The Manch Who Stole Christmas

Senator Joe Manchin’s declaration last weekend that he “cannot vote to move forward on” the Build Back Better Act is a tough pill to swallow for anyone who supports the myriad of critical programs the bill contains, from green energy infrastructure to child tax credits.  The existential threat of climate change in particular makes this news reverberate with the weight of collective doom — with the polar caps melting and the West Coast burning, will the U.S. still not do the bare minimum to protect our collective future?  This is to say nothing of the needless kneecapping of working families and the larger economy — Goldman Sachs has already downgraded its forecast of U.S. growth in 2022 due to Manchin’s declaration — not to mention the political prospects of Manchin’s fellow Democrats in 2022 and beyond.

But it is exactly because the stakes are so high that everyone who has an interest in the BBB’s substance, if not this specific legislation, needs to take a beat and not succumb to doomsaying and hair-rending.  There’s no getting around the agony of being one recalcitrant senator short of getting this over the finish line, but this can’t blind us to a near-miraculous unity among Democratic legislators.  Whatever its many shortcomings, this is not a party in disarray, but rather one discovering once again that being on the cusp of either victory or defeat often looks nearly indistinguishable.

On the economic front, this Zachary Carter piece that I discussed last month remains persuasive.  Increasingly progressive economic thinking has won the day among Democrats, and Manchin represents a dwindling, rear-guard effort within the party to say otherwise.  Of course, his power is magnified immensely by the Democrats’ extremely narrow Senate majority, but it’s a mistake to confuse a position of leverage with anything like the strength of Manchin’s political ideas.  The fact that he has resorted to easily disprovable lies in his opposition to measures like green energy incentives drives home the point.

The stakes are so high right now, and the collective anguish among Democrats and supporters of democracy so intense, because there is a basic perception that Democrats really only have one shot at passing the collection of policies folded into the BBB Act: fail on this (and on voting rights legislation), and the Republicans will sweep into permanent power in 2022 and beyond.  I share these fears — but the fact that Democratic leadership signaled an immediate pivot to voting rights legislation in place of a tabled BBB bill highlights their basic mishandling of the very dangers to democracy they seem to understand.  All along, legislation that protects democracy should have been given equal priority to passing the BBB Act.  They are flip sides of the same coin — efforts to defend America against an authoritarian GOP onslaught by reinvigorating American democracy and our economy in progressive, egalitarian ways — and should never have been decoupled.  Rather than being a distraction from economic reforms and policies, foregrounding threats to democracy by pushing actual legislation would have a synergistic effect with the BBB Act, raising the true stakes that both types of legislation need to pass in order to address a common challenge.

This is not to say that such a strategy would have, or will, change Joe Manchin’s mind, but I think it would have led to the Democrats being much better-positioned to weather Manchin’s sabotage than they currently are.  Manchin’s position would have appeared even more extreme and disloyal not just to the Democratic Party but to the United States itself, and the Democratic Party would have elevated the stakes of failure in the eyes of the American people.  We also can’t lose sight of the basic fact that exactly zero Republicans support the BBB Act, and that no more than a thimbleful (if that) support democracy-strengthening legislation.  Anything that would maximize the Democrats’ position as appearing reasonable, and the GOP’s position as appearing extremist, would be to the Democrats’ benefit — as more deeply advertising the BBB Act as having democracy-saving benefits would do.

The good news is that it’s not too late for Biden and the Democrats’ congressional leadership to change course.  Ultimately, they need a strategy that will both maximize the chances of getting Manchin’s no vote turned around, but also the ability to communicate clearly the stakes of getting the BBB and pro-democracy legislation passed for the survival of our democracy.  After a certain point, spending so much of your firepower working over a single antediluvian member of your party (however truly gratifying that can feel!) instead of the entirety of an obstructionist authoritarian GOP doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.  Here we can reach out for the grain of truth Manchin himself has offered — if Democrats want more Democratic legislation, they’re going to have to elect more Democrats.  Any party strategy from this point forward needs to be aimed at maximizing the chances of getting those extra votes in 2022 — even in the absence of the BBB legislation.  By gradually whittling down the BBB Act, only for Manchin to declare none of it worthwhile, the unsuccessful effort to woo Manchin has inadvertently downplayed the urgency of this moment — even as the efforts to woo Manchin were indeed rooted in this very urgency.

At the same time, the Democrats seem not to have simultaneously pursued democracy legislation at least in part because it would bring them into direct conflict with a GOP that it desperately wanted to sign onto the bipartisan infrastructure bill.  In other words, the Democrats have been at cross-purposes with themselves, projecting disunity to the public while giving unwarranted breathing room to a Republican Party hell bent on sabotaging the economy, the fight against covid, and American democracy.  Again, some of this was unavoidable — it made sense to try to get Manchin’s crucial vote — but in retrospect we can see the harm this strategy did, a harm only compounded by Manchin’s apparent, final “no.”  My bottom line — if the BBB Act and democracy legislation aren’t going to get by Manchin, make the next year about how Republicans are stymying progress, not Joe Manchin, and figure out a way to leverage this into Democratic victories in 2022.

Pelosi Comments Send Democratic Stock Down

By voicing her opposition to a ban on stock trading by members of Congress, despite a recent report showing that nearly 50 senators and representatives have recently violated the weak existing laws around stock disclosures, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has demonstrated a basic misunderstanding of our current political crisis and a troubling vision for the Democratic Party.  After a Trump presidency in which corruption and self-dealing replaced any sense of the public interest, the logical, ethical, and indeed self-interested path for Democrats would be to ensure their party promoted and lived by the highest ethical standards possible, so as to draw the greatest possible contrast with a GOP that objected not at all to the former president’s betrayals of the public trust.  After witnessing a four-year plundering of the public purse (think of all the Secret Service and other funds spent at Trump properties during his many, many visits to them) and foreign policy subordinated to Trump’s re-election strategy (think the Ukraine quid pro quo demand that led to his first impeachment), you would think that Democratic leaders would see rooting out and preventing corruption as a winning strategy for the party — an issue that ties together both financial shenanigans and acts of political malpractice.

Apparently, though, the virtues of clean government and drawing a razor-sharp contrast with the Republican Party are not so clear to Speaker Pelosi.  While opposition to stricter laws on stock trading on congresspeople appears to be shared by a strong majority of House Democrats, and a charitable read on Pelosi’s position would be that she is simply voicing the sentiment of this majority, such abject surrender to a self-defeating position is the opposite of actual leadership.  Banning stock trading by congresspeople is, simply put, the lowest of low-hanging fruit.  The idea that members of Congress can buy and sell stocks in companies whose fortunes could be affected by the legislation they themselves pass sounds like a textbook definition of corruption.  I would frankly be shocked if a majority of Americans would even believe that this is currently legal.

The STOCK Act, in place since 2012 and under which members of Congress are required to report the trades of themselves and family members within a certain time period, is obviously not working, if so many are failing to comply with it, and this lack of compliance with laughably lax requirements feeds the public’s fears of politicians not bound by the same rules as everyone else.  But you could make the case that even if the STOCK Act were fully adhered to, it would actually still represent a form of legalized corruption — a flimsy substitute for truly ethically-minded laws that would protect voters from the risk that their representatives might confuse personal gain with public purpose.

Pelosi also told reporters that, “We’re a free-market economy.  They should be able to participate in that.”  Ironically, this comment captures the scale of the corruption at the heart of the current arrangement. As Pelosi well knows, many aspects of our free-market economy are in fact governed by laws that Congress passes, whether they affect individual companies (as with spending bills) or whether they address the actual structure of the overall economy.  The idea that politicians are free agents able to enjoy the fruits of a free economy, rather than stewards of this economy and working to make sure their constituents are the ones who benefit from it, inverts the way things are supposed to work in a democratic society.  

Pelosi’s comments couldn’t come at a worse possible time, but at least they have the virtue of being clarifying.  With the Democrats apparently shelving the Build Back Better act after it had dominated their agenda through much of the last year, the idea that the leader of the House Democrats has decided to emphatically embrace a corrupt stock trading setup for members of Congress strikes me, at least, as profoundly demoralizing.  I guess it’s OK if Democrats don’t pass any laws to help the American people, as long as they can make money on the stock market based on their insider knowledge of rules, regulations, and pending legislation?  That does not sound like a winning midterm strategy to me, and the fact that Democrats might feel insulated from GOP attacks on this front because Republicans, too, benefit from this unethical arrangement only highlights the Speaker’s breathtaking cynicism and failure to grasp the political moment. Pelosi’s statements yesterday are deeply offensive and troubling for anyone who supports a Democratic Party that fights for the common man, not the uncommonly lucky legislator.

Right-Wing Violence is a Cudgel for Delegitimizing the GOP

It’s been a couple weeks since it was making headlines, but I wanted to flag a couple excellent articles about the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict and the larger threat of right-wing political violence in the United States.  Zach Beauchamp and Adam Serwer both place Rittenhouse’s acquittal in the larger context of a radicalizing right wing, with Serwer delving deeper into the white supremacist mindset at the heart of the gun rights ideology. Both make the essential point that the Rittenhouse case, in Beauchamp’s words, “has revealed a scary convergence between the fringe and the mainstream on the wisdom of turning guns against their political enemies. Its resolution validates that belief in ways that challenge the basic nonviolent compact at the heart of democratic political life.” He continues:

Rittenhouse is a powerful symbol for the right because he acted out a long-held fantasy — a man with his gun, standing up to the liberal hordes. That he was found not guilty is validation that fantasy could be made reality, a godsend to genuine extremists.

But his acquittal’s celebration across a much broader spectrum of the right is perhaps even more troubling. It threatens the mainstream consensus that political violence has no place in a democratic society — and the related notion that Americans need to share a country with people who disagree with them.

Of all the parlous recent developments in American politics, the right’s effort to normalize violence against its opponents takes the cake as the single most ominous one — after all, it’s not much of a free society or democracy when the rule of law succumbs to the rule of the gun. There are plenty of failed states around the world to let us know what that looks like, and the fact that we have to contemplate such a possible future for the United States is something of a waking nightmare. But as disorienting as it is, we need to look at the most frightening and disheartening aspects of our situation unflinchingly, because it is only by acknowledging them that we can properly confront them.

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With right-wing actors willing to kill their imagined political enemies, and a Republican Party increasingly comfortable with accommodating this mindset, the future of our democracy lies not simply in stopping the spread of violence, but in creating an overwhelming backlash to such depraved attitudes and actions in order to delegitimize both the insurrectionist right and the GOP. These murderous tactics are intended to strike fear and disarray into Democratic and pro-democracy voters. In response, Democrats and defenders of democracy must work to ensure that the violence and intimidation directed against our democracy arouses not just anger, but rage against those who would replace the rule of law with the law of the jungle. As crucial as it is that journalists and news outlets cover right-wing violence and GOP complicity in order to inform Americans of the danger, it is simply not enough that writers like Beauchamp, Serwer, and Eric Boehlert are communicating to the public the dangerous dynamics at play; we need Democratic politicians to talk about this threat to their voters and to the public at large, to make the moral and emotional case that anyone who uses, or encourages, violence in this country to gain political power should be considered persona non grata in the public sphere, and that supporters of democracy need to make their voices heard at all levels of society, from civic institutions like election boards to casting votes for politicians who defend our form of government. Such a hard line is essential in the face of right-wing efforts to blur the lines and to insist on a sick continuity between the bullet and the ballot box.

The right-wing movement towards violence rests partially on a fantasy that it is actually the left that is responsible for political violence in America; witness the many outlandish stories of murderous antifa and city-burning Black Lives Matter protestors that are a staple of right-wing outlets like Fox News and OANN. Against this, Democratic politicians need to say plainly what right-wing violence actually aims at: the injury and murder of innocent Americans, whether they’re exercising their rights to protest, to worship, to carry out their duties as elected officials, or to simply go shopping at a mall in El Paso. The horrific imbalance between deranged right-wingers bent on killing, and innocent Americans living their lives, must always be kept in view — right-wing violence aims at murder and mayhem, and has zero connection to legitimate political action.

Though there have been numerous incidents of right-wing violence and intimidation over the last several years — including the Rittenhouse shootings, the Tree of Life synagogue murders, and the occupation of the Michigan capitol building and plot to kidnap that state’s governor, to name a few — it is the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that most powerfully demonstrates the linkages between the Republican Party and a growing propensity on the right to deploy violence to achieve political ends. A Republican president incited a bloody-minded mix of militia types, white supremacists, and radicalized individuals to storm the Capitol and keep him in power by whatever means necessary, including the violent intimidation and near-murder of U.S. senators and representatives (and this is to say nothing of the many corrupt, non-violent machinations Trump employed in the weeks prior to January 6 to attempt to remain in office). We literally have hundreds of hours of video evidence of the derangement and danger of far-right insurrectionists smashing apart the Capitol, assaulting and maiming Capitol police officers, and shouting for the deaths of U.S. elected officials; the public record could not be clearer. It could also not be clearer that in the weeks and months following the assault, the bulk of the Republican Party made itself complicit in the violence of that day by continuing to support the former president’s false claims of a stolen election — the very cause for which the perpetrators of January 6 acted. We are still learning about the extent of coordination between the White House, Republican congresspeople, and the violence at the Capitol, but even what we know already is sufficient to stain the GOP at large with the infamy and violence of that day.

So there is no path forward that doesn’t include condemnation of GOP-Trumpist violence and intimidation as part of the Democratic Party’s claim to be America’s sole major party of democracy, and to discredit the GOP in the eyes of American voters. It is not enough to decry political violence; Democrats need to explicitly make the case that any support of political violence, such as when GOP representatives offer a congressional internship to the poster child for recent political vigilantism, is a demonstration of the GOP’s unfitness for power. They cannot treat this a some sort of side issue — it is a looming threat to American democracy, and they can communicate this by acting like it, not only in their words but also through their actions, such as legislation that clarifies and expands laws around political intimidation. Ultimately, it’s up to the GOP’s political opposition to mobilize such public sentiment, to actually do something about the dangers we face, and to inflict as severe a political price as possible on the Republican Party. Without political pushback, there are no conceivable impediments to the right-wing tendency towards violence. And as I suggested above, a powerful starting point would be intensified Democratic focus on the January 6 insurrection and Donald Trump’s incitement of right-wing violence against the U.S. government, which can illuminate the broader bloody-minded assault on American voters and institutions even as it constitutes an unspeakable political crime in its own right.

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The right-wing effort to legitimize violence requires lies about Democrats and the left, seeking to shift responsibility for initiating violence on to them. This goes beyond lies about the threat posed by antifa; as Beauchamp and Serwer both suggest, the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election serves as justification to take back America by any means necessary. The effort seeks to blur the lines between democracy and violence, to make it seem as if they can coexist, when the truth is that violence is the enemy of a democratic society. The Democrats must hold this line, and persuade as many Americans as possible that those who use violence and intimidation to achieve their political ends are democracy’s enemies. While the right wing would love to believe that they are fighting a heroic battle against armed adversaries, what they actually envision is violence and murder directed at unarmed innocents. This is not a rhetorical fight that the Republican Party can be allowed to win, to say nothing of allowing actual violent acts to subvert and destroy our democracy.

Moreover, such pushback isn’t just needed for its own sake — going as hard as possible against right-wing violence and intimidation can also play a key role in unraveling the rest of the GOP’s anti-democratic agenda, as such violence exists on a continuum with other anti-democratic attacks. Here’s Serwer again:

The party finds the apocalyptic fear of impending leftist tyranny useful not only for turning out its supporters, but also for rationalizing legislative attempts to disenfranchise, gerrymander, and otherwise nullify the votes of Democratic constituencies. Engineering the American political system so that Republicans’ political rivals are unable to contest their power is a less forceful solution than killing people, but the political goal is similar: to never have to share power with those they disagree with.

The propensity towards violence is on a spectrum with the desire to undo American elections, rooted in the same rotten authoritarian soil; turning actual violence into a rhetorical weapon to bludgeon the GOP for their entire anti-democratic justice would be poetic and necessary justice.

Finally, it’s also important for the Democrats to engage anew with the lack a regulatory or moral regime that could stem the tide of everyday gun violence that slaughters thousands of American annually — a bloody phenomenon that, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues, has played a role in America’s slide towards authoritarianism and further bloodshed:

The scale and scope of gun violence in America doesn’t just desensitize us to violence. It also cheapens the value of life. It fosters political, social and psychological conditions that are propitious for autocracy. The omission of gun law reform from discussions of democracy protection is symptomatic of our normalization of this tragic situation. The Jan. 6 insurrection shows us how dangerous that blind spot has become.

From this perspective, the eagerness of some on the political right for outright violence partakes of a broader national illness in which we are already accustomed to firearms disrupting the social peace and destroying countless lives. Citizens are more prepared to commit violence, and others are prepared to tacitly accept it, when criminal gun violence already wracks the nation. Likewise, this mayhem fosters the authoritarian mindset that leads to acceptance of authoritarian rule and the enactment of political — that is, anti-democratic — violence. As others have noted, Democrats, by supporting gun control and sending the unmistakable message that gun violence is a crisis for our country, can make clear that they are the party of law and order, against the GOP’s indifference to mass death, fear, and vigilantism. To defeat GOP authoritarianism, both the right-wing embrace of violence and the generalized gun violence of American society require direct, unwavering confrontation.

Fantastic But Ominous New Coverage of the Coup Attempt That Never Ended

The Atlantic has published an in-depth story by Barton Gellman about Donald Trump’s coup attempt and ongoing efforts by the Republican Party to ensure that the next such effort succeeds.  This is probably the best single piece I’ve read about the authoritarian crisis this country is experiencing.  Gellman conveys both the foulness of Trump’s scheme to throw out the November 2020 elections results, the horrors of the January 6 insurrection, and the ongoing abomination of Republican legislators working to subvert election mechanisms and rules so that a future Republican presidential candidate can fully escape the intent of American voters.  He also captures the mix of racism, resentment, and delusion at the heart of the most extreme Trump supporters, and their frightening openness to violence as a means to secure undemocratic future power for the Republican Party.  To give you a flavor and some enticement to read more, here’s an excerpt from the opening:

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

The piece is dense with information and insights, but I want to draw out a few points that relate to posts I’ve written over the past year.  First, Gellman’s examination of the participants in the January 6 storming of the Capitol provides yet more evidence that a combination of white supremacism and white fear of demographic change is the motor behind much of the ongoing right-wing rebellion.  Discussing the search to find common threads among the participants, he writes:    

“Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.” 

[. . .] Respondents who believed in the Great Replacement theory, regardless of their views on anything else, were nearly four times as likely as those who did not to support the violent removal of the president.”

In other words, the same basic white resentment that’s now at the core of the Republican Party’s appeal is also driving some of the Republican base to violent extremes.  Among other things, this helps us understand that rather than being an attack by organized groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the violence of January 6 was indicative of a much larger group of Republican-aligned Americans who see violence as necessary to preserve political power.  As one expert told Gellman, “This really is a new, politically violent mass movement.  This is collective political violence,” rather than the work of isolated individuals.

Gellman also makes a strong case that GOP efforts across the nation to subvert the nation’s election machinery are probably even more of a threat to American democracy than the attempts to gerrymander and disenfranchise voters.  State legislatures are going so far as to enshrine their ability to reject election results that they don’t like, a direct attack not just on majority rule but democracy itself.  But Gellman’s interviews with right-wing Republicans who’ve fully embraced the lies about a stolen election and the need to take the country back by any means necessary may be the most arresting aspect of the article.  More than anything, I was struck by the off-the-chart levels of delusion, resentment, and narcissism of these predominantly white, male Americans who have essentially decided that to save this country, they will need to destroy it.  At bottom, the idea that they have everything to lose if all Americans, regardless of skin color, race, gender, or national origin, are recognized as fully equal members of the nation, is white supremacism in all its crapitude, and cannot be reasoned with, only defeated.  Likewise, the paranoid belief that it is the left, and minorities, who are the ones threatening the nation with violence is a classic case of projection and self-serving propaganda.  The rush to justify violent resistance, to open the door to killing their purported enemies, speaks to a soul sickness that endangers us all. 

In the face of this continuing radicalization of millions of right-wing voters in favor of overturning American democracy — by violence, if they think necessary — Gellman indirectly shines an even brighter light on the Democrats’ failure to protect democracy — a failure that hardly ends with their refusal so far to attempt the obvious strengthening of our election mechanisms, like eliminating gerrymandering.  By refusing to act like we face a crisis, Democratic leaders are effectively demobilizing their base even as the GOP is radicalizing its own voters.  The Democrats are also failing to perform the basic task of alerting the public to vitally important political developments that pose catastrophic dangers to our collective good. This disparity in attitudes goes beyond maddening, into the realm of self-sabotage and fantasy levels of denial.  For instance, just this week, Greg Sargent reports at The Plum Line blog, President Biden’s team is hosting the Summit for Democracy, but appears unwilling to actually concede the depth of the U.S.’s own democracy problem and the need for actual action, rather than overoptimistic words about bringing Americans together.  If Democrats don’t understand that what they face is an inevitable and necessary confrontation with democracy’s internal enemies, they’ll never bring to bear the urgency and focus that this moment requires.

Return of the Republicans From Planet Omicron

National Public Radio has taken an in-depth look at covid mortality rates across the country, and has reached the dismaying conclusion that that there’s a direct correlation between political affiliation and one’s chances of dying in the coronavirus pandemic.  This might not seem surprising given our general understanding that the Republican Party has a higher proportion of vaccine-resistant individuals than the Democrats, but the starkness of the numbers hit like a punch in the gut:

NPR looked at deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which vaccinations widely became available. People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.7 times the death rates of those that went for Biden. Counties with an even higher share of the vote for Trump saw higher COVID-19 mortality rates.

In October, the reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth, according to Charles Gaba, an independent health care analyst who's been tracking partisanship trends during the pandemic and helped to review NPR's methodology. Those numbers have dropped slightly in recent weeks, Gaba says: "It's back down to around 5.5 times higher.

Death rates in Trump-supporting counties that are between 2.7 and 5.5 times higher than those of Biden-supporting counties constitute a disastrous and shocking disparity in health outcomes, and should strengthen Democratic resolve to go on the offensive against a GOP that continues to sabotage the national fight against the covid pandemic.

As I discussed a couple weeks ago, this prevailing Republican strategy is rendered even more unforgivable by the party’s simultaneous effort to blame Joe Biden for not getting the coronavirus under control.  If this is not a clear example of a party having blood on its hands, I really don’t what is.  Republican politicians are opposing commonsense health policies, and promoting fantasies like the efficacy of herd immunity in place of vaccinations, that have helped turned this pandemic into a literal culling of Republican voters.  If the GOP is going to promote policies and fake science that result in mass death, then turn around and blame Joe Biden for the inevitable mass death, then this is a matter on which Joe Biden has not choice but to engage more strongly, both for the sake of bringing the pandemic to an end and for his own party’s political future.

Today, we have the latest indication that the GOP is only doubling down on its pro-covid polices, with The Washington Post reporting that, “Congressional Republicans are planning to ratchet up their attempts to repeal President Biden’s vaccine and testing mandates, seeking to unwind policies that the White House and top public health officials see as critical to combating the coronavirus.” In the next day, Republicans in the Senate, backed by one or two conservative Democrats, are expected to pass legislation aimed at blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine and testing mandate for large businesses. And this comes less than a week after GOP senators almost forced a government shutdown as part of their war on mandates.

Crucially, beyond the supremely important public health upside, escalating the rhetorical fight against GOP covid insanity offers two powerful political advantages.  First, it could help drive a wedge between some Republican voters and their GOP representatives; after all, how often can you truthfully say in politics that a party's officials are pursuing policies that are killing off their voters in vast numbers?  Joe Biden is the president of all Americans, and has a duty to protect citizens when their elected representatives are acting against their most basic interests, like life and health, even when those citizens didn’t vote for him. Second, it will help energize Democratic base voters by reminding them why they elected Joe Biden and a Democratic majority in the first place — to protect them from the depredations of right-wing extremists, who, among other things, refuse to embrace basic medical advice and long-standing precedent on how to battle a pandemic.

The Great Unrousing, Revisited

Last week, I shared my perception that media coverage of America’s democracy crisis seems to have been improving lately, even as the Democratic Party remains in a state of catatonic denial about the GOP’s accelerating anti-democratic extremism — a split phenomenon that, for me at least, only heightens the sense of a collective nightmare transpiring and a nation unable to wake itself up out of it.  The past several days have only brought more mixed blessings on the coverage front, as several tocsin-sounding pieces have been published by a trio of acute chroniclers of our authoritarian precipice.  

First, Jamelle Bouie describes the GOP effort to prepare the ground for Donald Trump’s return to power in 2024, linking the campaign to undermine state-level election administration with the push for one-party legislative rule in battleground states that could help the GOP win or subvert the 2022 and 2024 contests.  Crucially, Bouie captures how this whole vast effort is being conducted very much in the open — a conspiracy hiding in plain sight, to quote the title of the piece:

Increasingly untethered from any commitment to electoral democracy, large and influential parts of the Republican Party are working to put Trump back in power by any means necessary. Republicans could win without these tactics — they did so in Virginia last month — but there’s no reason to think that the party will pull itself off this road.

Every incentive driving the Republican Party, from Fox News to the former president, points away from sober engagement with the realities of American politics and toward the outrageous, the antisocial and the authoritarian.

None of this is happening behind closed doors. We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.

Of everything I’ve seen lately, for me this piece best captures the unreality of our political situation — one of America’s two political parties openly making war on democracy, its roadmap to illicit power signaled loud and clear for anyone willing to hear it.

But as I also argued last week, the GOP push to seize minority power against the majority will is shadowed by a parallel crisis: that of the Democratic Party and much of the center-left to either acknowledge this slow-motion coup is happening, or to act to counter and defeat it.  On matters of the Democrats’ self-defeating tendencies as we move further and further towards an authoritarian hellscape, there’ve been few analysts better than Brian Beutler, and his latest column uses recent indications that Roe v. Wade will soon be gutted or overturned to explore the Democrats’ democracy-defense crisis.

Skeptical that a banning or near-banning of abortion would automatically redound to the Democrats’ electoral benefit, Beutler digs into the contradictions at the heart of the party’s apparent strategy to defend a right that a great many of its voters believe is non-negotiable.  As he sees it, even aggressive efforts by the Democrats to defend abortion rights would run up against a Republican opposition whose powers to thwart the Democrats are extremely strong, if not impregnable, because of the way the GOP has already made itself able to withstand majority opinion due to its various anti-democratic maneuvers.  The Democrats, on the other hand, are in a best-case scenario left telling their voters to “simply” vote for Democrats in greater numbers than ever in 2022 and beyond, when the Democrats are simultaneously unwilling or unable to pass legislation that would undo voter suppression and gerrymandering that blocks the Democrats from translating these votes into actual congressional seats and power.  (An additional enormous downside for Democrats being unable to defend their voters’ interests, despite the best efforts of these very voters, is that it can lead to demoralization among the party’s base, making it even harder for Democrats to win the decisive popular vote margins they would need to possibly overcome Republican subterfuge).

So why won’t the Democratic leadership do what they need to do not just to defend American democracy, but to defend themselves from being relegated to oblivion, like the domestic political equivalent of AFC Richmond?  Beutler describes a party that prefers to “[float] above the fray,” an approach that “doesn’t work because it’s incongruent to the realities staring them in the face. It’s how you wind up responding to a coup attempt with an infrastructure bill while the fascists convince more voters that you’re the real threat to democracy.”

But though he doesn’t sound optimistic that this will likely change, Beutler makes a point that had been floating in the back of my own mind recently: “The only nice thing about staring doom in the face is it focuses the mind. Democratic leaders are clearly not prepared to accept what I wrote above as their fate today, but the sooner they do, the sooner they might get their act together, if only to save themselves. As I’ve written before, there’s still the tiniest of openings for them to do what currently seems impossible, and the only reason to think they might is that they must.”  I actually believe this is a stronger incentive than Beutler may think, insofar as if politicians are about anything, it is their own political survival.  But more than this, I also think that we can’t look at Democratic politicians’ incentives to take action in isolation.  It may be delusional, but I do think that grassroots pressure can make a decisive difference here.  This is particularly true because on something like abortion, as with many other issues, the otherwise abstract stakes of “defending democracy” are given precise, urgent dimension.  If enough of the Democratic base sees that the Democrats will only be able to defend abortion rights if democracy-strengthening legislation gets passed, and what’s stopping that is the filibuster, then I can promise you that you’re going to have a hell of a lot more people calling their senators demanding that the filibuster be reformed (whether that would be enough to catalyze change is admittedly another question — and yes, I realize that a single senator (cough cough, Joe Manchin!) could still derail filibuster reform).  Indeed, the ability of actual voters to mobilize and exert pressure on their elected representatives is going to be a key part of any revitalization of American democracy, above and beyond the question of whether Democratic officials choose to do what’s necessary to defend the interests of their constituents.

What gives me a bit of optimism these days is that the majority of the American people and the Democratic Party have literally not yet begun to fight, to coin a phrase.  The reality is that the American majority is in the process of having the power of its votes dissipated and nullified by an increasingly fanatical right-wing movement whose hero is a sociopath, and whose vision for women is subservience, for non-white Americans is degradation, and for the planet is exploitation to the point of collective suicide.  I believe part of the Democrats’ problem is the failure to articulate a countervailing, egalitarian, life-affirming vision for America — but the good news is that such a vision already exists in large part, and much of the work needed to get us out of this mess revolves around articulating that vision and how Democrats and progressives can instantiate it through policy and good governance.

Conversely, the right may be energized right now, but its anti-democratic animus ultimately comes from a place of fear and weakness, not strength.  The historian Thomas Zimmer has a great Twitter thread that touches on this important, and under-discussed, aspect of our present crisis:

The silver lining is that the political order the Right prefers no longer has majority support - which is exactly why conservatives are exploring avenues to erect authoritarian minority rule.  That’s the paradox at the heart of the political situation right now: Yes, democracy is in grave danger – but not because it’s weakened recently, but because it’s actually gotten stronger, or to be more precise: closer to the promise of multiracial, pluralistic democracy.  The reactionary counter-mobilization from the Right is not coming from a place of strength – conservatives are radicalizing because they feel their backs against the wall, convinced to be confronted with near-overwhelming forces of liberalism, leftism, wokeism.

Zimmer’s reference to “the paradox at the heart of the political situation” really resonates for me, and gets at the frustrations and outrage I keep trying to articulate myself: it’s maddening for Democrats and other defenders of democracy to be playing defense right now, when those who oppose it are essentially lashing out because they know they can no longer win under democracy’ rules.  To not make this basic insight central to how the Democratic Party talks about the need to defend democracy, and to promote its many policies that would do so (including the stalled-out voting rights acts and the economically transformative Build Back Better Act) continues to strike me as a completely unnecessary act of self-sabotage, and a shying away from a necessary confrontation with an illegitimate, anti-democratic movement that seeks to pervert the country in its own frightened, delusional image.

When Will Democrats Finally Rouse Themselves to Defend Democracy?

The biggest story in American politics for the last several years has been the Republican Party’s increasing turn to authoritarian politics.  The GOP’s movement toward outright opposition to democracy had been evident for years, in its campaigns of extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression and efforts to stack the courts with right-wing judges who might insulate GOP priorities from majority will, but the Trump presidency fully catalyzed the shift.  To the GOP’s existing tendencies, Trump fused a classic model of the authoritarian strongman leader around whom the party could rally.  Donald Trump believed in this vision so much, in fact, that he even attempted a coup in his remaining months in power, culminating in the violence of January 6.

With the majority of GOP leaders and rank and file embracing the Big Lie that Democrats stole the presidency from Trump, the party has prioritized a raft of state-level legislation and rhetoric designed to subvert future elections and cement permanent Republican power.  On the gerrymandering front, The New York Times summarizes the situation thus: “In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia, Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.”  If voters cannot change their leaders, even if a majority vote for the opposition party, then we cannot say that those voters are living in a democracy.  And when you add atop this voter suppression measures aimed specifically at traditionally Democratic constituencies like African-Americans and students, the anti-democratic vise grip becomes even more of a stranglehold.

Alongside this, Republicans who lie that the 2020 election was stolen are now taking over election boards around the country.  This chilling Washington Post report captures the dark spirit of their effort, which is pretty clearly aimed at putting in place a body of Trumpist apparatchiks who will throw out future ballots that don’t support their preferred candidates.  The previous chair of the Michigan GOP tells the Post that, “This is a great big flashing red warning sign.  The officials who fulfilled their legal duty after the last election are now being replaced by people who are pledging to throw a wrench in the gears of the next election. It tells you that they are planning nothing but chaos and that they have a strategy to disrupt the certification of the next election.”  The head of a nonpartisan voting group neatly summarizes the situation: “Having election deniers run elections is like having arsonists take over the fire department.”

Parallel to efforts to block majority rule and fair elections, the GOP has begun to incorporate threats of violence and intimidation into its politics.  The New York Times reports that:

From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party. Ten months after rioters attacked the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, and after four years of a president who often spoke in violent terms about his adversaries, right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him from power.

GOP leaders signal their comfort with these tactics by their silence, and by refusing to condemn the perpetrators — including Representative Paul Gosar, who just weeks ago tweeted violent images depicting a cartoon version of himself killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening to do the same to President Joe Biden.  As the Times notes, the threats have already had concrete effects, with literally hundreds of election workers and health officials leaving county and states posts over the past year.  The GOP has no incentive to stop employing and condoning these tactics because they are working — they are inciting the GOP base to greater and greater rage and bloodlust, and driving good people out of public service, to be replaced by partisan hacks who will serve the party’s will in place of the public interest.

Taken together, these GOP efforts aimed at the basic foundations of our democracy arguably constitute a slow-rolling coup that is slowly but surely accelerating.  Throw in the GOP’s opposition to common-sense measures to end the pandemic, such as its fight against vaccine mandates, and what comes into view is a party that is essentially war with American democracy and society in the pursuit of power and dominance. 

* * *

But alongside the crisis of Republican authoritarianism, we’re experiencing an intertwined, parallel crisis that becomes more inexcusable and infuriating by the day: the general refusal of Democratic Party leaders and elected officials to explicitly confront the GOP’s descent into anti-democratic madness.  This Democratic failure encompasses the party’s inability to act legislatively against the GOP assault — such as by passing vitally important voting rights legislation that might undo the GOP’s severe gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts — but is not limited to the lack of substantive action.  Just as damningly, the Democrats are failing to describe to the public and to the media the nature of the GOP threat, or to rally decent Americans into fervent opposition against this anti-democratic juggernaut.  By falling so very short on both the substantive and rhetorical fronts, they are helping create the very political conditions that allow the GOP’s assault on democracy to thrive.  When the Republican Party enacts policies and endorses violent rhetoric without its opposition adequately responding, the Democrats tacitly help to normalize the GOP’s tactics and strategies as fair play in our democratic system, even when those tactics and strategies are aimed at destroying our democracy.

The fact of the matter is that we are already well past the point when promotion of the norms and structures of democracy, and a full-throated fight against democracy’s domestic enemies, should have shot to the top of the Democratic agenda.  While protecting democracy was a major theme of the Democrats’ anti-Trump rhetoric during his administration — after all, the appeal to vote for Democrats to stop the depredations of a want-to-be strongman were key to their 2018 and 2020 wins — this strategy has failed to evolve into legislation to back it up, or to evolve to encompass the radicalized GOP in its indictment.

It is somewhat unbelievable that this needs to be said, but also a perfect encapsulation of the Democrats’ mind-boggling torpor: President Trump attempted to stage a coup against the American government, culminating in an assault on the Capitol; in the wake of the coup attempt, not only did the great majority of Republican senators and representatives oppose efforts to impeach and convict the president for his attempted violent overthrow of American democracy, but have since then coalesced into a near-uniform embrace of the contention that Democrats stole the presidency from Trump.  And yet, the Democrats have so far failed to make this a central talking point for why Americans should vote for them instead of Republicans.  They’ve also failed to prioritize passing laws that might counter not only GOP gerrymandering, but the Republicans’ multi-layered effort to gum up and subvert the conduct of elections themselves, not to mention ensure that those who engage in violent political intimidation are legally sanctioned.  Beyond this, where are the new laws that would ensure that the corruption and self-dealing of another president like Donald Trump (or, god forbid, another Trump presidency) could never happen again?

Somewhat ironically, the sense of crisis has only been deepened by recent efforts by the media to sound the alarm, such as in the articles I noted above.  In part, this is because the detailed reporting of the Republican anti-democratic efforts portrays more fully than ever a breathtakingly brazen and multi-faceted effort to gain power without majority support.  But in turn, such a portrayal only further highlights the Democrats’ relative lack not only of urgency, but of basic strategy and commitment to defeating the GOP onslaught.  For me, it’s also driven home the absolute necessity of the Democrats taking the initiative in defense of democracy — because the reporting and other media analysis, as good as some of it is, cannot adequately convey the urgency and arouse the mass indignation that Democratic politicians can and must.  It is one thing for the The New York Times to report that several U.S. states are now only democracies in name only; it is another thing entirely for one of the United States’ two major political parties to declare that the GOP is attacking our right to govern ourselves in service of a twisted vision of plutocratic power, white supremacy, and a perverted, militant Christianism.

The various threads of the GOP’s anti-democratic strategy are mutually reinforcing, making it essential that Democratic politicians pull them together to make a case against GOP authoritarianism and for supporting a pro-democracy Democratic Party, rather than relying on the media to do so for them.  Voter suppression makes gerrymandering more effective; violent threats mean that not just Democrats but moderate Republicans are intimidated out of public office, or from joining public demonstrations that might show mass opposition to GOP policies and governance.

Again, it is amazing to me that the Democrats would have any hesitation on this point, or that anyone would need to push their leadership to action.  The GOP is basically working to ensure that the votes of most Americans essentially don’t count, so that a Republican minority can take power, and is increasingly comfortable with inciting violence to get its way — the very definition, to put it mildly, of an extremely unpopular political position.  The GOP is opposed to America, so much so that they can’t really even renounce the coup that the former president attempted!  They hate America so much, they’re still trying to make that coup happen by a slow-motion insurrection against U.S. democracy!  Do the Democrats really think that defending democracy against its domestic enemies is some sort of controversial or high-risk political stance? And this is just to speak of the situation in purely political terms, which of course is not nearly the case.  Not only do Democrats have an overwhelming need to call out and oppose GOP authoritarianism for the sake of the party’s survival and serving its voters, the party has a responsibility, equal if not even more pressing, to defend American democracy for its own sake.

I don’t have a comprehensive theory of why Democrats seem to be choking in this moment, although the most charitable explanations include elements of shock, intimidation, and disbelief at how quickly and thoroughly the GOP has turned into an authoritarian party.  Another major reason is that the Democrats, starting from the Biden administration on down, continue to prize the appearance of bipartisanship as a central party goal.  As Jeet Heer puts it, “Biden failed to make the link between Trump and the party’s increasing extremism in the 2020 election. Like Hillary Clinton before him, he tried to distinguish between the toxic Trump and a redeemable GOP. But this sop to moderate Republicans effectively prevents Democrats from describing what’s actually happening.”

But the GOP is only growing more radicalized as the months pass, giving the lie to simplistic notions that “the fever will break” or that moderates will rebel and take back the party.  Extremism now feeds extremism within the GOP, and the only way it will stop is for another party to stop it.  As has been pointed out elsewhere, the Republican strategy is working for them — they are gaining impregnable power and intimidating opponents — without paying any political price.  But of course they’re not paying any political price, because the Democrats, again for reasons not entirely clear to me, have chosen not to make an actual assault on American government, up to and including a coup attempt by a Republican president, a central issue in their case for why American should support them and reject Republicans. What will it take to move the Democrats?

The Republicans From Planet Omicron

Last week, The New York Times published an article highlighting Republican efforts to blame President Biden for the persistence of the covid pandemic while opposing the very measures that could bring this crisis to an end.  To its credit, the piece acknowledges the basic cognitive dissonance of the GOP’s attacks, but fails to reach the obvious and logical conclusion: that the GOP is actively undermining the fight against covid as a way to sabotage the Biden presidency and win back political power.  That is, the GOP strategy is not absurd, but sinister and murderous.  Instead, the article frames GOP criticism as founded in good-faith disputes about how best to fight the coronavirus, when in fact Republicans advocate approaches to ending the pandemic that have no basis in either science or basic logic.

We need look no further than the final year of the Trump administration for proof that the party’s leaders are comfortable with inflicting mass death and suffering on the American people in the name of preserving their political fortunes.  President Trump openly embarked on a strategy of downplaying the threat and damage of the coronavirus out of a belief that doing so would prevent the sort of sharp economic downturn that could harm his re-election chances.  This strategy received broad support from GOP elected officials, and so we were treated to a barrage of propaganda, originating in the White House but echoed by his political allies, that American workers must sacrifice their health and their lives in order to keep the economy humming along.  All this in the pre-vaccine era, when masks and social distancing were our sole protections.  This cynical strategy was our reality, and is a matter of public record. 

With a Democrat in the White House, the script has flipped, but the immorality remains the same.  Now, a primary Republican goal is to prevent an economic comeback, and key to that is prolonging the pandemic.  The Times notes that the GOP has made this obvious connection between the health of the economy and the state of the pandemic: “Republican strategists believe Mr. Biden’s approval ratings on the economy — the key to his party’s prospects in next year’s midterm elections — cannot improve until voters are more satisfied with his performance on the pandemic.”  And so we have Republicans in Congress and state houses continuing to spout the familiar nonsense about masking and vaccine mandates — but this time, not in the name of pretending the pandemic is no big thing, but to help ensure America’s economic recovery is hobbled as much as possible.

Further evidence that the motivations for doing so are deeper than just reflecting mistaken arguments about “freedom” generated by the Republican base is that GOP politicians continue to oppose vaccine mandates and bleat on about natural herd immunity despite the clear evidence that vaccination opposition is killing and sickening Republican voters in unconscionable numbers.  The Times reports that, “The most Republican counties have 2.78 times as many new cases than the most Democratic counties, down from three times as many a month ago [. . .] The death rate in those Republican counties is nearly six times as high as the death rate in the Democratic counties.”  The links to vaccine resistance are clear: two months ago, “90 percent of adult Democrats had been vaccinated, compared with 58 percent of adult Republicans."  A force more powerful than protecting its own constituents is at play here — the desire to destroy a Democratic presidency at all costs.

But even if you disagree with this assessment (and if you’re not persuaded, I would encourage you to read Brian Beutler’s powerful indictment of the GOP on this front from mid-summer, as well as Amanda Marcotte’s more recent piece making a similar case), if you can’t bring yourself to believe such cold-blooded calculation by the GOP, I would argue that the necessary Democratic response remains the same: to publicly identify GOP obstructionism as the single largest obstacle to America getting free of a pandemic that is ravaging the public health and undermining the economy with high inflation and uncertainty.  It is somewhat heartening that the Times got responses from the White House along these lines, but of course this has not nearly been a consistent, emphatic line from the Biden administration in the way it needs to be.

Now, though, with the emergence of the omicron variant and escalated GOP efforts to blame Biden for the pandemic, it’s political folly as well as health policy malpractice not to up the Democrats’ refutation and denunciation of Republican pro-covid policies.  As with other matters where the Democrats have ceded the initiative to the GOP, this is clearly a matter of great political advantage and moral high ground for the Democratic Party.  Every day, more and more people receive vaccinations, and the anti-vax message becomes increasingly revealed as outlandish and extreme.  The GOP finds itself standing on thinner and thinner ice, its anti-vax attitudes a sign of desperation as well as cruelty.

It’s understandable that Biden and Democrats wouldn’t want to further politicize the covid response in ways that threaten our ability to get more people vaccinated, or that could reinforce the idea that it’s a stamp of political resistance among the right to defy vaccine recommendations and mandates.  But this attitude doesn’t make a lot of sense when the GOP is actively trying to further politicize the issue (and again, this is putting aside the case that the GOP is not just politicizing but outright attempting to sabotage the covid fight).  Democrats can’t simply assume that most Americans will know the GOP is full of shit and malice.  Our efforts to get past the pandemic and get the economy going full steam are being actively sabotaged by the GOP — but even if the Democrats do not want to call it sabotage, they have a profound duty to push back on the GOP’s willingness to propagate junk science and magical thinking.  This is a legitimate political issue, on which the GOP is extremely vulnerable, and it would be foolish on both fronts — public health and political self-interest — not to hammer the GOP’s pro-covid policies and rhetoric. Alongside this, Biden surely needs to keep pushing on the vaccination front — among other things, it’s far past time to mandate vaccinations for U.S. air travel.

I will agree with the Republicans on one thing — the American people will definitely, and rightly, judge Joe Biden on whether or not he ends the pandemic, and that he and the Democrats will suffer mightily at the polls if they judge his work a failure.  President Biden has a fundamental responsibility to defend the American people against a pandemic that constitutes a threat to our lives and livelihoods; and as the omicron variant demonstrates, the coronavirus is not yet done with us.   When the opposition party is actively opposing the most basic, commonsense measures that will get us out of this crisis — is indeed arguably the primary reason why we are still caught up in this pandemic — then defense of the United States necessarily involves a full-throated denunciation of the anti-science, pro-covid policies of the GOP.  Make the GOP the face of the extreme anti-vax resistance, and Biden can both protect America and help remind people why the country voted the Democrats into power at this perilous time.

Democrats Need to Go on Offense Against GOP Racism and White Nationalism

One rule I’ve tried to follow in sharing my thoughts about American politics is a basic humility — by exposing my reasoning, not just my opinions, I’m happy to let my contradictions, bad assumptions, and hasty conclusions hang out for all to see.

That said, there are a few things I feel confident in proclaiming without too many reservations.  One of those is: in politics, it’s generally a foolish thing not to use the biggest tools available to defeat your opponents.  And it’s the Democratic Party’s violation of what should be an obvious principle that’s got me rending my hair and returning again and again to certain notions.

By my reckoning, over the last five years, the GOP has engaged in such a mix of anti-democratic politics, white supremacist behavior, and deadly incompetence that a case can and should be made for driving it out of existence, at least in its current incarnation, as one of America’s two major political parties.  What remains mind-boggling to me is that the Democratic Party, as a whole, still refuses to conduct its political campaigns and messaging to highlight the catastrophic failures and authoritarian intent of the Republican Party.  Here is a non-exhaustive indictment:

• Republican legislatures around the country are passing laws to ensure that Democratic-leaning voters are disenfranchised and disempowered, with particular aim taken at minority voters.  Even as I write this, Republican politicians and pundits continue to claim with zero evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, using it to justify an interlocking series of voter restrictions, gerrymandering, and subversion of electoral machinery to permanently lock Democrats out of power in state after state, and with a goal of taking federal power in 2022 and 2024 even if rejected by a majority of voters.  What should we call this but a party that no longer believes in democracy and majority rule?

• GOP politicians continue to deny the severity or even existence of human-caused climate change, in the process crippling not just America’s but all of humanity’s future out of a deadly dedication to the profits of fossil fuel companies and an indifference to the natural world that makes human flourishing possible.  What should we call this but a party that no longer believes not just in science but reality itself?

• GOP leaders continue to denounce and defy basic medical advice on fighting the covid pandemic, opposing not just vaccine mandates that could end this pandemic, but even the most basic measures like the wearing of masks in public to prevent transmission of a disease that has already killed more than 750,000 in the country.  What should we call this but a party that fails to value human life?

• Republican strategists aim to make the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools a major issue in future elections, even as CRT is not actually taught in public schools, but serves as a convenient stand-in for white Americans’ fears about losing status and power in a diversifying America.   Alongside attempts to nullify the votes of African-American and other minorities at the state level, what should we call this but a party that puts white supremacism into action?

• Republican politicians decry the supposed shiftlessness of American workers who ask for a living wage and better prospects, and continue a war on unions and worker power that makes a mockery of the party’s claims to represent blue collar Americans.  What should we call this but a party that hates American workers?

Again and again, the common thread is a tendency towards extremism in the name of greed, racism, and power, with a simultaneous effort to hide and deflect perceptions of this extremism.  A central task of Democrats should be to expose this extremism and deny the GOP the ability to use it to motivate base voters while also peeling off independents and supercharging Democratic constituencies.  I cannot overemphasize that this is not a case of slurring the GOP, or making stuff up.  It is about hammering home basic facts about the party.

Let me focus on one front that has become newly salient, in the wake of the Democrats’ disappointing loss in the Virginia governor’s race.  Whatever role it did or did not play in Glenn Youngkin’s victory, some Republican strategists believe that the candidate’s attacks on critical race theory were key to his success, and aim to make appeals to “parental rights” a part of their 2022 congressional strategy.  Based on the fact of the Democrats’ losses in the state, it also seems that the Democrats are arguably vulnerable on this front.

But even if it turns out that the anti-CRT rhetoric didn’t push the GOP over the top in the Virginia race, I think we need to turn the critique around, and ask: How was it possible that the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, wasn’t able to use the GOP’s cloaked appeals to white supremacism to clean the floor with his opponent?  From what I’ve seen, the answer is that the McAuliffe camp did not take the threat seriously enough, or at least not soon enough, and was not willing to make explicit the white supremacism that Youngkin employed to rile up the Republican right-wing base.

With the Virginia race in the rearview mirror, though, we are seeing tentative evidence that whatever balance Youngkin was able to maintain — energizing the Trump base with anti-CRT language while holding on to plausible deniability for more moderate voters that he really, truly was only interested in kids getting a quality education — will be increasingly difficult for other Republican candidates going forward.  Because it turns out that lots of Republicans are not nearly as disciplined at Youngkin, and are happy to acknowledge what should be obvious to any but the most naive political observers — that Republicans have been using opposition to “critical race theory” (which, again, is not actually taught in elementary and high schools) as a way to say that they don’t think American schoolchildren shouldn’t be taught that racism is bad — which, in turn, is a roundabout way of saying to voters that they don’t think that racism itself is bad, and that white supremacism should rightly be the political and social order of the nation.

This article from The Washington Post takes the Republican bad faith at face value, suggesting that there’s a slippery slope from anti-CRT rhetoric to outright opposing teaching about racism in schools, but this reverses the logical order — opposing CRT was from the start a way to oppose the teaching of racism, and let’s face it, the importance of civil rights, in schools.  What is actually happening now, and as the Post story documents well, is that the metaphorical Klan mask is coming off, and is being replaced by an actual Klan mask, as multiple Republican politicians and school board members are now feeling free to make clear their opposition is not to the academic theory of CRT, but indeed to any teaching of America’s racist past and the way this past has warped the present.  And so it was inevitable that novels by the great Tony Morrison would now be in their sights, the supposed aspersions of CRT meant to tar and feather her artistic efforts to explicate the legacy of slavery in such novels as Beloved and The Bluest Eye.  Also not surprisingly, the offensive against improper fiction has grown to encompass objections to books that involve LGBTQ themes; some enthusiastic board members in one Virginia county are ready to go to the logical end of this witch hunt, and have proposed burning the offending books to purge the schools and nation of their influence.  The extremity of Republican solutions betrays the extremity of Republican beliefs.  (Conversely, Democratic leaders who don’t think they can win a fight against book burning probably should not be Democratic leaders.)

The forces which the GOP has encouraged with its fig leaf of anti-CRT talk are too primal, too full of hatred, not to make themselves more fully known, to erupt in geysers of open racism.  But many GOP candidates, particularly those for national office, are likely to continue to use the anti-CRT language, even as it’s clear that it’s a stalking horse for banning the teaching of any racial issues in schools.  This requires the Democratic Party to explicitly and unceasingly explain to the American people what the GOP means when they talk about CRT, and to enlist in their service the many GOP politicos who are not so disciplined in their messaging as evidence.  Democrats should not hesitate to use the bogus anti-CRT offensive as an opening to talk about the white supremacism that energizes and motivates much of the modern Republican Party.  What the GOP sees as a major strength, the Democrats must work to turn into a deadly weakness. I would even go a step further — I think it would be the right thing for Democrats to pick fights with Republicans over teaching about civil rights and the legacy of slavery in American schools, on the principle that no complete civic education is possible without teaching these topics.

But as I’ve said before, the flip side to critiquing such Republican attitudes is just as important.  Democrats must hammer home a positive vision for an equitable, just America in which all Americans, of all races, are treated as full members of our national community; that learning about our imperfections makes us better able to overcome them; that the use of racial hatred to divide us weakens the entire nation, makes us less than the sum of our parts, and only serves democracy’s enemies.

What strikes me as bizarre is that Democrats might be in any way flummoxed by the GOP’s use of racist strategies to try to win elections, whether in Virginia or in 2022 and beyond.  The blueprint Donald Trump provided was that by making white identity politics the central appeal of the Republican Party, the GOP could actually win the presidency through the perversions of the electoral college, even with a minority of voter support.  Likewise, he reinforced the GOP’s trend toward gerrymandering and suppressing votes so that the party can win state elections on a permanent basis, and have a good chance of winning congressional power even if it comes up millions of votes short.  For any Democrats to think that fighting for racial equality is any way a side issue, or a subject that can be ducked or deferred, amounts to an unforgivable form of magical thinking.  There will be no winning the democracy fight without winning the fight against white supremacism.  And with the GOP descending into greater and greater extremism on matters of race and its vision for America’s future, the path forward is open for a Democratic Party willing not just to beat the Republican Party, but to discredit the GOP as a national political force.

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Democratic Anger

Something I was having trouble articulating a couple weeks ago, after Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race just a year after Joe Biden won that state by 10 points, has been stated plain as day by Brian Beutler:

What troubles me even more than the [Democrats’] governing errors, though, is the fact that Republicans were able to become competitive anywhere in any blue territory in the country so soon after Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans with incompetence and lies, then tried to steal the election leaving dead bodies in the halls of Congress. We can’t expect memories to last forever, but we can expect them to last longer than a year. There is plenty of precedent for the kind of reckoning Republicans deserve, and the fact that the entire GOP isn’t toxic in much more of the country after what we just lived through is prima facie evidence of a political failure.

For a year now, The Hot Screen and many other observers have been pretty rightly obsessed with the Democrats’ lackadaisical response to Donald Trump’s attempted coup and the rapid alignment of the Republican Party with the insurrectionist Big Lie that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 election.  A great part of why last Tuesday’s results were so disturbing is that, for the first time, we got a real-world test of the Democrats’ non-confrontational approach — and it was as disastrous as many of us had feared.  Thousands of suburban voters who had been shifting to the Democrats during the Trump years stampeded back into the Republican column, while disheartening numbers of Democrats didn’t bother to show up to the polls at all.

There have been numerous excellent discussions of how Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin was able to make racist appeals and energize the GOP base, while also appealing to swing voters by couching those appeals in the plausible deniability of talking about education concerns, in the form of anti-critical race theory rhetoric.  But even if you concede that other concerns separate from race, such as education and economic anxiety, were motivating some voters, this only makes the Democratic failure to tar and feather the GOP as a whole more damning: many Virginia voters felt that punishing the Democrats was more important than rewarding a Republican Party whose core organizing principle is that Donald Trump is actually still president of the United States, and that has in fact continued the insurrection of January 6 through other means, such as voting restrictions and suppression aimed at securing the GOP national power even against the will of the majority.

And so analyses of the role of race in the Virginia election also overlook a larger possibility: that many GOP voters went to the polls because they are incensed and angry out of their belief that the 2020 election was stolen.  As Beutler writes, “Add it all up and Tuesday starts to make an eerie kind of sense: A Republican base behaving, based on lies, the way you’d want people to act if they thought their way of life and tools for self-governance were being plundered. Meanwhile there’s a live torpedo aimed right at the hull of America’s popular majority, and our representatives refuse to act like it, plausibly costing Democrats a big swing vote.”  Because Democrats refuse to motivate their base about the real attack on democracy in a manner commensurate with how Republicans do motivate their base with made-up attacks on democracy, the Democrats have committed a profound unforced error.

You won’t get any argument from me against this essential Beutlerian formulation, and goodness knows I’ve probably quoted and echoed its various iterations across more pieces than even the most patient reader can stand.  But since last Tuesday’s election, a related idea has been bugging me: between the ongoing GOP insurrection against American democracy, and the redoubled GOP efforts to stoke white backlash to incite their voters to turn out, I’ve been puzzling over what I’m calling (probably because I’ve watched too many BBC mystery series during our covid years) The Mysterious Case of the Missing Democratic Anger.  Simply put, why are more Democratic congresspersons and senators not in a state of perpetual rage and contempt against at a GOP that is actively seeking to overturn American democracy and to maintain power through continuous incitements of white supremacy, and why are they not attempting to communicate and arouse this same outrage among their base?  I mean, you sure wouldn’t think so by their continuing broad emphasis on seeking bipartisanship and their general unwillingness to portray the GOP as a party no longer fit for partnership in a democratic nation.

But even if the pose of calm, rational evenhandedness towards the rabid GOP is a pose, a calculated effort to appear to be the grown-ups against the seething emotionalism of the GOP, something still does not compute.  Because even if I can understand Democratic politicians not acting angry, what I absolutely cannot fathom is the lack of rhetoric, policies, and overall attitude that would channel an anger that is righteous, democratic, and necessary in this time of extended political crisis.  

Let’s focus for a moment on a specific area of confrontation. The phenomenon of white backlash, which we surely witnessed in Virginia over the course of the recent gubernatorial race (with Glenn Youngkin vowing to fight critical race theory in schools), is a predictable reaction to the ejection of white supremacist Donald Trump from the White House — particularly when his party is largely committed to the lie that he didn't actually lose and sees his white nationalism as key to the party’s future.  This movement is powered in part by fear, yes, but also by anger, by white Americans’ resentment at losing power in American society to people of color.  Critically, I believe that the GOP’s embrace of white nationalism it is premised on the assumption that Democrats will not respond to it, out of a fear that doing so will drive away white voters, such as by creating the impression that Democrats are saying that all white people are racists.

But one reason I’m focusing on the emotion of anger is because I’m wondering if Democrats are reacting too strongly to their own feelings of anger, and that of their voters, and so are not trusting the response to white supremacism that this anger would direct them towards: outright denunciation and opposition.  It seems that at a minimum, Democrats are over-thinking the electoral threat of a strategy like that of Youngkin, where racist appeals are couched in plausible deniability (in this case, around the teaching of CRT to public school students, which is a way of shoehorning in the idea that teaching about racism and civil rights in schools is really a plot to make white children and people in general feel guilty about being white, and disempowered at having to recognize the equality of non-white Americans).  Rather than panicking about such subterfuge, justifiable outrage would demand that Democrats expose the racist operations of CRT fear-mongering, and embrace a righteous anger against white supremacists trying to poison the minds of American voters and American children alike with bizarre notions such as racism not being a central part of American history. The GOP is basically trying to prevent the sordid history of the Confederacy, the KKK, and Jim Crow from being taught to kids. In the face of this, Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of saying that part of the point of American education is to inculcate a righteous anger against the white supremacism of the past, and that a very good reason to do so is to help them be racially conscious citizens in the present.

Entitled to Prosper

In the wake of the over-hyped but still worrisome election results in Virginia and elsewhere last week, there is already pressure from some Democrats to scale back even more the broad social, environmental, and economic spending in the long-pending Build Back Better Act.  The reasoning here would be that the Democrats’ loss of the Virginia governorship in particular was due to voters believing President Biden has governed in too liberal a fashion.

But as the dominant media and political narrative of the past several months is that Democratic infrastructure legislation has been in limbo, this argument from the center and right of the Democratic Party doesn’t make a lot of sense, and sensible pushback against it has already begun.  At The New York Times, Paul Krugman notes that, “What’s crucial is that Democrats not take the election setbacks as an indication that they’ve overreached — that President Biden should back down on vaccine mandates, that their economic agenda is too left-wing. What the public perceives isn’t a party doing too much, but a party doing too little, and Biden and his allies need to end that sense of drift.” And at the Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent has a thorough takedown of the flaws in the reasoning of those urging a pullback in ambition, taking particular aim at those who say that Biden didn’t run on the big socio-economic polices he’s trying to pass, citing. . . actual things Biden said before he was elected president.  I also like Sargent’s diagnosis of the basic contradiction in the moderate-conservative blaming of the BBB Act for tearing down Democratic chances in Virginia when the BBB Act hasn’t even been passed yet: “The critics are incoherent on this point: The ideological scope of the package alienated moderate voters, and so did the failure to pass it.”

If nothing else, misguided attempts to marshal limited election results into a story about a grand national repudiation of progressive economic policies embraced by Biden and the great majority of Democrats remind us that this conflict over legislative ambition is a central fight in the Democratic Party right now.  But could it be that Biden and progressives have already won the battle far more than most of us realize?  Zachary Carter makes this case, arguing that despite how the BBB Act has been whittled down over the past few months by the objections of a handful of representatives and senators, its vision of a government that helps Americans with such essentials as child care has largely won the battle of ideas in the party.  Even the grinding pace of the BBB Act negotiations may have ultimately resulted in an underlying triumph: referring to the two Democratic senators most resistant to Biden’s agenda, Carter writes, “By repeatedly positioning themselves outside the Democratic mainstream, Manchin and Sinema have handed Biden a victory in the battle of ideas, even as they force him to scale back his policy ambitions.”  

If Carter is correct in his assessment, then this strengthens another interpretation of the Democrats’ recent political infighting and lack of strength in the Virginia elections: that rather than being a party in disarray, the party is suffering through a last-ditch effort by moderate and conservative Democrats to oppose a huge shift in Democratic thinking about how to promote economic growth and social well-being, and that once the BBB Act is passed, this shift in direction will at last be able to face the test of reality, in the form of voters who can judge its benefits or shortcomings for themselves.  Alongside evidence that a new intellectual framework has won over the majority of Democrats in Congress, it seems that greater legitimacy for ideas like child tax credits, pre-K for three- and four-year olds, and massive government investments in protecting Americans from tangible climate change will be difficult to reverse once voters actually start receiving those benefits.

I am not saying that these benefits will then result in Democrats handily winning elections — they will have to figure out how to deflect and demolish GOP race-baiting to have any hope of accomplishing that — but I would at least hope that positive reactions from constituents would create a feedback loop for Democrats to further double down on this new direction.  It seems that a theory of governance that says Americans deserve nice things from the government they themselves elect, and whose legitimacy ultimately rests on reflecting their will, can in the long run beat a vision that says the role of government is to ensure that Americans are always and ever responsible for their own individual fates. To borrow a term from Joe Manchin, Americans may soon come to fully embrace the idea that they are entitled to quite a lot, and that such entitlement is just, democratic, and of enormous benefit to American society.

Moving Beyond the Manchin Faction

I had wondered if I was a bit rough on Joe Manchin last week, but Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch has surely won the award for injurious manhandling of the anti-environment West Virginia senator and scourge of Joe Biden’s approval ratings.  His comparison of Manchin to the villain of many a James Bond movie is spot-on:

In 2021, the monster who is actually threatening Planet Earth with untimely demise is a Bond villain barely worthy of the title. His potential for a mountaintop lair in his home state of West Virginia has been flattened and stripped by a century of Big Coal, so his evil abode is instead a houseboat floating lazily in the Potomac River. His goon squad consists of oil company lobbyists and “Morning Joe” sycophants, and his only scar comes from repairing a sink aboard the “Almost Heaven.”

And yet make no mistake: West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has positioned himself to destroy the globe in a way that Auric Goldfinger, Ernst Starvo Blofeld, or Lyutsifer Safin could have only dreamed of. 

As good as this conceit is in and of itself, Bunch deploys it to hammer how destructive and nonsensical Manchin’s opposition to badly-needed environmental legislation truly is, writing that, “The droughts, floods, rising sea levels, mass migrations and human misery that would result from this failure — triggered by a self-aggrandizing U.S. senator’s ego and massive greed — will surely surpass any mad scientist’s doomsday device.”  He also makes a point that’s been staring a lot of us in the face: the corruption of Joe Manchin, with his ties to big coal and his personal investments in the industry, may be as old as the industry’s involvement in American politics, but the consequences of it are newly horrific, at least for anyone who’s interested in preserving a livable planet.

This gets to a point that I wish I had made more strongly, but that Dave Roberts hits on with a recent Manchin take-down.  Roberts writes:

Manchin’s objections to the programs in the BBB are not based on any empirical evidence or coherent theory of government. What he has is a set of reactionary instincts, gut reactions common to old conservative white men [. . .] He's just a vain, arrogant, rich old white guy who surrounds himself with other vain, arrogant, rich old white guys. They all overestimate their own intellect & abilities. And apparently they're still the pinhole through which all policy must pass. This country is so fucked.

If there is any silver lining in Manchin’s suicidal stubborness, it is that we collectively have a narrow opportunity to see this combination of entitlement, corruption, and incompetence in the plainest view possible, and to keep pushing the Democratic Party to grow beyond reliance on this sad old guard to fill out their senatorial ranks.

No Time to Die (Democratic Party Edition)

The win by Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia elections a couple days ago was deeply unsettling and is indeed a warning sign for Democrats, but the broad tenor of news coverage indicating this portends the party’s annihilation in 2022 and beyond is deeply overwrought and misleading.  The most tendentious interpretations — that Youngkin’s victory, as well as a very narrow Democratic win in the New Jersey governor’s race and other setbacks for progressive causes around the country, signal America’s wholesale rejection of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party — are pretty clearly reflective of the political preferences and blinders of their promulgators.  For a clear-minded corrective, this piece by Steve Benen provides valuable commentary on the way the Virginia governorship has generally gone to the party that lost the White House in the previous year, in the thermostatic way that Americans tend to move towards the opposition party, as well as on how a short while ago Democrats soundly defeated a recall effort of Governor Gavin Newsom in California.

It seems fairly clear that Joe Biden’s poor approval ratings played a significant part in Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe’s loss.  After all, Virginia has been trending blue for some years, and Biden defeated Donald Trump there by a solid 10 points just a year ago.  While turnout was relatively high for both parties, Democratic base enthusiasm just didn’t match that of the GOP, strongly suggesting knock-on effects of a generalized lack of enthusiasm for Biden.  And this lack of energization, in turn, owes much to the festering spectacle of inaction in Congress, as the twinned Build Back Better and bipartisan infrastructure bills seem to be enacting a real-world demonstration of Zeno’s paradox, ever approaching the finish line but never quite making it over.  Josh Marshall captures the dynamic succinctly, writing, “When the public mood is sour and the President looks powerless to accomplish the things he says are important members of the President’s party will lose elections.”

But it wasn’t just a lack of Democratic enthusiasm that led to the loss.  It appears that those who voted for the GOP were particularly energized by Youngkin’s claims that parents have lost control of what their children are taught in public schools.  But centered as these claims were around false allegations of the teaching of critical race theory, we can more accurately say that Youngkin rode to power by making racist appeals to the Virginia electorate.  What makes this a particular wake-up call for Democrats is that where Donald Trump badly failed to win Virginia by his own appeals to white supremacism, Youngkin was able to pull it off.  More specifically, as observers like Adam Serwer and Eric Levitz have noted, Youngkin was able to enthuse rural and right-wing voters while also luring back some suburban voters who had previously shifted to the Democrats.  

A Republican Party able to replicate this strategy, twinned with continuing low enthusiasm for Biden, would indeed be a catastrophe for the Democrats, and for American democracy.  After all, what is so concerning about this Democratic loss is the larger political crisis that forms the roiling background of everything that happened on Tuesday: that the GOP overall has devolved into an openly authoritarian, white supremacist party that is well on its way to instituting one-party rule in states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Texas through a mix of gerrymandering and voter suppression; a majority of whose representatives voted to reject the 2022 presidential election results in the wake of a coup attempt by Donald Trump; and, at the risk of repeating a detail just mentioned, whose former president attempted a coup to overthrow American democracy.  Levitz captures what should have been the results of this perfidy:

Democrats needed this to be untenable. They needed it to be impossible for the GOP to simultaneously broaden its base and remain in the good graces of Donald Trump and his core constituents. Which is to say: They needed Republicans to have finally gone too far, and disqualified themselves from the advantages that the out-of-power party typically enjoys in our two-party system.

The Virginia results demonstrate that this voter punishment of the GOP has not in fact happened; that politicians like Youngkin have managed to find a path forward that links insurrectionists and more “moderate” whites via the alchemy of plausibly-deniable racist appeals.

Yet, as chilling as this reality is, the more cheering news is that whether such a strategy works in 2022 and beyond is very much in the hands of Democrats.  Defeating it rests on whether Biden, along with national Democrats, can revive his popularity, and whether the Democrats are willing to directly take on the GOP’s defining authoritarianism and white supremacism (even when the latter is cloaked in the plausible deniability of anti-CRT language).  Addressing the issue of Biden’s popularity is another way of saying that the president needs to get a lot more done over the next year, and doing so in turn requires full acknowledgment of the crises that beset us a year into his presidency.

First, Americans remain deeply concerned and unsettled by the covid pandemic, which, despite mass vaccinations and some return to normalcy, continues to upend people’s lives — not least by taking 1,000 of them every day (Biden made an enormous error in basically declaring the pandemic over back in July — a premature victory lap that bizarrely underestimated the obvious potential of the delta variant to reverse the progress we’d made).  In retrospect, I think it’s also clear that Biden made a huge error in not acting more aggressively, and far earlier, to promulgate vaccine mandates.  It’s also well worth pointing out that the GOP has played a key role in hampering Biden’s attempts to end the pandemic, both through its encouragement of vaccine resistance and to basic expedients like mask-wearing and even social distancing.  I mention this because the president absolutely must do all in his power to staunch this pandemic, including escalating the vaccine mandate to include air travel in the U.S., and this path will necessarily involve a much more forceful confrontation with the GOP on the matter of its covid sabotage.  As more and more Americans join the ranks of the vaccinated, GOP resistance to vaccine mandates looks kookier and kookier: bringing the fight to the GOP can both accelerate our transition out of the pandemic and make them pay the price they so well deserve for helping prolong a pandemic that has now killed more than 750,000 people in the United States.  The suggestions by some GOP governors that they are now against all mandatory vaccinations seems like a point of particular vulnerability.

Americans’ faith in Biden has also been shaken by the ongoing economic weirdness that encompasses worker shortages, inflation, and consumer product delays due to overburdened supply chains.  Even as there is plenty of positive news — the economy is growing, we’re adding jobs, many workers are able to demand and get higher wages, and the “Great Resignation” could well end up with millions of happier citizens and greater economic efficiency — the bad news is still unsettling, and hurts Biden when he appears to have no ability to fix it at the moment.  Part of this is reality — there will be inflation when some products are in short supply and shipping costs are through the roof — but this doesn’t absolve Biden of doing everything he possibly can to get inflation trending down and supply lines unsnarled.  I remain deeply perplexed that the Biden administration keeps coming up short on bringing sufficient government resources to bear on supply chain challenges.  Even with the crucial acknowledgment that many of our logistics nightmares were decades in the making, it seems incredible that, with Democratic control of Congress and his presidential prestige hanging in the balance, we’re not seeing more federal intervention in what comes down to moving physical objects from point A to point B.  This does not require the Manhattan project to resolve, just manpower, loading docks, and logistical expertise.  

Finally, support for Biden has been undermined by the lack of legislative progress in Congress to date.  Key to defeating the GOP and its authoritarianism is showing that democracy works in terms of making people’s lives materially better.  I’m hardly in the “blame-Biden” camp for why the BBB and BIFF bills have taken so long, but by hook or by crook, Biden has the responsibility for getting his agenda over the finish line.

To varying degrees, the fate of Biden and the Democrats on these three fronts is well within their control.  But engaging only on these matters isn’t enough.  The Virginia results, if nothing else, should be sufficient to convince them that an explicit, relentless assault on the GOP’s white supremacism is both justified and necessary.  Specifically, they must develop a strategy that denies the Republican Party the ability to affect concern about “critical race theory,” when CRT is the GOP’s current way of saying that white supremacy should be embedded in American institutions, beginning with schools not teaching about such basics as the evils of slavery and its ongoing racist legacy.  I think those who have been arguing that Democrats cannot cede “culture war” fights to the GOP, in the hopes that their policies will win the day, have been vindicated by what we saw in Virginia.  After all, “culture war” fights really are political fights, about what values we believe in and what sort of country we want to have.  I think Amanda Marcotte hit the nail on the head when she tweeted:

Imagine if McAuliffe had, instead of that idiot parents having input in schools comment, had hit back with, "I believe MLK Jr. should be taught in schools, and don't think some mini-Trump should be able to stop that." Instead, he waited until the last minute to strike back.

I can't believe Republicans ran what is tantamount to a pro-book burning campaign, and Democrats, ever fearful about culture war politics, let that one lie until it was too late.

The idea that Democrats should be on the defensive when Republicans campaign on banning books by black people is an absurdity (and also no doubt speaks to McAuliffe’s particular shortcomings as a politician).  If white supremacism is the engine of the GOP’s appeal, then the Democrats need to do everything possible to discredit and destroy that engine. 

Anxieties over schooling due to covid provided a lozenge beneath which the toxic pill of anti-CRT racism could appear palatable, and make use of many Americans’ resentment and anger — particularly in light of the Black Lives Matter protests of last year.  It should surprise absolutely no one that the GOP would try to cultivate and benefit from a racist backlash against BLM demonstrations.

Finally, above all, and unifying other Democratic efforts, the Democrats must learn to talk explicitly, unremittingly, and damningly of the GOP as America’s authoritarian party, unfit to hold power.  This reluctance is all the more amazing when you stop to consider that the great majority of GOP members, as well as the vast apparatus of right-wing media, expends much of their energy constantly making the false case that Democrats are a traitorous, un-American gang ready to sell out the country to Islamist terrorists and Mexican rapists at the first opportunity.  Perhaps most critically, the Democrats need to stop acting like the GOP is an equal and respectable partner in government.  As Jared Yates Sexton wrote in the context of the Virginia election, “[M]ake the GOP’s radicalization a prominent issue. Quit reaching across the aisle for a hand holding a dagger. Talk incessantly about what this antidemocratic, authoritarian movement represents. Stop gifting them respectability and cover.”

It is simply amazing that in Virginia, the GOP alleged that Democrats intend to undermine the nation by teaching “critical race theory” to kids, while Democrats chose not to emphasize that authoritarian, racist GOP values already led to an attempted coup by the former president (the clincher is that the GOP’s anti-CRT strategy is a manifestation of the same illness that led to Trumpism and the authoritarian surge that resulted in the coup attempt).  Put the GOP on the defensive by moving forward the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to protect democracy, and use the January 6 commission to identify and punish all GOP politicians who took part in the coup attempt or tried to cover it up afterwards.

One final point, in the hope of sort of tying all these observations together.  Since the Virginia election, I’ve seen a few people taking big picture views of U.S. politics and society, pointing to things like the 2008 financial crash and rampant inequality, and more recently the covid pandemic and the George Floyd civil rights protests, as reminders that our society and politics are far from stable and experiencing a prolonged period of transition.  To these I would add the overwhelming urgency of responding to climate change.  Taken together, they form a background of anxiety and fear to American life.  The growing authoritarianism of the GOP has roots in this instability, as does the appeal it poses to millions of Americans.  In uncertain times, people tend to want strong leaders who can offer them certainty and protection against perceived threats.  The Democrats have the obligation to present America with leadership where strength takes the form of competence, inspiration, and vision, as a democratic answer to the strongman, racist authoritarianism of the GOP.  From this perspective, there is very little worse that the Democrats could now do than to subscribe to self-blaming ideas of their own foreordained doom in 2022 and beyond.  The idea that the one party that stands for democratic governance in the United States should lack confidence about the fundamental soundness of its vision for America, or in the various policy proposals in the BBB and BIFF bills that consistently receive broad support among the voting public, is frankly nonsensical.  The fundamental problem is that the Democrats have not fully engaged the fight they need to engage against Republican sabotage, propaganda, and incitement of violence.  Engage that fight, offer no quarter to the authoritarian GOP, and let the chips fall where they may.  Even if the Democrats lose in 2022, or god forbid, 2024, they will provide a template for a democratic future that will eventually defeat the authoritarianism of the GOP.  

Are Spine Donations Needed for Major Democratic Donors?

Recent statements from major Democratic Party donors that they may withhold donations for the midterms out of frustration at the lack of Democratic legislation should inspire fear and loathing in the hearts of rank-and-file voters.  Likely intended, at least in part, as a way to pressure Democratic legislators to hurry up and pass the massive Build Back Better and bipartisan infrastructure bills, such statements raise troubling questions about these donors’ basic understanding of current American politics.  After all, no close observer of the recent roadblocks to passing both bills could reasonably conclude that the great majority of Democrats aren’t united in passing legislation that would give a significant boost to the economy and social safety net.  Even a cursory review of recent stories — even recent headlines, for Pete’s sake! — would show that two conservative Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema, have been instrumental in stymying a final product through a combination of obfuscation and ad hoc objections.  Punishing the vast majority of Democrats in 2022, rather than, say, mounting a pressure campaign now against this pair of holdout Democrats, is a curious choice that suggests a lack of commitment to the manifold goals that are so closely within reach.

This proposed donor capital strike also betrays a basic misunderstanding of the current stakes of American politics, in which the alternative to Democratic rule is the proven incompetence, malice, and white supremacist authoritarianism of the GOP.  For donors to tacitly suggest it would be better for the Democrats to lose their support and well, lose, in 2022 strangely elides the likely deadlock that would ensue, as well as the momentum this would lend to the possibility of a second Trump presidency in 2024.  If these threats of withholding are true, they speak to a basic failure of values and vision among these financiers and other titans of wealth.  It also suggests a basic failure of logic: after all, with the Democrats so close to passing major legislation, wouldn’t the better play be to pledge to double down on commitments to the Democratic Party, particularly to the progressives who are holding the party’s feet to the fire in getting this legislation passed?  

It’s sickening that the Democrats are to any extent reliant on donors who threaten to take their money and walk at the party’s hour of greatest need for unity and resolve.  Even if simply intended as a motivator for legislative action, it simultaneously sends a message of demoralization to the party’s base voters, while suggesting that the alternative of GOP rule is any way palatable or sane.

Defense of Voting Rights and Vision of a Democratic Society Are Inextricably Linked

A typically-incisive recent piece by John Stoehr has helped shake loose an idea that’s been stuck in my craw for a couple weeks now, as if it were a good samaritan performing the Heimlich on a hapless diner with a bit of choice steak lodged in his throat.  After referencing the ongoing discussions around popularism and the $10 million question of what electoral strategy or policies have the best chance of winning the Democrats power in 2022 and beyond, Stoehr comes down firmly on the side of those arguing that policy just isn’t as important as people think in determining elections.  Instead, he says that the particular crisis of democracy we’re in right now is uppermost in Democratic-leaning voters’ minds: 

The biggest coalition in the country’s history did not vote for Joe Biden because it wanted his party to enact its policies, however good those policies may be. It voted for him to save America from a leader of an authoritarian collective threatening to assimilate everyone into a police state predicated on preserving the superiority of white Christian men. When democracy itself is in danger, policies become secondary.

What was so startling was how strongly I both agreed and disagreed with his formulation.  Because as much as I’ve been alternately startled, outraged, and dismayed by the Democrats’ refusal or inability thus far to press the case to the American people that GOP authoritarianism is a deadly threat to this country, and agree that defense of democracy should be the party’s highest priority; and as much as I agree that fury at Trump and his American authoritarianism was key to Joe Biden’s win, I don’t agree that a focus on saving democracy will be voters’ highest priority in 2022.

Now, I’m not saying that continuing fear and loathing of Donald Trump doesn’t motivate Democratic voters.  In a New York Times article on the Virginia’s governor’s race that Stoehr cites, some Democratic voters are clearly being energized to vote out of repugnance at the prospect of a Trumpist candidate, Glenn Youngkin, winning power in their state.  There are also Trump-adjacent policies, such as vaccine and mask resistance, that also scare the living daylights out of Democratic voters, and that seem to have helped motivate them to turn out in sufficient numbers in California’s recall election to basically replicate Governor Gavin Newsom’s overwhelming victory in the last gubernatorial race.  So the evidence, and common sense, say that Democrats shouldn’t shy away from reminding voters that the GOP is now the party of Trump, with all the associations of white supremacism, corruption, authoritarianism, and incompetence the man and his presidency convey.

But it’s not sufficient for Democrats to place anti-Trump sentiment at the center of their appeal.  I think you can see hints of the danger of doing so in the Virginia governor’s race, where Democratic Terry McAuliffe has gone all in on tying Youngkin to Donald Trump.  I will say upfront that there’s evidence that this linkage is a strong motivator with the Democratic base — the Times piece noted above provides examples of this.  However, my worry is that this sort of appeal can come across as desperate to voters who aren’t so strongly anti-Trump, and perversely, start to suggest a lack of confidence on the Democrats’ part if they fail to actually provide an affirmative reason for voting for the party.  At the same time, a focus on Trump can misguidedly take the place of making a broader case against the larger anti-democratic corruption of the Republican Party itself.  

But even if Democrats articulate the anti-democratic turn of the GOP, this in itself would also be insufficient as the focus of their electoral case, for some of the same reasons that Stoehr and others have used to argue against relying too much on policies to sway voters: because talking about democracy, or threats to democracy, is in and of itself simply too abstract to resonate with many voters.  Instead — and now we get to the insight that coughed out of me when I read Stoehr’s piece — making the case to Americans that both policies and democracy matter to their individual lives infuses both with a power they don’t have on their own, makes concrete what would otherwise be ungrounded.  One way of putting it is this: why should Americans care if the GOP is taking their votes away, if casting those votes isn’t perceived as having an impact on their lives?  Abstracting voting rights from the individual and collective power that those rights represent when turned into laws and policy would be a noble but perverse appeal, separating votes from the actual, concrete results that can follow.

The necessary fight against Republican authoritarianism is equally a fight for a democratic future on multiple fronts beyond defense of the franchise: on the economy, on the environment, on civil rights.  The best way to energize voters based on GOP efforts to suppress their votes, or not have those votes count as they should, is to also articulate and fight for concrete democratic visions of our economy and society that can result from casting those votes.  While it’s true that voters may be alternately unmoved or unaware of how specific Democratic policies have benefitted them, it is also true that a broad enough array of policies that promote economic equality and benefit Americans in a variety of ways would collectively give them a reason to vote for Democrats.  If Democrats passed debt relief for college loans, and crowed about this fact, would this really not rally grateful debtors to reward the party?  If Democrats expanded child care credits, and talked endlessly about this, would this really not appeal to families of all classes?  And it’s not just that voters would reward Democrats for what they’d done; more than past performance, it’s future promises and visions that weigh the most when citizens mark their ballots.  And this, in turn, gives vital power and substance to the Democrats’ fight against Republican authoritarianism, which would take away both the power of Democrats’ votes and the many specific policies that would benefit not just Democratic voters, but the great majority of Americans of both parties.   

Fighting for the right to vote necessarily involves fighting for a more broadly democratic America — otherwise, the benefits of the right to vote would end with putting Democrats in power simply to make sure the GOP doesn’t fuck voters over (which is essential, but hardly everything).  The logic of voting rights (the morality of the franchise, the general understanding that it is so important) is that it is more than a negative right to protect yourself — it is the key to creating something that reveals itself to be a democratic society, whose limits are as broad as the imagination of the people who participate in it.