Groom and Doom

Josh Marshall has identified the rapid rise of “groomer” discourse within the mainstream Republican Party, so that what was once an extremist, “crazy” notion is now a prime political talking point and weapon for rank-and-file GOP politicians. Further, what was initially a slur used to attack transgender people has evolved to encompass a broad range of GOP attacks against what they perceive as all forms of sexual deviance, meant to tar not just sexual minorities but the Democrats who advocate for their rights.  Marshall writes that:

The entire bundle of conversations about transgenderism, gender identity and homosexuality have been very suddenly repackaged as “grooming” and “pedophilia.” Any discussion of gender identity or homosexuality in schools is now “grooming” kids for pedophiles. Even same sex marriage — which is, of course, by definition for adults — is another part of the “grooming” agenda.

[…] The new equation is that anything that doesn’t amount to a staunch defense of sexual and gender traditionalism is just some form of pedophilia and “grooming” children for pedophiles. That is the governing equation that has exploded across the right really just over the last two months.

[…] It is a very rapid turn of events by which the most outlandish and genocide-friendly features of the Pizzagate and QAnon movements suddenly became totally ubiquitous and mainstream among Republican officeholders from Capitol Hill all the way down to the local level.

It is hard to find a more glaring example of the mismatch between the Democrats’ posture toward the Republican Party and the radicalized GOP's no-holds-barred politics than the emergence of groomer discourse as a key strategy. By equating basic issues of human rights propounded by Democrats with sexual abuse of minors, the Republican Party now claims, explicitly, that the Democrats aren’t simply a party that traffics in moral turpitude, but represents a form of evil that no good American can accept. This is not just a strategy to rally the base to the polls; it’s a strategy to rally the base to the barricades, and to their gun lockers. As Marshall has noted elsewhere (and as the title to this piece nods to), labeling your political opponents as child molesters is an incitement to violence. The language is de-humanizing and all-encompassing, painting a conspiracy of evil so vast and incomprehensible as to invite the necessity of cosmic retribution by god’s willing instruments. It is a political language that makes democratic politics impossible — how can there be any sort of compromise with such moral reprobates? It suggests that political defeat for one’s enemies is insufficient; they must be destroyed, annihilated, killed.

And yet, despite this clear evidence of Republican radicalization, we continue to hear from President Biden that the Republican Party is a reasonable party, a party that loves America, a party that is necessary to the functioning of American democracy. Whether the groomer rhetoric actually ends in outright violence against Democrats should not be the line that the GOP needs to cross before Democratic leaders like Biden acknowledge the reality of the danger.  

This doesn’t mean that the Democrats should simply mirror the same dehumanizing language and totalizing spirit of destruction towards the GOP. But Democrats are living in a fantasy world if they think that there can be any sort of meaningful political partnership with an opposition that has embraced a messianic, absolutist view of politics that denies any legitimacy to the Democratic Party. More to the point, Democrats are also misguided if they don’t understand the importance of alerting and mobilizing their own base against such a deranged and militant right-wing movement. In this, the Democrats’ somnolence is akin to the party’s turgid response to Republican attacks on voting and civil rights, which at this point constitute a full-blown effort to reverse America’s halting progress towards equality over the last half century. By ignoring clear signs that the GOP has transformed into an authoritarian entity opposed not only to democratic governance, but to the freedom and equality that are the essence of civil society, Democrats are arguably doing the opposite of what they should, lulling Americans into thinking that they can safely tune out political news, or choose not to vote in November because they don’t perceive how very high the stakes are.  

Any debate over whether the Democrats can or should engage directly with the GOP’s inflammatory groomer rhetoric should have been ended by Michigan state representative Mallory McMorrow’s epic takedown of a Republic opponent who targeted her with such language. The shock waves that McMorrow’s speech has sent through the Democratic firmament are a sign that the party is more than ready for a rethink of the default attitude that there’s no need to respond to extreme GOP rhetoric that equates Democratic politics with child rape. Among other things, the effectiveness of McMorrow’s speech helps us understand the extreme vulnerability of this right-wing attack line. When it is held up to the plain light of day, and examined for what it is, any ordinary citizen can see that it is insane, foolish language far removed from the moral high ground it claims to stake.  

Self-Inflicted Texas Border Mess Messes With Texas Governor

Last week, I wrote about Texas Governor Gregg Abbott’s institution of vehicle safety inspections along the U.S.-Mexico border, ostensibly aimed at stopping human and drug smuggling but in reality a power play by the governor to challenge federal border authority and burnish his right-wing credentials ahead of this year’s gubernatorial race. Abbott subsequently suspended the program, claiming that “Mexican officials had agreed to new security measures.” But given the immense backlash from the business community, it seems more than likely that Abbott decided to cut his losses while the cutting was good.

It’s important to note, though, that Abbott kept the operation in place just long enough to create an impression of toughness and anti-immigrant animus for conservative voters, but not long enough for the Biden administration to slap down his actions as an unconstitutional interference in federal prerogatives such as border control and the conduct of foreign policy. In this sense, Abbott’s strategy can be seen as a success. As we also noted last week, the inspections served as a way to harm the larger American economy and thus Democrats’ re-election prospects in November — a weaponization of trade across the border to achieve Republican political objectives.  As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes, Abbott’s actions comes from an authoritarian playbook: “What Abbott did is a continuation of far-right democracy destabilization tactics also seen with the convoy movement (and used in Chile before the 1973 coup). You sabotage the flow of goods and create hardships for the sitting democratic govt. Watch for more of this.” This follows a pattern of other such behavior, perhaps most notably the GOP’s murderous covid policies — a connection Catherine Rampel makes when she observes that, “He might presume that angry voters will see backlogged traffic, empty store shelves and struggling businesses and blame President Biden, even though this latest contribution to supply-chain woes comes courtesy of Abbott’s own policies. If that sounds far-fetched, recall that Abbott and other Republicans have tried to blame Biden for mounting covid infections and deaths, even as these same politicians have deliberately sown distrust in vaccines and undermined or outright barred efforts to increase vaccination and other covid-prevention measures.”

This is why it’s essential that Democrats do what they can to shape the narrative of Abbott’s actions, including their dark intent and destructive effects. On the economic level alone, the indictment of the governor’s policy is striking; one economic research firm estimates that the U.S. economy lost nearly $9 billion due to the delays and losses resulting from the inspections (think rotted fruit and supply chain disruptions). Beyond this, the Democrats (starting with Beto O’Rourke, who’s running to unseat Abbott) can make the straightforward case that Abbott was willing to hurt ordinary Americans in order to enhance his standing with hard-core conservatives. Not only is this a powerful and necessary line of attack against the Texas governor, it is an easy-to-understand story that also reflects broader GOP prioritization of the party’s goals over the public good.  

Once again, one is struck by the high risk/high reward aspect of such right-wing strategies.  As Ben-Ghiat notes, the inspection regime was intended in part to hurt Democrats’ ability to govern — but accomplishing such an end is not cost-free. Abbott’s inspections have brought backlash from the normally GOP-friendly business community, and it should not be difficult for Democrats to parlay that into voter doubts about the Republican Party’s supposed confidence around the economy more generally. And on the national stage, Democrats can link Abbott’s actions to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ war on Disney, which is about to unleash economic pain on ordinary citizens in that state. The GOP is using economic warfare as a political weapon, and a truthful, accurate account of this should prove unsettling to many Americans. Beyond this, the Democrats can no longer shy away from a unified message that describes GOP strategies, from anti-mask and anti-vaccine rhetoric to undermining the economy through interfering with cross-border trade, as a coherent strategy to harm the common good out of a right-wing lust for power and domination.

Texas Governor Messes With America

Whether or not Democrats choose to acknowledge it and act accordingly, the dominant fact of American politics is the Republican Party’s open embrace of white, conservative Christian dominance and an accompanying turn towards authoritarianism the GOP sees as necessary, given the steadily decline of the white Christian population relative to other demographic groups. It should be plain as day that the GOP has determined that if democracy no longer serves the power of its constituents, democracy should be considered as an obstacle to be overcome. The ultimate evidence of this, as I have argued before, is the fact that the last Republican president attempted a coup to stay in power, yet remains the dominant favorite of both base and elected officials to be the party’s standard bearer in 2024. Indeed, since January 6, much of the party’s energy, particularly at the state level, has been aimed at ensuring that proper mechanisms are in place so that a future coup attempt will succeed, accompanied as well by technically legal but clearly anti-democratic efforts to deny the power of the vote to Democratic-leaning groups. Meanwhile, the party has acted to sabotage the Biden administration’s efforts to defeat the covid pandemic, from senseless opposition to mask mandates to coddling vaccine conspiracy kooks, in the hopes of undermining the president’s ability to govern or get re-elected. The mix of anti-democratic industriousness, embrace of insurrectionary violence, and willingness to weaponize mass death in pursuit of political power means that the January 6 coup attempt never really ended; rather, the GOP has entered into a state of slow-motion insurrection against American democracy that continues to the present day.

Part of the surrealness of our times is that the Democratic Party has, by and large, simply refused to acknowledge the basic fact that the GOP has effectively divorced American democracy. From President Biden’s continued emphasis on bipartisan legislation, to Democrats on the January 6 committee divided on whether to refer the former president’s lawlessness to the Justice Department for prosecution, the party is gripped by a denialism that serves neither their own nor the country’s interests. You don’t have to agree with my provocative “GOP is in insurrection” take to be able to see that the Republican Party has abandoned adherence to democratic norms and ideals; yet the Democratic Party, as a whole, declines to focus anywhere near sufficient attention on the GOP’s turn to authoritarianism. (Likewise, and in related fashion, the party has inexplicably refused to engage in a no-holds-barred pushback against the GOP’s state-level assault on civil, women’s, and gay rights).

I’ll be honest; even I sometimes have my doubts about whether “insurrection” is too harsh a description for what the GOP is engaging in. Yet, like clockwork, Republican politicians continue to engage in behavior that reminds us that something far beyond the bounds of “normal” politics is underway, and that insurrection is a useful framework for understanding what’s going on. The most recent example is in Texas, where GOP Governor Greg Abbott has instituted a strict regime of vehicle inspections at the U.S.-Mexico border in retaliation for the Biden administration’s relaxation of Trump-era immigration restrictions implemented on the basis of the covid pandemic. While Abbott is technically using his state’s legal authority to regulate vehicles, the intention is clearly to exert influence over border policy — a matter of national regulation. Abbott has given his game away, both by declaring that the vehicle safety inspections are aimed at drug and human smuggling, and by engaging in discussions with Mexican governors aimed at pressuring them to increase border security in exchange for Abbott relenting on the inspections. As Josh Marshall points out in a rundown of the situation at the border, it’s not just that Abbott has arrogated to himself foreign policy and interstate trade regulation that rightly belong to the federal government; he’s also inflicting economic damage and contributing to inflationary pressures in the U.S. economy, as long delays of trucks bringing in industrial supplies and agricultural goods contribute to product shortages and food price hikes:

Abbott’s move seems constitutionally dubious at best. State governors have no authority to regulate or interdict other trade between US states or international trade. He is able to do it under the guise of ‘safety inspections’. But the federal government already does safety inspections. And these are clearly being used to throttle trade which, again, states have no authority to do.

The U.S. continues to be wracked by supply chain disruptions and inflation. This move seems designed — and well designed — to exacerbate both. Abbott’s calculation, probably accurate, is that he can create chaos and price spikes to pressure Biden and it’s no skin off his back since Biden will be blamed anyway. It’s all gravy.

I would argue that Abbott’s behavior goes far beyond bare-knuckle politics, into actions adjacent to the insurrectionist mindset evident in the events of January 6 and the GOP’s opposition to common-sense covid measures. Abbott isn’t simply staging political theater; he’s actively undermining the American economy, and the lives of U.S. citizens, in the name of advancing his own power, not to mention indirectly challenging unquestionable prerogatives of the president and the federal government. Perhaps it shouldn’t be 100% surprising given that it’s Texas we’re talking about, but he’s behaving as if his state were a sovereign nation in conflict with a hostile foreign power — that hostile foreign power being not Mexico but the United States of America.

This impression is only strengthened when we stop to consider that Abbott’s actions are of a piece with, and indeed may have been inspired by, the trucker protests that snarled traffic and daily life in Canada’s capital and along key border crossings with the U.S. a couple months ago, as Josh Kovensky writes in a great summary of the Texas situation. Only, in this case, Abbott is an elected government official who is, in Kovensky’s apt words, “using the power of the state to apply pressure for his own political hobby-horse.” This really gets at what’s so ominous about Abbott’s actions — he’s deploying his own governmental powers against the interests of the United States, in the name of advancing his own political power and undermining his political opponents.

This is radical stuff, and should be treated as such. Heck, even Texas business interests are mad as hell, seeing millions of dollars worth of food start to spoil, and other costly damages due to the delays. Yet, we have yet to heard any significant critique from the Biden administration. The clincher is that, as we can see from the business community’s criticisms of Abbott, he’s put himself out on a limb here. He’s got to know he’s gone beyond his actual authority; yet the longer he’s not challenged, the more his risky gambit starts to look not just like smart politics, but acceptable politics. And while it’s true that Abbott would surely be delighted to drag the Biden administration into a fight and increase his national profile as a conservative standing up to the president, the Biden administration runs the parallel risk of tacitly normalizing Abbott’s arguably insurrectionary behavior. The Biden administration, and Democrats more generally, simply don’t think they can benefit from confrontations with the GOP over hot-button issues — even when it’s clear to an objective observer that, in this case, Abbott is clearly running the risk of becoming the poster child for grand-standing politicians being a root cause of inflation in the United States.

More broadly, the lack of a Democratic response is of a piece with the more general Democratic failure to confront the Republican Party over its willingness to harm American interests for partisan gain. If the Democrats had already been hard at work making such a case, then they would be able to easily slot Abbott’s behavior into this pre-existing, established conduct.  Instead, the continued lack of a coherent response invites continued norm-breaking by Republican politicians, who are increasingly assured that they will either pay no political price for hurting their fellow Americans and assaulting our political order, or will be able to benefit off perceptions that it’s an isolated “partisan squabble” not tied to a larger GOP assault on America. While it’s a good rule of thumb in politics not to respond to every provocation or to let your opponent retain the initiative, the Democrats’ continued refusal to describe a through-line in the GOP’s democratically destabilizing behavior has become a central part of our crisis.  If the Democrats won’t consistently push back in the name of majoritarian governance and protection of the majority’s interests — whether political, economic, or social — then what on earth will stop the GOP from pursuing an anti-democratic agenda to its furthest end points?

The Youth of Today, The Voters of Tomorrow

Of the various fronts on which the Democratic Party is current failing or flailing, the massive drop-off in enthusiasm among young voters contends to be the single most frustrating. As Ron Brownstein recounts at CNN, the votes of Generation Z and Millennial voters were crucial to Democratic victories in 2018 and 2020; yet President Biden’s current job approval rating among the 18-34 age range is a paltry 40%, boding disastrous knock-on effects for congressional Democrats in November. Current Democratic difficulties with these younger voters aren’t just a matter of neglecting to court a specialized constituency, but point to broader failures of strategy and mindset currently plaguing the Democrats, and that affect their ability to attract and energize a broad array of potential voters beyond these rising generations.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s descent into authoritarianism and its right-wing war on democracy, but in important ways, such Republican animus is directed in particular at younger voters, who collectively are more likely to be disenfranchised by racist voter laws, impacted by its war on abortion rights, afflicted by the results of the GOP’s anti-environmental policies, and disempowered by Republican effort to make white Christian nationalism the rule of the realm. The demographic changes so central to fueling the right-wing backlash are due primarily to the diversity of American’s younger generations, not just in terms of racial diversity but also as measured by trends like diminished religious affiliation and more diverse sexual identity. In this respect, we can, without much exaggeration, say that the GOP is not simply opposed to democracy, but to the American future itself.

Yet, over the first year and change of the Biden administration, younger voters’ support for the president and his party have slipped precipitously. Observers point to two major causes — the failure of Biden and Democrats to deliver on campaign promises that rallied them to the polls in 2020, and the absence of Donald Trump from the political scene to incentivize their political participation. What both have in common is that their solutions are at least to some degree within Democrats’ power to effect — if they can bother to do so.

You can criticize Joe Biden for the specific political strategies he’s embraced to try to pass his legislative agenda — wasting months of valuable time in a futile quest for bipartisan cooperation on his Build Back Better legislation, underestimating the coal baron cunning of Senator Joe Manchin — but he has at least tried to move forward legislation that would address the interests of younger voters. From free community college to green energy spending, campaign promises weren’t ignored — but they did run into the wood-chipper of extremely narrow Democratic majorities. From this, one truism of a conclusion can be drawn — if Democrats are to pass progressive legislation that appeals to and serves younger voters, they will need to elect additional progressive Democrats to both the House and Senate.

But to do so, at a time when the Democrats already control both houses as well as the presidency, would require more than being upfront and honest with younger voters about the political realities of a narrowly-controlled Congress, and the need to increase Democratic majorities in November. After all, reliance on this strategy alone would require a leap of faith among citizens who can’t realistically be expected to easily forgive Democrats for not passing high-priority legislation, when they hear every day from the media the basic truth that the Democrats control Congress and the presidency. This means that in order to increase their majorities, Democrats also need to turn up the fire and brimstone against their Republican opposition, and to communicate to voters — particularly disaffected Gen Z and Millennial members — the retrograde and punitive policies that the GOP is already passing around the country at the state level, and will attempt to pass through Congress should it gain control. Without substantive legislative accomplishments to run on, the Democrats must communicate to younger voters that the Republican Party is a white supremacist, authoritarian, Christian nationalist political organization whose end goal is to ensure that this rising generation of Americans are shut out of political power and subject to whatever punitive, exploitative legislation the GOP cares to pass. If Donald Trump is no longer on the ballot to motivate young voters, then Democrats must do everything to remind them that the poison of Trump has now seeped into the very marrow of the Republican Party.

Of course, this course of action — a scorched-earth campaign against the GOP — runs directly against Biden administration appeals to bipartisanship that arguably form a core part of Joe Biden’s self-constructed political identity. They also run counter to a basic Democratic reluctance to fully confront the GOP, which is in turn rooted in the gerontocratic nature of the Democratic leadership, a fear of such a strategy backfiring, and a wish to promote an image of the Democrats as a moderate, reasonable party.  Yet, without telling the truth about the GOP, Democrats will continue to be unable to communicate a coherent narrative about American politics that's essential to attracting and retaining young voters. Without talking about the radicalization of the GOP, it instead looks like the major problem with American politics is Democratic infighting, rather than the Republican project to deny younger Americans the right to the ballot, to health care, to abortion, to a healthy environment, or to a livable minimum wage.

The key here is that there’s a direct line to be drawn between GOP radicalization and the Democrats’ support for young voters’ interests. The Republican Party has gone authoritarian not simply because younger Americans are transforming the country into a multiracial, religiously diverse nation in a way that is rippling across the country’s cultural fabric, but also because younger voters have already made their political impact felt by giving the majority of their votes to Democrats in the last several election cycles, pushing them into the majority in Congress in 2018 and 2020 and ensuring Joe Biden’s election. In other words, the GOP’s radicalization is due in no small part to the fact that younger generation have already begun to assert their growing power through the Democratic Party.

Also remember: Gen Z and Millennial voters haven’t been voting for Democrats due to some arbitrary and iron political law that says young people simply must vote for Democrats. Rather, these cohorts have favored Democrats because the party’s policies and politics appeal to them more than the GOP for substantive reasons; for instance, a party that supports raising the minimum wage and equality for gay Americans will attract the votes of young workers in entry-level jobs and rising generations who lack the bigotry of their parents.

But the crisis point the Democrats have reached is that young voters, like any voters in a democracy, expect something basic in return for their votes — they expect the party they voted for to actually represent them.  Right now, in failing to pass the basic economic and social legislation that President Biden promised, the Democrats are failing to serve the young voters who put them in office, and it is reasonable for those voters to feel disappointment. A healthy democratic political system requires a party to effectively represent its constituents.  This again brings us to the basic point that Democrats must communicate a coherent, truthful story about the nature of America politics — not only by acknowledging the conflicts and cross-pressures in the Democratic Party that have led to disappointing results in terms of recent legislation, but also by discussing the larger conflict between a reactionary right-wing movement embodied by the GOP and an increasingly diverse and politically progressive American majority centered in the Democratic Party.  

As the GOP gerrymanders and voter-suppresses its way into securing minoritarian power against a Democratic-leaning majority in the United States, it’s fair to say that any Democratic failure to stop this authoritarian menace is not just bad for anyone who actually believes in American democracy, but would also be, quite specifically, a failure to protect the interests of Gen Z and Millennial voters who are most directly targeted by both voter suppression and the specific laws — anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-worker — that the GOP would then be in a position to pass. Of course, this isn’t any sort of theoretical situation — it is already happening, from the “don’t say gay” law recently passed in Florida to Texas’ bounty on pregnant women (who will mostly be Gen Z and Millennials) that have stripped millions of them of their basic rights.  In this sense, the Democrats have already failed their young voters — which makes it all the more important to alert these cohorts to the danger posed by the GOP, as part of a strategy of gaining their votes and defeating this anti-democratic, reactionary onslaught.

A Supreme Opportunity For Democrats to Discuss a Corrupted Court

Whether the Democratic Party responds with appropriate fury and action to the revelations that the right-wing activist wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was a full-throated advocate of Donald Trump’s efforts to throw out the presidential election results, or allows this moment of crisis and opportunity to pass by, feels different from previous points when the party chose the path of non-confrontation in the face of GOP radicalization.  For a member of the Supreme Court to be so closely proximate to the plot to overthrow American democracy not only demonstrates the dangerous scope of that plot, but also focuses public attention on the court’s broader corruption as a partisan enabler of a right-wing authoritarian movement.  In one sudden blow, the Democrats have a powerful weapon to energize discussions around the corrupted Supreme Court, and to make the case for Court reforms (expansion, term limits, far stricter ethics rules) that would draw on protection of democracy and the rule of law as their motivation.

Although we don’t have a precise idea (yet) of what Justice Thomas may have discussed with his wife, Ginni, observers like Josh Marshall make a compelling case that it is highly probable he knew of his spouse’s insurrectionary activities, and yet continued to rule on cases directly related to the January 6 coup attempt.  Marshall writes that:

You cannot look at these texts and not know to close to a certainty, based on the texts, what is publicly known about their relationship and their history of shared partisan political activism and not know that they not only discussed the matter but that he was on the same page with her. So Thomas himself was also a party to this conspiracy, privy to its actions and goals if perhaps not taking affirmative steps to advance it.

Any hesitation at all among Democratic members of the January 6 committee to question Ginni Thomas would be mind-boggling (it appears Republican Representive Liz Cheney initially opposed the idea, but has consented to request voluntary questioning but not a subpoena).  The idea that any sort of deference by proxy is due to Mrs. Thomas is clearly outweighed by the enormity of the offenses that the committee is investigating.  Yet, as of today, I have not seen any news that the committee plans to question Thomas; disturbingly, The New York Times reports that committee leaders have now discussed for weeks, without resolution, whether to question Thomas.  It’s also relevant that before the Mark Meadows-Ginni Thomas emails showing the latter’s deep involvement in working to overturn the election results were leaked, Thomas had talked down her connection to the events of January 6 — strongly suggesting she understands the political and even legal peril of her true involvement.

The Democrats’ decision on how to pursue the Thomas revelations also feels different from earlier inflection points because it comes at a time when the Democrats’ path to retaining control the House and Senate in November is close to being closed to them.  Inflation and a failure to accomplish basic Biden campaign promises, coupled with unrelenting GOP opposition and fear-mongering, has demobilized the Democratic base while rousing Republican voters.  The Democrats’ continued insistence on fighting out the November elections mainly on kitchen table issues, when most Americans see the kitchen table a priced 10% higher than last year and not available for immediate delivery, is increasingly masochistic in the face of the GOP’s overt and self-incriminating threats to democracy, which have at least a theoretical chance of galvanizing the Democratic base into voting — if the Democrats choose to make these threats central to their election campaigns (beyond this, of course, prioritizing the fight to save democracy is the right thing to do).  

As I’ve said before, keeping public attention focused on the January 6 coup and related efforts to overturn the 2020 election results is essential if the Democrats wish to make the case against the GOP’s broader, continuing turn to authoritarian politics.  The horrors of January 6 bring together all the foul strands of right-wing politics — the contempt for democracy, the white supremacism, the embrace of violence — in a way that is easily understood and viscerally felt.  It is a skeleton key to explain the array of Republican measures since January 6 — ranging from gerrymandering and racist voter suppression to attacks on women’s and gay rights — that constitute a continuation of the coup attempt by other means, part and parcel of a right-wing movement against the social and political progress of the last several decades.  

In a somewhat analogous way, the corruption of Ginni and Clarence Thomas might be employed as a decoder ring for the larger corruption of the Republican Party, beyond simply Donald Trump and his defenders.  As Marshall notes in another post, the involvement of Ginni Thomas and other long-time Republicans in the coup attempt suggests that the roots of the anti-democratic animus revealed that day originated not in Trump, but rather the establishment Republican Party itself.  If the Democrats can make the case that a conservative icon like Clarence Thomas was coup-adjacent or coup-sympathetic, then they should make it, both for the sake of protecting American democracy and for demonstrating the Republican Party’s essential unfitness to hold power. 

The Ginni Thomas revelations are also amplified by the proximity of the November elections since the congressional investigation of the January 6 insurrection will be shut down should Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives.  In this way, these latest disclosures raise the stakes of the upcoming election more than ever — if at this late date we are still learning damning evidence about the extent of the right-wing Republican effort to overthrow American democracy, what may we still learn in the coming months and years if the investigation continues?  The alternative is chilling, with the GOP in a position to bury the truth and act as accomplices to insurrection, while also turning the investigative powers of Congress into baseless crusades against Democrats in a further abuse of power.

A Cathartic Look at the Failures of the U.S. Coronavirus Response

There are many compelling reasons to read Ed Wong’s recent account in The Atlantic of the U.S.’s tragically flawed covid response, but I would put at the top of the list the way it speaks to the mass denial and avoidance around the enormous U.S. death toll due to the covid pandemic. Among all the missteps, misdeeds, and delusions that have characterized our covid years, I’ve increasingly found the basic dissonance between the massive death toll and public acquiescence the single most unnerving aspect of the crisis. Where we should have seen citizen outrage, we have see muted resignation; where we should have seen ceaseless government efforts to protect the population, we have seen a stunningly high tolerance for preventable deaths.

As Wong reminds us, with nearly a million dead, the U.S. faired worse than its peer countries, so much so that:

Dying from COVID robbed each American of about a decade of life on average. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century.” [. . . ] Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. An estimated 149,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver.

Wong gets to the heart of the matter, exploring why the United States essentially normalized such high death rates, particularly in light of the fact that we have had the means to greatly reduce those numbers. The answers he provides are complex and interrelated, from the basic invisibility of the virus (as compared to telegenic disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes); a fatalism due to repeated government failures to control the virus; far higher death tolls among minority Americans considered less valuable by their fellow citizens; enormous health care disparities based on race and class; and a tendency to make the fight against the virus into a matter of personal rather than collective responsibility.

Crucially, Wong turns to how the attitudes that have undermined the U.S. efforts so far are now setting us up for future disaster and unnecessary loss of life. This may be the greatest cause of the dissonance I’ve been feeling — this enormous public and governmental urge to return to normal, without taking into account the lessons that could help us actually stay in normal if and when we get there. The solutions are far broader than covid-specific measures like vaccines — Wong correctly suggests, among other things, that systemic changes to address inequality in public health more broadly will be needed if we want to avoid a repeat:

The inequities that were overlooked in this pandemic will ignite the next one—but they don’t have to. Improving ventilation in workplaces, schools, and other public buildings would prevent deaths from COVID and other airborne viruses, including flu. Paid sick leave would allow workers to protect their colleagues without risking their livelihood. Equitable access to antivirals and other treatments could help immunocompromised people who can’t be protected through vaccination. Universal health care would help the poorest people, who still bear the greatest risk of infection. A universe of options lies between the caricatured extremes of lockdowns and inaction, and will save lives when new variants or viruses inevitably arise.

The good news is that, according to polling, most Americans do prefer an approach that better prepares the country for future pandemics — what Wong describes as a “build back better” approach. Perversely, though, most people also seem to believe that other people don’t support this, leading to a sense of public resignation; as Wong writes, “By wrongly assuming that everyone else wants to return to the previous status quo, we foreclose the possibility of creating something better.” This is where Wong’s account intersects with what I’ve focused on for the past two years as a core aspect of the failed coronavirus response: the fact that one political party dedicated itself to denying the reality and severity of the pandemic, while the other party shied away from the necessary battles that would have ensured a far more equitable and comprehensive fight against the virus. The American citizenry is being told by its government — by public health authorities responsive to politicians’ overriding interest in promoting a sense of normalcy, and by politicians themselves — that the most important thing is to move on from the pandemic.

Far from an act of leadership, this is an act of profound negligence. Where are the calls for universal health care? Where is the legislation to ensure paid sick leave for service workers who suffered so greatly over the past two years? Such measures are treated as secondary, and at any rate are extreme long shots given the Democrats’ tenuous control of Congress and the GOP’s reflexive opposition to legislation to address health care disparities or workers’ rights. But the situation is obviously perverse: by refusing to prioritize a reckoning with the U.S. coronavirus response, Democrats in particular are failing to catalyze a public discussion that would actually create more pressure and momentum for such legislation to pass.  

Instead, at least so far, the government response is heading in the opposite direction, with Congress failing to pass an additional $15 billion in coronavirus-related funding earlier this month — a failure that will have imminent, real-world affects on our ability to manage a pandemic that, as Wong hammers home in a more recent piece, we are still in the midst of. It is also notable that the failure appears due to a combination of Republican indifference to the pandemic and Democratic unwillingness to prioritize the continuing covid fight. This is a de facto consensus to “move on” carried to an absurd extreme — willing it to be so, even as too many Americans continue to die and vaccination rates remain stalled out at too-low levels. If for no other reason, the refusal to look squarely at the failures of the covid response to date must be rectified, for the sake of averting future, avoidable disasters.

The Ukraine Crisis Is a Pressure Test of Biden's Green Energy Commitments

It may not have been on most people’s radar in the first shocking days of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, but the repercussions for the fight against climate change have quickly become clear, a critical ancillary aspect of the crisis. Russia’s role as a major supplier of oil and gas, and the objective of denying Russia the revenue and power that flow from this, have created a host of urgent questions. A central dilemma the world faces, and the one with the biggest impact on climate change, is the degree to which the response will spur investments — not only in Europe, but here in the U.S. — in fossil fuel technologies that will only contribute to immense long-term damage to our environment.

In the U.S., the Republican Party has jumped on the conjunction of this question and high gas prices (coupled with overall high inflation) to demand a huge expansion of domestic oil and gas production, while also claiming that any high prices right now are actually due to the Biden administration’s aggressive green energy policies. In other words, the GOP sees this crisis as an opportunity to renew its war in favor of big oil and against the stability of the planet’s ecosystems.

Such Republican pressure, coupled with the very real economic impact of the Russian invasion, in turn means that this crisis has created a crucial test for the Biden administration’s commitment to the fight against climate change. Though it’s far too early to know how things will play out, there are a few pieces of tentative good news on this front. First, there seems to be pretty broad understanding of the stakes, certainly among those involved with climate issues, but also within the Biden administration itself. According to The Washington Post, 

Biden has personally expressed support for recasting the administration’s clean energy proposals as part of an attempt to move America away from its dependence on authoritarian petrostates, according to two people aware of the president’s thinking on the matter.

“That’ll mean tyrants like Putin won’t be able to use fossil fuels as weapons against other nations, and it will make America the world leader in manufacturing and exporting clean energy technologies of the future to countries all around the world,” Biden said Tuesday as he made a renewed push for investments in renewable energy. “This is the goal we should be racing toward.”

Let us hope this is more than just lip service to a good cause. I don’t think we can overstate how essential it is for the Biden administration to use this crisis to double down on the importance of a green energy revolution, not least because the near-term solutions do inevitably involve, at least in part, ensuring a steady supply of oil and gas for Europe, the U.S., and other nations around the globe. The reality is that fossil fuel price hikes and supply constraints have the potential to have real-world impacts on millions of people around the globe, who not only will pay higher prices for heating and transportation, but who will also be adversely affected by any resulting economic slowdowns. This is to say nothing of the suffering that would ensue if European households were unable to heat themselves during the cold weather of late winter and spring. Particularly after the battering the world’s economies have suffered due to the coronavirus pandemic, this is a very big deal. Yet the Biden administration must balance these short-term needs with the longer-term, existential goal of weaning the U.S., and the world, off of fossil fuels. Demonstrating this commitment at a time of crisis, and emphasizing the urgency of fighting climate change even in the face of immediate needs to keep fossil fuel supplies steady, is a balance that the Biden administration must get right if it wants to maintain public support for green energy policies and actually move the U.S. towards those goals. In fact, successfully navigating this moment will arguably strengthen the case for green energy in the long term, if the U.S. can demonstrate that climate goals need not be abandoned due to short-term demands.  

Clearly the GOP and fossil fuel companies see a golden opportunity to blunt the momentum towards clean energy, bolstered as they are by the actual ongoing effects on fossil fuel supplies and prices due to the Russian invasion. But the critical flaw in their reasoning is that they’ve reverted to the discredited notion that climate change isn’t a serious threat to the world economy, political stability, and civilizational survival. It would be one thing if they presented the current moment as a one-time need to expand fossil fuel production — but as others have pointed out, that’s not how fossil fuel infrastructure works. New investments will require years of operation to pay for themselves, locking the U.S. and other countries into additional decades of planet-fouling energy production. Instead, the GOP betrays its anti-environmental animus by using the current crisis to argue that it somehow discredits the fight against climate change as a general proposition. This is a crazy, nihilistic position, rooted in the same anti-science, exploitative economic practices that have gotten us to this perilous climate moment to begin with. (It’s also worth pointing out that the world economy’s continued reliance on fossil fuels is a prime reason why Russia has been able to afford the weaponry and financial insulation that enabled its invasion of Ukraine in the first place.)

If anything, this is an opportunity for the Biden administration and others to play offense at promoting a green energy economy. For instance, a great idea floated by climate activist Bill McKibben has now been echoed by White House advisors: the United States could mass produce heat pumps, perhaps under the auspices of the Defense Production Act, and export them to Europe to compensate for any gas supply constraints or shut-offs. This sort of two-in-one move is exactly the sort of policy the White House should be pursuing as part of the solution to the current energy conundrum — it advances climate protection while also helping mitigate the immediate energy crisis.

McKibben also suggests that individual Americans can do their part to both help Ukraine and fight climate change by instituting ride-share and limited-driving practices to reduce oil use and the indirect flow of dollars to fund the Russian war machine. Whether or not this particular idea catches on, it’s a reminder that we need to keep building society-wide pressure in favor of climate action, and find ways that people can make an impact even as green energy legislation remains stalled in Congress by Republican and conservative Democratic opposition. The likelihood of forcing political action only increases when people make green choices in their daily lives, exposing pro-fossil fuel politicians as the anti-science extremists that they are.

Democrats Can't Count On Authoritarian GOP to Back Them In Ukraine Crisis

The domestic political fallout from Russia’s Ukraine invasion will be developing over the coming weeks, months, and likely years, but as I discussed last week, some elements are already crystal clear. The Republican Party has indicated that, despite the U.S. facing arguably the worst foreign policy crisis since the end of the Cold War, it will use the conflict as a partisan political weapon against the Democrats and President Biden in upcoming elections. Far from being the good-faith criticisms of a loyal opposition, the GOP’s line of attack constitutes a shocking willingness to do substantive harm to national interests in the name of partisan gain.

Even as they appear to be abandoning long-term indifference to Ukraine’s fate (more on that shortly), Republican politicians have floated two major criticisms: that President Biden is responsible for Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine due to his incompetence and weakness, and that Biden is responsible for the high gas prices that have ensued, both due to his aforementioned culpability in causing the invasion and because he has set up the U.S. for oil and gas shortages because of his (actually non-existent) aggressive measures against global warming and in favor of green energy.  

The danger, as Brian Beutler writes this week at Crooked Media, is that the national unity against Putin that Joe Biden claimed in his state of the union address will inevitably fray if the Republicans continue to press their attacks against the president. The idea of unity at the political level is of course already tenuous, given that there’s no good evidence that the GOP’s sudden reversal into concern for the fate of Ukraine has any real substance to it. But there is actual unity among the voting public, at least for now (among other startling recent poll results, some 79% of Americans favor banning imports of Russian oil, even if it means higher prices at the gas pump). This widespread shared public outrage against Russia is a big part of why Republicans have at least felt compelled to voice their outrage about the attack on Ukraine, even if their actions over the past several years have told a far different story about their support of that embattled nation.

Beutler’s point is that this public unity will eventually dissolve, at least among GOP voters, if their elected officials continue a campaign of denigration against the president’s leadership and place the blame for higher gas prices (and thus continued inflation) squarely on Biden. In other words, the GOP’s electoral strategy is inextricably linked to subverting Joe Biden’s — that is, the nation’s — ability to confront and restrain Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine, which already contains dark, if still remote, possibilities of spreading into a broader war against NATO.

I highly recommend reading Beutler’s column, which presents the dynamic I summarize above in much more nuance and detail, and also gets at the solution to this issue: the need for Democrats to ensure that their arguments prevail against those of the GOP in what will inevitably become (due to the GOP’s scorched earth strategy) a partisan fight over the direction of U.S. policy towards the invasion and management of the accompanying economic and political challenges. But there’s another angle I wanted to bring into play here, probably not a surprising one for many: the continuity between GOP actions on Ukraine and the Republican insurrectionary project that’s been underway since the waning days of the Trump administration.

We can’t really properly talk about the Republican reaction to Ukraine without putting it in the broader context of the ongoing GOP attack against free and fair elections in this country, which I’ve argued constitutes a slow-motion coup against American democracy. Republican efforts to unfairly blame Biden for Russia’s invasion, in a way that ultimately strengthens the hand of an authoritarian ruler, needs to be seen as deeply linked to the GOP’s own authoritarian aims in the United States. It is not so much that Republican politicians see Putin as an actual ally — though some, including former President Trump, clearly do — but that the GOP has no actual interest in defending democracy, or warding off authoritarianism, in another country. After all, a true commitment to promoting democracy abroad would inevitably expose the gaping distance from the GOP’s policies at home, where voter suppression, radical gerrymandering, and white supremacism are central elements of its politics. The GOP can’t defend democracy abroad in any meaningful way without undermining its war against democracy at home.

In turn, any Democratic strategies regarding the Ukraine crisis that fail to account for the GOP’s insurrectionary turn are bound to be hampered and subverted by such a glaring blind spot (this, not coincidentally, is definitely a theme of Beutler’s article noted above). Here, Republican backing of a ban on Russian oil imports is a chilling case study.  As The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank summarizes, “For days, Republicans called for a ban on imports of Russian oil, a move that, while the right thing to do to counter Putin’s attack against Ukraine, would cause already high gas prices to rise even further. Biden did as Republicans wanted — and they responded by blaming his energy policies for spiking gas prices.” While the GOP benefits in the public eye by appearing tough on Putin, I would argue that the primary GOP interest in banning these oil imports is in fact to harm the Biden presidency, given the Republican Party’s actual lack of interest in either defending Ukraine or democracy in general. Recognition of this fact would prompt a far different Democratic response, which right now is primarily to overlook the GOP attacks in favor of pointing to the GOP actions as a demonstration of national unity.  

This is not to say that there aren’t very good reasons for Biden and the Democrats to want to create an appearance of togetherness. After all, any perceptions by Putin or U.S. allies that America is divided in its resolve to defend Ukraine could have deeply counterproductive consequences in the real world, whether by emboldening Russia or disheartening our friends. But Democrats surely also have an interest in promoting actual unity at home, rather than the false one that currently obtains — and this would entail confronting the GOP on its hypocrisy when it blames Joe Biden for the consequences of the very actions the GOP claims to support.

Rather than impute good faith to the GOP’s support of a Russian oil ban, Democrats should act with full awareness of the GOP’s insurrectionary nature, and mercilessly attack the GOP when it tries to turn a show of bipartisan unity into a baseless attack on the president — that is, when it reveals the true motivations behind its pretense of unity. This might seems counterintuitive — won’t this just cause the appearance of American disarray the Democrats are so eager to avoid? — but the fact of the matter is that, at least right now, the GOP is actually in a bind. GOP politicos do have to appear anti-Putin and anti-invasion, due to broad public upset at the Russian attack. And so when they blatantly use actions they themselves support to attack Biden, and thus undermine the very efforts to bring Russia to heel that they claim to back, they create enormous vulnerabilities for themselves. The hypocrisy is so glaring as to be not blinding, but deeply illuminating. When the GOP demonstrates that it would rather blame Joe Biden for inflation than Vladimir Putin, the party is both showing its true insurrectionary colors and placing itself in the crosshairs of a righteous critique.

As we’ve seen so often before, Democrats insist on compartmentalizing the feral, anti-democratic descent of the GOP, behaving as if its war on democracy might somehow be separated out from other areas of politics. This manifests in various ways, from President Biden’s continued insistence on the supreme importance of bipartisan legislation, to the party’s general reluctance to highlight the broader GOP’s complicity in Donald Trump's January 6 coup attempt, to a refusal to level with Democratic voters and the public at large about the GOP’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist vision for America. And now, at a time of foreign policy crisis,  the Democrats risk repeating the error, promoting a fiction that politics stops at the water’s edge even as the GOP demonstrates the folly of such self-delusion.   

Only self-imposed constraints are stopping President Biden and his fellow Democrats from making the GOP pay a steep price for their subversion of American efforts to counter Russian aggression, which is the far more accurate reading of the past few weeks’ events than the fiction that the GOP has joined Democrats in an amazing display of national resolve. Democrats should proceed with eyes wide open as to the nature of their political opponents. The fact that the GOP has not been shaken back into a shared national purpose, even with Russian armies threatening the systems of post-Cold War stability, should in fact be another wake-up call as to the true nature of the contemporary GOP. 

The ability to roll back Russian aggression, defend global stability, and, above all else, promote true democracy around the world depends on the Democrats’ ability to roll back the GOP. On its own, the media will obviously not zero in on the Republican Party’s malign role in the current crisis — but if Democrats make this into a story, then there is a far greater chance this will become a larger part of the national conversation. As has frequently happened over the past several years, the Democrats can promote the national interest at the same time as they promote their partisan goals, which is what happens when only one party is committed to the perpetuation of American democracy.  

The alternative, which strikes me as likely absent a course change by the Democrats, is that the Republican Party will simply escalate its attempts to blame Biden for any invasion-related fallout to the U.S. economy. Without active efforts by the Biden administration to maintain public support — which necessarily involves pushing back against the GOP’s self-serving and deceptive critiques — this support will gradually diminish, particularly among a Republican base driven into a frenzy against “Biden inflation.” With the GOP hell-bent on turning U.S. resistance to Russian aggression into a partisan issue, the Democrats ignore this distinct possibility at the nation’s peril.  

Lack of Climate Change Talk at SOU Was Missed Presidential Opportunity

Let’s hope that President Biden’s disturbing silence on climate change in his state of the union address was solely due to the emergence of the Ukraine invasion as the dominant narrative of the night. After all, just a day before his speech, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yet another urgent report: this time, on how the impacts of climate change are being felt by human societies faster and more powerfully than anticipated, “so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt.” Such news created an obvious opening for the president to discuss the overwhelming need for action in his annual address.

Yet the omission makes even less sense when the same speech included assurances to the public that the Biden administration would do what it can do minimize the impact on U.S. energy prices from the Ukraine crisis. The obvious solution is to increase gas and oil supplies, including by opening up more American land for drilling — exactly the solution that some in the Republican Party are already advocating. Indeed, it’s not too much to say that the GOP sees this as a perfect opening to blunt the momentum towards transforming the energy sector in a sustainable direction; as Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch notes, Republicans are “using the crisis [to] advocate for their donors’ pet projects like the Keystone XL pipeline — killed, for now, by the White House because of its climate impact — or opening up more drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Now, the GOP can claim that fossil fuels are key to economic stability and even defending freedom itself.

Without a doubt, the Russian invasion is a true crisis, the handling of which will likely have enormous repercussions for the future of international relations, the world economy, democracy, and the global fight against authoritarianism. Biden does need to shield the U.S. against its impacts. But there is an inevitable tension between the goals of maintaining our gas and oil supplies, and pursuing the even more important long-term fight against climate change, which just as surely holds the potential to destabilize our economies, undermine free societies, and empower authoritarian leaders eager to spin environmental chaos into justification for strongman rule. Indeed, the Russian invasion will not be the last crisis where such conflicting needs must be balanced — yet balanced they must be.

This is particularly the case when the very leverage Vladimir Putin holds through control of large oil and gas supplies is key to his ability to wield power and sow chaos. A powerful, overlapping response to both authoritarianism and climate change is possible: weaning the world off fossil fuels, as fast as possible. As Bunch reminds us, “Dictators like Putin or Saudi Arabia’s murderous monarchs have used their control of the oil spigot to extort other nations and bend them to their will. In the present crisis, Putin’s leverage on the West would amount to a hill of beans if Europe had started earlier and more aggressively to move away from fossil fuels. Thus, building infrastructure that would lock us into oil and gas for another generation seems the height of madness.”

Rather than being at odds, then, the fight against climate change is inextricably twinned with the fight against authoritarianism. This is why it’s so disappointing that President Biden did not make this case when he had the nation’s attention focused on him last week. If nothing else, it would have been an instance of going on offense against the GOP’s completely predictable pro-fossil fuel response to the Ukraine crisis. Instead, Biden now must contend with the Republicans’ tendentious arguments for expanding drilling, having surrendered a prime opportunity to knock them off balance and make a case for actual energy independence, where we trade dependence on oil companies for the reliable, renewable power that come from the wind and the sun.

Democrats Shouldn't Fool Themselves About GOP's Sudden Eagerness to Confront Russia

Like many of you, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been at the front of my mind for much of the past two weeks. Many have noted the feeling of a pivot point in history, whether it’s the eruption of a new Cold War or an escalation of direct hostilities with Russia; a possibly destabilizing cascade of follow-on events (food and energy shortages, higher inflation, a huge new refugee crisis); or a strengthening of European solidarity and unexpected impetus to an accelerated transition to green energy. But by far the most important framework for thinking about the attack on Ukraine should be the conflict between democratic, free societies and a resurgent authoritarianism that finds inspiration in the tactics and beliefs of fascistic leaders, with Vladimir Putin claiming a leading role.

Here in the United States, it should shock us anew that until the invasion, many Republican elected officials and pundits have been unabashed fans of Putin  — a function not only of loyalty to Donald Trump’s own unstinting support for the Russian leader, but also of a belief in Putin’s importance as an avatar of “white Christian values” in the world, as political scientist Thomas Zimmer describes. But though many in the GOP are currently rushing to do an about-face by sounding off their support for Ukraine, and even warning sternly against pro-Putin voices in the party (as Mike Pence recently did), it would be foolish for Democrats to accept this hypocrisy as the price for national unity at a time of foreign policy crisis. After all, nearly every sitting Republican representative and senator voted either not to impeach or not to convict Donald Trump following his attempts to deny Ukraine vital armaments in exchange for manufacturing political dirt on Joe Biden; a mere two years ago, the GOP saw protecting its corrupt president as more important than the cause of a U.S. ally and crucial test case for democracy along the Russian border. 

As bad, though, is our current political reality, in which the GOP is already preparing to wield the Ukraine conflict as another weapon in their war to kneecap the Biden presidency and pursue their own brand of authoritarian rule in the United States. As The New York Times reports regarding Republican strategy discussions, “with inflation soaring, linking Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine to his domestic woes could prove to be a potent argument with voters in the fall.” The lines of attack are clear. First, it seems inevitable that we’ll see the Russian invasion continue to impact oil prices, which have already gone higher on fears of disruptions or embargo, which in turn will drive inflation up or at least keep it at its currently elevated levels. This will allow the GOP to hammer Biden for “causing” inflation, simply because he’s president while it’s happening, while also making the case that any Biden administration resistance to expanding gas and oil production in the U.S. is also driving prices higher. Second, some in the GOP will assert that they want to be even more aggressive than Biden in countering Russia, free of the president’s need to keep the present confrontation from spiraling out of control (witness Lindsey Graham’s speculation that what we really need to roll back the invasion is for someone to assassinate Putin). Finally, Republicans will do what they can to blame Biden for creating the current crisis; indeed, minority leader Kevin McCarthy introduced this critique when he tweeted yesterday that, “Just as the United States should have supplied weapons to Ukraine sooner, we should speed up the sale of weapons to Taiwan so they can safeguard their future against China.” McCarthy’s brazen effort to rewrite history is particularly offensive, requiring us to ignore the sordid history of Trump’s blackmailing of Ukraine and the GOP’s stalwart defense of his self-dealing, while essentially casting President Biden as the one who failed Ukraine. It is as if he is begging the Democrats to call him out.  Well, they should.

Given that the GOP is openly telegraphing its plans to undermine Biden’s efforts to marshal American power against arguably the greatest threat to world peace since the end of the Cold War, and is implicated in the emergence of this threat through the Trump presidency, Biden and the Democrats should go on the offense against such partisan efforts. They need to realize that they can’t simply will bipartisanship into existence just because we face an international crisis. Indeed, the fact that the GOP can’t even unite behind the president at such a time should be front and center in the Democratic Party’s appeal to American voters. At Crooked Media, Brian Beutler outlines what such an outreach effort to voters would look like:

Tell them that Republicans are under [Trump’s] thumb—remind them of this, with the huge archive of Trump’s words and deeds, every day. Instead of stopping short at, “I will do everything in my power to limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump,” draw on the same kind of anticipatory information tactics that so effectively stripped Putin bare: Because they’ve sided with Putin, Republicans in Congress will try to convince you that higher gas prices are Democrats' fault—don’t believe them [. . .] Another, more straightforward way is to simply observe that the party that tried to overturn our election here in the U.S. is now in the pocket of the tyrant who’s trying to snuff out democracy in Ukraine by force.

While this would obviously also be a partisan approach to a foreign policy situation, as Beutler acknowledges, what the Democrats ignore at their peril is that this is simultaneously the correct approach to take in order to defend the national interest. A party that has to date chosen to coddle apologists for the Russian dictator or offer him outright support, to the point that we can make the case that their actions helped make Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more likely, cannot now be allowed to whitewash that sordid history for the sake of seeking advantage against a Democratic president, and in doing so undermine his efforts to defend the national interest.

Beutler also makes another point that’s well worth drawing out, when he writes, “The urgency to deny [Republicans] power has just grown significantly, because if they win we can’t count on them to be on the side of global democracy in a new war against fascism that just turned hot.” This captures the urgent need for Democrats to assume a proper stance against GOP criticism around Ukraine and inflation. If Democrats believe that defending Ukraine is critical to defending democracy around the world, then employing a hard-hitting but truthful critique against an opposition party that would abandon that defense should it come to power must be a high priority.

I should be clear that the GOP is perfectly free to offer whatever criticism it wants of Biden’s efforts around the Ukraine crisis. In an ideal situation — which we are far from — good-faith critiques would be a vital part of our democratic deliberative processes. But in any circumstances, and certainly right now, Biden and the Democrats are equally free to denounce criticisms that are baseless, inflammtory, and ultimately in the service of the GOP’s authoritarian endgame. This is yet another case where the Democrats are badly served by behaving as if the Republicans are still a normal political party dedicated to democratic norms.

What's Stopping Democrats From Fully Engaging Against GOP's White Supremacism?

Last week, I surveyed Republican efforts to subvert the teaching of U.S. history with white supremacist propaganda aimed at reproducing the bigotry of GOP politicians, who view racist manipulation as key to retaining power in a diversifying America over the coming decades. Rather than being a side issue that Democrats should easily dismiss, these attacks on basic American principles of equality and free thinking in schools pose a threat to American democracy as well as an enormous opening for Democrats to hit back against massive Republican overreach.

We are now beginning to see hard evidence that the GOP hasn’t just chosen an immoral side in this fight, but a highly unpopular one. In a column last week, Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent cites recent polling on the issue:

The poll finds that 83 percent of Americans say books should never be banned for criticizing U.S. history; 85 percent oppose banning them for airing ideas you disagree with; and 87 percent oppose banning them for discussing race or depicting slavery.

What’s more, 76 percent of Americans say schools should be allowed to teach ideas and historical events that “might make some students uncomfortable.” And 68 percent say such teachings make people more understanding of what others went through, while 58 percent believe racism is still a serious problem today.

Finally, 66 percent say public schools either teach too little about the history of Black Americans (42 percent) or teach the right amount (24 percent). Yet 59 percent say we’ve made “a lot of real progress getting rid of racial discrimination” since the 1960s.

Among other things, these numbers give the lie to the idea that Republican politicians represent anything like majority opinion as they seek to sanitize and propagandize the teaching of U.S. history. Just the opposite — they represent a minority, even fringe opinion. These poll results are even more remarkable in light of the fact that Republicans have spent literally the last year attempting to incite public opinion to align with their war on U.S. history, with almost zero Democratic pushback, and still have built nothing close to majority support.

The big take-away for me, though, is how these polls demonstrate what Democrats should have already concluded based on political instinct, morality, and common sense: rather than Democrats being on shaky ground, it is the GOP that has made itself vulnerable by embarking on a racist initiative to rework the very nature of U.S. history education — an initiative that involves not just teaching white supremacist propaganda, but, as Sargent reminds us, also involves the incitement of violence against school officials as part of a broader campaign of intimidation against U.S. public education.

I won’t repeat my in-depth arguments for why Democratic hesitance to engage on this issue has been so wrong-headed, but I do want to delve more into the underlying question of why, exactly, Democrats would have such difficulty doing the morally correct and politically advantageous thing in this and other similar conflicts. Crooked’s Brian Beutler has long been hitting Democrats for their reluctance to engage in what they perceive as mere culture war sideshows, and has extensively documented the self-defeating nature of this disinclination; in a recent newsletter, he revisited some ideas about why this might be the Democrats’ default position. Noting the the double-edged news that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has belatedly registered the power of culture war attacks by Republicans, and is looking at strategies to neutralize those attacks through more effective fact-checking, he writes:

I see Democrats’ late grappling with the potency of GOP culture war tactics as both necessary and terribly myopic. It’s also of a piece with the party leadership’s tendency to recoil from partisan matters in general—to react, rather than take charge, only when forced, and to do so in the most shrunken and narrowcast possible way. 

[. . .] The way I’d put it is that the most important division in Dem politics isn’t left vs. center—it’s partisan and procedural boldness vs. timidity.

[. . .] Because they’re scared, Democrats can’t seem to recognize the GOP’s huge and obvious vulnerabilities when they arise, let alone exploit them. Whatever the bone of contention happens to be on any given day, Republicans approach it by trying to disrupt the Democratic OODA loop, and Democrats, almost always playing for defense, let it happen. It’s allowed Republicans to set the terms of national discourse on almost all issues—the economy, the pandemic, education, everything outside the penumbra of January 6—with the federal government under unified Democratic control.

I don’t want to be too reductionist with Beutler’s many nuanced observations over the years, but I want do draw out a common theme I see between the points above and in his previous columns: the Democrats’ apparent lack of conviction and confidence in their own policy positions, let alone in their ability to win fights over more amorphous culture war issues where, far more often than not, right and majority opinion are on their side. This assumption of their own lack of popularity and righteousness, I would submit, is an awfully strange attitude for a political party to take!

Beutler’s references to the Democrats being “scared” as well as timid on partisan and procedural fronts are important parts of the puzzle, reminding us that whatever the deeper reasons for their political decision-making, Democratic leaders bear ultimate responsibility for whether they choose to fight or flee.  Here, psychology, as well as basic realities like the advanced age of what some describe as the Democrats’ gerontocratic leadership, may certainly play a part.

The interaction of age and outdated conceptions of politics is something that Thomas Zimmer touches on in a recent exploration of why Democrats so often pull their punches in critiquing their GOP opponents. Zimmer notes that older Democratic leadership figures “came up in a very different political environment, when there was indeed a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in Congress.” To be a bit provocative: their age means they are somewhat stuck in the past, unable to acknowledged the current highly partisan reality. But Zimmer gets closer to the heart of what’s holding many Democrats back when he writes that:

The way some establishment Democrats have acted suggests they feel a kinship with their Republican opponents grounded in a worldview of white elite centrism. Their perspective on the prospect of a white reactionary regime is influenced by the fact that, consciously or not, they understand that their elite status wouldn’t necessarily be affected all that much. The Republican dogma – that the world works best if it’s run by prosperous white folks – has a certain appeal to wealthy white elites, regardless of party.

[. . .] American political discourse is still significantly shaped by the paradigm of white innocence. Economic anxiety, anti-elite backlash, or just liberals being mean – whatever animates white people’s extremism, it must not be racism, and they cannot be blamed for their actions [. . .] The idea of white innocence also clouds Democratic elites’ perspective on Republican elites: Since they cannot possibly be animated by reactionary white nationalism, they must be motivated by more benign forces, fear of the Trumpian base perhaps, or maybe they are being seduced by the dangerous demagogue.  

Zimmer’s observations takes on even greater resonance — and persuasiveness — when we consider that the root of so much of our current political conflicts, whether on the level of policy or “culture war,” is a mammoth struggle over whether we will be a white supremacist nation or one that accords all Americans political equality regardless of skin color or race. Certainly this seems to be Zimmer’s understanding in making his observations quoted above, and it allows us to circle back and more fully answer the question we started with: what’s behind Democrats’ reluctance to fight back against Republican white nationalist authoritarianism with the ferocity and single-mindedness needed to win this fight, even when a clear majority of Americans are on their side and not doing so threatens the very survival of both democracy and the Democratic Party?

I think Zimmer’s discussion of what amount to white supremacist blind spots among Democratic leaders does much to explain their maddening reluctance or inability to take the fight to the GOP. At a basic level, Democratic leaders don’t want to admit the centrality of racism to our current politics, and the necessity of aiming for the destruction of white supremacism, because they literally can’t imagine a world without it. Too many have internalized its benefits and feel immune to its worst consequences. It’s simply beyond conception that it might be eliminated or brought completely to heel; their imaginations simply cannot make that leap.

But I think we can go further, and say that not only has this blinded them to the nature of their Republican opposition, this has equally blinded them to the nature of the the American people they purport to serve — not just to the racism of so many white Republicans who will never be wooed into the Democratic fold by kitchen table appeals, but to the burning desire in millions of Americans to do all that’s possible to destroy, degrade, and nullify white supremacism as a force in this country. Instead, for too many Democratic leaders, elevating the pernicious role of white supremacism in public consciousness must only hurt the Democratic Party by forcing white Americans to choose race over principle, which they fear will push millions of white Democratic voters into the GOP camp, or at best, into non-voting neutrality. The Democratic Party is gripped by a primordial, even unconscious fear that the GOP will successfully label the Democrats as the non-white people’s party, and in this way administer a sort of coup de grace to the party’s prospects forevermore. This feeds their reluctance to make the obvious case that the inverse is true, and perniciously so — that the GOP has become not only the white people’s party, it has in fact become the party of white supremacism and its accompanying drive to authoritarian power against the American majority.

In turn, the Democrats’ inability to fully reckon with the white supremacist mindset that is rending our politics and leading the GOP into violent authoritarianism is preventing them from fully engaging against either authoritarianism or its racist roots.  Democratic leaders place high importance on a conciliatory, bipartisan approach to politics, when what our country truly needs is a full disclosure and exploration of its actual conflicts and irreconcilable divisions. There cannot ever be peace or compromise with the forces of white supremacism, because white supremacism is not compatible with a full, multi-racial democracy. Yet Democrats leaders continue to behave as if this were not so, wish to deny the logic of the moment, leading to all manner of bizarre behavior like ducking out of fights about banning books and accurate teaching about the history of racism in America. In doing so — by failing to rally the majority that is already on their side, and by demoralizing their base by acting as if basic ideals aren’t worth fighting for, they actually make it more likely that they will lose future elections.

GOP War on Education Aims to Turn Classrooms Into Incubators of White Supremacism

No matter how much Republicans talk about critical race theory and being “anti-woke,” nothing should blind us to the fundamentally white supremacist intent of their ongoing efforts to restrict public school education on matters of racial inequality and exploitation. The efforts by Florida state Republicans to pervert education in his state are a standout example, with The Washington Post reporting that a state Senate bill:

sets new standards for school curriculum, requiring districts to teach “the history and content” of the Declaration of Independence and proper forms of patriotism. Teachers and lesson plans may not imply that any “individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

“An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” the legislation states.

HB7 is even more expansive, giving parents and state regulators considerable authority to ban books or teachings that cause discomfort, including carefully reviewing lessons about “the Civil War, the expansion of the United States … the world wars, and the civil rights movement.”

A separate bill in the Senate, SB1300, would also appoint a state-trained reviewer in each school district to look over curriculums and textbooks, and establish procedures for any parents or resident to file objections to material they find offensive. 

The Florida shenanigans illuminate a central point about the GOP’s war on history teaching — it’s very much not simply about promoting a distorted version of the past, but rather about the power of white Americans over non-whites in the present. It’s no exaggeration to say that conservatives and the Republican Party want to ensure that public schools act as incubators for white supremacism, which necessarily involves minimizing any teaching of racism in America’s past and present, so that a social and power hierarchy in which whites are on top is rendered both invisible and unchanging. The centrality of protecting (white) children from “discomfort” gives the game away, because the idea that white kids might feel guilty about slavery and racism is only a concern if white kids identify with racist Americans in the past. But why would white kids feel truly guilty if they aren’t racist? And if they do have racist attitudes, isn’t the purpose of a good civic education to challenge such feelings? The tacit assumption that they are as prejudiced as their parents betrays the backwards mentality of the GOP. Ultimately, conservative parents and politicians aren’t worried that white kids will feel guilty; they’re worried that white kids will feel anger — at them and their inexcusable racism.

But still more striking is what the “discomfort” rhetoric seeks to hide. Rather than white kids being made to feel guilty about racism, the far likelier — and powerful — effect of learning about racism is sympathy for racism’s victims. Even more powerfully, such sympathy might naturally lead to identification with people of other races — a potential blurring of the lines between white children and minority children that is key to the racist backlash against public education. Of course, such identification has the virtue of being rooted in the reality of our common humanity and our highest ideals as a people, while attempts to derail and subvert such basic human connection is at the heart of the white supremacist project.

Given the tremendous stakes, it’s incredible to me that the Democratic Party has not already organized a full-scale pushback against this movement to indoctrinate white school kids into white supremacism while inculcating non-white kids in a web of disinformation and propaganda. As Ronald Brownstein discusses in a recent essay, these efforts mirror and complement the current GOP onslaught against voting rights for minority Americans. The associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund tells Brownstein that, “This is the next wave of voters, so the indoctrination that we see occurring right now is planting the seeds for the control of that electorate as they become voters. They are trying to manipulate power and exert their influence at both ends of the spectrum by limiting those who can cast ballots now, and by indoctrinating those who can cast ballots later.”

Just as voter suppression tactics aim to relieve brown-skinned Americans of the franchise, propagandistic renderings of American history and reality are aimed at relieving brown-skinned young Americans of any sense that structural racism exists in the country and may be affecting their life prospects. Brownstein notes that, “Though the measures have been promoted mostly as a defensive tool (to prevent white students from feeling guilty), many see in them an equally important offensive goal: discouraging the growing number of nonwhite students, as they reach voting age, from viewing systemic discrimination as a problem that public policy should address.”

For elected Democrats to look at what’s happening in schools across the country, and dismiss it simply as “culture war” distraction that’s not worth engaging in, is to completely misunderstand how these public education conflicts are deeply tied in to struggles over political power. The GOP isn’t expending all this energy for nothing; Republican politicians understand the short- and long-term political benefits of what Democrats might dismiss as a side show. But how we think about our history and what is encouraged or discouraged to be discussed in classrooms inevitably shapes the political context of American life.

Among the various ugly strands involved in this assault on truth and free thought in American schools, the idea that Republicans are seeking to preemptively disempower young Americans of color through the teaching of white supremacist-inflected history is particularly abhorrent. Not only should this be opposed on purely moral grounds, it also strikes me as political dynamite to use against the racist GOP. No American parent whose child is on the receiving end of this propaganda effort will be happy to learn that one of America’s political parties is committed to ensuring that their children grow up disempowered and primed to be exploited by a white supremacist minority. This is enraging stuff, and any Democrats’ failure to speak to it and counter it is a profound betrayal of their constituents.

The current GOP effort is an affront not only to minority children, though, but to white children as well, who not only are being inculcated in the tenets of white supremacy, but implicitly being sold on the lie that their lives will be prosperous only so long as they remain atop the political heap. It is an effort to poison their minds and corrupt their souls, but also to make them pliant future victims of the GOP’s plutocratic economic policies. In fact, the Democrats can easily make the opposite case as the GOP is — that vast numbers of white Americans will continue to live in poverty or straitened circumstances because the GOP has convinced them it’s better to feel superior to African-Americans and other minorities than to actually have better life prospects, like affordable college education, free health care, or a minimum wage that allows for a life of dignity. By advocating propaganda in place of history, the Republican Party aims to hinder young Americans’ ability to interrogate the white supremacism that is central to the GOP’s electoral strategy.

Likewise, Democrats can’t simply stand by and let the GOP wreak havoc on the education not just on the children of their constituents, but on the education of likely future Democratic voters. Simply put, Democrats need to appeal to and defend this rising multi-racial majority, both as a matter of morality and of self-interest.  For any Democrat to assume that changing demographics will automatically translate into an imminent Democratic majority ignores not just GOP efforts to engineer white minority rule in perpetuity, but the fact that there isn’t some magical reason that minority Americans tend to skew Democratic. Rather, it’s for the substantive reason that Democrats have, far more than the GOP has ever done, advocated for the equality of all Americans regardless of race or ethnicity (not to mention gender and sexual identity). To the degree that Democrats do not double down on this record, they risk (rightly) losing the loyalty of  millions of current and potential voters. 

At the same time, the potency of the GOP’s foul narrative that any gain by brown-skinned Americans necessarily means a loss for white Americans needs to be countered and defused. In this age of accelerating voter suppression and unhindered gerrymandering, the Democrats need a strategy to win over enough white voters so that the Republican project of minority rule can no longer sustain itself. Right now, the GOP is reinforcing its white supremacist narrative by pretending that U.S. history, if taught accurately, constitutes anti-white propaganda. Engaging in this fight over history education would give Democrats a prime opportunity to articulate a countervailing and unifying vision for America, based on our actual history, that sees recognition and confrontation of past — and present — racism as key to transcending it for a nation that works better for everyone, regardless of the color of their skin. The way forward involves giving every American child the tools to transcend the sins of their fathers and mothers, not doom them to repeat those sins or be their future victims.

Republicans clearly see the benefits of riling up their base with lies rooted in the idea that the “wrong” sort of history aims to denigrate white people and make white kids feel guilty about being white, and that they’re defending white Americans from the treasonous libel of anti-American liberals. But what I’m arguing for shouldn’t be confused with “fight fire with fire” tactics — though that’s admittedly part of it. This is one front in a larger fight about whether the United States will become a true multi-racial democracy, or whether it will be increasingly strangled by the minority rule of conservative whites. For the Democrats to break the back of GOP legitimacy, they will need to articulate a unifying vision for the country that captures the imagination and allays the fears of both non-white and white Americans. They must aim big, at no less than destroying the power of white supremacism in this country.

They have material reality on their side already — our current situation of extreme inequality, with its deep roots in racism, is holding us back collectively, save for the wealthiest among us. But beyond this, they also have morality and right on their side. While white supremacism remains deeply entrenched in the U.S., the primary importance the Republicans are according to “culture war” issues aimed at invigorating white resentment and white rage should remind us that even the Republicans see these advantages as impermanent and in constant need of reinforcement. And why wouldn’t this be the case? Allying yourself with a cause that brought the country such calamities as slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow carries obviously toxic, self-defeating downsides for anyone not fully bought-in to its retrograde ideas. This isn’t just a vague ideology, like conservatism. It’s an ideology that’s indefensibly evil. We know this not only from its past and current effects, which have resulted in mass murder and exploitation over the course of centuries, but because it goes against basic notions ideas of our shared, common humanity. Against the cynicism and cruelty of the GOP vision, Democrats need to keep the faith that our common humanity will serve as a powerful force in binding us back together, however slow and difficult that effort may be.

Another Week, Another Insurrection

A week doesn’t seem to go by without the GOP providing fresh evidence that it has transformed into the party of insurrection.  Witness the Republican National Committee issuing a condemnation of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger asserting that, via their participation in the House January 6 commission, they are aiding Democrats in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”  In other words, the Republican Party has now asserted that the attack on the Capitol was “legitimate political discourse.”  Not only is this retroactive support of an insurrection against the United States, it defines violence as a legitimate element of politics going forward.

Violence, though, is the enemy of democracy, the attempt to substitute force for the casting of votes and peaceful adherence to election results that are the very heart of democratic politics.  Declaring the violence is a proper way to conduct politics is simply another way of declaring war on democracy.  This is insurrectionary behavior, not an intemperate statement.  It gives aid and comfort to those who participated in the January 6 attack, but also looks ahead to the future, informing Republican voters and others on the right that the party will have their back if they participate in future violence against the republic.  It is also of a piece with Donald Trump’s recent calls for Republican rank-and-file to engage in street actions if state prosecutors begin charging him for his many crimes.  The rule of law is to be opposed with the law of the jungle.

So we need to be using the terms “insurrection” and “insurrectionary” when talking about the Republican Party — not only for the sake of accuracy, but because they capture and communicate the urgency of our American political crisis.  They let us better comprehend the ways that the GOP is in rebellion against both the democratic rules of American politics and the ideal of a free and equal society, attempting to overturn them with a mix of violence, subversion of elections, and attacks on civic harmony.  They break through the illusion that there is anything ordinary about the present political stakes, or that politics is confined simply to the action in Congress and statehouses.

For instance, this rebellion certainly encompasses the GOP’s unending war on the war on covid, in which anti-vaxx and anti-mask animus ensure that the U.S. suffers mass death, social chaos, and economic destruction in the name of denying Democrats victories in the 2022 and 2024 elections.  It also includes the support among elected officials for truck protests akin to those afflicting Canada; many in the GOP are quite comfortable with fomenting economic mayhem through such protests, so long as it gives them a leg up in the November elections.  It also arguably includes the widespread right-wing effort, to which many GOP politicians have happily subscribed, to subvert public education so that the classroom becomes an incubator of white supremacism and disempowerment for minority students.

We are experiencing a broad right-wing, white supremacist uprising against American democracy and society that aims to transform it into something authoritarian, morally repugnant, and, crucially, politically illegitimate.  The Republican Party is the primary agent of this reactionary movement.  Any politics that seeks to defeat it needs to broadcast and confront the GOP’s insurrectionary nature.

Let the Little Ray of Sunshine In

I’ve been arguing for some time now that there’s no way out our political crisis until the Democrats fully acknowledge and confront the authoritarian, white supremacist reality of the Republican Party.  For democracy to survive, Democrats need to defend it. But dishearteningly, through a combination of structural disadvantage, internal division, and poor leadership, the Democratic Party has so far failed to meet the moment. Incredibly, the party seems reluctant to make the GOP pay a political price for literally becoming a party of authoritarian insurrection, or to even know how to do so.

E.J. Dionne has a column out that manages to capture both the general notion of what the Democrats need to do, and the party’s bizarre confusion about how to properly engage the challenge before them. Not only is the GOP tied into Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen presidential election, Dionne correctly points out, the party is now engaged in doing what it can to undermine and steal the 2022 and 2024 elections. Meanwhile, it benefits from some voters’ excitement about Trumpism, even as it doesn’t suffer any previous backlash from Democratic voters, who aren’t being made aware by their elected officials as to the continuing threat of Trumpist authoritarianism. Asks Dionne, “So why are Democrats not shouting from the rooftops about the need to protect democracy?”

(I should pause here and say that, in a bleak media and political landscape, the fact that an opinion writer as essentially mainstream as E.J. Dionne is talking about his bewilderment at the Democrats’ fumbling of such an important and obvious thing as protecting democracy feels like a ray of hope. Surely, at some point, if enough people yell loud enough about the problem, the party leadership will be moved to act, at least so as not to appear too far outside mainstream consensus, right? Right. Like I said, it’s a ray of hope, not a full blast of sunshine, but we will take hope where we can.)

At any rate, Dionne offers a partial answer to his question about what’s keeping the Democrats so tongue-tied: too much adherence to the advice of political consultants who don’t see defense of democracy as a winning issue, particularly in comparison to everyday concerns like inflation and the state of the economy. Dionne rightly points out the circular logic at play, since not talking about issues is often a guaranty that voters will assume they’re not important.

But whatever role the consultant class might play in warping Democratic politicians’ strategies, the basic idea that Democrats are worried about prioritizing the fight for democracy because it doesn’t poll well is persuasive. And this, I would submit, is absolutely bonkers. There are limitless, effective ways in which the party can link everyday concerns with the democracy fight (hell, even the consultants Dionne interviews make some limp suggestions in this direction). The one area where I have a little sympathy with the party leadership right now is over worries that “democracy in crisis” might sound abstract next to the idea of food prices shooting up — but my sympathy ends when I start to think about how easy it is to make the GOP’s war on democracy as concrete as inflation’s war on Americans’ bank accounts.

On the one hand, after the shit show of the Trump presidency, Democrats should be able to easily make the case about what actually happens when the GOP holds power: uncontrolled pandemics, looting of the treasury, the elevation of white supremacism, and violent insurrection, coupled with inaction on any pressing issue facing the country save tax cuts for the richest among us. And on the positive side of the ledger, Democrats can point to the things that they can and will do if they hold power: expanded health care, stronger government support for unions, a higher minimum wage, more money for public schools, robust support for a green energy transition, and equal protection under the law regardless of your race, gender, or sexual orientation.

All of these ills, and all of these goods, are tied to whether or not the GOP overturns American democracy and institutes some variant of one-party rule in this country. Any concern that defending democracy is too abstract for voters to comprehend is a failure of imagination by politicians, not voters. At the end of the day, a Democratic message to voters that unites the war for democracy with the fight for everyday justice and prosperity might boil down to this: “Whatever you want in life, in your job, for your family, will simply be meaningless if your vote no longer counts, as the Republican Party is aiming for. Vote for Democrats, and not only will we make sure that your vote counts, we will fight like hell to make sure your civil rights are protected, the economy prospers for everyone, your children get a world-class education, the planet lives, and fascism dies.”

Given what I believe is the obviousness of the approach the Democrats should be taking, the question I find myself mulling more and more is the same one Dionne raises — why aren’t Democrats shouting from the rooftops about the threat to democracy, when such a clear case can be made in conjunction with concrete, kitchen table issues? I suspect that part of the Democrats’ failure to fully engage in the fight for democracy, and against GOP authoritarianism, can be tied to the party’s internal divisions over how much it should fight for the social and economic goods that are the concrete manifestations of democracy. One shocking but clarifying aspect of the apparently defunct Build Back Better Act is how non-radical its elements were: from child care and free community college to green energy spending, its initial, grandest form contained a wide range of programs that this country should already have had long ago. Prioritizing defense of democracy would also logically mean prioritizing delivery of the material and social goods that move democracy from theory to practice, that ultimately make democracy worth fighting for: the ability to make our votes count and our collective voice heard, not simply because it is morally right, but because it is the way we advance our collective interests.  

My hunch is that another substantial reason for Democrats’ torpor is the party’s hesitation in confronting the white supremacism that’s core to the GOP’s turn to authoritarianism —not because the party leadership isn’t opposed to racism, but due to a primal fear of alienating white voters by making the stakes of the conflict so explicit. This caution runs the risk of being self-defeating, and of giving aid and comfort to the forces of white supremacist reaction. If the GOP can continue to more and more explicitly identify itself as the party of white supremacism, and to enact laws that give white supremacism the authority of state power, while the Democrats don’t describe this reality or move unambiguously to oppose it, this can only lead to demoralization among its multi-ethnic base and delegitimization of the party leadership.

What’s even crazier is that not only do the Democrats face a GOP opposition that sees ending competitive democracy as the road to power, the Republican Party’s machinations have crossed over into a sort of closeted insurrectionism. With retroactive approval of the January 6 coup attempt granted by most Republican congresspeople and senators, the party standing back and standing by as the former president incites mob violence against prosecutors who have him in their crosshairs, and multiple GOP state legislatures looking at ways to throw out presidential election results the next time around, the Republican Party has basically decided that insurrection is politics by other means, and that it feels pretty darned good. To see various Democratic Party politicians respond by insisting that Democratic voters just have to try harder to vote, by continuously imputing bipartisan openness to opponents who long for their destruction, and by essentially lying to their base about the threat the country faces, you would be in good company if it appeared to you that many Democratic leaders appear to have no clue as to the depth of the crisis we are in. So plain old denial may well be playing a part in the Democrats’ deer-in-the-headlights act. 

Once again, it’s clear that our political crisis has two complementary halves: a GOP gone feral with authoritarian and white supremacist beliefs, and a Democratic Party not fully committed to opposing this existential threat to our democracy and to our basic ability to live our lives as we see fit.  This is not to say there is any equivalence between the two, only that you could make a pretty good case that a tougher and more clear-eyed Democratic Party leadership would allow no political quarter to an opposition bent on the destruction of American democracy and the conversion of much of the Democratic base to unchallengeable second-class citizenship.  Something has got to give here; let us hope it involves a new wave of Democratic leaders fighting back, and not the GOP steamrolling over the majority in the coming years.

GOP Sabotage in Pandemic Fight Is Fair Game for Democratic Pushback

Adam Johnson has written a great elucidation of how, through the course of the pandemic, commentators and politicians have anthropomorphized the coronavirus into a sentient, malevolent entity akin to a terrorist group or crazy regime.  This rhetorical gambit, he argues, has powered all sorts of misguided and perniciously bad takes on public health strategies.  Johnson notes that, “It’s not just a quirky cultural framework that’s interesting to note in its own right, but part of a larger epistemological regime in American political discourse: So much of how we speak about the world is based on tough-guy bullshit, solipsism, martial posturing, hyper-individualism, and triggering the libs.”

Kudos to Johnson for drawing our attention to this glitch in the discourse, and how it enables all manner of nonsense — such as Republican politicians arguing that we shouldn’t live in fear of the virus, or rants about how people are “done” with the virus, as if we were in an abusive relationship that it’s in our power to break off (news flash: you can’t dump a pandemic).

But where Johnson really gets cooking with gas is in connecting this anthropomorphization of covid with a right-wing effort to blame the suffering that covid has wrought on liberals who purportedly want public health measures against the pandemic.  Of columnist Bari Weiss’ recent appearance on Bill Maher’s Real Time show, in which she proclaimed herself to be “done” with the virus, he writes that: 

What’s notable about this rant, aside from the fact that it’s presented as edgy or subversive truth-telling when it’s basically bipartisan conventional wisdom at this point (sans, perhaps, mask mandates), is that what she’s spewing is 100 percent, uncut demagoguery. She’s taking genuine and understandable frustrations and re-positioning the cause of the audience’s suffering as not the virus itself, but liberal scolds lobbying for modest mitigation efforts. This re-positioning gets a major applause from Maher's audience, and of course it does: It deliberately appeals to our reptilian brain—the part that’s mad, mad at all the sacrifice and suffering, mad at all the missed birthdays, funerals, and trauma we’ve all suffered over the past two years—and gives it a human face. It’s not Covid, it’s those goddamn Covid-weary liberals who want to shut everything down.

A parallel phenomenon plays out when GOP politicians talk about not living in fear of the virus: by behaving as if the virus is a conscious enemy that’s trying to psych us out, the GOP can then point to progressives as the real enemies, for supporting measures that would purportedly have us upend our lives out of fear of this actively malevolent force.  The GOP thus makes the terms of debate such that “the force we’re standing up against is not the virus, but oppressive and overly paranoid protection measures,” which are presented not just as a needless, harmful surrender to the virus, but even more politically potent, to crazy liberals who favor such measures for their own sinister ends. As Johnson summarizes: “Take vague anger over the disruption to normal life, and don’t blame a non-sentient, non-intelligent, agency-free virus, but those calling for public health interventions to delay or reduce its spread.”

Two things stand out to me in Johnson’s observations.  First, he’s identified something that arguably constitutes a major engine of right-wing resistance to common-sense anti-covid measures — the way that right-wing politicians and opinion shapers work to channel very justifiable anger at the ravages of covid into anger at their political enemies for the alleged crime of being the ones who are actually causing the suffering.  Second, he gets at something that Democrats and progressives have been slow to grasp: the sheer amount of existing anger that the right is thus able to tap, and, more specifically, the underlying irrationality of these emotions, which constitute a vast reservoir of resentment that the Democrats ignore at their peril.

Once again, I’m reminded of the disparity in political approaches between our two major political parties.  Not just on the pandemic, but on issues of crime, immigration, and, most prominently, race, the GOP as a party appears fully conscious of, well, the unconscious and emotional motivations of Americans — that appeals emotion and irrationality can rouse and motivate voters.  In contrast, the Democrats still seem largely wedded to a rational, policy and fact-based approach of appealing to voters’ rational and material interests.  What’s particularly enlightening about Johnson’s essay, and the way that covid has ripped not just through our population but through our politics, is that this pandemic has helped revealed the fatal limits to the Democrats’ overly rationalist approach.

The truth is, from the very start, the U.S. approach to this pandemic was deliberately politicized and thus undercut by a Republican White House eager not to harm the economy in the run-up to the 2020 election.  Not only did Donald Trump insist that the coronavirus was not a threat to the United States, his instinct for self-preservation hindered the necessary governmental and societal mobilization that could have bought us precious time in the pandemic’s early days.  Just as perniciously, the GOP’s need to cover for Trump’s mistakes created a massive incentive for the party to double down on Trump’s efforts to downplay the seriousness of the virus.  Then, once Joe Biden became president, the GOP’s focus went full bore on undermining measures to fight the virus, in the hopes that the economic harm and societal damage would increase their chances of success in the 2022 midterms and beyond.  As Perry Bacon Jr. summarizes in a recent column, “While the president was running a massive campaign to get Americans vaccinated, GOP officials and conservative media effectively ran an anti-vaccine countercampaign, promoting doubts or playing down the importance of inoculations. Mask-wearing, vaccines and every other part of Biden’s covid strategies have been broadly undermined by Republicans, including GOP-appointed judges."  Most catastrophic has been the combination of outright and tacit support for the anti-vaccination movement, which has helped ensure that the U.S. has seen death rates and infections that surpass many of its peers. 

In the face of this sabotage, and the resulting literal death count, the Biden administration’s continued insistence on treating the fight against the pandemic as something that must rise above politics must be deemed a failure.  What Johnson’s piece helped illuminate for me is the sense that Democrats are courting disaster if they fail to confront a GOP strategy that redirects Americans’ anger and fear towards the virus and necessary mitigation measures — irrationally conflated, as Johnson describes — onto Democrats.  Key to the party protecting itself is making sure that all that rancor, resentment, and rage roiling in American hearts and minds over the pandemic are properly directed at a Republican Party that has made itself an accomplice to covid’s continued prevalence and deadliness across the land.

While it’s understandable that the Biden administration would want to keep the vaccination effort in particular as free of politics as possible, so as to increase the chances of persuading reluctant Americans — particularly on the right — to get vaccinated, plateauing vaccination rates demonstrate the limits to the current approach.  Beyond this, the unacceptably high infection and death rates we’ve been seeing are signs of a strategy gone terribly wrong.  In failing to counter the GOP’s one-sided politicization of the covid fight, President Biden and the Democratic Party more broadly are helping bring about a situation in which the GOP’s deliberate use of the pandemic as a weapon to undercut the fortunes of its political opposition are inflicting deadly, serious harm on the nation.  In failing to defend the country against such sabotage, the Democrats are failing their basic purpose as a political party — to serve the public interest — and inexplicably allowing a full-on assault against their own political fortunes to proceed unchallenged.

This is not to say that the Biden Administration hasn’t made mistakes outside of failing to confront the GOP over pandemic sabotage, or that it bears no responsibility for the continued ravages of the coronavirus.  Among other things, it’s now clear that Joe Biden’s declaration of victory over the coronavirus back in the early summer of 2021 was both premature and counter-productive, and that the administration displayed stunning flat-footedness in anticipating the dangers of both the delta and omicron variants.  The lack of better guidance around what type of masks to wear, and the extremely belated provision of very limited numbers of N95s to Americans free of charge, only appear more mind-boggling as time goes on.

Yet the Biden administration’s unforced errors and failures have occurred under a larger good-faith, science-based effort to bring the pandemic to an end — an effort opposed at multiple points, over the course of the last year, by much of the Republican Party.  At long last, then, the Democrats need to take all the justified anger that people are feeling about the pandemic still upending lives, and direct it squarely at those most responsible for prolonging the pandemic: a GOP that dementedly behaves as if the virus is a conscious, sentient enemy, and that urges American to “defy” both the virus and opposes commonsense measures like vaccination and mandatory masking.  Not only is this the right thing to do, it’s the politically smart move — not just for the sake of countering GOP efforts to place the blame on Democrats, but because majority opinion remains strongly in favor of the effective, science-based approaches that Democrats generally advocate.  On this front, it’s telling that the GOP and right-wing commentators revert again and again to the idea that Democrats are pushing “lockdowns” and other such onerous restrictions, when the truth is that the current mitigation measures are limited to mask-wearing requirements in public places and a continued push for vaccination.  In many ways, the GOP is pushing back against alleged Democratic policies that don’t actually exist.  The opportunity exists to paint the GOP as a party of extremism, anti-science, and indifference to mass suffering.

On the specific issue of prioritizing vaccinations, the Dems have a moral as well as political obligation to rethink their approach.  As Jonathan Chait writes, the anti-vaxx wing of the Republican Party has now grown so large that it’s essentially an unshakeable element of the GOP coalition; even Republican politicians who officially support vaccination provide space for anti-vaxx disinformation and activists to spread their poison.  Opposition to vaccines on made-up grounds is a public health threat in its own right, and Democrats must speak and act based on this fact: first and foremost, for calling out Republican politicians who engage in anti-scientific and anti-public health rhetoric, and who promote such policies.  Republican politicians are in a vulnerable position, in that what’s popular or acceptable within their own coalition is rightly seen as simply crazy by the rest of the country.  Democrats need to exploit this element of Republican extremism, and implicate the larger GOP in the insanity of its anti-vaxx elements.  

Among other things, no Democrat talking about vaccination efforts should ever fail to remind listeners of the hideous differential between Democratic- and Republican-leaning counties in covid deaths.  It should be a basic talking point that the GOP is pursuing policies and encouraging ideas that are killing its own voters.  The purpose of this, apart from communicating the truth, is to pry apart GOP voters from the politicians who have betrayed them.  Equally importantly, it would serve as a wake-up call to disaffected Democrats unnerved by high inflation and perceptions that Joe Biden hasn’t been able to deliver on his most ambitious campaign promises: if the GOP returns to power, the country risks seeing the death rates of red counties sweeping the whole nation.

One might argue that there’s no reason for a shift in Democratic strategy, given that the omicron wave is peaking and the possibility that we may be through the worst of the pandemic.  But this is not just a fight over the present state of things: it’s both a fight over the past, and over how we set ourselves up for the future.  Even if the omicron variant ends up being the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, we can’t allow the GOP to re-write history in a way that assigns blame for these horrific death tolls on the Democrats.  Likewise, given the very real possibility of an equally bad or even worse variant in the future, Democrats have every incentive to defend public health policy that emphasizes the importance of measures like vaccination and masking as basic tools for fighting this and similar pandemics.  Ultimately, this goes far beyond pandemic preparation, to a very real fight over what sort of country we want to be: one in which everyone does their part to advance the public good, or one in which each person is valorized for acting in the most selfish ways possible, whether it’s refusing life-saving vaccines or harassing public health officials for doing their jobs. Democrats need to come to grips with the fact that this is not just one more random “culture war” fight, but a struggle essential to the continued health and prosperity of the country far into the future.