Business as Unusual

No doubt self-interest is playing a part in the willingness of numerous major corporations to speak out against the anti-democracy voting restrictions being moved forward by Republican state legislators around the country.  As observers like Josh Marshall have noted, many of these companies understand that the very minority groups targeted by these GOP bills are indistinguishable from growing customer bases that help these companies prosper now, and more importantly, increasingly into the future; as Marshall puts it, “Consumer-facing corporations are most sensitive and responsive to economic dynamism, disposable income and growth.”  Alongside this, these companies realize that the relative political power of these groups will continue to increase.

Acknowledging these fact helps us healthily limit our expectations that these companies will somehow save the day and rescue American democracy from its enemies; the same sensitivities to long-term profit and power could very conceivably turn such corporations to a new path of caution and complicity — if, for example, the GOP embarked on a determined effort to punish them for their activism.  In fact, we have already seen scattershot attempts at such an effort, including the Georgia legislature’s repeal of a tax law that benefitted Delta Airlines after that company spoke out against voting restrictions in that state, and Mitch McConnell’s absurd declaration that corporations should butt out of politics save for the act of giving money to Republican candidates.

But tempering our expectations does not mean dismissing such corporate stands outright.  It is a big deal for major companies to effectively declare voting rights to be beyond the realm of partisan politics; this helps send a message to the citizenry that voting restrictions constitute abnormal, illegitimate actions outside the proper bounds of American politics.  The reality is that voting rights are foundational to American democracy.

It’s also notable that the initial impetus and organization of a corporate response to the anti-voting initiatives came from African-American CEOs and business leaders.  This feels to me like a glaring demonstration of how important it is for minorities to be fully represented in corporate boardrooms and so be in a position to expand our ideas of the democratic responsibilities of American companies.  I don’t want to be too pollyannish about this — but the fact that this corporate movement has been spearheaded by African-Americans makes it hard to dismiss it as simply the cold calculations of hard-headed business leaders.

Crucially, companies vocalizing their opposition to voting restrictions also opens up a window on its opposite: companies that continue to support Republican legislators pushing voting restrictions whose goal is to cement GOP political power at the expense of American democracy , at the same time as these companies rely on the GOP to push for corporate tax cuts and a favorable regulatory environment.  The mutual embrace of corporate American and the GOP is long-standing; but when it involves companies donating to politicians who disassemble American democracy to achieve permanent power, so that those companies might continue to increase corporate profits through the legislative favors those politicians bestow, we are beyond misleading talk of companies exercising their right to “free speech” through campaign donations, and into a realm where companies and politicians participate in a fascistic enterprise that should rightly be seen as the antithesis of American democracy.  

From this perspective, the willingness of some companies to speak out on voting rights should be taken as an opening to discuss the extreme dangers and basic immorality of companies that continue to donate to anti-voting rights GOP politicians.  Such companies make themselves complicit in an attack on democracy, and we need to talk about it in such terms.  Conversely, it’s extremely worrisome that the GOP is comfortable targeting companies for retribution for the crime of supporting basic democracy, as happened with Delta in Georgia.  This seems to be not just an abuse of power, but an abuse of power in the name of replacing American democracy with an authoritarian governance that sees only GOP rule as legitimate.  

An Incisive Take on Cuomo's Corruptions

Rebecca Traister has written not only a useful guide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s rapidly-deteriorating political fortunes, but a deeply incisive look into the links among his authoritarian style, sexism, and incompetence.  She also pulls back the lens to make a broader point about the nature of how many male politicians of both major political parties choose to wield power.

This paragraph captures her basic thesis:

Though the multiple scandals erupting in Albany seem to toggle between sexualized harassment stories and evidence of mismanagement, what is emerging is in fact a single story: That through years of ruthless tactics, deployed both within his office and against anyone he perceived as an adversary, critic, or competitor for authority, Cuomo has fostered a culture that supported harassment, cruelty, and deception [. . .] his tough-guy routine has in fact worked to obscure governing failures; it is precisely what has permitted Cuomo and his administration to spend a decade being [. . .] both mean and bad at their jobs.

As someone who pays pretty much no attention to New York politics but whose general impression over the last several years has been of a corrupt and not particularly progressive New York governor, Traister’s reporting and analysis more than validates my own personal third-hand impressions of unimpressive goings-in in Albany.  But as good as her concentration on Cuomo is, the broader critique she makes regarding a more widespread American governing style is just as striking.  The New York voting public’s confusion of a performance of strength that’s rooted in a fundamental sexism with an authentic, effective leadership style points not only to a con job perpetuated by Cuomo, but basic cultural assumptions about leadership found across the U.S., and which should trouble citizens of a democracy.  

Traister makes the essential comparison between the styles and results of Cuomo and Donald Trump — a likeness that was transmuted into false difference by uncritical media coverage during the coronavirus pandemic.  One major observation I come away with is that, no matter our political orientation or professed ideology, many of us are too easily swayed and seduced by those who simply appear powerful and confident, particularly in troubled times — a phenomenon that Cuomo demonstrates is hardly confined to the right and the Republican Party.  Whatever the social or biological undercurrents to this impulse, we need far greater discussion and awareness of its tension with a democratic spirit; it’s an authoritarian lure that corrodes fundamental values like basic accountability of our elected officials.

For those eager for an increasingly progressive and effective Democratic Party, Cuomo, and other politicians of his substance and style, are a roadblock to the party’s ability to expand its electoral appeal and make meaningful economic and social progress across this country.  Among other things, Cuomo’s retrograde example helps advance pragmatic arguments for why Democrats should continue to promote a strong bench of female politicians, with the non-negotiable goal of representation equal to the female share of the population.  To read of the twisted, sexist, self-serving ways of Cuomo and his administration, and to realize that they’ve been following a long-existing template in American politics, should lead seamlessly to a collective drive to shatter that template into a thousand irretrievably broken pieces.

When It Comes to a Global Covid Vaccination Campaign, It's OK For the U.S. to Embrace Its Savior Complex

As the U.S. covid vaccination campaign continues to accelerate, there are reports that the U.S. government is looking more comprehensively at sharing vaccines and vaccine technology with countries around the globe.  This is good news from a public health perspective, and also good news for the United States’ moral and diplomatic standing in the world.  Last week, we talked about resistance by the pharmaceutical industry and some government officials to making proprietary vaccine formulas available to poorer countries — such resistance itself being a formula for mass unnecessary suffering if there ever was one.

It appears, though, that progressive Democratic lawmakers (including, happily, The Hot Screen’s local representative Earl Blumenauer) have been trying to light a fire under the Biden administration to share patent technology on a temporary basis, and that the Biden team is considering such action.  This would be tremendous news for global health, and a further sign that sanity has returned to the White House.  As I argued last week, I don’t see a persuasive argument that corporate incentives to develop new vaccines will be harmed long-term by taking this special measure during an unprecedented global pandemic, particularly when big Pharma has profited, and will continue to profit, enormously from its research and production (this research and production, crucially, has been backstopped by the American taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars).

As I also mentioned last week, people like historian Timothy Snyder have been making the case that a global vaccine initiative by the U.S. could reap enormous diplomatic benefits.  Comments by a spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative suggest that this perspective is on the radar of American policymakers, as he remarked that, “As part of rebuilding our alliances, we are exploring every avenue to coordinate with our global partners and are evaluating the efficacy of this specific proposal by its true potential to save lives.”  And Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also recently addressed criticism of the lackluster U.S. role in global vaccinations, saying that, “As we get more confident in our vaccine supply here at home, we are exploring options to share more with other countries going forward. We believe that we will be in a position to do much more on this front.”  Notably, Blinken also remarked that the United States would not “trade shots in arm for political favors.”  This seems to be both an acknowledgment that vaccine sharing needs to be fair, and a shot across the bow of countries like China and Russia that have thus far been more assertive in exporting doses of covid vaccines.  But of course, the perceived fairness of U.S. vaccine distribution efforts has an inevitable diplomatic aspect.  There is nothing inherently wrong with putting U.S. resources into a necessary global campaign while also embracing the windfall of goodwill and reinforced alliances that it would cultivate.

And reporting on France’s continuing difficulties in combatting the coronavirus offers more evidence that U.S. efforts shouldn’t be limited only to poorer nations.  This New York Times article details a general malaise among the country’s populace at their country’s collective failure to get the pandemic under better control.  Significantly, France is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council that has not yet developed and deployed its own vaccine, contributing to the country’s sense of failure.  A U.S. relief effort that includes European allies like France would be the right thing to do on health grounds, but would also provide an inoculation against far-right political parties like France’s National Front that are sure to use this foundering government response as a cudgel against democracy and liberal society.  The U.S. has every interest in vaccinating the world against incipient authoritarian movements as well as against the coronavirus.

Waiting in Vain for a Redeemed Mick Mulvaney

In an appearance desired by no one and further cementing his reputation as an unparalleled hypocrite and right-wing boob, former congressman and Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney appeared to criticize former President Donald Trump in a CNN appearance last week — then quickly made clear that he would still support Trump if he were to be the 2024 GOP presidential candidate.  Responding to comments by the former president that the January 6 insurrectionists had posed “zero threat,” Mulvaney remarked that, “I was surprised to hear the President say that. Clearly there were people who were behaving themselves, and then there were people who absolutely were not, but to come out and say that everyone was fine and there was no risk, that's just manifestly false -- people died, other people were severely injured.”

But by then making clear that he nonetheless views Trump as a viable presidential candidate for the Republican Party despite his role in an armed insurrection against the United States, Mulvaney showed that his aim was never to critique the act of insurrection or Trump’s role in it, but to offer guidance to the former president in how to talk about the Capitol attack so that he doesn’t alienate possible future voters who don’t happen to be hard-right Republicans.  Mulvaney understands the indefensibility of pretending that the violence did not happen, and is simply acting in line with other pro-Trump politicians to steer a “middle course” that acknowledges the undeniable violence while pretending that the former president bears no responsibility for it. 

To Mulvaney and others of his ilk, Trump does himself no favors by promoting an entirely alternate reality in which rioters were actually “hugging and kissing” police officers, as Trump said last week; such an obvious lie might fly with Trump die-hards, but not with other Republican voters less willing to deny the plentiful footage of right-wing extremists beating cops and sacking the Capitol building.  Like other GOP politicians, Mulvaney is hedging his bets, pretending to critique the president while in actuality offering him advice so that he doesn’t totally destroy the party’s 2024 chances should he stage a comeback.  As Mulvaney told CNN, Trump “is still a major player in the Republican Party — there's a lot of folks who were turned off by the last six weeks, and especially the riots, that he's going to have to do some work to sort of build bridges back with, if he wants to run again.”  But any criticism of Donald Trump that doesn’t include the obvious addendum that he should never hold public office again is no criticism at all — it’s propaganda in service of a would-be authoritarian who ended his dark reign in office by making war on the United States.  Attempts to deny or dilute this basic fact constitute complicity with the original act of insurrection.

When Will There Be A Vaccine Against the Power of Big Pharma?

The United States appears to be at a real turning point in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.  Even as cases remain inexcusably high, and many states have prematurely relaxed commonsense mask and social distancing restrictions, the pace of vaccinations is accelerating, with President Biden calling on states to make inoculations available to all adults by May 1.

But with a pandemic that has spread around the entire world, an excessive focus on our country’s fortunes threatens to be deeply counterproductive.  After all, most people are now aware that the longer the virus rages around the world, the better the chances that it will mutate into variants against which current vaccines are less effective.  Stopping the virus at home means stopping it overseas.

Depressingly, though, much of the world remains unvaccinated, with the dominant theme being a grotesque inequality between wealthier countries and others; according to The New York Times, “Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far. Under current projections, many of the rest will have to wait years.”

As that startling Times piece goes on to describe, there’s a key reason for this disparity, and for the horrifying prospect that it might be years before poorer nations and populations receive vaccines: it turns out that much of the developed world chose not to include language in vaccine contracts that would have forced pharmaceutical companies to share vaccine know-how with companies and governments seeking to vaccinate poorer countries.  One might have expected the Trump administration to display such indifference; but even less morally-compromised European countries followed the same contractual path.  Something went terribly wrong across many nations, for reasons that beg a deeper look.

Fortunately for the sake of continued government leverage in the United States, many of the current coronavirus vaccines employ biotechnology that depends on a patent the U.S. government is about to receive; this patent will allow our government not only to make money licensing the technology to the companies already using it, but will also present an opportunity to pressure them into sharing their vaccine formulations with poorer nations.  Incredibly, though, it appears that there’s hesitancy within the Biden administration about how much pressure to exert.  The conflict seems to come down to balancing the monetary incentives for pharmaceutical companies to continue taking risks in developing vaccines against the basic need to vaccinate people.

But there can’t be any question that the U.S. government must strike this balance in a way that results in cheap, readily-available vaccines for the rest of the world as soon as humanly possible.  To do otherwise subverts a central purpose of patents; they’re not only intended to spur innovation by offering financial protections to inventors, but particularly in the case of vaccines, their obvious goal is to benefit society.  In the case of a deadly pandemic that has already crippled societies and economies, tilting the balance in favor of protecting health seems overwhelmingly correct on both moral and pragmatic grounds.  Losing hundreds of thousands or even millions more lives so that rich and powerful biotech companies supposedly remain incentivized to innovate is a moral tradeoff no civilized society or world should even be contemplating.  If our system of vaccine development requires thousands to die in order for it to function, then the system is contemptible and broken.

The worries about undermining innovation and incentives to develop vaccines become even more tenuous when you step back and contemplate that it was the U.S. government’s willingness to backstop vaccine research, and provide research it had itself developed, that made the rapid development of coronavirus vaccines by corporations possible in the first place.  In other words, we’ve already recognized that this pandemic is a situation where it’s insufficient to rely on market mechanisms to incentivize vaccine development.  Having applied an approach of strong government intervention — an intervention grounded in the expenditure of taxpayer dollars — you can’t then turn around and try to argue that we’re now in a situation where the government will somehow destroy all future incentives for innovation by pressuring pharmaceutical companies to share their technologies.  That is an unacceptable, immoral argument, and I hope to god it’s not one that the Biden administration intends to make.  I also wonder if the hesitation is not simply coming from the government, but from companies eager to protect their profits at any cost, even as those profits are based on funds and research provided courtesy of the American people.  (As a side note, I have yet to hear about a single pharmaceutical company rejecting government assistance on the principle that it improperly undermined their incentive to develop vaccines).

And as historian Timothy Snyder argues, the case for the United States making vaccines available to poorer nations is overwhelming simply in terms of basic self-interest; the gains he describes greatly overshadow exaggerated concerns that pressuring pharmaceutical companies might somehow hurt future vaccine development.  As Snyder describes matters, the pandemic and its fallout is the most pressing issue of our time, and the United States can reap immense diplomatic and other soft power benefits by acting as a vaccine distributor to the world.  Such benefits would be on top of the essential need to stop further mutations that undermine an effective vaccine regimen within U.S. borders, and to ensure the world economy does not continue to be suppressed by the pandemic.

Snyder notes the small cost of contributing to vaccination efforts in comparison to U.S. military spending, which hints at another argument that he doesn’t fully explore: placing public health concerns at the center of U.S. diplomatic efforts could be a way to roll back and rectify decades of a counterproductively militarized American foreign policy.  And protecting global health has more than a passing commonality with the overwhelming existential challenge of our time: stopping climate change as quickly as we can.  Demonstrating leadership through a massive global public health initiative could also help supercharge the cause of U.S. leadership on global climate change efforts. 

Intriguingly, Snyder ties a U.S. vaccine initiative to our ability to protect democracies as they remain under assault from authoritarian leaders and parties around the world.  By providing assistance not only to poorer nations, but also to our European allies as they fumble through vaccine issues, the U.S. has a chance of gaining major good will with millions of ordinary Europeans, and providing persuasive evidence of the effectiveness of democratic governance in those countries that cooperate with American assistance.  As Snyder summarizes, “The United States has a once-in-a-century chance to do well by doing right.”

The Dark Political Heart of Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

Even if, all appearances to the contrary, it turns out that somehow racial hatred had nothing to do with the killing of six Asian-Americans and two others in Georgia last week, then at least the nation can no longer look away from the wave of violence against Asian-Americans in this country; one report has found that anti-Asian hate crimes rose 150% from 2019 to 2020.  Many observers associate this violence with the scapegoating of the Asian community for the coronavirus pandemic — a retrograde tendency of irrational blame that many are right to point out has a long and sordid history in this country, perhaps most ignominiously in the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

But even as racism still clearly finds a place in the hearts of many Americans, and must be treated as a societal problem to be attacked and scourged away on many fronts, there can be no credible discussion of ending violence against Asian-Americans, or African-Americans, or any other minority group in America, that does not include the elephant in the room: the elephant of a GOP that has become a de facto white supremacist political party.  

This recent rise in anti-Asian animus has a clear relationship to the bigotry and slander of our former president, who repeatedly insisted on calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” or “kung flu,” even as other politicians, leaders, and activists warned of the violence this could incite.  The former president did not care.  Indeed, it’s fair to say that he welcomed the division that such language brought, that he saw it as yet another way to supercharge the white identity politics that he had mastered and thrived on.  Donald Trump, more than any other single person, created a permission structure for the bigoted and the ignorant, amplifying whatever baseline attacks the Asian-American community would have endured in the absence of his hateful rhetoric, even as the hate crimes mounted and those of Asian descent paid the price for what the president cold-bloodedly saw as a re-election tactic.

The GOP politicians who stood by while the former president fomented hate and prejudice are complicit in this violence.  And even now that he’s out office, the core of white supremacism that binds the party together was on full display in last week’s congressional hearings on anti-Asian violence.  Texas Representative Chip Roy was less concerned about such violence, and far more about the GOP’s supposed right to continue the racist incitement, making the preposterous argument that Democrats were trying to limit Republicans’ ability to criticize China (he also appeared to speak approvingly of lynching as a form of punishment).  Another GOP representative, Tom McClintock of California, tried to turn the hearings into an indictment of Democrats for impugning the United States as a promised land for minorities, remarking that, “If America was such hate filled, discriminatory, racist society filled with animus against Asian Americans, how do you explain the remarkable success of Asian Americans in our country?”  The idea that some Asian-Americans might have succeeded despite such obstacles seems not have occurred to the man, nor that suggesting Asian-Americans are a uniformly affluent and contented model minority group is in itself pretty racist.  This is to say nothing of his apparent lack of awareness of laws like the late 19th century Chinese Exclusion Act, or past acts of violence and oppression that scarred the lives of generations of Asian immigrants.  Is it really possible he isn’t aware of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II?   

The unwillingness to simply engage and accept the reality of violence against people of Asian descent in America puts such Republicans on the wrong side of justice and history, as does the willingness of many to continue using the same inflammatory language so beloved of their former president and current warlord-in-exile.  But beyond this reflexive defense of the United States as a nation devoid of substantial racism — a defense that serves to excuse and defend white supremacism in all its modern manifestations — the GOP also lends legitimacy to racist violence through its own increasing willingness to countenance violence for political ends.  From the wholesale unwillingness to hold Donald Trump accountable for inciting violent insurrection against the country, to looking the other way as GOP lies about a stolen election fuel a growing far-right nationalist terror movement against Americans and our government, to its unswerving support for any murderous-minded insurrectionist's or bigot’s right to buy a gun, the Republican Party increasingly sees violence as an essential tool to help it maintain a grip on power.  As its deathly embrace of an inexorably dwindling white base means that the party has come into increasingly direct conflict with basic principles of democracy and majority rule, the GOP is helping to legitimate a “by any means necessary” resistance among ordinary Americans.  Indeed, at this point, it seems misleading to insist on separating out strands of terroristic right-wing violence from GOP complicity.  As John Stoehr observed last week in the wake of the Atlanta shootings:

I would argue that most shooting massacres that we have witnessed since the assault weapons ban expired in 2004—Sandy Hook, Charleston, El Paso, Parkland, and now Atlanta—are in ways large and small a reflection of this violent impulse to stop whatever it is that democracy is producing, and that cannot be stopped through normal, legitimate and non-violent means. I would also argue that the Republicans knew instinctively what they were doing when they scorched the earth to prevent democracy from putting a stop to the violence. They have created conditions in which domestic terrorism is now a normal part of life.

Yet, as essential as this observation is, I would not stop simply with the Republican Party’s courting of violent methods and incitement of murderous anti-democratic and racist extremist elements.  It’s just as important to recognize the superficially non-violent means embraced by the Republican Party that end up legitimizing the violence and empowering racist Americans at the expense of minorities.  Escalating GOP attacks on the right to vote might appear to be the “legal” way that the party looks to privilege its overwhelmingly white voters over their fellow Americans, but at its base is the same belief in the fundamental inferiority of non-White Americans — a white supremacist attitude that inexorably requires violence to keep them in their place.

The GOP’s massive ongoing campaign across multiple states to make it ever harder for minority voters to cast a ballot, or have their votes count, also means that these voters are denied the political power necessary to protect themselves against racist violence: it makes it less likely that hate crime laws will be passed or diligently enforced, less likely that the politicians who are supposed to represent them don’t engage in racially inflammatory rhetoric that gets people killed.  In a stark sense, as Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and others are bullied, injured, and killed by racist violence, the GOP is seeking to make it more difficult for those Americans to use their government to protect themselves from such violence.  This is to say nothing of the way that voters suppression prevents these voters from having enough influence on American government to change it, and our society, enough to finally dismantle white supremacism and the countless social, economic, and psychological harms it inflicts.

I recognize that ideals of bipartisanship have great momentum and staying power in American politics, but we are increasingly at a point where Democrats’ refusal to clearly and openly call out the Republican Party’s transformation into a white nationalist, authoritarian party does more harm than good. Such refusal helps normalize obscene levels of bigotry and violence, and denies the American people the benefits of seeing the full stakes of our very real political divisions.

Sea Change or Calm Before the Storm?

I will be honest: the last four years often felt to me like the country was at war, beset by a president and a Republican Party whose assault involved interrelated cultural, economic, and political campaigns of degradation and destruction.  There was not a day that felt like politics as usual.  Instead, the president worked to enrage his white base against their fellow Americans, demonizing immigrants and minorities while performing the alchemy of fusing his personal sense of victimization with that of white Americans, while working to weaponize the federal government in service of his own power.  At the same time, most major accomplishments, such as they were, were recognizably traditionally Republican — like massive tax cuts for the ultra-rich paired with absolute indifference to the federal government having any actual responsibility or even relationship to the majority of the people it serves. 

This war on America turned absolutely catastrophic when the coronavirus pandemic struck.  The Trump administration had already dismantled important parts of our public health apparatus that could have helped stem the crucial early spread of the virus, while the president’s sociopathic insistence that the virus was not threat to American health (born out of fear of harming his re-election prospects) ensured that the federal response would be hobbled as long as he remained in office.  And so the war on America began to count its casualties in the tens of thousands, then the hundreds of thousands, as the body count began to resemble an actual war, only with civilians filling the graves in place of soldiers.  

But metaphoric war became literal on January 6, 2020, when an insurrectionist mob incited by the president stormed the Capitol.  The danger had emerged fully-formed and undeniable; we were at the point that the president, abetted by a GOP that echoed his lies of a stolen election, was willing to goad right-wing extremists into a physical assault against the United States government, in an act of treason by an elected official matched only by the politicians who joined the Confederacy a century and a half ago.

I review this sordid recent history, first, as context for why, over the past couple months, it has felt difficult to grasp that that the country’s political direction may have turned much faster than I thought possible.  Yet not only has Joe Biden become president, but the Democrats have moved quickly and aggressively to pass a massive $1.9 trillion bill to fight the coronavirus and provide economic support to millions of Americans; polling shows that the legislation is popular across broad reaches of the public, including Republicans.  Meanwhile, vaccine production and crucially, distribution, have steadily escalated, so that Joe Biden can credibly tell us that by May 1, vaccinations should be open to every adult.  On top of this, the Biden administration is already looking ahead to a huge infrastructure bill that will further goose the economy while repairing and modernizing decades’ worth of deferred spending and construction.  In other words, by many objective measures, things aren’t just looking up, they’re heading in the right direction.

Obviously, Biden as president, combined with Democratic control of Congress, is the central reason for our turnaround.  But the question I’ve been asking myself, coming out of the trauma and fears of the Trump years, is why the Democrats have been able to roll over the GOP so far.  Beyond the basic fact that the Democrats control Congress (though narrowly) and the presidency, it seems like the initiative is simply on their side right now, with much of this momentum tied to the idea that the federal government has a central role to play in the economy on behalf of ordinary Americans.

This is all still in flux, of course, and we won’t have more definitive answers for years, but a few recent articles have offered some intriguing perspectives on what might be going on.  At The Editorial Board blog, John Stoehr posits that the scale of the coronavirus crisis essentially broke conservative Republican opposition to big government spending; after Americans received multiple rounds of relief checks, even conservative voters became acclimated to the idea that the government has a larger role to play in the economy.  Whereas before the GOP relied on inculcating fear among voters against government spending, these tactics can’t work the same way when it’s the GOP that started not just the higher federal spending, but also (at least tacitly) embraced the idea that the government has both a role and a responsibility to protect Americans’ economic well-being.  Given that that the Democrats already believed this, the Republicans inadvertently helped establish a new consensus in American politics.

The Plum Line’s Paul Waldman provides another clue to a possible sea change in our politics.  He argues that because a) Joe Biden is white and b) has a long-established centrist identity, the culture war tactics that the GOP honed to perfection during Barack Obama’s presidency, and that continued while President Trump continued to use Obama as his political foil, simply don’t work against Joe Biden.  He points to white people’s “cultural anxiety” as key to Trump’s sway with the GOP base: 

It was not “economic anxiety” that pulled so many White voters toward him, it was cultural anxiety: the feeling that your way of life is receding, that popular culture rejects your values, that you’re being forced to consider the sensibilities of people you thought were beneath you on the ladder of status, and that it will only get worse.

In other words, even when Obama was no longer president, Trump used the fears and resentments his predecessor had aroused (and had been used to arouse) to keep his white base engaged and enraged.  But even though he served as Obama’s VP, it’s simply impossible to paint Biden as anything akin to a Kenyan socialist aiming to enslave white people and impose Sharia law on god-fearing Christians (I have seen Republicans say many nasty things about Joe Biden, but I haven’t yet heard any dare to claim that he wasn’t born in America).

And Waldman adds a point that others have made recently as well — that Joe Biden, whether based on personal inclination or conscious political strategy (or both), doesn’t seem interested in engaging in any sort of culture war exchange with the GOP.

What intrigues me is the way that Stoehr’s and Waldman’s theories complement each other.  It’s not just that, as Stoehr describes, the GOP opened the spigots of government spending for the public good, thus helping to normalize the idea of a large government role in the economy and on behalf of working people.  When white people received their stimulus checks and unemployment assistance, it also helped undermine the Republican myth that government spending is always for the benefit of undeserving minorities — a myth that the GOP has relied on to ensure that cultural anxieties about reduced social status and power can be used as a cudgel against government spending that would in reality benefit BOTH whites and non-whites alike.  So if, as Waldman argues, the GOP is having trouble saddling the Biden presidency with culture war attacks because of who Biden is, Biden has also benefitted from Trump and the GOP’s economic relief efforts that saw white Americans receive massive amounts of government largesse.

And if Joe Biden continues and indeed expands those same policies — policies that undeniably benefit people of all races and indeed classes (save for the ultra-rich) — then the GOP’s culture war tactics may become less effective, and its resistance to an activist federal government politically dangerous (Waldman argues as much, seeing a GOP potentially in danger of being on the wrong side of a massive change in public consensus about the role of government in American life).  

It’s way too soon to tell if we are witnessing a sea change or a temporary shift in attitudes connected to the pandemic and its aftermath, but after the brutal struggles during the Trump administration to simply keep our democracy alive, these possibilities are worth keeping an eye on. On the flip side, it’s also nearly inevitable that the same policies and leadership that may be making a dent in the attitudes of some Republican voters are also supercharging the resentments of others, so that even as we may be seeing the development of a new consensus in American politics, the backlash may grow still more severe, even if it’s embraced by a smaller chunk of the population than before.

Future Non-Shock

Undoubtedly the biggest political news of the week is the Democrats’ passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.  Apart from the general benefit of addressing health needs related to the coronavirus, it also delivers massive amounts of cash to Americans and government spending that together will keep our damaged economy on the path to recovery.  But as Jamelle Bouie elucidates, it’s also a massively progressive piece of legislation that “is expected to reduce overall poverty by more than a third and child poverty by more than half. It is, with no exaggeration, the single most important piece of anti-poverty legislation since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.”

After the derangements and gutting of the public weal during the Trump years, the size of the ambition here is pretty dizzying; the door seems suddenly open to a renewed federal role in the economy and moving the United States toward greater equality after years of growing income and wealth gaps. 

But this ambition didn’t come from nowhere; economists, political thinkers, and others have been talking for years about reviving an activist ideal for American government (which I think is ultimately intertwined with reviving American democracy itself — the American people have every right to employ their common government for shared economic ends).

For a great overview of some of this progressive thinking, I highly recommend Noah Smith’s interview of Saikat Chakrabarti, who among other things wrote the Green New Deal while he was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff.  Not only does Chakrabarti’s deep involvement in progressive thinking make him a compelling narrator of recent trends in the movement, the interview captures a sense of deep intellectual and moral ferment, in which erstwhile “radical” ideas have been moved closer and closer to the realm of common sense.  The interview hits on topics that you may have heard about before; but for me, it brought a lot of ideas into more of a coherent whole, while highlighting some essential insights of contemporary progressivism.

Probably the most striking point that I’ve encountered elsewhere, but which hit me with a fresh perspective, is the insight that shifting the economy to fight climate change doesn’t necessarily mean limiting economic growth, but could actually be the key to developing a new, sustainable prosperity for the country; that the United States has lulled itself into thinking that we are already a fully-developed economy.  Along these lines, Chakrabarti’s explanation of the political strategizing behind development of the Green New Deal is gripping stuff, all the more so as we’ve reached a point where attempts to open the public discussion have paid off.  The conversation about the need for an American industrial policy is also pretty hot; in it, you can see the outlines of a policy that, among other things, can neutralize Trump-Republican fake populism that pretends to put America first but always ends up putting Americans last.  Just a great stimulating and challenging read.

Neanderthal v. Homo Sapiens

Last week, after the governors of Mississippi and Texas announced an end their states’ mask-wearing mandates and that businesses could open at full capacity, President Joe Biden told reporters that such rollbacks are a “big mistake" and that "The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking.”  His “Neanderthal” comment in particular was seized on by a slew of GOP politicians who sought to turn the president’s phrasing from a criticism of bad public health decisions by elected leaders into a wholesale attack on all Republican voters.  Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, gave a master class in misdirection through high dudgeon, tweeting that “Mississippians don't need handlers. As numbers drop, they can assess their choices and listen to experts. I guess I just think we should trust Americans, not insult them.”

Among other reasons, the kerfluffle was notable because it was a rare instance of Joe Biden seeming to throw culture war shade in the way his predecessor did on a near-hourly basis.  But where Donald Trump always clearly intended to divide Americans, it’s a huge stretch to claim that Biden was effectively blowing up his claims to unify America, as many Republicans indeed argued.  The truth of Biden’s approach is far closer to what Ezra Klein described last week about Biden’s effort to turn down the temperature of American politics.  

So why the “Neanderthal” remarks from Biden?  An honest reading makes clear that the president was taking aim at the Republican leaders making premature and ill-advised decisions to relax coronavirus precautions, rather than attacking ordinary citizens.  The president is on sound public health ground here, as health officials continue to advocate for the wearing of masks; for example, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN last week that, “I understand the need to want to get back to normality, but you're only going to set yourself back if you just completely push aside the public health guidelines.”

I think it’s also safe to say that Biden’s language expressed a real personal outrage against the governors’ policies.  Crucially, it’s an outrage that is incredibly well-founded, based not on a disagreement on something like tax policy or amount of stimulus needed to help the economy (as important as those are), but on basic matters of life and death.  Governors who are prematurely declaring victory over the virus and signaling that basic health measures are no longer necessary are endangering the lives of their citizens, full stop.   

It’s a complete red herring for GOP politicians to fall back on arguments that “personal responsibility,” not state laws, will save the day, and that states should trust people to make the right decisions.  It is incredible at this late date that Republican leaders continue to pretend that mask mandates are simply about the choice about whether to protect’s oneself from the virus.  The far more important role of masks is in fact to prevent spreading the virus to others.  And so the discussion of personal freedom is completely perverted into a question as to whether a person is “free” to catch the virus, when the real question is whether the rest of us should be free from catching it.  Without mask mandates, people can now enter businesses without masks in Texas and Mississippi, endangering not simply themselves but everyone they come into contact with.  But it gets worse. People who choose not to wear masks are also increasing the odds of dangerous mutations in the virus that can make it more contagious and more deadly. This is bad enough for their own states, but of course the virus doesn’t recognize state, or national, borders. And yet these governors wold have us believe that they are only engaged in a discussion of freedom in their states.

It is harder to think of a more tendentious mis-definition of “freedom” than what we are hearing from governors like Mississippi’s Reeves or Texas’ Gregg Abbott.

It may seem counter-intuitive, given the bad-faith willingness of the GOP to twist the president’s words, but I would argue that Joe Biden’s language was not nearly harsh enough.  Mask-wearing is such a tremendously easy way to slow the spread of the virus, imposing zero cost on citizens and bringing vast benefits.  It’s not just bad policy to eliminate such state mandates — it’s outright murderous.  More people will die than otherwise, for absolutely no good reason. Such relaxation is all the more contemptible as public health experts issue warnings that new strains of the virus may push the U.S. into a spike of Covid-19 cases.

It may prove over the long term that Biden’s general refusal to engage in culture war flash points is a winning strategy, but it’s deeply galling that on a matter of life and death, Biden and other Democrats are constrained from using the appropriate language to describe the actions of their political opponents.

No Normalization for Pro-Trump Terrorists

It is astonishing to me that the House Democratic leadership cancelled a planned session of Congress this Thursday due to a possible attack plot by pro-Trump terrorists, without making a full-court, unmistakable press in the media to hold not just Donald Trump but the GOP accountable for their role in encouraging this far-right menace.  After all, the FBI has assessed that the fake theory that Democrats stole the November election from Trump is inspiring far-right extremism — a falsehood propounded not only by the former president but by a strong majority of Republicans in Congress, to the point that adherence to this slander against our democracy has become a litmus test for Republican loyalty not only to the former president, but to a sinister, ever more authoritarian brand of anti-democratic politics.  For Democrats to cancel Congress for a day due to threats from GOP-aligned terrorists, and not spend that day talking nonstop about how these terrorists are inspired by election lies propagated by Republican politicians, is simply bizarre.   These violent threats against Congress are an abomination, and should be treated as such; they should certainly not be normalized.

Thank goodness no attack materialized this week, but closing Congress, even as a prudent precaution, without an accompanying indictment of those politicians who provide the terrorists inspiration and political cover, also promotes the distortion that Congress as a whole is the target, when the reality is that it’s Democrats in Congress who are the real targets of the Trumpist terrorists.  The Republicans’ broad refusal to denounce the fake tales of conspiracy that drive these insurrectionists is an act of complicity, and deserves the harshest ongoing condemnation.

Thursday’s closure itself is also a worrisome decision, substituting fear in place of what should be a stance of furious resolve against armed insurrectionists.  I understand that there is a Democratic strategy, certainly coming out of the White House but also embraced by most Democratic members of Congress, to turn down the temperature on some conflicts and press on with the people’s business.  But even as the Democrats pushed Thursday’s planned work into Wednesday evening to avoid disruptions, this closure still tells far-right terrorists that their plots do in fact have a chance of interfering with the Democrats’ agenda. That does not seem like a great recipe for shutting down and discrediting this extremist movement.

A Harsh Wakeup Call on Foreign Policy Front

Two events last week offered a jolting reminder that though we may have exchanged an authoritarian president for a mainstream one, dangerous tendencies of U.S. foreign policy that predated the Trump administration still continue.  Airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria, and a Biden administration decision not to punish the Saudi Arabian leader who ordered the killing of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, signal that violence and accommodation of anti-democratic governments remain sickeningly close to the heart of American foreign relations.

The airstrikes remind us that the United States, no matter who the president might be, remains committed to a series of open-ended, undeclared wars around the globe.  The presence of U.S. troops in Syria, a sovereign country on which we have not declared war, and bombings in its territory — even those aimed at terrorists — have never gotten anything close to the public debate or open political discussion they merit.  On multiple fronts, of which Syria is only one, the U.S. government — from the president and the bureaucracy he commands, to members of Congress responsible for oversight of the executive — have consistently failed for years to make such momentous decisions the focus of appropriate political debate, treating them instead as unobjectionable, natural features of our role in the world.

The second story speaks directly to the U.S.’s long-standing alliance with Saudi Arabia, and more generally to the perennial tradeoff between democratic values and realpolitik.  The Biden administration has officially determined that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the killing of Khashoggi, but has determined not to punish the prince directly.  Instead, the administration is sanctioning various other Saudi officials; not insignificant, but not a full reckoning, either.  As for the reasoning that went into this decision after Joe Biden had called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” during the 2020 election campaign, the New York Times notes that, “The administration concluded it could not risk a full rupture of its relationship with the kingdom, relied on by the United States to help contain Iran, to counter terrorist groups and to broker peaceful relations with Israel. Cutting off Saudi Arabia could also push its leaders toward China.”

These justifications have some power.  After all, the U.S. has an obligation to make foreign policy decisions that protect American lives and interests, and there will always be a balancing of risks and rewards.  However, the assassination of Khashoggi was so brazen, shocking, and overwhelmingly meaningful that it should continue to focus attention on what exactly the American long game is, not just towards Saudi Arabia but towards other murderous dictatorships.  After all, given that Khashoggi was an American resident and a columnist for a major U.S. newspaper, his killing was not just an attack on a single person, but indirectly an assault on our own freedom of the press and ability to provide security for those who call the United States home.

Likewise, if U.S. policy is to promote democracy and human rights around the globe, then how exactly do we expect Saudi Arabia to progress towards democracy when its leader kills and intimidates his political opponents?  For Bin Salman is responsible for many more Saudi dissident deaths beyond Khashoggi (and this is to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of civilians slaughtered in the Saudi-led war in Yemen).  As Nicholas Kristof writes in response to the administration’s decision:

 [E]ven through the lens of realpolitik it’s a missed opportunity to help Saudi Arabia understand that its own interest lies in finding a new crown prince who isn’t reckless and doesn’t kill and dismember journalists [. . .] it’s precisely because Saudi Arabia is so important that Biden should stand strong and send signals — now, while there is a window for change — that the kingdom is better off with a new crown prince who doesn’t dismember journalists.

Particularly inflammatory in the death of Khashoggi is how it constitutes such a wholesale inversion of democratic, liberal values.  Bin Salman ordered the full power of the Saudi state against a single man because that man refused to submit to the leader’s will.  Without due process, without any particular charges against him being necessary, without a trial, the Saudi state summarily executed him in a brutal and chilling manner.  In the United States, in contrast, we recognize the importance of laws and rules that ensure that even a single person can stand against the power of the state — that no person can be wiped away by the government as if they never existed.  The United States is far from perfect in the practice of this ideal — but seeing it so grotesquely violated by a country deemed to be an essential ally should make us all question the value of such an alliance.  Certainly it should prompt a harder look at what we consider to be common interests with such a monstrosity.

Though the Biden administration may be able to justify its measured response to the killing of Khashoggi, can it justify looking away from the larger pattern of Saudi violence and violations of democratic norms?  And looking farther afield, will there be any sort of hard look at America’s stance toward other countries that actively wish us and our democratic values harm, but which we continue to consider as allies out of expedience? What is the strategy for moving toward a better world?

Violent Tendencies

Journalist and political analyst Ronald Brownstein has written a comprehensive, essential piece on the links between rising violent right-wing extremism and the Republican Party’s increasing sympathy with this awful trend.  At the level of GOP elected officials, this attitude is reflected in the party’s unwillingness to hold President Trump accountable for his acts of insurrection, or to discipline the assassination-minded Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

But parallel to this party-level dereliction of duty is a widespread sympathy for violent means within the GOP’s rank and file.  According to polls and research cited by Brownstein, “51% of Republicans agreed with the statement that "we may have to use force" to save "the traditional American way of life,” while more than 40% of Republicans agreed with the statement that, “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”  More concretely, another poll found that nearly 20% of GOP voters supported the attack on the Capitol.

These are frightening numbers; equally disturbing is the fact that they appear to be supercharged by white Americans’ reaction to demographic trends leading to a higher proportion of minorities in the American population — trends that will not be changing.  Among those who believe that discrimination against whites is a bigger problem than discrimination against minorities, more than 60% of Republican respondents agreed that "we may have to use force" to save "the traditional American way of life,” even as nearly 75% of Republicans who think minorities experience more discrimination disagreed.  In a similar vein, “Nearly half of the Republicans who see widespread bias against Whites say Americans must consider violent action; almost four-fifths of the other Republicans reject that idea.”

Brownstein notes that, “These attitudes don't suggest large numbers of Republican voters will pursue violent actions themselves; but, as the past few weeks show, they make it less likely that Republican leaders will clearly excommunicate such extremism.”  One expert estimates that there may be 75,000 to 100,000 people dedicated to actual armed insurrection; but outside this is a “larger group of Republicans expressing sympathy for the attack on the Capitol — and a much larger group than that expressing sympathy more generally for the belief that the threats to American society as they define it have grown so great that force or violence is justified to respond to them.” 

In other words, huge numbers of white Americans afraid of losing their status, power, and wealth due to the increasing diversity of our population have decided to sanction violence to defend themselves.  Even if they themselves will not pick up a gun to do so, they offer a permissive environment for the most murderous of right-wing extremists.  The roots of this trend toward violence seem unlikely to change, and so all decent citizens and politicians have no choice but to act to confront and defuse it lest the GOP increasingly endorse terror tactics to work its minoritarian will on the American people.

Yet, as Brownstein frames it, GOP party leaders simply appear unwilling to confront either the extremist forces or the growing sympathy for violence among GOP voters.  The ominous result is that the GOP as a party is helping make political violence appear acceptable and reasonable — exactly the opposite of what needs to be happening.  Like I’ve said before, violence and physical intimidation are the antithesis of a democracy.  In condoning such activities, the Republican Party is coming close to declaring war on the American people and government.

Faced with a GOP that has lost its adherence to the peaceful competition for power that’s the bedrock of democracy, primary responsibility for backing America from the brink of murder and mayhem at the hands of GOP-aligned domestic extremists falls squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party.  The first step is for the Democrats to recognize and accept this responsibility; the next is to devise strategies that head off violence as much as possible and inflict a maximal political price on the GOP.  If we are at the start of a period in which domestic terrorists sanctioned by large swathes of the Republican Party attack American civilians and society, then ensuring that federal and state law enforcement prioritize reining in and prosecuting this threat is paramount.  On this count, there are early signs that the Biden administration is taking matter seriously.  For example, at his Senate confirmation hearing on Monday, Attorney General-nominee Merrick Garland highlighted the domestic extremist threat as being greater than during the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and indicated he would prioritize investigation of the Capitol assault.  A message from the top that right-wing extremists are public enemy number is essential to communicating to the public, and to the extremists themselves, that they will not be coddled and encouraged as they were under the Trump administration.

Beyond this, Democrats should move aggressively to pass legislation ensuring that white supremacists and other violent extremists are banned from any positions in law enforcement, and making it illegal for police and federal agents to support such organizations. Likewise, any members of the military with ties to white supremacist organizations should face court martial and prison time.  If such legislation raises a howl from Republicans, then so much the better; let the voting public judge the acceptability of politicians who can’t bring themselves to denounce extremists, or who seek alliances with them.  As with the prioritization of rolling back white nationalist violence, the aim is not only to stop these forces, but to draw a bright line in American politics and society demonstrating that they and their tactics lie beyond any conceivable claims to legitimacy; that they and their choice to intimidate and kill mean they have chosen to make war on America.

The Democrats also can’t hesitate to hammer on the links between GOP attacks on democracy — such as propagation of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — and the way such attacks incite and serve as recruitment tools for domestic insurgency.  Republican politicians must be denied the plausible deniability that their anti-democratic rhetoric and legislation (such as attempts to restrict voting based on fictional voter fraud claims and concerns) is somehow unconnected to the fury and motivation of armed insurrectionists.  

Similarly, GOP rank and file must not be allowed to maintain the illusion that they can sympathize with violence and somehow consider themselves to be upstanding Americans.  There is nothing noble, there is nothing legitimate, there is nothing Christian about countenancing the murder of your fellow American citizens — which is in fact the aim of violent extremists.  Some on the far right may try to obscure matters by talking about being engaged in a “civil war,” but when you target unarmed people to achieve political ends, you’re simply committing terrorism. Every Republican voter needs to be forced to confront the political evil of this attitude, and be denied room to believe that violence in politics means anything but the murder of innocent civilians, and constitutes a war on democracy that will be opposed and defeated by the American majority.

I keep coming back to this unpleasant topic because it’s one of the central dangers of our time, but is not getting nearly the full attention it deserves.  I am guessing that many Democrats are adopting a head in the sand approach, reasoning that if we don’t talk about it, it will somehow go away.  But the opposite is likelier to be true — that failing to register the appropriate horror, outrage and defiance towards those who would choose violence over citizenship only encourages them on their dark journey.  This goes not only for the right-wing terrorists, but also for those millions who “merely” sympathize with using force to protect a retrograde and discredited vision of America.  Any support for such violence is a moral abomination and a betrayal of their citizenship, and should be talked about in such terms.

On Cruz Control

This past week witnessed a deployment of firepower not seen since the bombardment of the Normandy coast prior to D-Day.  I am talking, of course, about the national scourging of Ted Cruz that followed exposure of his Margaritaville excursion to sunny Cancun, Mexico, in the midst of a deeply destructive Texas deep freeze.  Cruz is a long-loathed politician, and his enactment of an updated “let them eat cake” lifestyle deserves all the mockery and disdain it’s received.

But while hitting Cruz for his repugnant abdication of responsibility and deranged lies about why he was making the trip (he infamously sought to blame his daughters) is good for the cause of holding our political leaders accountable, the best commentary I’ve seen links his southern sojourn to the wider failure of an anti-government mindset that finds its home in the Republican Party.  Jared Yates Sexton has written the best of the pieces I’ve seen, in which he notes that the disaster that befell Texas “is the result of decades of vilification of government and shared society, a building rejection of basic human needs and the very process by which we are supposed to come together, resolve our differences, decide on courses of action, and somehow, someway make this reality better.”  In Cruz’s behavior, he sees a politician of a piece with this degraded political world, who “is not senator to help people, he’s senator to build his brand and find exposure.”  By Cruz’s own terms, his behavior is normal:

When we look at Cruz in disgust and see him as a shuffling pariah, what we see is the literal embodiment of a system that has been corrupted and repositioned away from the pursuit of the public good and a festering, poisonous infection.  

[. . .] What Ted Cruz did wrong was to act authentically.

I think Sexton is correct about how Cruz views his position — he clearly did not see his responsibility in this moment of crisis as exerting his political powers on behalf of his constituents.  Instead, what prevailed was an attitude of indifference rooted in his belief that nothing in particular was wrong, just as he had seen nothing wrong during Texas Republicans’ long war on government and social goods, or for that matter in the Trump-inspired insurrection on January 6th.  To act as if the results of GOP mismanagement constituted a crisis would be to admit the existence of that crisis and the failures of governance that made it possible.  Cruz’s ability to deny the severity of what had happened, to not anticipate the political blowback to his callous vacationing, is emblematic of an entire political party that is unable to change course, that cannot admit its catastrophic errors: a party that’s truly on Cruz control.

Burning Down the (People's) House

Lately, I’ve been trying to argue how the Republican embrace of political violence during the Trump years — from the former president’s suggestions that supporters beat up protestors at his rallies, to the grand fascistic crescendo of the Capitol assault — should taint a broad range of the GOP’s anti-democratic measures that preceded this escalation and that continue through the present.  You might phrase it like this: violence is what authoritarian-minded people turn to when gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression fail to get the job done, but they’re all part of the same authoritarian playbook.  

But a huge part of the reason I want to make this connection between violence and other anti-democratic methods is because political violence is uniquely destructive and irreconcilable with democratic politics.  Peaceful means of addressing our conflicts and doing the public business, whether through voting or legislation, is so much a part of our system that I would guess most people usually didn’t even think about this basic assumption of nonviolence — at least not until the Trump presidency.  That’s why the phrase “peaceful transfer of power” seemed, until this year, to be a sort of redundancy, a piece of old-fashioned verbiage dragged out ritualistically every four years.  Of course transfers of power are peaceful, why wouldn’t they be?  Sadly, we have learned otherwise.

This is why the Democrats can’t hesitate to tie the GOP not only to the Capitol assault, but to broader instances of right-wing violence and intimidation around the nation that have been fostered and in some cases overtly encouraged by Republican politicians.  The GOP comfort with political violence needs to be kept very much at the forefront of the Democrats’ case against the Republican Party.  This is both because it’s crucial to stop the violence, but also to deny the GOP the plausible deniability in which the party seeks to cloak its increasing comfort with it.  You can already see the second challenge playing out with the Capitol attack, with many in the Republican Party condemning the assault, yet finding themselves unwilling to hold President Trump to account for inciting it, or to renounce the myth of a stolen election that helped ignite the insurrection.  Meanwhile, still other elements of the right claim the attack either wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed, or was the work of leftist agitators like antifa.  

This is a classic case of having your cake and eating it, too: the Republican Party is attempting to reap the upside of violence while evading the downside.  One of the main downsides is that a great majority of the American people are repelled, horrified, and angered by political violence, as well they should be.  The baseline taboo nature of violence for most Americans has doubtless played a large role in keeping it to the margins for many years.  But we can now see that all the play-acting of militia types has simply been laying the groundwork for attacks and insurrection, as Josh Marshall discusses here.

It should be clear that the GOP is not making common cause with the armed far-right just because they want their votes, though the necessity of squeezing out every last vote of their diminishing white base does encourage this courtship.  Republican politicians who speak approvingly of armed gangs that take over statehouses and show up at Black Lives Matter events as auxiliary police forces know full well that the purpose of these armed men is to intimidate and terrorize their political opposition.  For a horrifying example of this phenomenon, check out coverage of the growing amity between militia movements and Republican politicians in Michigan.  In that state, the two groups have found common cause in opposing a Democratic governor and Democratic legislators around coronavirus measures.  It’s a profile in cowardice, opportunism, and moral turpitude, not to mention a case study of fascist politics in action.

Yet GOP politicians are happily signing onto such intimidation as a political tactic to overwhelm, demoralize, and strike fear into their Democratic opposition.  This report from Matt Shuham at Talking Points Memo describes how this is not a future problem, but has already traumatized some of those targeted by right-wing extremists around the country.  Reporting on protests at state legislatures in Michigan, Oregon, and Idaho, he writes that, “The lingering threat of political violence, legislators told me, still hangs over the work they do daily. It has chilled the democratic process and made elected representatives afraid for their own safety, and in some cases hesitant to fully express their views.”  One state representative remarked to Shuham, “[D]oes it really make sense to get up and make a big speech about why I’m making this vote, or is that just going to land 50 armed guys terrorizing my family outside my House?”  Even now, the right-wing terror campaign is already having its intended effects, to the benefit of the perpetrators and their GOP allies.

In the Capitol assault, we see the outlines of an even more terrible strategy: killing your political opponents when you can’t beat them at the ballot box.  In the context of January 6, such behavior has been widely acknowledged as treason and insurrection; the task of Democrats now is to communicate to the American people that “lesser” forms of violence, such as when Republicans ally themselves with armed right-wing militias, likewise constitute treason and insurrection.  And while they need to appeal to the decency of most Americans, they also can’t take for granted that the use of political violence is self-apparently bad.  It’s essential that the taboo nature of political violence be revisited and revived; that these grounds for condemning, repudiating, and rolling back the GOP be made crystal clear. 

Impeachment May Be Over, But The Work of Tying GOP to Capitol Insurrection Has Just Begun

It may or may not matter as time passes and we gain greater perspective; but the Democrats’ revolving resolve to call a witness to the impeachment trial and then to simply accept a written affidavit felt to many like an unnecessary backing down from a position of strength.  It wasn’t the prospect of getting Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler on video describing what she’d heard Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy say about Donald Trump’s refusal to send help to the besieged Capitol, but of a larger initiative to gather damning witness statements, that very temporarily energized so many Democrats.  Of course nothing was going to change enough GOP senatorial minds to result in conviction; but as many (including myself) have argued, the single most important purpose of the impeachment process was to educate and energize Americans as to what happened on January 6, and to make it clear that the GOP is complicit in the former president’s insurrectionism.  As Ronald Brownstein wrote on Saturday, “this trial was Ds biggest chance to show public how far Trump has moved GOP toward anti democratic means & acceptance of white nationalist extremism. Taking time to fill out that case day by day, especially w/witnesses, would have filled in picture much more for US.”

So, yes, it was unnerving to see Democrats appear to embrace and just as quickly back down from this opportunity, as it suggests they don’t fully grasp either the authoritarian nature of their GOP opposition or the Democrats’ responsibility in the fight ahead to defend American democracy.  But this may be an overly bleak reading of events.  It sounds like there was conflict among Democrats about how to proceed, and even a bad decision by leadership is not fatal to the Democrats’ chances.  But the events of this weekend only reinforce my sense that the Democrats absolutely must abandon their mindset that they are in any sort of “normal” democratic competition with the GOP for votes and power.  The decision of an overwhelming majority of Republican senators to retroactively green light the president’s violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government — an attempt that may well have resulted in the deaths of some of those very same senators — needs to be seen as the crossing of the Rubicon that it is.  In casting their votes to acquit, 43 Republican senators joined the cause of insurrection.

Though the impeachment is over, the Democrats must do everything they can to communicate to the public the terrible import of the January 6 attack and the decision of Republican senators to acquit the president.  Remember — the primary GOP response to President Trump’s loss, and subsequent coup attempt, has not been to re-examine the party’s decision to overwhelmingly back an authoritarian psychopath over the last four years.  Instead, it’s been to turn their attention to undermining state voting systems with the aim of preventing likely Democratic voters from being able to cast their votes or have their votes fairly counted, all rooted in the Big Lie that the Democrats cheated their way to power in November.  Their response, in other words, has been to continue Donald Trump’s insurrection by other means.  America’s existential political challenge is not Donald Trump; it is the Republican Party. The assault on the Capitol, and the vote to acquit Trump, are cudgels to use against the GOP for years into the future.

The Democrats must also drive home a related sin committed by the GOP in the impeachment acquittal: by signaling that the attempt at violent insurrection was no big thing, they’ve also sent a powerful message to the domestic extremist groups that took part in the Capitol attack that the GOP has their back; that the GOP and the terrorists are on the same side; that these groups should, as Trump himself notoriously put it, “stand back and stand by.”  A party that provides comfort to violent extremists deserves the support of no American voter.

There’s renewed coverage today of a conflict in the GOP between those who continue to support Trump and those who want the party to distance itself from him.  As an example of the latter group, this article in The Washington Post points to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who gave a speech denouncing Trump — yet McConnell only did so after voting to acquit the former president.  McConnell’s reasoning for opposing conviction is textbook McConnellian flimflam, and as coverage is rightly pointing out, leaves out his own role in refusing to recognize Biden’s victory for weeks upon weeks (not to mention his years-long abetting of Trump’s immoral and authoritarian presidency).  Already, state parties are mobilizing for retribution against the paltry handful of GOP senators who broke ranks and voted to convict; there’s no reason to think that this renewed “civil war” will end any less decisively in favor of Trumpist forces than it did when declared finished a few weeks ago.  And at any rate, as I’ve argued repeatedly, there’s a clear continuum between “normal” Republicans who simply want to restrict Democratic-likely voting by any legal means necessary, and those Trumpist politicians who now look kindly on violent intimidation to achieve their political goals.  The entire party has been corrupted by an anti-democratic animus, and the Democrats would not be well served by acting as if some Republicans are reliable partners, while others are compromised by their associations with Trump.  Democrats need to make sure this entire disastrous political party is known as the enablers of Trumpism and violence.

The struggle we are in can feel daunting, particularly after a day like yesterday when a Democratic fighting spirit seemed to self-extinguish in a matter of hours.  But at worst, this only means that voters need to continue to impress on their elected officials the need to defend American democracy, and to vote out those Democrats who won’t stand up for us.  It’s also well worth reminding ourselves that GOP authoritarianism is supported by a minority of Americans.  Indeed, looking at the impeachment vote in the Senate, it turns out that senators who backed conviction represented 202 million Americans, or 61.6% of the population, as opposed to those senators who voted for acquittal, who represented only 125 million Americans, or 38.2% of the population.  We should take heart that, when we put aside the anti-democratic distortions of Senate representation, the vote to convict Trump represented an even larger repudiation of his lawlessness.