Amid Impeachment Vote, The Thrill of the Perfect Description

Listening to activist-turned-Representative Cori Bush call Donald Trump “the white supremacist-in-chief” as she casts a vote to impeach him, you can hear the battle against white supremacism well and truly joined.  Democrats must not relent in depicting the Capitol assault as inseparable from an ongoing white supremacist insurrection, and which itself was an astonishing display of white impunity.  

Having long been fond of this nickname for Trump, The Hot Screen endorses its perfect deployment by Bush.  Many Republicans boo’d in response to her remarks, which tells me they hit home.

As thrilling as her “white supremacist-in-chief” jab is when Bush says that “we have a mandate to legislate in defense of black lives.”  This white supremacist insurrection is a threat most directly to our African-American and other minority citizens, and our government must act to protect them from domestic terrorists and their political enablers, swiftly and relentlessly.

Capitol Attack Is Just One Part Of Larger Insurrection Incited By Trump

House Democrats, joined by 10 Republicans, have rightly voted to impeach Donald Trump on a charge of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.”  But while impeachment supporters point to the January 6 attack on the Capitol as the basis for the charge, neither they nor the public should lose sight of the fact that the incitement of violence of which the president is guilty goes past that one act, and indeed continues into the present.  Donald Trump has also apparently incited a larger violent insurrection against the United States; a new federal joint intelligence bulletin states that the attack on the Capitol itself is now expected to be a “significant driver of violence” for armed militia groups and racist extremists who are targeting the presidential inauguration next week.”  In other words, the president lit a fuse that led to one explosion, and that explosion is now anticipated to lead to further cascades of violence.

In a week’s time, this violent insurrection will be wholly autonomous from the cause of “stopping the steal” and keeping President Trump in office.  The attack on the Capitol may well turn out to have been the tip of the iceberg of a wave of terrorism.  All the more reason to punish Trump after he’s out of office.  Indeed, as former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayem writes, ensuring that justice is imposed on a post-presidential Donald Trump may be essential to combatting the white nationalist terrorism he has helped unleash.

Critics Underplay Role of Impeachment as a Defensive Weapon While Trump Remains President

In this fraught and volatile insurrectionist interregnum, I’ve heard some false choices being built into discussions of whether the president should be impeached, and, a much longer shot, tried and convicted in the Senate.  It seems there is almost universal agreement that even if the House impeaches the president (which as of this evening seem imminent), there won’t be enough time to hold a Senate trial — even impeachment supporters are acknowledging this basic fact.

But to then argue that impeachment is pointless and possibly counter-productive for Democrats sets aside the urgency of this moment, and views the remaining days of Trump’s presidency as if matters will remain more or less static, with the coup attempt is over and done with.  This is wrong-headed. Democrats are leading an impeachment charge first and foremost because the president presents an immediate threat to the country; the supreme goal so long as Trump stays in office is to deter him from further attacks on the American government.  Impeachment at this point is only about punishment insofar as punishment serves to deter the president from getting more people killed. Even if impeachment does not result in removal within his remaining days in office, as the Democratic leadership itself admits, it is obviously a very symbolically potent Congressional weapon that signals to the president, his party, and the public that Donald Trump’s behavior requires removal from office, that the eyes of the nation are upon him, and that the nation will not stand for further attacks. It also sends a message to the armed insurrectionists that the American people are coming for their leader, and that we don’t fear the rage this might provoke.

A brief but important side note: It’s crucial to remember that we are only having a discussion about impeachment and its purported ineffetiveness because sufficiently large numbers of Republicans in the House and Senate have stared into the void of a murderous, deranged president willing to commit violence to stay in office, and yawned.  If the GOP had instead done its duty, congressional Republicans could very likely have persuaded Trump’s cabinet to remove him from office via the 25th amendment.  Instead, congressional Republicans chose to stand down.  Many have now chosen to slur Democratic impeachment efforts as somehow the true destabilizer of the next several days, when if fact its the Republicans’ dereliction of duty that leaves Democrats with no better options.  The GOP itself took the best (i.e., quickest) option off the table.

It also seems many people are mistakenly behaving as if a Democratic decision to impeach right now somehow commits them to a Senate trial that will derail the opening weeks of the Biden presidency, in the midst of already-existing public health and economic emergencies.  The reality is that, if Trump leaves office without inciting further attacks on America, the Democrats are hardly trapped into continuing with the impeachment effort, which is being driven first and foremost right now by the need to stop Trump right now.  After his presidency ends, it will still be important to act against him, both as punishment and to deter similar behavior by future presidents.  But at that point, if it makes more sense to do so by means other than conviction in an impeachment trial, then so be it.  Nothing is set in stone.  For instance, some have pointed out that if the goal is to stop Trump from running for future office, passing a law based on his insurrectionist activities would do as well as an impeachment conviction.  And given the choices of a criminal prosecution that delivers Trump some serious jail time and a symbolic conviction that leaves him free, I don’t think I’m alone in preferring the former (it would also be galling if overemphasis on an impeachment trial undermined accountability for the president via the legal system).

Contentions that impeaching Trump will undermine the early Biden administration are also overly rooted in the unstated assumption that as time passes, the collective horror over the Capitol assault will diminish.  The opposite is far more likely; it’s much more probable that in the coming days and weeks, we will learn far more horrifying details of the president’s culpability (and coordination with other malevolent actors) that will sharpen mass outrage about January 6.  It is also quite likely that by the time he leaves office, we will have witnessed more violence or attempted violence on the part of Trump-supporting insurrectionists.  Such information and actions will stoke the fires for punishment.  To reiterate: once Trump leaves office, the Democrats and others will be free to focus on his proper punishment, free of existential worries about the damage he can still do as president.  Indeed, true justice will require a much fuller accounting of the extent of his coup plot, which will hardly be complete even with the various revelations likely to arrive during the next week.

Blatant Disregard

It may seem like a small thing next to the assault on the Capitol, but the refusal of some Republican congresspeople to wear masks while cooped up and under siege with fellow lawmakers strikes me as sociopathic, not to mention hard to comprehend.  In a life-and-death situation, they still lacked basic empathy with their peers on the other side of the aisle?  They couldn’t acknowledge the reality of coronavirus in a moment of shared peril?  While it’s a far cry from committing sedition, it’s on the same continuum of disregard for the mutual dependence and respect at the heart of any democratic society.  And the news that 75-year-old Democratic Representative Bonnie Coleman has tested positive for the coronavirus reminds us that, yes, being cooped up in closed rooms for hours on end can be covid spread events, particularly when some people refuse to wear masks.  A good reminder, amidst the GOP’s descent into insurrectionism, that before these guys made war on America, they were already making war on science and reason.

Late note: Shortly after I wrote this, I read of Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal’s postive covid-19 test following the Capitol lockdown. Her Twitter thread announcing this fact minces no words in condemning the behavior of the Republic congresspeople who refused to wear masks. Jayapal’s interview by Rebecca Traister about the congresswoman’s experience during the assault, and the way forward from here, is harrowing but inspiring reading.

The Three-Headed Insurrectionist Snake

To help sort through the overload of information about last week’s coup attempt, I’m finding it useful to think of it as involving three overlapping elements: an attack on our democracy by President Trump, an attack by congressional Republicans, and an attack by an insurrectionist mob that included neo-Nazis, white nationalists, QAnon supporters, and other members of the violent far right.

The president had been engaging in an attempted coup for weeks before the physical assault on the Capitol, centered around the lie that he won the November election, and he pursued through various attempts to throw out or manufacture an alternative set of election results.  The insufficiency of this effort finally led him to incite an actual attack on Congress that might block the certification of the electoral college results or massacre his political adversaries.

Alongside that effort, congressional Republicans participated in the president’s attempted coup by echoing or at least assenting to his lies about the election, and so working to create an alternate reality that would convince millions of Republican voters that they had been robbed of their presidential choice.  These efforts finally led 6 senators and 139 representatives from the GOP to vote against the validity of the 2020 election — a legislative coup attempt that instantiated the president’s attempt to overturn the election result, and which was the legislative parallel to the physical assault on the Capitol.

The third strand of the coup attempt was the physical assault on the Capitol, inspired and inflamed by the president’s claims of a stolen election, and carried out not only by conspiratorially-minded rank-and-file Republicans, but also by far-right extremists interested in decapitating the American government and perhaps instigating a civil war.

One reason to parse out these three strands, apart from helping to better grasp a complicated and fast-moving reality, is that each requires its own particular response.  You could say that over the past few days, I’ve been reading furiously, and writing a bit, about how to respond to the culpability of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in making war on the United States.  But I wanted to at least highlight the third element of the story for a moment, the far-right extremists who committed the actual assault on the Capitol.   One of Trump’s primary crimes has been to progressively embolden and unleash these violent actors, but many have rushed to point out that this extremism has been gestating and growing for many years without nearly sufficient attention by either the federal government or by law enforcement.  And we are seeing signs that these extremists have been tremendously emboldened by their attack, which at least initially resulted in justified feelings of impunity. Now the FBI is warning of possible right-wing attacks leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration this week.  It appears that Trump, in his final days, has uncorked an insurrectionist movement long in the making, and that presents an immediate threat to the United States in and of itself, apart from the president’s illicit attempts to hold on to power.

But though they constitute an autonomous, and ongoing, threat to the United States, these violent actors can be influenced by the political decisions made in the coming days.  There are strong arguments that punishing Trump now will take some of the wind out of their sails; at the Washington Post, Kathleen Belew and Elizabeth Neumann argue that removing the “inciter-in-chief” is a necessary element of fighting seriously against this menace.  They also note that, “A united Republican response removing the individual most responsible for the incitement and empowerment of violent extremism would send a swift message that the United States will not tolerate supporting terrorism in any form — even when it comes from within their own party.”  Such a response, of course, has not been forthcoming — so that even as thousands of armed men plot murder and mayhem under the blessing of the president, the Republican Party refuses to take even the most basic, patriotic steps to defend the American people and our government.

After Coup Attempt, Punishing Trump Is Non-Negotiable for Democrats

Earlier today, Jeet Heer observed that, “Saying that impeaching Trump will hamper Biden's agenda is saying that holding Trump accountable and stopping future Trumps is not part of Biden's agenda. It should be.”  I couldn’t agree more — and I think Heer’s comment points up a dangerous reluctance among some Democrats to fully appreciate that the attack on America launched by Trump, complicit Republicans, and violent far-right groups is not an inconvenience, but an unavoidable fight that must be engaged now, without delay.

Indeed, as I wrote yesterday, it’s foolish to act as if the coup attempt is actually over; it should be considered ongoing as long as Donald Trump remains in office, still fully vested with the awesome powers of the presidency and ever closer to the reality of post-presidential powerlessness and doom.  I have no doubt that at this moment, the president is scheming to stay in office past January 20th.  To think otherwise is to fail to recognize the seriousness of his crimes against the nation or his aggrieved, psychotic, and unrepentant character.

I don’t think it’s overblown to say that this is as if another country had declared war on the United States just before Biden’s inauguration, and the new president declared that defending the United States should not be part of his agenda as it would prove a distraction.  This would obviously be absurd, but it’s no more absurd than worrying about having to spend time and energy on this attempted coup against American democracy.  There simply is no choice; it’s too important to let fall by the wayside.

Rather than bemoaning the inescapability of addressing the coup attempt or viewing it as a waste of limited political capital, I think Democrats underestimate the way that holding accountable Trump and other elected complicit in the coup attempt actually complements existing aspects of the Democratic agenda.  I am thinking in the first place of the pro-democracy moves and legislation that were necessary even before the coup attempt, and that are even more urgent now, such as a restoration of the Voting Rights Act, limits on partisan gerrymandering, and statehood for Washington, D.C.  And so long as the Biden administration goes full throttle on implementing a response to the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic fallout, simultaneously keeping some focus on the coup participants would serve to remind Americans that our covid-economic crisis is due in great part to a president who devoted his time to overthrowing America’s democratic order rather than doing his job.

A final consideration — I think we can be fairly certain that still more damning revelations are still to come about the extent and seriousness of the coup attempt, including both the physical attack on the Capitol and the president’s broader attempt to undo the November election results. Democrats who downplay prioritizing impeachment, or otherwise punishing the president for his transgressions, run the risk of being blindsided by new information that stokes the growing rage of millions of Americans, and being put in a position of having responded inadequately to a lawless president.

It's Actually OK to Push the Republicans to Self-Destruct

Henry Farrell has an excellent take on Republican claims that Democrats are being “divisive” by seeking accountability for the storming of the Capitol.  He notes that being divisive is actually very much the point, that this push for accountability “is intended to enforce a clear division between those who accept and are committed to democracy and those who are willing to turn to violence when the vote doesn't turn out the way that they want it to.”  He goes on to write that anyone interested in preserving democracy needs to fight back and discredit attempts to bring violence into the political system in order to avoid a downward spiral of rule by force and general ruination of our democracy.

I think this is absolutely correct, and is at the heart of why Democrats and any Republicans still committed to American democracy need to fight implacably to punish anyone involved in this coup attempt.  Farrell notes that what the GOP is really worried about when it lobs accusations of divisiveness is in fact exposing a schism in the Republican Party between those who condone violence and those who don’t. 

The possibility that demanding accountability would fracture the Republican Party is an excellent secondary reason to pursue it.  It will force the Republicans to either clean house, or openly show themselves as a party that sanctions violence to achieve their political goals — which is to say, no longer a legitimate democratic party. I think this ties in to my hunch that the Democrats fear pushing the GOP to a point of breakdown, either by acting more aggressively on impeachment or rallying more quickly in favor of expelling from Congress those Republican representative and senators who inflamed the insurrectionary mob by propagating the big lie that the election was stolen.  The internal fight into which Democrats could push the Republicans might well result in the pro-violence faction winning out, with the Democrats left to face a yet-more vicious opponent.  But if this fear is holding them back, it’s not a reasonable one.  Holding the GOP accountable for the way some of its members incited violence is more likely to simply rupture the Republican Party into a de facto civil war between pro- and anti-democracy factions, which would weaken the party while it was ongoing, and could well result in the more “moderate” members of the GOP carrying the day.

But whatever strategic or tactical errors the Democrats are making right now, it can’t be stressed enough that the continued danger posed by Donald Trump, who has declared war on American government yet remains in office, is decisively due to the great majority of Republican congressmen who refuse to do the obvious thing and insist on his immediate removal from power.  This in itself is an act of treachery and complicity that echoes the president’s insurrectionary acts, and lies atop the prior complicity of so many congressmen in repeating or assenting to the president’s incendiary lie that the election was stolen.  Our democratic crisis is also a Republican Party crisis.

Ignore the GOP's Hollow Calls For "Unity"

Calls for “unity” from Republicans aiming to head off an accounting for Trump and his co-conspirators are laughable, but also seem to be the party’s current strategy for limiting fallout to the GOP from the attack on the Capitol.  As I noted earlier today, every member of the GOP who voted to reject the election results following the attack made themselves party to the same cause that inspired these domestic terrorists; coming after the attack, after the true toll of the lies and propaganda was obvious, their votes retroactively blessed the insurrectionist cause.

By attacking the Democrats who seek accountability for the crimes of January 6, rather than simply joining them in demanding justice for all the perpetrators and instigators, these congressional Republicans are effectively lending aid and comfort to the insurrectionists.  And although I recognize that the Democrats have an interest in not alienating Republicans who they may well need to govern in a narrowly-divided Congress, the attack on the Congress was not within the spectrum of normal political conflict; it was a physical, deadly attack on American democracy, and requires a steely, implacable response.  If Republicans are not unified behind the cause of bringing to justice the perpetrators of this attempted coup, then that is a choice they are making, not the fault of Democrats.  The morally-degraded state of many GOP congressmen - their inability to acknowledge their own culpability in inspiring acts of sedition - are hardly an excuse for not holding them accountable for their role in this horrifying event.

And so measures like calling for the expulsion of Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who led the effort against the electoral college certification in the Senate, are in fact true acts of unification, the acts of democracy’s defenders identifying and excluding from power democracy’s enemies.  That some Republicans are resorting to absurd distractions from an actual attack on the Capitol shows just how scared they are at the long-term damage the GOP faces.  They are in denial, and far from taking responsibility for their own actions.

I wrote earlier today that Democrats face some serious challenges in making impeachment work, the largest being that the effort would probably take longer than Trump’s time in office.  Yet it’s increasingly clear that forcing Republicans to vote on impeachment, and then possibly to convict the president, may be just the reckoning the GOP needs.  It would serve as a litmus test to make plain as day which Republicans support insurrection against the American government, and which remain legitimate political actors.

Partners in Crime

In the wake of President Trump’s failed coup attempt — which includes not just the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol but his various non-violent maneuvers to claim the November election was stolen from him and to throw out the results — the most pressing needs in American politics are to protect our democracy from further attacks while Trump remains president, punish the perpetrators, and ensure as much as possible that nothing like this is ever tried again.

The need to protect ourselves during the final days of Trump’s presidency is the most urgent.  So far, the Democrats have made it clear that Trump should not remain president, and have called on him to resign or be relieved of his office via the 25th Amendment; as it’s pretty clear neither will happen, they are now turning to the threat of impeachment.  But as we all know, even if impeachment is successful, it requires a substantial number of Republicans (17) to then actually remove him from office.  This does not seem likely to happen.  It also does not appear likely the impeachment process would be accomplished by the end of Trump’s term, which means it would spill over into the start of Biden’s presidency.  At that point, impeachment would obviously not be about the immediate threat posed by Trump, but a punishment for his crimes (including, if the Senate did vote to convict, the important fact that he would be banned from holding future public office).

So we are stuck for the next 11 days with a president who has declared war on the American people by inciting violence against the U.S. government.  This should at least focus us on the fact that Trump remains in office because the GOP largely refuses to join Democratic efforts to expel him from office.  His cabinet has abnegated its responsibilities to relieve him of office, and in the Senate, Mitch McConnell has made clear his intentions to slow-walk any impeachment trial.

I think this brings us to the central conundrum for Democrats, both in effectively defending the country in the next week and a half, and in fashioning an appropriate punishment for the coup participants and a strategy to prevent another in the future.  The great majority of congressional Republicans stand implicated in this coup attempt by their steadfast support of Trump throughout his presidency — a presidency that has included similar attacks on democracy, including incitement of violence against Democratic politicians and propagation of lies about election fraud (remember, Trump has consistently claimed to have won the 2016 popular vote by millions of votes).  During this time, the party as a whole has consistently behaved as if the Democrats are not a legitimate opposition party. As Kurt Bardella writes, the GOP claims that Democrats are radicals aiming to take over American with socialism and communism; what logical conclusion could Republican voters reach except that any means necessary are allowed to repel such a threat?  And since the November election, the majority of congressional Republicans have assented in or outright supported the president’s big lie that he won the election — a lie that became the basis for the violence of January 6 . 

In a better world, the assault on the Capitol would have immediately led GOP representative and senators to oppose Trump’s effort to not certify the electoral college results.  Instead, mere hours after the attack, 6 Republican senators and a whopping 139 representatives (65% of the Republican house caucus) still effectively voted to overturn the election results.  As Greg Sargent explains, “In so doing, [. . .] Republicans validated precisely the same pack of lies that Trump has told about the election for months to sustain the bigger lie that its outcome was illegitimate — the very notion that drove the mob assault in the first place.” In other words, hours after a violent attack on democracy, many Republicans voted to accomplish by (illicit) legislative means the very same goals as the horde of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and QAnon fanatics had attempted by force.  This is a distinction without a difference, and deeply damning for those Republican officials. A direct line can be drawn between their made-up lies about a stolen election, broadcast to millions of Republican voters, and the masses of Trump supporters enraged and emboldened to act violently to reverse the election results.

This is all to help explain the glaring fact that, after a president directed a physical assault on Congress, one that could well have cost the lives of elected officials and, in a worst case scenario, could have killed the vice president and other officials in the direct line of succession to the presidency, the Republicans by and large refuse to expel Trump from office.  Even as many Republicans in Congress seem genuinely disturbed by the president’s actions, and willing to criticize the president’s behavior, they simply can’t bring themselves to take the logical, necessary next steps to protect the nation against a president who constitutes an immediate and pressing danger to us all.  It is simply not believable that congressional Republicans could not convince Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment,  or figure out a combination of carrots and sticks to prompt his resignation.  A strong case can be made that such inaction means that every Republican refusing to do their duty is now complicit in Trump’s coup attempt — an attempt that, though failed at the moment, should be considered a sort of chronic condition so long as the president remains in office.  We simply cannot trust such a man to not try again in the coming days.

The problem for the Democrats is that, were they to speak truthfully about the support of Trump’s coup attempt by congressional Republicans, they would risk those Republicans closing ranks around Trump, and the Republicans accusing the Democrats of turning this into a “partisan” fight - indeed, they are already attacking the Democrats of promoting “division” by their mere attempts to reign in a lawless president.  Yet I would argue that any attempt to impeach Trump without acknowledging GOP complicity risks allowing the GOP off the hook, identifying Trump as the main problem.  And so what should be a non-partisan project of driving Trump from office is inevitably a partisan struggle — because the GOP is implicated in his actions (and also, very, very importantly, doesn’t want to piss off his base in forcing him from office).

With so many in the GOP still loyal to Trump, or unwilling to fully admit the seriousness of his actions that implicate themselves, the nation is left in a deeply dangerous place until January 20, with a lawless and psychopathic president still plotting to overthrow American democracy, and Republicans effectively turning Democratic-led efforts to reign him in as a partisan ploy.  The Democrats must put fetishization of bipartisanship aside, and make clear to the public both that the GOP is blocking removal of Donald Trump, and bears responsibility for his future, inevitable attempts to remain in office (some, like Representative Adam Schiff, are beginning to make this case).

But the inability to punish Trump and his enablers at this moment of maximum danger means it’s all the more important to make sure they pay a price once Joe Biden assumes the presidency.  As commentators like Zeynep Tufecki have been saying, this failed coup is now effectively a test run for a better-organized, successful attempt, and we need to learn from this one to make sure future ones are deterred.  Democrats will not be able to avoid a full-scale effort to hold GOP elected officials accountable for their enabling of Donald Trump’s war on America, or they risk bringing a worse attempt on us all.

End This Outlaw Presidency Now

January 6 was a horrifying day for America, but the one silver lining I’ll start with is that, for once in the past four years, there seems to be broad agreement among politicians and citizens that it was in fact horrifying.  No matter that Trump’s full embrace of violence to get his way was entirely predictable and long-telegraphed —the assault and occupation of the Capitol building by pro-Trump extremists incited by the president was a declaration of war against the nation that few can deny.

This is a situation in which figuring out all the details of what exactly happened needs to take back seat to quick and decisive action to remove Trump from power.  In inciting rioters to assault Congress, he both sought to block the certification of his defeat by Joe Biden, and to physically assault the legislative branch of government.  If this isn’t treason and sedition, then nothing is.

This whole catastrophe has been shot through with a dangerous and at times surreal inability for many to comprehend the reality of the moment.  This may have been exemplified by Joe Biden’s stern calls yesterday for Donald Trump to tell the insurrectionists to stand down.  While this made sense on its face, it made no sense given the logic of events.  Trump was the one who incited this attack, and unsurprisingly his taped statement released soon afterward made a mockery of Biden’s request (asking the rioters to be peaceful and go home after they had already accomplished their disruptive purpose, telling them that he loved them).

But a more serious contradiction could be found in the attitude of Republicans senators and representatives who quickly denounced the attack, after so many had supported not just Trump’s recent attacks on the election results, but his varied and continuous lawlessness throughout his entire presidency.  Whether or not Trump acted in coordination with any members of Congress in his violent plans, the GOP bears damning responsibility for allowing this monster to remain in power through his entire term.

This in turn led to the bizarre spectacle of Democrats and Republicans making a show of not being cowed by the attackers, and completing the presidential vote certification that evening (Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow had a great exchange that captured the oddity of members of both parties wanting to “move on” mere hours after the violent assault on the Capitol).  Republicans cannot make false claims that the election was rigged, and then profess shock when the president who promulgates these lies acts as if they have provided him with an excuse to violently overthrow American democracy.  The lack of remorse among the GOP was signaled loud and clear: even after the attack, eight senators and 139 representatives ended up voting against accepting the election results, and so declared themselves participants in sedition.

While there are understandable and even compelling reasons for displays of national unity right in the aftermath of this horror show, such displays are counterproductive if they let off the hook those who bear responsibility for the events of January 6.  While I can see the reasoning among Democrats in not wanting to escalate matters by turning this event immediately into a wholesale indictment of Republican complicity in the Trump presidency, failing to hold his enablers to account threatens to become its own form of complicity.  We can see this playing out now in the clearly urgent discussions in Congress as to whether and how to remove Trump from office in the coming days.  House members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are calling for his impeachment, while today Senator Chuck Schumer said the 25th Amendment should be used to end this presidency.  I have seen reasonable arguments that impeachment would take longer than acting under the 25th Amendment, but the latter route also, quite significantly, places the onus on the Republican Party to clean up the Trump mess.  Trump’s cabinet members would have to invoke the act, but surely would not do so without consultation with GOP congressional leaders.

Yet, even in light of yesterday’s events, this seems like only the remotest of possibilities.  Republican officials fear the wrath of Trump supporters, and it seems they’d rather risk harm to the nation in the coming weeks than harm to their electoral prospects by angering the Republican base.  What seems more realistic is GOP and Democratic leaders coming to some sort of tacit understanding to sideline Trump for his remaining days in office.  This would be an unfortunate ducking of the threat that Donald Trump poses to the nation so long as he remains in his office, and open the door to allowing him to escape any punishment for his treasonous behavior after he leaves office.

I would also argue there’s something profoundly offensive and unsettling in the Democrats pressing the GOP to “do the right thing” via the 25th Amendment at the very tail end of Trump’s presidency, after he has already done so much damage with only the barest whimper of resistance.  The idea that Republicans might claim credit for stopping Trump is nauseating, a whitewash of their years of enabling his horror show of a presidency. 

Speaking of holding people responsible, there’s also a desperate need to suss out how the white nationalist mob so easily breached the Capitol’s defenses.  I have seen some early reporting that there was a wholesale failure across multiple agencies to prepare for the rioters, who had signaled their intentions and received encouragement from the president well ahead of time.  What is very clear, though, is that the insurrectionists were treated with kid gloves in comparison to how many police departments across the nation treated peaceful civil rights protestors this summer.  As observers like Bree Newsome Bass have noted, this was a spectacle of white privilege and violence, and a demonstration that white supremacism is at the heart of the Trump-GOP challenge to American democracy.  The attackers seemed not to fear the repercussions of their actions, and the Capitol police made good on this by arresting only 50-some rioters out of the thousands who participated.  The idea that Trump supporters could attack the Capitol and disrupt American government, yet walk away largely unpunished, is to me as unsettling as the deranged president’s incitement of their actions.  It is not simply as if, but exactly like our democracy not being able to defend itself against its clear enemies.  Those who participated must be tracked down and brought to justice; any law enforcement found to have been derelict in their duty need to be relieved of their jobs and punished to the greatest extent possible.  The rule of law cannot be maintained while allowing clearly lawless and anti-democratic assaults to go unanswered.

Draw the Line

Today’s news of a call between President Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, in which the president suggested that the latter needed to find the votes in Georgia that would allow him to win the already-decided election, is only the latest reason why the Democratic Party cannot continue to behave as if the GOP is fully committed to the constitution or the rule of law.  The president’s words, captured in a recording obtained by the Washington Post, are hardly an isolated incident, but are of a piece with his efforts long before November to subvert the election results — efforts that have been either actively abetted or tacitly approved by the great majority of Republican senators and representatives.

A few days from now, on January 6, a dozen GOP senators and 140 representatives plan to challenge the final results of the electoral college vote, in an act of sedition against the November election results exceeded only by the secession of southern states at the start of the Civil War.  It is highly likely that all of them fully understand that the president lost the election fair and square; it is just as likely that they see this effort as a necessary step in undermining future presidential elections that the GOP, having won the popular vote just once in the past 32 years, is quite likely to again lose.  As historian and expert on authoritarianism Timothy Snyder writes, “A faith-based challenge to a democratic election amounts to an attempt to undo democracy itself.”

The president’s recorded call, and the conspiracy among so many elected Republicans to play along with the false claims of election fraud to which the president clings like a survivor hanging on to the debris of a sinking ship, are parts of the same corrupt whole.  Large swathes of the Republican Party have made clear their open opposition to democracy by these false claims of election fraud.  These allegations are the thinnest of covers for simply refusing to recognize the presidential election results.  In doing so, even if their current efforts fail, they are working to convince millions of Republican voters, and potentially millions of other Americans, that they, too, should not accept the election results. In doing so, they are actively seeking to re-write the rules of our political system so that conspiracy and propaganda take the places of free and fair elections.

In pushing against the boundaries of American politics, they pose an enormous danger to the country. Too many Democrats, including President-elect Biden, seem to think that if they hold their fire, the GOP will return to a more democracy-friendly stance after Biden is sworn in.  But this dismisses the reality that the attack on democracy is happening now, that in these days of interregnum the GOP is advancing its anti-democratic cause at little cost to itself.  This passive stance makes no sense, either for the good of the country or the good of the Democratic Party.  What’s more, by asserting rules that fly in the face of our common understanding of American democracy, Republicans have also made themselves politically vulnerable.  The Democrats should be absolutely crucifying the GOP for its daily descent into authoritarianism; yet they often appear desperate to avoid a fight that is already upon them.  The GOP has already declared war on them and our democracy.  Pretending otherwise doesn’t change the reality, it only means that the Democrats are failing to do their duty.  Talk of healing and finding common ground are meaningless when your opponents are actively recruiting millions of American to take their side in a war against democracy.

The potential gains of a more aggressive push-back against the GOP, and the folly of not doing so, could not be clearer in the juxtaposition of the president’s treasonous Georgia phone call and the determination of so many GOP senators and representatives to contest the electoral college results.  The president has been caught on tape engaging in an impeachable effort to cheat his way to election victory; this, after weeks of claiming that the Democrats are the ones who did the cheating.  All those GOP elected officials have already committed themselves to Trump’s side and the treasonous idea that the president was actually re-elected; and now we have irrefutable evidence that he is the cheater, which means they have now committed themselves to the president’s cause of cheating to overthrow the election results. In such a cut-and-dried scenario, in which the GOP has essentially built the gallows and measured out the rope for its own public hanging, why would the opposition party not ensure that the Republicans pay a maximal price in public opinion for such treasonous behavior?  What bizarre definition of national unity requires Democrats to stand down when these congressional Republicans have exposed themselves not simply as frauds, but as traitorous fools?

All Unquiet on the Western Front, Part III

Two recent articles from The New York Times continue the newspaper’s documentation of a sinister and dangerous infiltration of German security forces by far-right extremist networks.  As I wrote when I flagged the first of these reports earlier this year, the rise of Nazi-adjacent adherents inside the German armed forces is a nauseating development, almost the stuff of dystopian science fiction.  But as I’ll get into a little later, what’s going on in Germany is of urgent importance to Americans, and more of us need to be paying attention to these disturbing events.

While earlier reporting from the Times concentrated on far-right elements in the German military, particularly in its elite KSK commando units, a piece from last week explores the growing evidence of a widespread extremist presence in the nation’s police forces.  A multiplicity of chat groups populated by policemen share racist, antisemitic, and anti-Muslim content, such as “images of Hitler, memes of a refugee in a gas chamber and the shooting of a Black man.”  As with the networks uncovered in the ranks of the German army, some adherents appear to be moving beyond rhetoric to plans for action: a few weeks ago, raids on a “violent far-right chat” group resulted in recovery of ammunition from the homes of two officers.  More concretely, police computer records have been used to pull up data on prominent Germans of foreign ancestry, who subsequently experienced threats to their lives.  These targets include “a defense lawyer of Turkish descent who specializes in Islamist terrorism cases” and a Turkish-German comedian.

Particularly alarming is that the German police were reformed after World War II specifically to prevent their militarization and politicization, as had occurred under Nazism.  The Times notes that “cadets across the country are now taught in unsparing detail about the shameful legacy of policing under the Nazis — and how it informs the mission and institution of policing today.”  That such radicalization is occurring despite such conscious efforts to head it off for literally decades is deeply unsettling.  The article goes on to note that some Germans “fear that the infiltration of police ranks poses special dangers for Germany, not least a creeping subversion of state institutions that are supposed to serve and protect the public.”

This crisis among Germany’s police is not occurring in a vacuum, but parallels the rise of right-wing politicians and politics in the country.  Indeed, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, or AfD, has “aggressively courted” the police and military; the Times observes that “penetrating state institutions, especially those with guns has been part of the party’s strategy from the start.”  More than this, some elements of the AfD appear to be encouraging German security forces to engage in outright treason against the German state: the head of the AfD in the German state of Thuringia “has repeatedly appealed to police officers and intelligence agents to resist the orders of the government, which he calls ‘the real enemies of democracy and freedom.’”  (Indeed, in a shocking appraisal of the AfD’s subversiveness, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency “considers the AfD so dangerous that it may place the entire party under observation”).

A second Times article published yesterday centers on a German army officer who, in addition to participating in far-right groups, created a false immigrant identity for himself as part of a scheme to, as German prosecutors allege, “carry out one or several assassinations that could be blamed on his refugee alter ego and set off enough civil unrest to bring down the Federal Republic of Germany.”  The officer, identified in court documents as “Franco A.,” was arrested in 2017, but a trial will finally happen early next year; the Times reporter, Katrin Bennhold, spent many hours interviewing Franco A. for the article, and presents his story as emblematic of “the tale of today’s two Germanys”:

One was born of its defeat in World War II and reared by a liberal consensus that for decades rejected nationalism and schooled its citizens in contrition. That Germany is giving way to a more unsettled nation as its wartime history recedes and a long-dormant far right rousts itself in opposition to a diversifying society. Germany’s postwar consensus teeters in the balance.

The account of Franco A.’s life and the crimes of which he’s been accused read like a combination spy novel-psychological thriller (it occurs to me that had John Le Carré not passed away this year, his next novel might well have been about the right-wing presence in Germany’s armed forces).  Franco A. has his own idiosyncratic story, but it offers important potential clues to the mindset of other Germans who have turned their backs of German democracy in the name of preserving or saving what they see as a pure German-ness under assault by immigrants and others (one telling detail is that Franco himself is hardly a pure German, having an Italian father who abandoned him as a toddler; in an act of linguistic rebellion, Franco A calls him his “producer” rather than his father).  It also offers examples of a German problem that has accompanied and abetted right-wing expansion in the military: a general refusal by higher-ups and politicians to acknowledge it’s actually happening.  For instance, after Franco A. wrote a master’s thesis that described immigration as “genocide” and the Old Testament as “a blueprint for Jews to gain global dominance,” he suffered no consequences, while his extremist views were not communicated to military counterintelligence, “whose remit is to monitor extremism in the armed forces.”

Every time I read about the rise of the right-wing in Germany, and in particular in its security services, I’m hit by a powerful sense of transgression, of breaking taboos.  The inevitable background is Nazism and the holocaust, dictatorship and the demonization of the Jews.  At a gut level, the idea that German policemen or soldiers would look at the Nazis and find inspiration goes beyond appalling, into a basic affront against the supposition that we live in a world capable of moral and political progress.  It is very difficult, viscerally, not to view these developments, and these men, through a prism of good and evil.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this perspective, but it doesn’t necessarily help us understand why this is happening, and just as importantly, how it can best be countered and reversed.  A growing, violent conspiracy to overthrow the German government isn’t just a threat to Germany — it’s a threat to the United States.  Germany is arguably our most important ally, a lynchpin of our NATO alliance and a leader of democracy in Europe (particularly now that the United Kingdom has shirked its international responsibilities and ideals in the name of a self-defeating hyper-nationalism).  Beyond this, the persistence of German democracy represents the best of America’s positive role in the world, a constitutional government cultivated and protected by prior generations of Americans, and part of a worldwide fabric of liberal democracy that helps keep our own democracy safe.  It’s a sign of the depth of our own internal conflicts, myopia to the larger world, and alienation from our own history, that the rise of the far-right in Germany’s armed forces and police isn’t a much bigger story in the U.S.

Given the bottomless depravity of Germany’s Nazi past, and how strongly the country has worked to educate its citizenry about it, it seems that the very taboo nature of Nazism, or Nazi-adjacent ideas like German racial purity and the subversive threat of outsiders, carries a perverse inherent appeal to certain people, the lure of the forbidden.  But what of the substance of the concerns that the right-wing soldiers and police officers express, that they fear Germany is being overrun by immigrants and must act to protect the country, even if that means destroying its democracy through treason and violence, acting like the very terrorists they claim many of the immigrants are?

One clue that immigration alone may not be the whole story is a fact that becomes glaring after reading so many of these articles: the extremist networks in the military and police aren’t just right-wing, they’re utterly male networks, to the point that I have yet to see mention of a single woman who participated in the chat groups or armed plots.  This sense of repressed and soured male energy seems to have intersected with Germany’s restrictions on military involvement since World War II; there is a distinct sense of men play-acting fantasies in a world closed to women, where they can construct narratives of dominance and violent redemption safe from basic reality checks.

It is to the point that I begin to wonder if immigration, while certainly a real spur to their radicalism, isn’t also acting as a cover for more profound causes rooted in what some would describe as “toxic masculinity.”  After all, does it really make any sort of logical sense that a million Middle Eastern immigrants allowed into the country in response to the Syrian refugee crisis would really overwhelm and destroy a nation of 80 million?  And a related question haunts not just German but other western right-wing movements: if the “pure” national cultures they are trying to protect are so great, how can it be that they’re so easily threatened by a few brown-skinned people?  Isn’t it likelier, given the greatness of German culture, that this minority would assimilate to the über-appealing German culture and values? Why are violence and dominance seen as the only viable resolutions to this supposed crisis?

These recent Times articles got me thinking in particular of this Amanda Marcotte essay about the role of sexism and patriarchy in authoritarian movements, and of this more recent piece by David Futrelle.  Among other things, Marcotte argues that male fears of rising female power are a larger component of growing authoritarianism around the world than is generally thought.  Meanwhile, Futrelle actually draws a direct link between white men’s fears of losing their privileged societal position to women, on the one hand, and conspiracy theories that immigration by brown-skinned men in particular will challenge their sexual primacy while resulting in mixed-race babies who will effectively replace the white population (the so-called “white genocide”).  It is hard to look at Germany and not think some less articulated force along such lines is at play.  After all, this is not the Germany of the 1920’s and early 1930’s.  The economy is not in shambles.  The country is not paying war reparations.  There is not massive political instability.  Yet, these men with guns feel massively insecure, as if their place in society were not at all assured, despite the fact that they occupy positions of great responsibility, power, and authority. To be blunt about it: these are the German men entrusted to carry guns and defend the nation, yet in a grotesque process of both mission creep and mission shrink, they may now confuse perceived threats to themselves with threats to the homeland.

This is why, despite the nightmarish aspects of this right-wing Teutonic menace, I wonder if a great part of defeating it will be to expose it to sunlight, to the interrogation of basic morality and facts.  This is not to say it should be take lightly — right-wing extremists have already killed numerous of immigrants in recent years, and there is no reason to think that plots disrupted by German authorities wouldn’t have otherwise arrived at their violent conclusions.  Hundreds or thousands of well-armed men dreaming and plotting of a “Day X” when their will to violence overturns the democratic order must be taken seriously.  But just as the German government has made an enormous mistake in not taking these plots seriously in the past, they are both absurd and ominous enough that their uncovering and publicizing now might spark a backlash among the large majority of Germans repelled by their deadly schemes.

GOP State Senator Accuses Oregon Democrats of Being at War With. . . God?

An outburst by a state senator from Roseburg last week reminds us that Oregon Republicans are having a lot of trouble taking the reality of the coronavirus pandemic seriously.  The state GOP as a whole has been eager to critique and roll back the various restrictions Governor Kate Brown has put in place, trying to position themselves as the only party that cares about the economy even if it means opposing necessary, life-saving measures.  The party also contains its share of outright coronavirus deniers, like Clackamas County Commissioner Tootie Smith, who last month publicly vowed to host a maskless and outsized Thanksgiving in a bold attempt to both insult and endanger the voters who put her in office.  Now Senator Dallas Heard has taken up the flag of rebellion against common sense, dramatically removing his mask in the state capitol building last week to emphasize his resistance to masking requirements in the legislature.  In demonstrating contempt for his fellow legislators and basic public health measures, and by grandstanding in a way that ensured his contempt would catch media attention, Heard gives aid and comfort to those denying the seriousness of this pandemic and the necessity of public health measures to combat it.  In doing so, he betrays the public trust.

Adding to the insanity, Heard indicated that he would have worn the mask if he had simply been asked to, “but you commanded it, and therefore I declare my right to protest against your false authority.”  The “false authority” he references is the ability of the state senate to set rules for the safety of its members, which doesn’t seem like a false authority at all.  But in other remarks, we get a stronger sense of where Heard is coming from:

Heard argued that state lawmakers and Gov. Kate Brown’s decision to close the Capitol to the public and to require masks was an “intimidation of the people and children of God.”

“This is His kingdom, not ours,” Heard said during the morning session. “The days of your unchecked assault against our freedoms and His children is over. You have oppressed the free peoples of Oregon.”

You don’t have to dig too deep to reach the theocratic mindset behind Heard’s remarks, or the way he brings it to bear against the democratic basics of Oregon government.  From Heard’s perspective, Democratic legislators have trespassed against God’s will through the sin of legislating.  Heard seems to suggest that Democratic lawmakers, like earthly minions of Satan, are thus making war on God himself, engaging in an “unchecked assault against our freedoms and His children.”

Thankfully, though, whatever their religious beliefs, an overwhelming number of Oregonians believe that the laws of the land should be made by men and women, not by those claiming to speak for their personal God.  Claiming otherwise is to advocate for a theocratic approach to government that is at itself at war with American democracy, the rule of law, and the very basic American principle of religious tolerance whereby no one gets to impose their beliefs on the rest of us.

Heard may be an outlier among Republican state representatives in his willingness to exploit religious passions and divisions for partisan gain, but his attempts to use the covid pandemic as a cudgel against Democrats reflects a broader GOP strategy in the state.  The Oregonian reports that House Republican Leader Christine Drazan tried to link the coronavirus restrictions in the state Capitol —which included closing the building to the public — to Democratic legislators’ “closed meetings and backroom deals.”  It’s slander to suggest that health measures are simply part of a Democratic plan to illicitly pass legislation, but this high-ranking Republican went there, claiming that,  “As Oregonians who were locked out of the building, protested and demanded their rightful place in the halls of government, democrat leaders locked the minority party out of the lawmaking process inside the building.”  But as Drazan should know as a state representative, in a democracy, the party with more votes does in fact have the right to pass laws on behalf of the majority that elected it.  Conflating public health measures with alleged Democratic perfidy isn’t just cynical, but threatens to undermine public trust in health measures for the sake of partisan gain. 

Ironically, in their appeals to theocracy and conspiracy theories about public health measures, both Heard and Drazan remind us why Oregon Republicans are in fact not just a minority party, but a dwindling minority party, in the state.  When your response to your own unpopularity is to insult democracy and sow doubt about public health measures in order to inflame the fears and prejudices of your shrinking base, you remind all Oregonians of how right most of us have been to withhold our votes from a party so undeserving of the public trust.

Panic Party

If you have managed to pay even moderate attention to U.S. politics since the election, and not made the reasonable choice to take a time-out after the deeply exhausting November elections, you have probably heard of how some Democrats are voicing disappointment in the overall results despite Joe Biden’s decisive popular vote victory.  The Democrats lost seats in the House, lost Senate races they were confident they would win, and failed to make many gains in state house races across the country.  In some places, Democrats lost ground with white working class voters despite those very workers failing to benefit under President Trump; received a smaller share of Latino votes than expected; and saw the president outperform his previous urban vote share.

Such results were certainly below many Democrats’ expectations, and require study and debate to figure out the reasons for the distance between hope and reality.  But a report in the Washington Post describes how some in the Democratic Party are prematurely converting these disappointments into portents of coming disaster:

Those warning signs have dampened the celebratory mood among Democrats enthusiastic about dispatching Trump. Party strategists now speak privately with a sense of gloom and publicly with a tone of concern as the election results become clearer.

They worry about the potential emergence of a mostly male and increasingly interracial working-class coalition for Republicans that will cut into the demographic advantages Democrats had long counted on. They speculate that the tremendous Democratic gains in the suburbs during the Trump years might fade when he leaves office. And they fret that their inability to make inroads in more rural areas could forestall anything but the most narrow Senate majority in the future.

While the challenges and threats are hardly figments of their imagination, my 10,000-foot-view on the fears expressed by Democratic strategists in this article and elsewhere is that they trace back to the fact that American politics is in a time of both conflict and transition not seen for perhaps half a century.  Such a scenario would be particularly unsettling to those who have spent much of their professional careers with a more static and glacially-paced internal model of how American politics operates.  For instance, while hardly all Democrats believe that demographic changes will eventually deliver greater and greater political power to Democrats, I do think that many, if not most Democrats, have assumed such trends as part of their overall understanding of American politics.  Even if you only have this trend as one of your reference points, it is admittedly unsettling to see elections results suggesting, for instance, that Latino voters not only aren’t automatically going to vote for Democrats in decisive numbers, but that they also voted for a president who many Democrats think couldn’t have been clearer in his contempt towards Latinos and other minorities.

I think the dominant undercurrent of the Post article is the perceived tension between a Democratic Party that appeals to minority voters but that can also appeal to white voters.  This tension, created in large part by demographic changes that are steadily reducing white people’s majority status in the country, is unavoidable for the party, and is indeed a fault line in American society and politics, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s ability to leverage white fears into the first white supremacist presidency of the modern era.  

I also think that some Democrats have had unrealistic expectations of what it’s going to take, and how long it’s going to take, to bring white working-class voters back into the Democratic Party after a schism between this voting block and the party that has been going on, and grown, for literally decades.  Many of these voters live in conservative news bubbles that subject them to undisguised propaganda, including reinforcing perceptions that their economic and status challenges in life are due to non-whites taking over the country.  From this perspective, even no-brainer Democratic “messaging” ideas like running ads where rural whites make appeals to rural whites must fight against deeply-established perceptions that the Democrats don’t care about white or working people.  And to dismiss Donald Trump’s role in legitimizing white supremacist politics among millions of voters, or to think that this Klan-robed genie can be stuffed back in the bottle after a single election cycle, only increases the sense of disappointment when white voters fail to respond sufficiently to Democrats’ messaging on economic issues.

I think Democrats who are panicking at election results would be well-served by taking a step back and looking at the big picture.  Democrats won the presidency against an incumbent president, not an easy feat, particularly when the incumbent worked nonstop during the election to subvert the American people’s faith that voting can make a difference.  The Democrats lost seats, but held the House.  The Senate was always going to be difficult to win, given its over-representation of white, rural (i.e., GOP-leaning) states — and there is still a chance that they will win the run-offs in Georgia and control the Senate after all.

Getting too deep into the nitty-gritty of the election results also risks losing sight of the fact that, through vote suppression and gerrymandering, the GOP has rigged elections to give them a built-in advantage.  In states like North Carolina and Michigan, the number of Democrats elected to the House are not in proportion to the size of the Democrats’ vote.  Likewise, agonizing over the Senate, while understandable, is self-defeating when Democrats ignore the fact that Democratic candidate for Senate won many millions more votes than did GOP candidates.  To internalize these factors as Democratic failures, rather than as decisive reasons to rally the American people to the party against an authoritarian GOP in future elections, is truly self-defeating.

What I am getting at is that worried Democrats need to have the courage of their convictions.  If you believe that major elements of the Democratic agenda are the right ones for America, then you need to have faith that you can persuade people of them.  Thinking about the Latino vote presents a major case of how a little perspective might help.  While there is nothing pre-ordained about a diverse group of people — both immigrants and natural-born citizens, with roots in dozens of countries with a broad range of cultures and politics — overwhelmingly choosing to vote for Democrats, the Democrats have surely appealed to many of these voters by being a party that fights far more strongly for racial equality and immigrant rights than the GOP.  At the same time, it is not at all wild that many Latino voters might choose to vote for the GOP — for instance, because they oppose abortion or don’t agree with amnesty for undocumented immigrants when they themselves followed the letter of the law in coming to the United States.  Clearly the Democrats have made some stupid, unforced errors in too often treating Latinos as a monolithic voting block that has no choice but to vote for Democrats; but nothing is stopping the Democrats from learning from their mistakes and redoubling their efforts to win Latino voters based on the fact that on multiple fronts, the Democrats will work to improve their lives in ways that the GOP would never do.

The Post article talks to strategists who think the Democrats need to communicate in more authentic ways to voters (particularly white voters) about their economic needs.  As the Ohio state Democratic chairman argues, “We need to go right into these small towns and tell them what the Democratic agenda is for them and why it will lift them.  Until we do that, we will be on defense.”  And Democratic Representative Tim Ryan tells the Post that the “Democratic brand [. . .] is completely disconnected from workers,” with the Post noting that Ryan “argues for a far more targeted economic message, promising a tax cut for the middle class, infrastructure spending and a new manufacturing agenda.”

But even more important than straight talk is actually delivering economic results.  The Democrats can already rightly make the case that the last two Republican presidents have created economic disasters; but what they also have to do is actually reverse those disasters and improve all Americans’ lives.  Working to deliver substantial, concrete results to ordinary Americans is the existential requirement for Democrats right now.  Alongside strengthening our voting systems to roll back Republican sabotage of elections and voting rights, there really is no other way forward.  Fussing and worrying about small shifts in voting preferences, and acting as if Democrats have no deep appeal or ability to persuade Americans, is a foolish distraction from what will truly decide the fate of the Democrats and the direction of American politics over the coming years.

The Battle for Democracy: Telling It Like It Is

Earlier this week, I took a first stab at what I think the Democrats need to do to start rolling back the GOP’s war on democracy. Today, I wanted to dig deeper into how the Democrats can more accurately articulate the nature of this fight, both to themselves and to the American public. As a starting point, I wanted to flag this recent post over at The Editorial Board, where John Stoehr notes recent Democratic rhetoric that suggest growing recognition that the party must explicitly call out the treasonous behavior of the GOP in working to overturn the 2020 election results.

First, late last week, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he said that:

The most serious attempt to overthrow our democracy in the history of this country is underway. Those who are pushing to make President Trump president for a second term no matter the outcome of the election are engaged in a treachery against their nation. You cannot at the same time love America and hate democracy. But as we speak, a whole lot of flag-waving Republicans are nakedly trying to invalidate millions of legal votes, because that is the only way that they can make Donald Trump president again. It is the only way … because he didn’t win.

Stoehr also relays similar remarks by Representative Adam Schiff from last Friday.  In reference to the fact that so many Republicans were willing to join a lawsuit to throw out millions of votes for Joe Biden, Schiff remarked that:

The remedy is to make the case to the American people that they are being betrayed. The Republicans said they stood for something. As it turns out, they don’t stand for anything. Helping the country see how close we are coming to losing our democracy and why it’s worth fighting for. I think we all thought democracy was self-effectuating, that we could count on the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice on its own. We have learned we have to fight for it every day.

I don’t think there’s much question that these are fighting words from both Murphy and Schiff; the bigger question is whether they portend the beginning of a broader Democratic strategy of articulating the truth about how very far the GOP has gone in rejecting majority rule and the rule of law in favor of a politics of doing anything to win.  This Monday, though, we received some more evidence that Democrats are at least increasingly willing to speak explicitly of the GOP’s authoritarian turn, as Joe Biden’s speech following his official Electoral College victory included explicit and damning remarks about the GOP efforts to overturn the election:

Even more stunning, 17 Republican Attorneys General, and 126 Republican members of the Congress, actually, they actually signed onto a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas. That lawsuit asked the United States Supreme Court to reject the certified vote counts in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This legal maneuver was an effort by elected officials and one group of states to try to get the Supreme Court to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans in other states. And to hand the presidency to a candidate who lost the Electoral College, lost the popular vote, and lost each and every one of the states whose votes they were trying to reverse.

It’s a position so extreme, we’ve never seen it before. And position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution. Thankfully, a unanimous Supreme Court immediately and completely rejected this effort. The Court sent a clear signal to President Trump that they would be no part of an unprecedented assault on our democracy. Every single avenue was made available to President Trump to contest the results. He took full advantage of each and every one of those avenues.

At a minimum, by including these passages, Joe Biden clearly wanted the historical record to include his own recognition that the events of the past five weeks were unprecedented in American history, and that the Republicans merit condemnation.  But Biden must also have been aware that the Republicans would not just interpret this as chastisement for prior behavior, but treat it as a provocation and grounds to accuse Biden of poisoning the waters with partisan rhetoric even before he’s sworn in.  Knowing this, it’s promising that Biden still forged ahead, and thought the risk was important enough to publicly assert that the Republicans have crossed a line that can’t be ignored in the name of bipartisanship.

Yet, based on what we know of Biden’s political history, together with reports of his efforts to reach out to Republican senators before he takes office, I think it’s safe to say that the president-elect at least holds out some hope that the extremism that has increasingly characterized the GOP will moderate once Trump is out of office (indeed, it’s safe to say this because Biden himself has said so!).  And so I don’t expect Biden to leverage his victory remarks into a full-on campaign of labeling the GOP as the party of authoritarianism and anti-democracy in the coming weeks.  His initial olive branch to the GOP also makes me skeptical that many other Democrats will offer such critiques at the risk of falling afoul of Biden’s gentler strategy, and also now that Biden’s victory has been secured beyond the reach of Republican sabotage.  In this light, the pessimist in me sees Murphy’s and Schiff’s remarks as one-offs, a matter of setting the record straight at this moment in time.

One notable thing about Murphy and Schiff’s remarks is that it’s obvious they didn’t make them lightly.  Another is that they don’t simply throw around terms like “treachery” and the idea that the American people “are being betrayed” without making crystal clear what behavior requires such harsh terminology.  I think Murphy’s speech quite economically and effectively lays out its case, which might be reduced to, “If a politician works to keep Trump in office even though he lost the election, that politician is engaging in treason.”  Not only is the logic sound, the rhetoric fits the level of the offense.

I think it will become increasingly clear in the next few years, as the Republicans double down on their effort to preserve minority rule, and we learn of the full extent of the statutory and political crimes of the Trump administration, that the Democrats pulled their rhetorical punches for far too long against a GOP political leadership that has en masse abandoned our democracy.  The one saving grace I see is that you cannot say that the Democrats have cheapened the language of patriotism and treason by overusing it; in this way, they have at least preserved its potential to have some effect. 

More than any other political commentator I follow, Stoehr has articulated a case for calling out the GOP on its treasonous actions during the Trump administration, while elaborating on the many ways the GOP has broken faith with American democracy and the basic tenets of patriotism such that it merits such damning rhetoric.  Apart from the visceral satisfaction of having someone describe the GOP’s depraved behavior with the appropriate language, I’ve taken Stoehr’s broader point to be that you can’t persuade voters of how badly awry the GOP has gone unless you’re able to describe it accurately.  In this case, “treasonous,” “seditious,” or “betrayal” are words that help convey the full import and danger of the Republican Party’s war on democracy that a phrase like “war on democracy”, or even a paragraphs-long elaboration of what this war on democracy entails, cannot do on their own.

But beyond this, the more important thing is not simply to use the appropriate rhetoric, but to act against the offenses that call for such language.  If the GOP has behaved in a way that’s treasonous, such as by trying to throw out election results, then the Democrats need not just to describe it accurately, but to pair their rhetoric with meaningful action that puts a stop to future attempts to throw out election results.  In this case, such actions include the necessity of pushing through new federal voting reforms that make it near-impossible for states to restrict the voting rights of American citizens; ending the catastrophic Electoral College; and ensuring that the process of counting and certifying votes is further insulated from partisan interference and violent intimidation by would-be insurrectionists.

So another way of understanding the proper use of charged language like “treason” and “betrayal” — language that, not incidentally, has been abused by the right as a rhetorical bludgeon against Democrats for many, many years — is that it’s a key part of setting and maintaining the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable in a democracy.  Such boundaries are absolutely necessary for our democracy to survive, and the current fight over what they are, or whether they should even exist, is tightly bound up with the question of when it’s proper to use terms like “treason.”

It’s no coincidence that Democratic willingness to finally use such language is occurring at the same time that the Republicans are engaging in behavior that truly merits it.  Yet the clear inertia that the Democrats must overcome in order to use it points to a weakening or ambiguity of such language that itself suggests a long-term crisis of our democracy.  After all, “treason” as a word and as a concept is only powerful if enough people agree to what it means, or agree that what it means matters.  Certainly in comparison with Republican politicians, Democrats don’t generally employ language that inflames and divides, which is certainly a risk when you’re saying that the Republicans have betrayed their country — an idea that GOP politicians and most GOP voters are sure to reject out of hand.  But Democrats are also, I think, wary of using such language when it might not even be meaningful to their own base of voters.

But this brings us to a few points that persuade me that for Democrats, it is well worth taking the risk in escalating their rhetoric against the GOP.  First, given the extreme circumstances we have reached, where the GOP has placed voter suppression and now outright rejection of election results at the heart of its electoral strategy, the Democrats have no choice but to make such outlandish and anti-democratic behavior the center of their own case against the GOP.  Another way to put this is that the Democrats must make such arguments in order to persuade people that these arguments are correct.  In other words, asserting that the GOP is essentially committing treachery against the nation is a way of making people aware that they must make a choice between democracy and authoritarianism (to borrow another insight from Stoehr), and that the Democrats stand for democracy.  Using such language alongside accurate, good-faith descriptions of why such language is called for seems to me a necessary piece of re-establishing what is and is not considered acceptable in our democracy — which is another way of saying re-establishing our democracy itself.

One main challenge for Democrats is that the GOP continues to hide behind a veil of plausible deniability, claiming fealty to democracy while opposing it in action.  Going on the attack, both rhetorically and substantively, serves to rip away that veil.  You can already see this happening.  In Georgia, some politicians now want to pass a law that would allow state legislators to choose a presidential candidate even if that candidate didn’t win the majority of votes.  There is simply no definition of contemporary American democracy that involves politicians substituting their choice of president for the will of the voters; and yet Republican politicians are now willing to go there!  On a grander scale, this is exactly what has happened in the wake of the 2020 election.  The Democrats played by the rules of democracy, mobilizing voters to win the election; the GOP, led by Donald Trump, rejected that victory, making their opposition to democracy explicit.  As dangerous as this GOP behavior is, there is absolutely no benefit in Democrats not describing it for what it is.

It’s also important to understand that escalated rhetoric about the Republican’s anti-democratic behavior in electoral politics will be most effective when coupled with a similar line of attack against the GOP’s other policies.  I want to be clear: the GOP’s war on democracy is damning enough.  But its accompanying agenda of tax cuts for the rich, indifference to poverty, denial of global warming, demonization of immigrants, protection of racist policing, and opposition to public healthcare even in the face of a pandemic demonstrate that its opposition to the good of the majority runs far beyond its sabotage of the mechanisms of voting.  For instance, Paul Waldman makes the case for applying the same escalated rhetoric we’ve been discussing to the GOP’s economic obstructionism:

[Democrats] need to make clear that Republicans want Biden’s presidency to fail, and to make it happen they’re attacking the American economy. They want to take food off families’ tables, force cutbacks in state and local services, make it harder for businesses to open safely, and create a vicious cycle of austerity from Washington and anemic recovery in the rest of the country, in the hope that Americans will blame Biden for all of it.

Refusing to authorize a new stimulus is an attack on the American economy. Trying to limit that stimulus to far less than what is needed is an attack on the American economy. Threatening blackmail is an attack on the American economy.

Across the board, it’s high time for truth telling, for describing in unvarnished terms the GOP’s descent into authoritarianism and indifference to mass suffering. Whether it’s calling out treason when it happens before our eyes, or describing the Republican Party’s fundamental inability to bring credible responses to the crises and challenges of our time, the Democrats may be pleasantly surprised to learn that simply telling the truth about the GOP can be a revolutionary act.