Opening Round

The immensity of America’s democracy crisis means that no single politician or single event will be sufficient to turn back the Republicans’ authoritarian project and restore our halting national path to greater democracy, equality, and freedom. It will be easy for the GOP and cynics alike to advertise the alleged failures of the January 6 committee investigation, as indeed has been the case even before its public hearings began this week. But I’ve been trying to make the case over the last year that a proper focus and understanding of January 6 is something of a skeleton key for communicating to the American public the broader dangers of our political moment, and for mounting an adequate defense. In itself, January 6 constituted a singular domestic attack on American democracy, the likes of which none of us have experienced in our lifetimes; symbolically, it allows us to more fully comprehend the anti-democratic animus and violent mindset that has taken possession of the Republican Party.  

And so I’ve awaited the public hearings with a mix of great anticipation and mounting dread. While they would never be enough in themselves to arrest the momentum of Republican authoritarianism, a proper understanding of January 6 in the public mind is essential to giving us a fighting chance to defend and restore American democracy, and the hearings are probably our last, best chance to do so.

There’s been a lot of coverage of what the committee members are actually aiming to accomplish, and from the opening session on Thursday, we’ve got at least part of an answer. The committee clearly has Donald Trump in its sights as the person who bears ultimate responsibility for both the attack on the Capitol and the larger conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. To its credit, they have also already made clear that Trump was assisted in his efforts by members of his own party, as well as by right-wing paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This wide-lens approach, in addition to capturing the full reality of the seditious scheme launched following Trump’s election loss, also properly conveys to the public the multi-pronged nature of the threat. It wasn’t just an onslaught of bloodlusting freaks garbed in MAGA caps and body armor who overran the Capitol police, but an attempted subversion of the law of the land by respectable men dressed in suits and ties. This is crucial to a point I’ve also been discussing recently — that we need to understand insurrection not just as acts of violence, but any general attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.

After the first day of hearings, it’s become clearer to me that the committee has its hands full with effectively illuminating and communicating the events leading up to January 6, and with elucidating Donald Trump’s illicit attempts to remain in power after losing the election. The broader, necessary project of linking Trump’s plot with the GOP’s continuation of his insurrection will fall to the broader Democratic Party, the media, and the public in the days ahead.  What we can hope for, though, is that the committee provides powerful tools for making this larger case; what we’ve seen so far offers hope that they are in the process of doing so.

First, the committee’s clear demonstration that the effort to overturn the election involved far more than the storming of the Capitol is extremely important, both in terms of understanding Donald Trump’s treasonous behavior and for making the broader case that the Republican Party has now taken up his insurrectionary torch. An effort to overthrow a government doesn’t just have to involve violence, but can encompass a wide range of abuses of power involving the legal system, propaganda, and executive authority — and from what we’ve seen so far, the committee is well aware that this basic fact absolutely needs to be communicated to the public. The horrifying visuals of right-wing mobs overrunning the Capitol have much more visceral punch than the more abstract, behind-the-scenes and beyond-the-camera efforts to subvert the election, making it more difficult to understand the scope of the plot; but by sharing video of interviews with Trump administration officials and investigators, the committee has been working to elevate these less visually impactful elements to the same gut-punch level.

I think the committee also understands that one of its goals must be to communicate the essentially shocking nature of what the nation experienced — a goal more necessary than ever in light of the GOP’s year-and-a-half-long effort to whitewash and dismiss the Trumpist putsch. In this vein, it is all to the good that we heard Representative Benny Thompson give the events their proper name: “Any legal jargon you hear about seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, all boils down to this: January 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup.” Accurately referring to Trump’s efforts as an “attempted coup” is essential to conveying the true horror and threat of January 6; it is also necessary for conveying the true horror and threat of the GOP’s ongoing efforts to take up the insurrectionary torch from Donald Trump, as the party works to suppress votes, subvert election mechanisms, and gain power against the will of the American majority in future elections.

Beyond the use of accurate descriptive language, the committee is also demonstrating the shocking nature of the insurrection by revisiting, with new perspectives and details, the sheer violence of the Capitol assault. For instance, Representative Liz Cheney left little doubt that Donald Trump encouraged the assassination of Mike Pence that day, as he incited the crowd with tweets to target the vice president, and expressed his sentiment to witnesses that day that the mob was right in trying to hang him. The idea that a president would encourage the murder of his second-in-command is so far beyond the pale that we can be said to almost lack words to describe the horror of it. But most of us, I think, viscerally register the fundamental evil involved, and such feelings of dread and disgust will be key to rallying the public against Trump’s current accomplices and inheritors.

The committee has also made clear that it will not shy away from depicting the actual violence of that day, while also demonstrating that the crowd was beating police officers under the clear and direct inspiration of America’s chief executive; Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards’ statement that she was slipping in the blood of fellow wounded officers as they fought to keep the insurrectionists from breaching the Capitol is phrasing as powerful as a thousand images. Along these lines, it’s also to the good that the committee appears committed to highlighting the involvement of paramilitary gangs like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and their links to Trump’s larger scheme. The existence of such groups, their role in physically attempting to overthrow the US government, and the complicity of members of the GOP in their activities together constitute an enraging stick of political dynamite that, if properly deployed, should blow up the GOP’s continued existence as a viable national political party.

We are also seeing strong indications that the committee will lay out a case that the actions of President Trump and his accomplices broke the law. As Liz Cheney put it, “What President Trump demanded Mike Pence do wasn't just wrong -- it was illegal and unconstitutional.”  I think this is an obvious but until now underplayed aspect of the public case that the committee, and Democrats, can make. The public will respond more strongly to the idea that Trump actually broke laws than the more diffuse notion that he broke political norms or acted immorally, and that this investigation is not reducible to a political power play by Democrats, but rather a way to uphold the rule of law to which all Americans should be subject.  

Finally — and this again might seem like an obvious point — the committee appears to be making the case that no matter the punishment the justice system ultimately does or does not mete out to Trump, the American people must never allow him back into power. Even if the Justice Department refuses to indict him, the committee seems to be aiming at destroying Trump’s appeal to a maximal extent, exposing him as a liar, an insurrectionist, and a psychopath. On January 6, Donald Trump renounced his role as commander in chief, and assumed a new position as the chieftain of an insurrectionary army. This fact alone should exile him from American politics for all time.

It’s essential, though, that the Democrats take up a larger goal at the point where the committee’s responsibilities and realistic goals end: if not during the hearings, then in their aftermath, Democrats absolutely must mount a parallel effort to show that the GOP has embraced the insurrectionary goals of the Trumpian campaign that led to January 6. As important as it is to have a full accounting of Trump’s insurrection for its own sake, it’s even more important that the United States defend itself against the ongoing Republican insurrection that has taken up Trump’s cause, and ensure its failure. They can start with the point that, in defending Trump from the evidence of the committee, the party has retroactively made itself into a supporter of the insurrection. As Josh Marshall recently observed, “for House Republicans, a bipartisan investigation into a violent effort to overthrow the government of the United States is a "partisan witch-hunt." If you're seeking to protect and exonerate the insurrection you are supporting it. The GOP is pro-insurrection.”

The January 6 hearings provide an ideal opening for the Democrats to end once and for all their fruitless calls for bipartisanship in opposing the authoritarianism and white supremacism that are driving the GOP to greater and greater extremism. The party’s mass refusal to participate in the committee — save for exiles like Liz Cheney — is as glaring an example as you can get that the GOP simply doesn’t believe that Trump’s insurrection was in any way wrong; as Marshall pointed out above, there is no meaningful distinction between providing cover for an insurrection and supporting it. In this respect, the Democrats should use the hearings and whatever impression they make on public opinion to hammer home the GOP’s alignment with the events of that day — both the plot to overthrow democracy, and the willingness to employ violence to do so. For the plot to overthrow democracy, the Democrats have ample current evidence, from GOP voter suppression aimed at rigging the November election results to open plotting to subvert the 2024 election by rejecting the popular vote in key swing states. Demonstrating the continuities between the events culminating in January 6, and the GOP’s ongoing anti-democratic campaign, may be the single greatest weapon in the Democrats’ toolkit for defending the United States. Likewise, the overtly violent forces that Trump recruited to his cause on January 6 continue to threaten Americans’ safety; just yesterday, police arrested more then 30 associates of the Patriot Front white nationalist group in close proximity to a gay pride parade in Coeur D’Alene. After a point, continuing to behave as if the current GOP is redeemable is indistinguishable from providing the Republican Party with undeserved, counter-productive cover for its authoritarian assault on America. I don’t see how the Democrats can reconcile the GOP’s full-throated opposition to the January 6 hearings with calls for bipartisan defense of American democracy. Democratic leaders need to fully internalize that we’re past the old world of democratic competition between the two parties, where both respected election results and the rule of law; the Republicans are no longer following the same rules as the rest of us, and for the Democrats to behave otherwise no longer serves the public interest. 

Democratic Leaders Can't Avoid a Reckoning on Abortion Rights

This New York Times guest column caught my attention, both because I’m a long-time admirer of Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog, but more importantly because he defines a concrete, achievable path to defending abortion rights that also recognizes the galvanizing potential of this issue in the midterms. Reviewing recent polling that shows, if anything, increasing public support for abortion rights in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft essentially overturning Roe v. Wade, Marshall praises Democratic plans to make abortion rights a defining issue in November, but notes that the party will fail to motivate the public without offering a concrete plan to actually defend these rights.

Marshall argues that the Democrats need to present the public with a defned path to solidifying abortion rights, writing, “get clear public commitments from every Senate Democrat (and candidate for Senate) not only to vote for the Roe bill in January 2023 but also to change the filibuster rules to ensure that a majority vote would actually pass the bill and send it to the White House for the president’s signature [. . .] And that is the party’s message that makes the 2022 midterms a referendum on Roe: “Give us the House and two more senators, and we will make Roe law in January 2023.” What’s striking about his recommendation is that it calls for the voting public to exert pressure now on their elected representative to pledge abortion action should the Democrats hold the House and increase their Senate majority by the requisite two or three seats (to overcome the intransigence of Senators Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin towards any necessary filibuster reforms). The notion of the public placing pressure on Democratic representatives has been a missing piece from much political opining in the days of the Biden administration. Marshall’s call for it here is, I think, recognition of a broader phenomenon — that the Democratic Party leadership will simply not defend basic rights, and rally the base with sufficient urgency, unless it receives an overwhelming message from the base to do so.

The impending demise of abortion rights may be the ultimate example of this Democratic Party lethargy.  I agree with Marshall that the party owes the American public a plan to defend abortion rights. The bodily autonomy of American women is both a basic tenet of the Democrats and a non-negotiable American right, and for both reasons the Democrats must not only prioritize the issue but actually demonstrate a way to resolve it. If the Democrats won’t make a stand on this issue, what will they make a stand on?

On the abortion issue, as with others, I fear that part of what’s holding Democratic leaders back from making concrete promises is concern over ruffling party unity by forcing a handful of senators and representatives into losing any room to maneuver on abortion rights. Alongside this, it seems plausible that the Democrats are also wary that such a law would be quickly overturned by the Supreme Court (a concern that Marshall rightly dismisses as a self-inflicted party paralysis), which would prompt an immediate reckoning as to whether the Democrats should prioritize Court expansion. 

In other words, the common sense of Marshall’s recommendation helps us understand how eager the Democratic Party leadership is to avoid reckonings and confrontation, both among party members and with the GOP, that they view as dangerous to the party’s prospects. But abortion rights are rights well worth risking a reckoning over; the lack of a necessary fight would be more dangerous than actually doing everything humanly possible to defend these rights, as it would certainly demoralize the rank and file, as well as inevitably lead to inter-party fights the party ostensibly wants to avoid. The future of the Democratic Party lies in the expansion of basic human rights, not in their constriction or evisceration, and anyone in Democratic leadership who does not grasp this should probably not be part of the leadership.

Spiraling Gun Violence Is Inextricable From GOP's Authoritarian Turn

After the one-two punch of gun violence of the past couple weeks — the Buffalo domestic terrorist attack against African-Americans and the Uvalde slaughter of children, these awful events accompanied by a cluster of smaller mass shootings around the nation — we have subsequently experienced a reprise of the political pathologies that have enabled such frequent mass violence in the first place. The GOP closed ranks in defense of unrestricted gun ownership, while tossing out bad faith chaff to distract from the fundamental horror of their absolutist position, with Mitch McConnell repeating his obfuscatory playbook of years past and other elected officials blaming everything but guns for the massacres. Meanwhile, the Democrats have found themselves hamstrung by the lack of a working Senate majority, the absurdity of the filibuster, and a continued refusal to escalate the crisis of gun violence to the top of the national agenda.

In the face of such immobility against continuing terror and bloodshed, there’s been much commentary about the high unlikelihood of progress on gun control in the near-, medium-, and even long-term future. But it would be a mistake to confuse the gridlock on meaningful measures to reduce gun violence with the idea that the overall situation has been static since, say, the massacre at Sandy Hook — that “nothing has changed.”

The fact of the matter is, with gun violence, things have gone from bad to worse. First, it seems undeniable that over the last decade, the Republican Party has grown ever more opposed to any restrictions on gun ownership. As others have pointed out, guns are more intertwined than ever with Republican partisan identity — just look at the “family with guns” photos that increasingly seem to be a requirement for any self-respecting GOP candidate (“the family that shoots together wins elections together”). It should be obvious to any objective observer that guns have continued to proliferate across the land because this is what the GOP believes in: the second amendment means that every American is entitled to as much military-grade weaponry as they can afford.

But the GOP’s increasing radicalism on gun ownership and gun violence isn’t happening in a vacuum, but is deeply tied to the party’s broader turn to authoritarianism and white nationalism. As January 6 and its aftermath have made clear, a significant faction in the Republican Party views violence as a useful and even necessary instrument of the party’s anti-democratic path to power. The idea that every good American needs to be armed and ready to pull the trigger is inseparable from the GOP and far-right’s broad claims that the United States is under assault by a ragtag army of immigrants, Black Lives Matter protestors, LGBTQ activists, feminists, and plain old Democrats who simply hate America out of spite and possible devil worship. The love of guns can’t be separated from fear of, and a wish to dominate, the non-male, non-white America majority.

We are now living in an America that is armed to the teeth in no small part due to the racism, paranoia, and insurrectionary longings of a minority of far-right Americans. Not surprisingly, the official arguments they put forth to defend their absolutist position on gun rights have been shredded by contact with reality, as we’ve effectively run a decades-long experiment in which data comes in the number of lives snuffed short by bullets. Only an ideologue would try to argue that we’re somehow safer with increasing numbers of guns in homes and on the streets. Yet the right views all these deaths of innocent victims, not to mention the vast numbers of suicides enabled by easy access to guns, as so much acceptable collateral damage in the name of sustaining a paranoid belief that white Americans are under assault and must be able to use force to defend themselves.  

In light of a dynamic where more guns are making us less safe, the continued right-wing insistence that still more guns must be the solution feels deeply disingenuous. It seems as likely that they view the ensuing societal fraying due to gun violence as a useful tool in their authoritarian project — mutual distrust and existential fear being fertile soil for strongman politics, as political scientists like Ruth Ben-Ghiat have persuasively argued.

So my (admittedly) counter-intuitive argument is that it should actually be easier than ever for supporters of gun control to make a powerful case that the GOP, for a variety of reasons, is the prime force behind our epidemic of gun violence, and is the singular obstacle to preserving the lives of ourselves and our loved ones. The party’s motivations for supporting unrestricted gun ownership have become more openly noxious and anti-American by the year, wedded as they are to white supremacism and authoritarianism, while the heinous real-world consequences of their gun worship are witnessed daily. At the same time, it should be equally clear that there will be no progress against gun violence without rolling back the broader threat of GOP authoritarianism and the party’s ongoing project to unravel American democracy. It simply makes no sense at this point to treat gun violence as an issue separate from this larger conflict in American politics (which also involves, at a minimum, eliminating the filibuster in order to bring a bit more balance to the structurally undemocratic Senate), even as it is an important and illuminating front in the fight against the right-wing uprising.

Dark Convergence

The horrific slaughter of ten Americans in Buffalo last week is yet another warning, as if we needed one, that violent white supremacism is a growing threat to American lives and safety. But the apparent centrality of the racist “Great Replacement” theory to the shooter’s motivations provides an opportunity — paid for in the blood of innocent victims — for us to understand that these very same white supremacist ideas are in fact behind the broader right-wing wave that brought Donald Trump to power and that is fueling authoritarian GOP policies in state after state. The violence that Buffalo suffered is the sharp end of a continuum of domination, exploitation, and demonization that, if allowed to fully gain power, would transform America into a debased and undemocratic land.

In one of several excellent articles from various writers that explore the links between Great Replacement theory and Republican politics, Amanda Marcotte describes the theory as positing that a “cabal of rich Jewish people [. . .] has conspired to “replace” white Christian Americans with other races and ethnic groups in order to gain political and social control.” And writer Talia Lavin notes that the theory is not limited to the U.S., and constitutes “the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness.”

In her piece at Rolling Stone, Lavin gets right to the heart of the linkages between proponents of the Great Replacement theory and the political aims of the Republican Party and the right-wing movement it represents:

The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican Party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like [alleged Buffalo shooter] Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.

But as Lavin and others have documented, it’s not just that the Great Replacement theory overlaps with the GOP’s white supremacist vision for America. Conservative pundits like Tucker Carlson and GOP politicians like Representative Elise Stefanik (the number three Republican in the House) have embraced what was previously a fringe white nationalist position, and have nestled it into the center of the contemporary conservative movement. The New York Times recently documented the hundreds of times Carlson “amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration”; meanwhile, Stefanik has used Great Replacement messaging in recent fundraising efforts.

But perhaps the single most-damning point in the aftermath of the Buffalo shooting is Adam Serwer’s observation that, “Three years ago, when a white-supremacist fanatic killed dozens of people in El Paso, Texas, the reaction from the right was unreserved condemnation. When another white-supremacist fanatic killed 10 people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, last week, the reaction from some figures on the right was to acknowledge that the guy had a point about this whole “replacement” thing.” In other words, given an opportunity to denounce this sordid theory, many in the GOP have instead chosen to double-down. At a minimum, this provides legitimization of extremist beliefs that slide inexorably into violence; more darkly, this doubling-down suggests that the Republican Party views terroristic violence as an acceptable side effect of the white supremacist garbage it uses to motivate its base.

Particularly striking is how the deranged consequences of Great Replacement theory are indistinguishable from the GOP’s raft of right-wing policies. Historian Kathleen Belew describes how an “obsession with protecting white birthrates” is central to Great Replacement theory, and enumerates the logical consequences of this obsession:

This belief transforms social issues into direct threats: Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population. Abortion is a problem because white babies will be aborted. L.G.B.T.Q. rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the white birthrate. Integration, intermarriage and even the presence of Black people distant from a white community — an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack — are seen as a threat to the white birthrate through the threat of miscegenation. 

Yet on all the policy fronts that Belew notes — immigration, women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights — the Republican Party’s retrograde policy ideas are fully aligned with those of Great Replacement adherents (the links between anti-abortion belief and the need for more white babies is particularly chilling in light of the imminent demise of Roe v. Wade — it is so utterly dystopian that the power of the Supreme Court is being used to advance the goals of a delusional and violent belief system). This goes back to Lavin’s point I noted above — the GOP and Great Replacement adherents share a belief in the non-negotiability of a white nation. From this perspective, Great Replacement theory might be viewed as an evolution of white supremacist ideology when faced with a fear of white majorities disappearing — a hysterical road map for the perpetuation of white supremacism that posits diabolical conspiracies and “white genocide” as the intentional acts of malevolent, all-powerful forces.

What should be clear by this point is that white supremacist and Great Replacement ideology are on a collision course with any meaningful idea of American democracy — one where every citizen is considered equal, regardless of skin color or national origin. As Serwer notes, “The ideology of the Great Replacement is a particular threat to democratic governance because it insists that entire categories of human beings can or should be excluded from democratic rights and protections.” This observation also neatly captures how there’s really no simple distinction between the legislative consequences of the Great Replacement mindset and outright violence in service of its vision. If non-white Americans are part of a sinister plot to replace white Americans, then even second-class citizenship and exploitation are ultimately too good for them. As Serwer chillingly puts it, “Any political cause can theoretically inspire terrorism, but this one is unlike others in that what it demands of its targets is their non-existence.” And so laws that disempower black and brown Americans ensure that both state and vigilante violence can be unleashed against these groups, without fear that they might wield countervailing political power to protect themselves.

*

The fact that GOP politicos are doubling down on the rhetoric and substance of Great Replacement ideas in the wake of the Buffalo massacre signals that we have passed a tipping point in American politics. The Republican Party obviously sees the incitement of racial paranoia as key to gaining and retaining power in the coming years, and sees any accompanying violence as acceptable collateral damage at worst, and a useful part of their power play at best. The central goal of white power inexorably leads the party ever deeper into authoritarian politics, as it becomes necessary to deny the legitimacy and political representation of non-white voters — both as a logical consequence of white supremacy, and as the path to enacting its vision of an America in which whites hold unchallenged power.

This is not a fever that will break or a fire that will burn itself out. It is a movement of hatred and evil that will not stop on its own, but will need to be stopped by a greater opposing force, as observers like political scientist Thomas Zimmer have argued. The past six years have demonstrated the limits of a Democratic strategy that has declined to call out and counter head on not just white supremacist violence, but the entirety of white supremacist and Great Replacement thinking that put Donald Trump in the White House, and that has driven what amounts to a Republican insurrection in the year and a half since he was driven from office. In particular, the fact that the GOP has embraced Trump’s insurrectionist lies about a stolen election and is moving en masse to subvert the 2022 and 2024 contests is solid evidence of a growing, not diminishing, threat, as much as is the GOP’s increasing boldness in making openly racist appeals to its base.

President Joe Biden’s response to the Buffalo shooting is a perfect encapsulation of how the Democrats have worked to capture the moral high ground while refusing to engage in the political hardball and necessary confrontation that would actually roll back the white supremacist threat. To his credit, during his visit to Buffalo in the wake of the murders, Biden stated that, “White supremacy is a poison” that is “running through our body politic,” and that, “We need to say as clearly and as forcefully as we can that the ideology of White supremacy has no place in America.” He even referenced Great Replacement theory, remarking that “the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced … by The Other, by people who don’t look like them and who are, therefore, in the perverse ideology that they possess and (are) being fed, lesser beings.”

Yet, having condemned white supremacism and its purveyors in general terms, the president declined to actually identify any particular politico who disseminates these ideas. And this is the point where the Democrats’ reluctance to fully engage in the fight against white supremacism stands revealed as ineffectual and absurd. President Biden, after correctly making the case that white supremacism is an unparalleled evil and threat to American democracy, also simultaneously told us that it’s just not important enough to get into a fight about, or existential enough to actually name names. This isn’t just self-contradictory; by Biden’s own reasoning, the failure to defeat white supremacy is a recipe for disaster for our democracy, not to mention for the civil rights of literally millions upon millions of Americans (including all those Democratic voters whose rights the Democratic Party would be failing to protect). It’s not enough to condemn white supremacism — the Democrats need to condemn the purveyors of white supremacism by name, make their political identities indistinguishable from their repugnant ideas, insist on the guilt by association of every GOP politicians who refuses to disavow their fellow politicians and such rancid notions, and, crucially, use these critiques in their appeals to voters to choose Democrats over Republicans.

Here’s one concrete idea of how this might work. Following the Buffalo shooting, some reporters, opinion writers, and even Democratic politicians did call out Representative Elise Stefanik for her inclusion of Great Replacement notions in her campaign advertising. However, within days of such critiques and denials that she had invoked the Great Replacement theory, Stefanik tweeted that, “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote.” Her tweet, directly echoing the idea that Democrats want immigrants to replace white voters, represented a defiant embrace of Great Replacement thinking. But at that point, rather than simply shaking fists in Stefanik’s general direction, Democrats should have immediately called for her resignation from her House leadership role, if not from her House position itself. In conjunction with this, and assuming that Stefanik would not resign, they should have ensured that every press encounter in the coming weeks not only reiterated calls for her resignation, but recapped her white supremacist ideology and how it taints the entire GOP caucus that has entrusted her with such a senior leadership position, and which is indeed shared by many in her caucus. How else do the Democrats expect to turn back the white supremacist uprising if they don’t actually take aim at the politicians leading the charge?Do Democrats themselves not understanding how shocking and unacceptable it is for a GOP politician to claim that Democrats want to literally replace white voters, and how this incites hatred and violence against both American citizens and immigrants? If this is not a political offense worth taking a stand on, then what is?

This returns us to a common theme here at The Hot Screen: the basic imbalance between the two parties in terms of their willingness to court conflict. Even as Republicans supercharge racial animus among white Americans in a quest to institute one-party rule in the country, Democrats again and again shy away from using the GOP’s open white supremacism as a weapon against them — both as a way to discredit the GOP in the eyes of the decent American majority, and as a necessary wake-up call to Democratic-leaning voters as to the stakes of the 2022 and 2024 elections. Instead, the Democrats perversely keep insisting on keeping the upcoming midterms on terrain hugely disadvantageous to them, emphasizing their ineffectual efforts to control inflation (which really is largely beyond their control) and plans for the economy and environment that have very little chance of making it through the narrowly divided Congress.

This is not to say that the Democrats should only talk about the GOP’s white supremacist goals.  But it is essential that the Democrats ensure that this is a key framework through which Americans view our political struggles and stakes. For instance, take the imminent loss of abortion rights, which if handled correctly may inspire a wave of Democratic base organizing and enthusiasm leading up to November. Defense of the right to abortion becomes all the more compelling if Democrats are able to link GOP abortion opposition to Great Replacement theory and the repugnant belief that white Americans must try to outbreed those of darker skin.  The same principles apply for Democrats going to war against voting restrictions that target minorities and hostility to trans rights; the goal should be to depict the GOP as openly aligned with the ends of white nationalist extremists and white supremacist thinking.

Democratic failure to confront this ideology of hate and the way it is driving the GOP towards authoritarianism would represent an unforgivable, not to mention horrifying, betrayal of the citizens they’ve been elected to serve. When African-Americans are gunned down by a terrorist inspired by the same ideas spouted by GOP politicians and right-wing pundits, we can see the incalculable cost of allowing this American cancer to grow without nearly adequate pushback.  Democrats are deluded if they think they can defend American democracy by speaking in generalities about the evils of white supremacism.  They must take the obvious next step, and target the GOP as the political wing of a white supremacist movement that has put American democracy and equality in it crosshairs. They must name names and describe their anti-American ends in detail, and rally Americans to their righteous cause of driving the white supremacist GOP from all levels of power.

Insurrectionary Obfuscations

A piece by Greg Sargent about news coverage of far-right Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Doug Mastriano absolutely nails a broader media failure that’s at the heart of our democracy crisis. Noting the numerous references to Mastriano as a 2020 “election denier,” Sargent digs into how this phrase serves to obscure the true dimensions of the candidate’s radical anti-democratic stance. The phrase “election denier” is “meant to convey the idea that Mastriano won’t accept Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential reelection loss,” but Sargent correctly points out that Mastriano has been quite explicit about using the powers of the governor’s office to throw out future presidential votes in favor of a Democratic candidate should he deem those votes suspect. Thus, Sargent suggests, a more accurate term for describing Mastriano would be “full-blown insurrectionist.” (Sargent’s point is strengthened by a point I think he underplays a bit, which is that Mastriano was an active participant in Donald Trump’s insurrectionary attempt to stay in office — these past activities alone would earn him the “insurrectionist” description.) 

The point Sargent is making, which boils down to an argument for reporters and editors to use language that accurately conveys reality to their readers, is one that applies not just to Mastriano, but to hundreds upon hundreds of GOP candidates and current officials who have not only been explicit about their goals of overturning the popular vote in future state and national elections, but have actually already embarked on making this anti-democratic vision a reality. In states controlled by the GOP, the party has been implementing a range of voter suppression measures, even as far-right candidates who believe in placing the thumb on the scales in favor of Republican votes seek and are elected to, or placed in, important election oversight roles.

Naming such activities as “insurrectionary” accurately conveys the truth of the matter — that such people are seeking to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States, whether at the federal or individual state level. Use of the phrase “election denier” is, as Sargent correctly describes, a deeply misleading canard that suggests that such politicos are merely deluded and unable to accept the reality of Donald Trump’s 2020 loss. The media’s mass glomming-on to the phrase is both symbol and substance of a general failure to accurately report the right-wing uprising that we are all currently living through. This failure is absolutely to the benefit of the far-right movement that seeks to replace our democratic order with something authoritarian and illegitimate.

It’s pretty clear to me that a major reason the media has thus far avoided the terms “insurrectionist” and “insurrection” to describe the GOP’s open conspiracy to subvert future elections is that these words carry connotations of violence. But the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “insurrection” as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” A revolt against “an established government” is most certainly what we have on our hands. It may be slow-rolling, and couched in legalisms and feigned interest in “the integrity of the vote,” but a revolt against our democracy it most certainly is. From extreme gerrymandering aimed at suppressing the representation of Democratic-leaning urban dwellers and minorities, to byzantine voter registration rules that hearken back to the Kafkaesque absurdities of Jim Crow, to election officials running on explicit platforms of ensuring the victory of GOP candidates, and to the propagation of a “great replacement” theory that seeks to convince white Americans that any means are justified to win future elections, the insurrection is real, and it is growing. This insurrection will continue even if the media, or Democrats, refuse to call it by its name; and refusing to call it by its name will help ensure that it continues, by serving to obscure an urgent reality from the American people.

Go to Hell, Hotelier! Or, the Continuing Misadventures of Ambassador (Retired) Gordon Sondland

The recrudescence of Gordon Sondland into national notice, via a profile in The Washington Post last week, will probably rock few people’s worlds.  Compared to some of the other cheats, grifters, white nationalists, and insurrectionists who populated the Trump administration, the former ambassador to the European Union never made it out of the minor leagues in terms of notoriety, though he had his moment in the sun during the first Trump impeachment hearings — and lord knows The Hot Screen had its fun with this living embodiment of the Peter principle.

But it would be a mistake to treat Sondland the way he wishes to be treated, as a well-meaning man who got caught up in some bad shit and tried to do his duty in unfortunate circumstances — as someone deserving reconsideration and rehabilitation in the public eye. Rather, Sondland was an important participant in former President Trump’s scheme to extort Ukraine into manufacturing information that could kneecap Joe Biden’s candidacy — a scheme that led to Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives. Not only was Sondland aware of the efforts to condition military aid to Ukraine on that foreign government concocting a false story about Joe Biden’s connection to corruption there, he was an active agent in conveying those conditions to the Ukrainian government.

According to the new Washington Post profile, Sondland’s main argument in his defense is that he was actually motivated by a desire to assist Ukraine, by making sure Ukraine did what it had to do in order to receive U.S. aid. But the idea that his attempts to aid Ukraine somehow justified his participation in a corrupt plot to blackmail an ally and defraud the American people is laughable. His part in Trump’s blackmail is the overriding fact of his role in the Trump administration, and at any rate, the plot to extort Ukraine actually delayed the aid that Sondland claims he wanted Ukraine to receive. It was a scheme he should have reported to State Department lawyers, not enabled.

As a quick path to understanding Sondland’s malign role in the Ukraine plot and its eventual exposure, it’s helpful to remember not just his role in the scheme, but the details of his testimony to the congressional committee that investigated the grounds for Trump’s first impeachment. At the behest of the State Department (which was clearly acting at the insistence of President Trump), Sondland initially refused to testify to Congress; he then testified, but lied by saying he never knew of a connection between U.S. aid to Ukraine and any conditions the Trump administration wanted in return; next, he almost immediately revised his testimony after his statements of innocence of such a plot were contradicted by other witnesses, even as he still withheld details of the president’s knowledge of the plot; and finally, a few weeks later, openly admitted that there was a “quid pro quo” plot directed at Ukraine aimed at manufacturing announcements of corruption investigations implicating Joe Biden, and also confessed that the president had very likely directed the scheme (though he still claimed no direct knowledge of this). That is, he obstructed the impeachment inquiry at various points until his position was made untenable by contradictory evidence. And not only did he seek to obscure his participation in the scheme (he may not have been a plotter, but he knowingly acted as an errand boy for its ends),but he also defended a corrupt president’s actions from full disclosure. He was a team player until he was not.

Sondland seems now to be attempting to build on the incremental goodwill he earned from the media and from opponents of President Trump because of the part his testimony played in proving the existence of the extortion scheme that led to President Trump’s first impeachment (apart from the Post interview, he has a memoir coming out this fall that The Hot Screen is excitedly not rushing to preorder; the tentative title is — and excuse me while I urple up my breakfast  — “The Envoy: Mastering the Art of Diplomacy with Trump and the World”). But the former ambassador’s current effort to whitewash his involvement in a scheme that resulted in only the third presidential impeachment in U.S. history deserves only scorn and rebuttal — not simply because of the actual, malicious role he played in subordinating U.S. national interests to Donald Trump’s re-election effort, but because of the entirety of his problematic service as ambassador to the EU, which reveals other levels of incompetence and corruption that implicate both Sondland and the system that placed him in such an important position in the first place.

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To begin at the beginning: Gordon Sondland was appointed as EU ambassador after giving a $1 million donation to the Trump inauguration, in what was openly understood to be a reward for his contribution. It’s worth noting that Sondland made this donation after withdrawing his previous support for Trump during the Republican presidential campaign (following Trump’s attacks on a Gold Star father who had dared to criticize him, which led to a premature belief in the demise of the candidate’s prospects). Sondland wanted to get right with the new president after showing this previous lack of faith, and had incentives to abase himself with Trump should future opportunities arise. It should be noted, though, that his assumption of an ambassadorship was hardly a uniquely Trump-era corruption — both parties have long appointed donors to such positions. In this respect, Sondland’s “public service” started in a familiarly sordid fashion, but would soon spiral down to sewer levels under distinct Trumpian pressures.

Prior to his emergence into public awareness in connection with the Ukraine scheme, Sondland’s ambassadorship was marked by ineptness and inattentiveness. As the Washington Post reported back in 2019,

In Brussels, Sondland garnered a reputation for his truculent manner and fondness for the trappings of privilege. He peppered closed-door negotiations with four-letter words. He carried a wireless buzzer into meetings at the U.S. Mission that enabled him to silently summon support staff to refill his teacup.

Sondland seemed to chafe at the constraints of his assignment. He traveled for meetings in Israel, Romania and other countries with little or no coordination with other officials. He acquired a reputation for being indiscreet, and was chastised for using his personal phone for state business, officials said.

Sondland also shuttled repeatedly back to Washington, often seeking face time with Trump.

Of course, we now know that his lack of attention to EU matters, particularly his devotion of so much time working on non-EU member Ukraine issues, was ultimately tied to the president’s extortion plot.

Beyond his peculiar work habits, Sondland’s tenure was shadowed by accusation of venality and corruption. According to another Washington Post article, Sondland spent nearly $1 million in taxpayer money upgrading his Brussels residence, including $400,000 in kitchen renovations, $30,000 for a sound system, and “$95,000 for an outdoor “living pod” with a pergola and electric heating, LED lighting strips and a remote-control system”:

The renovations at the E.U. ambassador’s residence, which include $33,000 for handmade furniture from Italy, appeared driven by Sondland’s lavish tastes rather than practical needs, people familiar with the matter said.

Two former U.S. officials said Sondland delighted in the trappings of being an American ambassador in Brussels.

“He got addicted,” one former official said. “The way you’re treated as a senior U.S. official, there’s nothing like it in terms of adrenaline and ego boost.”

So even absent his involvement in the Ukraine scheme, Sondland was a shining example of American elites failing upward, in this case buying himself into an important diplomatic role absent relevant experience, skills, or aptitude.  This was not public service, as an ambassadorship should ideally be, but self-service.

A full accounting of Sondland’s time in government should also take into account the way his relationship to Trump mirrored the sycophancy of so many of his administration peers, the soiling submission to the will of a corrupt and egomaniacal president out of an apparent eagerness to stay in his good graces. I noted above the backpedaling Sondland felt compelled to do after canceling a fundraiser for Trump, and it seems likely that his willingness to be complicit with Trump’s betrayal of the national interest flowed in part from a continued need to assuage a president who placed personal loyalty only below his deranged self-centeredness.

This is not to say that Gordon Sondland is an evil or even a bad man. Like all of us, he’s complicated, and his life story certainly its elements of sympathy. His parents had fled Nazi Germany to settle in the U.S., and this appears to have played some role in his wish for an ambassadorship; one acquaintance told The Seattle Times that “Sondland “was not reticent” about his pursuit of a diplomatic post, preferring a German-speaking nation, which would have meant a son of Holocaust refugees “would have come full circle. This is what he wanted and long sought.”” And his previous business career resulted in him becoming a successful hotelier in the Pacific Northwest.

But the crux of the matter is that Sondland was involved in a heinous scheme to subvert an American election, yet to this day shows no apparent acknowledgement of his role, let alone repentance or remorse. Rather than simply say that he made a mistake, and try to make amends, he attempts to whitewash his role with questionable assertions about his true intentions and heroism in these grisly matters. The question of how to respond to Sondland’s participation in the depravities of the Trump administration has always felt extremely grounded to me, as his connections to Portland (he has lived here and had hotels in the city) raised nitty-gritty issues of how his fellow residents should treat such disservice to the United States. Sondland long sought to burnish his reputation through charitable donations, including to the Portland Art Museum; after his involvement in the Ukraine shakedown, such activities took on the sheen of reputational laundering. A healthy country and community should shun and shame those who betray it, not accept their self-aggrandizing excuses at face value, or simply turn the page as if horrid events never happened. I am not saying that Sondland should be ostracized from polite society (at any rate, he now lives in Florida, so he has already inflicted that particular punishment on himself), but I am saying that it is worthwhile for a community to judge when certain people are no longer deserving of respect.

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And this is where the Washington Post profile of Sondland flirts with becoming part of the former ambassador’s whitewash effort. With a tone combining bemusement (“No one’s gotten the Gordon Sondland part of the story exactly right, according to Gordon Sondland”) and belittlement (“Do you remember Gordon Sondland?”), the piece conveys Sondland’s self-aggrandizing efforts without offering nearly sufficient factual counterpoints to his wish to present himself as an early defender of the Ukrainian people and Vladimir Zelensky. To be crystal clear: if Sondland had had a sincere interest in protecting both Ukranian and U.S. interests, he would have gone to State Department lawyers or the Washington press with his knowledge of the shocking plot to gin up false accusations against Joe Biden by withholding vital military supplies to Ukraine. Rather than do so, he helped convey this blackmail message to Ukraine.  These are contemptible actions, not heroic ones. He was a willing servant of a corrupt scheme. His self-justifications are like those of a get-away driver who claims innocence because he didn’t actually rob the bank.

The article, to its credit, does pin Sondland down on his hypocrisy (he refuses three times to give a straight answer as to whether he should have tried to stop the scheme). But though the piece explicitly asks, “What did happen? How should we make sense of Gordon Sondland’s cameo in this disorienting period of American politics?”, it provides far too much space for Sondland’s self-justifications, even as it repeats criticisms of his role in the Ukraine affair made by foreign policy experts people like John Bolton, Fiona Hill, and Alexander Vindman. Sondland is even allowed a riposte to these far more credible foreign policy professionals —“Everyone who writes these books, especially this group, think they’re hot s---, right? And they’re not.  They’re human beings, right? They made mistakes. I made mistakes.” — but the details of Sondland’s actual activities in pursuit of a corrupt presidential plot are not recapped. 

Instead, a critique is leveled at the far lesser matters of the tone and tenor of Sondland’s self-defenses in his upcoming memoir:

His version of history, recorded with the help of a ghostwriter, is both boastful and self-deprecating. His motivations were rooted in both “a desire to make a difference” and “a desire to be noticed.” He disparages “the global diplomatic system” as anachronistic, prissy, overpopulated (“There are just too many people”). He calls Bolton “extremely insecure,” Hill “a whiner” and Vindman’s heroic reputation “far from the truth.”

There’s also an interview with a Duke University political science professor who’s also a friend of Sondland, and who, not surprisingly, tells the Washington Post that, “Since I have talked with him over the years about foreign policy, I find the account he gives of his motivations and what he was trying to accomplish quite plausible.” As the article notes that Sondland’s family foundation has given Duke University $2 million in donations, I would judge the low credibility and basic irrelevance of such a character assessment to also be “quite plausible.”

Ultimately, it’s the article’s framing of Sondland as some sort of nostalgia trip, like an 80’s band profiled in a “where are they now” VH1 puff piece, that feels grotesquely off base. The concluding paragraphs, presented as one final possible answer to the “story” of Gordon Sondland, are like fingernails on a chalkboard every time I’ve read them:

 Maybe the Gordon Sondland part of the story is what it always appeared to be.

“Yes, I’m the quid pro quo guy,” he writes in the memoir, “but you know what? Everything in life is some kind of a quid pro quo.”

With Sondland’s call-back to the “quid pro quo” assertion from the impeachment hearings (when he finally fully testified that he was aware of a plot to premise U.S. aid in exchange for Ukrainian announcement of a Biden-harming investigation), but with the twist of turning it into a punchline in which Sondland gets the last word and essentially condones the corrupt maneuver that Trump tried to make, the Post piece lands with a whimper on a message of inconsequence: let bygones be bygones, what’s done is done, all the world’s a stage, everything’s a quid pro quo, so get over it.

But the salience of Sondland to our American narrative isn’t what sort of “story” he’d like to sell us, or what sort of person he is, but what he actually did that brought him to our collective attention in the first place. And what he did was play a central role in a conspiracy that the House of Representatives deemed worthy of impeaching a president for — a conspiracy that illicitly placed the president’s foreign policy powers in service of a plan to destroy a political rival and upend the 2020 election. This is the true Sondland story, whether he likes it or not. This is what we must remember. If the former ambassador can’t even admit that he did wrong, and begin to proffer amends and apologies to the American people, then any rehabilitation of his reputation should be made impossible by the media and the citizenry. (Damningly, he writes in his memory that he would consider supporting Trump for president in 2024 — an important clue to a broken moral compass and lack of repentance for his role as lackey to a corrupt president). The scheme he helped along was a grave offense against the country, and his role in it must not be forgotten or forgiven.

The Panic Party Must Be Cancelled

Something between panic and ennui (pannui?) appears to have the Democratic Party in its grip at the prospect of the November midterms. The party generally seems to have accepted the conventional wisdom that it will lose control of at least the House, and possibly the Senate, and that this outcome is more or less set in stone. But while there are real headwinds for the Democrats — the highest inflation in 40 years, a lingering pandemic, a frightening geopolitical situation, and the general tendency of voters to punish the president’s party — it makes no sense for Democrats to underestimate their own agency, to essentially psych themselves out about their own purported powerlessness. If you act like losers, you’re far more likely to lose — particularly in politics, where perception and confidence are such large factors. On top of this, there’s some real-world evidence that the Democrats aren’t even as badly favored as they seem to think; as E.J. Dionne points out, a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that registered voters preferred Democrats to Republicans 46% to 45% — not enough to overcome structural advantage that favor the GOP, but hardly definitive evidence of a hopeless blowout situation.

The sense of fatalism is mirrored in the Democrats’ misguided election strategies, which are aimed squarely at emphasizing the party’s failures and weaknesses. For instance, it makes little sense for Democrats to insist on running a campaign that over-emphasizes their legislative accomplishments — not when so much of the news coverage over the past year has been dominated by the Democrats’ inability to pass major legislation, and when the reality is that such accomplishments have been thin since the laudable American Rescue Plan. You or I may follow politics closely enough to know that their agenda has been stymied largely by one or two conservative/corporate senators (Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema), but the average voter just sees a lack of results, and blames it on the party as a whole.

In a similar vein, Democratic promises to pass more legislation prior to the election as a way of rallying base and swing voters — for instance, by enacting bits and pieces of the original Build Back Better package — are likely to fail, for the same reasons they failed before: they have no Republican support, and a single recalcitrant Democratic senator can bring any legislation to a halt. In fact, the incentives for Republicans to support bipartisan bills are even lower than before, as the party clearly sees a path to victory that capitalizes off Democratic unpopularity and stoking cultural outrage (more on that shortly), rather than passage of actual legislation.

For related reasons, it also doesn’t make a lot of sense for Democrats to overplay current economic challenges beyond their control — both in the sense of things they really can’t do much about, like stressed supply chains, and in the sense of things they might be able to do if they had an actual governing majority. Yes, Democrats shouldn’t seem indifferent to voters’ sense of economic malaise — which, after all, is based in disquieting realities — but they also don’t want to be tarred as being the cause.

In other words, the Democrats need to change the conversation as much as possible — and that road leads straight through identifying the GOP as the prime obstacle to the United States addressing the many challenges that beset us, from an economy that works for everyone to actually doing something about climate change. Luckily for the Democrats (though unluckily for the good of the country), the Republican Party provides more than enough material to give such a strategy a fighting chance.

Across the nation, the GOP is working to attack public education, the rights of sexual and racial minorities, and free and fair elections, with the short-term goal of victory in the midterms and the longer-term objective of enforcing a white supremacist, Christian dominance over American society. Dismissing GOP efforts to ban references to racism from history classes and demonize young trans people as enemies of society aren’t just ways to energize Republican base voters, but are the sharps points of a political movement that aims for no less than to strip power from the diverse American majority in favor of white conservatives (a case that writers like Ron Brownstein and Thomas Zimmer have been making). Democrats have long been reluctant to engage in what they perceive as “mere” culture war fights, but it’s long past time we realized that the idea of “culture war” itself is a deeply misleading term that ought to be retired once and for all. The ends of so-called culture war fights, like attacks on how the history of race in America is taught, have EVERYTHING to do with gaining power for white conservatives and denying power to those perceived as conservatism’s enemies — aka the majority of the American populace.

And as critics of the Democrats’ dismissive stance have observed, one of the huge ironies here is that Republicans are increasingly picking fights on so-called cultural issues where their positions are deeply unpopular. For instance, polls around the banning of books from schools and libraries show broad public opposition to Republican efforts. Likewise, Americans give overwhelming support to teaching an accurate version of American history that gives proper emphasis to the role of racism in shaping our past and present. And on the issue that is roiling politics this week and likely for some time to come, GOP opposition to abortion doesn’t have anything close to majority support in this country.

At this point, though, the Republicans themselves have basically indicated that they intend to make the midterms about what they perceive as winning cultural fights as much as, or even more than, the state of the economy and the Democrats’ allegedly catastrophic stewardship thereof. But what if the Republicans are actually dead wrong about the effectiveness of their appeals? First, Democrats have not actually engaged in a full-on pushback against things like the anti-critical race theory crusade, which is fairly easily exposed as a racist enterprise to deny the reality of white supremacism and the actuality of the African-American experience. And when we do see Democrats join the fight, such as when Michigan state representative Mallory McMorrow gave a speech denouncing a Republic opponent for claiming she supported pedophilia, it’s amazing to see how quickly and easily GOP talking points can be exposed as the frauds that they are.

Indeed, the Republicans’ turn from demonization of trans children to a suggestion that anyone who supports trans rights is by definition a pedophile or pedophile sympathizer constitutes a rabid, rapid descent into an us-versus-them extremism that, if properly exposed, can alienate far more people than it energizes. Overall, the GOP’s belief that it can use such issues to rally its base to the polls is premised on avoiding a backlash to such extreme and immoral positions — a backlash that it is well within the power of Democrats to encourage, if they were to simply make the effort. 

But the point is not merely to respond piecemeal to Republican extremism on individual issues — such as agreeing to make the midterms a referendum on whether trans women should be able to compete in high school sports. Rather, the proper approach would be to attack these various strands and present them to the public for what they are — a right-wing counter-revolution against the last half century of progress towards racial, sexual, and gender progress, all in the name of securing political and economic power for conservative white Americans at the expense of everyone else.

What’s increasingly frustrating to me is that, whether they now choose to recognize it or not, the Democrats have actually already been engaged in these so-called cultural fights, and the larger political struggle they underlie, for many years. The reason that this far-right counter-revolution is upon us is that there really has been a shift towards more power — both culturally and politically — for women, racial and sexual minorities, as well as non-Christians. And the political vehicle for these transformations has been the Democratic Party.

But now, the Democrats’ very success has brought us to a point where conservative white Americans feel sufficiently threatened that the GOP is not only willing to unleash the most hateful and extreme rhetoric to energize this base, but is overtly suggesting that non-Christian, non-white Americans aren’t even real Americans at all https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/21/republicans-biden-trump-election-democracy. It is all the more shocking, then, for Democrats not to recognize that this current backlash is actually a sign of their own party’s success, and that the way forward is to confront it directly, not cower before the lie that all this hatred represents the true spirit of a more authentic America.

So why not call the GOP’s bluff, and make the midterms about the larger choice of what sort of country we all want to live in: one where a narrow group of Americans are allowed to manipulate the political system for their own selfish ends at the expense of the majority, or one where everyone is treated equally — whether black or white, gay or straight, Christian or atheist — and where we’re all working for the common purpose of a greater United States that lifts up everyone?

This doesn’t mean that the Democrats can simply pretend that Americans’ economic concerns don’t exist — but it does provide a powerful path to re-contextualizing those concerns. First, this would allow the Democrats to remind Americans that there are other important considerations in life apart from whether inflation is high — not a game changer, maybe, but certainly a powerful antidote to the dominant “it’s the economy, stupid” perspective echoed by the GOP and the media. More importantly, it would help shift the debate over how to resolve our current economic challenges by reminding voters of the GOP’s complete and utter lack of a plan to actually help Americans, apart from the tired hat trick of cutting taxes for the rich; as Jennifer Rubin puts it, “And why is it that the most ambitious Republicans are spending more time battling nonexistent critical race theory in schools than on health care or inflation?” This is a question that every Democrat on the campaign trail should be asking. They must make explicit the deranged motivations and goals of the white supremacist, authoritarian GOP, and how divisive strategies also work to distract attention from actual economic concerns that affect everyone.  After all, if the Democrats don’t make this case, who will?

Ultimately, though, the Democrats should make every effort to shine a spotlight on the GOP’s war on American society and democracy because it’s the right thing to do. Particularly when we consider the Republicans’ in-the-plain-light-of-day efforts to subvert future elections, whether by gerrymandering, vote suppression, or corruptions of non-partisan voting processes, the party’s war on America is too dangerous to ignore. Not a day should go by without a prominent Democratic reminding voters that the last Republican president attempted a coup to stay in office — and that his false claims of a stolen election have now been adopted as a rallying cry by his party, as justification for ongoing maneuvers meant to ensure mere majority rule never again stops the GOP from holding power. If Democrats cannot make preservation of our democracy into an urgent and motivating issue, it’s not a problem with the issue — it’s a problem with the Democrats, and those who can’t convey such an obvious and urgent message need to make way for those who can.

As I’ll never tire of saying, the events surrounding January 6 in particular provide a nearly-inexhaustible ready-made case for why Republicans should never be allowed back into national power. A growing body of evidence shows that currently-serving members of the House were deeply involved in the coup effort, talking casually of imposing martial law and having the military oversee a re-do election to assure Trump of victory. Beyond this, Democrats should make sure that all GOP efforts to undermine free and fair elections are tainted by the violence and fundamental immorality of that day, dedicated as they are to the same ends.

Will any of this make a difference in the midterms? Of course it’s impossible to say. But even if the Democrats are bound to lose in November, it’s so much better to lose in a way that sets them up for future success, by using the next six months to tell the story of a backwards-looking, power-mad GOP obsessed with stunting the country’s future in the name of re-instituting the worse elements of our past. To lose in a way that gets the Democratic base fired up and ready to resist the depredations of a Republican Congress, and sets the party up for redemption in 2024, as a victorious GOP would surely show its true radicalism in the intervening years and sows the ground for its comeuppance.

Crusaders on the Court

Both in terms of substance and symbol, the Supreme Court’s apparent decision to strike down Roe v. Wade is a hinge point in American history. Not only does it attempt to revive the discredited and obscene notion that women are not the masters of their own bodies, it’s also the victory bellow of a far-right conservative movement that seeks to wield power against the interests of the American majority, with a sure promise of more retrograde decisions to come across a broad swathe of rights.

The sheer religious zealotry of the anti-abortion movement, and in particular of the Supreme Court justices who support this ruling, has struck me with something of the force of revelation. The majority would have us believe they are merely ruling on the absence of a certain right in the Constitution, but in reality they are actually imposing a religious worldview on the rest of us, one in which fantasy overwhelms reality at every point: that the fetus is an unborn human, that an imaginary baby trumps a real woman, and that the esoteric doctrines of a conservative Christianity should be the law of the land.

Such religious zealotry has no relation to actual morality or modern, secular notions of freedom. It is a faith twisted by misogyny and a steadfast belief in the subservience of women, and by a mistaken notion that it has the god-given right to impose its backwards beliefs on the rest of us. It is the eruption of twisted old gods and kings into the domain of democracy, and we should all broadcast its basic illegitimacy as part of the fight to turn back what is, ultimately, a right-wing religious war against our common humanity and universal human rights.

The Supreme Court is playing a leading role in this movement, but the same Christianist zealotry informs the agenda of the Republican Party of which the Court majority is aligned. As Jennifer Rubin reminds us,  “In his 11-point plan, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, declares: “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science.”  The GOP is committed to imposing a far-right Christian vision on all Americans, regardless of personal faith or belief.  This isn’t just wrong, it’s an offense against basic ideas of the separation of church and state that are essential to this country’s founding and greatness. None of us should be afraid to call out about this anti-American religious crusade and its deranged charade of speaking for god himself.

Overwrought Fears Around Potential Trump Prosecution Undermine the Rule of Law

Writing about the will he-won’t he debate as to whether Attorney General Merrick Garland will ever authorized prosecution of Donald Trump for his crimes against the nation, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne observes that, “Worry about what might or might not look “political” is itself a political consideration that should not impede equal justice under the law. If a president is not above the law, a defeated former president isn’t, either.” What Dionne is getting at is that a decision to prosecute Trump could be seen as politically motivated, rather than an objective application of the law to the facts at hand. This specific fear also appears to underlie Democratic hesitancy to refer crimes uncovered by the January 6 commission to the Justice Department for prosecution, or whether it would be better to let the Justice Department reach such a decision independently.

Dionne’s point that efforts to evade looking political can actually be quite political is spot on. In Garland’s case, the idea of holding back from prosecuting Trump so as not to look politically motivated has two significant, interrelated meanings. The first is that Garland would want to avoid appearing to act in a way that favors the Democrats, which would be an abuse of his position as attorney general. The second is that Garland would want to avoid undermining faith in the rule of law by creating the impression that he was acting out of partisan motivations.  

Under the first meaning, it would seem at first glance that maintaining an appearance of non-partisan neutrality would argue for Garland to look the other way in the matter of Trump’s offenses. But it’s not as simple as this. If Garland is influenced by how his decision might impact the Democratic Party, even if it is framed in terms of sparing them blowback for prosecuting political enemies, this would clearly be a political decision.

But even if Garland himself gave absolutely no consideration to protecting the Democrats in a decision not to prosecute Trump, this beneficial outcome for Democrats would still be part of a reasonable interpretation of events by some observers. This helps get at a point hiding in plain sight around this whole “political decision” debate — Garland simply cannot control what other people say about his decisions, including, most importantly and emphatically, what Republicans say.

The fact of the matter is that we already know that should the Justice Department decide to prosecute the former president, the GOP will inevitably attempt to frame it as a politically-motivated move to benefit the Democrats and kneecap the GOP’s leading 2024 presidential contender. It should be obvious that if every prosecutor refrained from pursuing a case because someone objected to it as politically motivated, the United States would soon descend into a state of lawlessness.

In the case of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, moreover, concerns about protecting trust in the rule of law by not prosecuting Trump fail the laugh test. In claiming that Donald Trump should be immune from normal prosecutorial decision-making, that he is in fact innocent despite whatever facts the Justice Department may possess, it is the GOP, not Merrick Garland, that works to undermine the rule of law.  Should Garland allow this “playing of the refs” to influence his decision, he will actually be validating and reinforcing a GOP argument for lawlessness, as least in the matter of corrupt and even insurrectionist politicians. Refusing to enforce the rule of law because you fear it will undermine the rule of law doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Finally, if it is true that Garland is hesitating because of a fear of appearing too “political,” then such a debate pits abstract, even theoretical concerns against a known, impinging reality. We are not talking about whether to prosecute a former president for a non-political or minor crime — as would be the case in some alternate universe where, say, Donald Trump had stolen a car and taken it for a joy ride while he was in office (in our unfortunate universe, it was the country he took for a joy ride!). Instead, the general crime in question — embarking on an attempted coup against American democracy — is the most serious type of political offense one can imagine, not the least aspect of which is that it is a direct attempt not just to undermine the rule of law but to eliminate it entirely. Moreover, Donald Trump’s criminal goals have now been taken up by many, if not most, elected Republicans, as they work to subvert future elections, legitimize political violence, and portray Democratic Party members as agents of evil rather than mere political opponents.  The true test of the rule of law is not whether Garland weighs abstract political considerations like a theologian counting angels on the head of a pin; the true test is whether our attorney general will use the power of the law to defend the existence of democracy itself, by making an example of the leader of a slow-motion but very much real American insurrection.

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.