time.  In an apparent effort to publicize to the nation that her ignorance extends far beyond not knowing how virus transmission works, Smith went on to tell Carlson that, “We are adults, we do not need to be treated like second-rate slaves” — once again confirming that you seldom have to wait long before a Republican elected official manages to slip in a bit of racism to show fealty to the white supremacist party the GOP has become.

I have seen Smith’s actions criticized as selfish, but selfish is just the tip of the iceberg.  As an elected official, and a fairly high-ranking one at that, Smith has a particular responsibility to model good behavior and promote the health of her constituents.  And yet she has indicated that “she believes public safety measures such as wearing a mask, staying 6 feet from others, washing hands and staying home when feeling sick are enough” (even as she vows to defy these measures at her Thanksgiving Day massacre).  That these few measures are enough to control the virus, or that it’s okay to defy them as long as you yourself feel healthy (as Smith appears to believe), would be news to anyone with a modicum of expertise around public health issues.  Pretending that she has some particular knowledge about how this deadly disease spreads, and undercutting not just the governor’s measures but the consensus of the health community about how to preserve lives, Smith has committed a dereliction of duty that renders her unworthy of the office she holds.  If she lacks the honor and good sense to resign her seat, then I pray that the citizens of Clackamas County will seek to recall her from office at the earliest opportunity, and maintain a steady stream of condemnation and ridicule in the meantime.

Cuckoo for Coups

If the clown car of the Republican coup to reverse the presidential election results was sputtering badly last week, it has now crashed through the guardrails and is in the process of tumbling to a fiery doom in the ravine below.  Judges are consistently rejecting the Trump “elite strike force” legal team’s preposterous filings, such as the demand to throw out the votes of all Pennsylvania voters.  A slow dribble of Republican officials continues to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory.  Rudy Giuliani, or at least his head, appears to be melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West.

But this is in no way to say that the longer-term danger has passed, or that the damage hasn’t been immense.  While the Democrats have consistently won crucial legal battles that have essentially stopped the Trump campaign from throwing out legitimate votes that won the electoral college for Joe Biden, the Trump team has been teaching the GOP a lesson about routes to flipping defeat into victory in a future, much closer election.  Similarly, as Dave Roberts writes, “What Trump is establishing right now is a new norm for the conservative movement, whereby "fighting for you" means disrupting the electoral process at every opportunity & rejecting results conservatives don't like. Even if he fails in this attempt, the norm will stand. And Trump’s losing effort is in fact a winning effort when it comes to telling his base that the election was stolen from him, and that by extension Joe Biden’s presidency is illegitimate — a benefit that likely is a key reason Republican elected officials have been nearly united in offering at least tacit support to the president’s failed coup.

In short, the Republican Party is in the process of advancing the concept that elections are inherently illegitimate when the Democrats win, making more explicit than ever the anti-democratic animus that underlies measures like gerrymandering and voter suppression.  That their war on voting has now extended to large-scale tacit support for an open attempt by the president to steal an election is the logical conclusion for a party that has long been drifting towards outright opposition to democratic government, and whose embrace of Donald Trump these last four years has set them firmly in the camp of authoritarianism. 

But I don’t think anyone can rightly be surprised by this latest turn of the screw.  The Republican Party has simply thrown off the last remaining bonds of loyalty to democratic government after years of hacking and sawing away.  This moment has been coming for decades.  What is genuinely surprising, though, is the Democratic Party’s deer-in-the-headlights response to an opposition party that may as well have hired a skywriting plane to puff out “We hate democracy” above every state in the union — and in particular, its response to America’s first coup attempt.  The Democrats obviously has a successful strategy to defeat Trump’s immediate effort to undo this election — essentially by winning in the courts — but they have had essentially no strategy to defeat the broader damage being done by Trump and the GOP telling tens of millions of voters that the Democrats only win by stealing elections, and that Joe Biden should not be considered to be a legitimate president.

Because while there is nothing the Democrats can do to stop the Republican Party from going down this dark road, there is also nothing the Republicans can do to stop the Democrats from using every means at their disposal to to make the case to the American people that the Republican Party has set itself beyond the pale of acceptable politics.  Yet, as observers like Jeet Heer and Brian Beutler have noted, the Democratic strategy has been more or less to wait out Trump’s coup attempt, rather than engage in more aggressive efforts, such as the House subpoenaing the General Services Administration appointee who refuses to sign the paperwork to release funds for the Biden transition to begin.  In the face of crisis, the Democrats seem largely dedicated to downplaying that the crisis is even occurring.  In doing so, they are playing a crucial role in normalizing the utterly abnormal behavior of Trump and the GOP.

Particularly dismaying is that so many millions of us have performed our role in ordinary democratic politics, casting far more than enough votes to drive Trump from office, yet before our eyes Trump and the Republicans are pursuing a new form of politics that goes on after the ballots have been counted, that declares that some have been cast illegally, that elections in fact do not decide our fate — in other words, telling us that they have only contempt for our rights as American citizens.  In the process, the GOP is enraging great portions of its base, telling them that the Democrats are a threat to the country, and setting the stage for future efforts to subvert elections by increasingly brazen means.

In the face of this, to see the Democratic Party not seize the rhetorical high ground, or attempt to maximize the damage to the GOP by its open embrace of ongoing election subversion, but instead to simply act as if our ordinary politics — specifically, the outcome of elections — has settled matters for all time, feels less like a demonstration of admirable sangfroid and more like an abdication of what this moment requires.  Not seeking to make the GOP pay a price for what feels increasingly like open treason against the government of the United States runs the catastrophic risk of normalizing the anti-democratic evolution of the GOP.

As Ron Brownstein points out, it makes sense for Joe Biden to pull his punches, since he is preaching a message of unity, but congressional Democrats have no such excuse.  What for me cinches the case that the Democrats are failing to rise to the moment is the explicit racism that has undergirded the president’s attempts to throw out the election results.  In his telling, it is not just Democrats but heavily African-American cities that are the culprits behind the purported theft of the election.  And so his election subversion team has repeatedly made the case that Trump would win if you just removed the votes of African-Americans in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta.  I honestly don’t know what further ammunition the Democrats are waiting for before they start explicitly referring to the GOP as America’s white supremacist party.

Exhibit A against the Democrats’ business-as-usual approach is that they did what they were supposed to — win a resounding victory against Trump — yet the GOP is not just unchastened, but has in fact escalated its anti-democratic assault by standing by as the president further divides the nation and inflames the GOP base into opposition to democratic (and Democratic) election results.  It is as if the Democrats were missing the basic equation that the more they win, the greater the incentive for the GOP to wage war on democracy.

Too many Democrats seem bizarrely reluctant to acknowledge the permanently changed nature of the Republican Party and the necessity of hardball strategies to discredit an openly authoritarian and racist GOP.  Alongside this, there is a reluctance to take a stand on first principles without which we cannot truly to be said to have either a democracy or a political union.  If the GOP is now at war with democracy itself, as I believe it is, then there is no point in not acknowledging that war, and using the GOP’s anti-democratic position as a central part of an appeal to voters.  If the GOP is acting in an unpatriotic way that amounts to treason and sedition, then act like it.  After all, these are not just words — they are descriptions of behavior that betrays the country, encompassing our freedom, our security, and our ability to collectively make decisions about our future.  As John Stoehr wrote last week at the Editorial Board, “If most Americans start seeing the Republicans through the lens of betrayal, if they start seeing the party as a separatist movement (that’s what it is), even the milquetoastiest of Democrats, like Joe Manchin, will be forced to go to the wall.”  Stoehr suggests that Trump is close to making the Republicans choose between party and patriotism, but I think the Democrats could make a decent case that the GOP has already crossed that Rubicon.  

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.