One Big Reason to Be Skeptical About a Realignment of Latino Voters

In a recent article at The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein takes a sharp look at recent assertions (mostly by conservative observers) that non-college-educated Latino voters are making a sharp and lasting shift from the Democrats to the GOP. Parsing recent polls and other data, he demonstrates that while there’s strong evidence that the partisan loyalties of some Latinos may well be in flux, there’s equally strong evidence that this massive and growing group is not suddenly and decisively turning to the GOP; Brownstein archly notes that such claims are “at best, wildly premature.” For me, the larger takeaway of his piece is that discussions of this complex and diverse voting block conceal various blind spots among many strategists about how politics actually works, including the relative ability of the GOP versus the Democrats to make good faith and effective appeals to Latino voters.

As Brownstein notes, there have been a spate of articles in recent months predicting that Latino voters are beginning to move into the GOP column, away from backing for Democrats that has reached higher than two-thirds support in recent years. A central exhibit is Donald Trump’s improved performance with Latino voters in 2020 in comparison with both his 2016 run and Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign; in 2016, Trump lost the Latino vote by around 40 points, while in 2020 he lost it by around 30 points. Alongside Trump’s increased share, observers also point to President Biden’s and Democrats’ current lackluster support among Latino voters; the president, for example, lies between 40% and 50% approval ratings in recent polls. 

Various conservative commentators have asserted that working-class Latinos (who constitute 85% of the Latino voting population) possess an underlying cultural affinity for the conservatism of the GOP, and are simultaneously being alienated by ideas like police defunding and terms like “Latinx” among Democrats. But when they move on to assertions that the GOP has become a multi-racial working class party, bullshit detectors should go off all the way from Anchorage to Ashtabula.

While there are certainly polls that show Latinos in strong disagreement with ideas like defunding the police (a position, it should always be noted, that is held by a vanishingly small percentage of Democratic politicians), Brownstein points to other research that actually shows quite strong Latino agreement with core Democratic positions, and an accompanying rejection of GOP cultural shibboleths. On issues like abortion, gun control, and immigration, Latino voters are strongly aligned with mainstream Democratic positions — areas of far more salience and endurance, Brownstein suggests, than hot-button issues like “defund the police.”  

But I’d argue there are even broader affinities between Latino voters and the Democratic Party, as well as points of contention between them and Republicans, that single-issue polls don’t really get at; that there is a big picture here that we ignore at our analytical peril. The Democratic Party, in various interrelated ways, has acted as America’s party of racial equality for many decades now. From the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s to more recent compassion for immigrants no matter the color of their skin, Democratic priorities on race have broadly advanced the interests of the Latino community. Conversely, the GOP has long been a party that prioritized the interests of white Americans above others, an identity that has only hardened during the presidency of Donald Trump and its aftermath, so that it is now no exaggeration to call the GOP a white supremacist party — for what better characterization can we ascribe to a political institution that gerrymanders political districts to promote the power of white people, bases its political appeal on inciting fear and hatred of demographic change that is seeing a browning of America, and continues to have as its de facto leader a man who started his presidential campaign by slurring Latinos as sexual predators?

Now, this isn’t to say that Trump’s increased share of the Latino vote in 2020, or President Biden’s deflated support, aren’t phenomena worth exploring, or aren’t suggestive of possible profound shifts. For me, though, the biggest question is how Trump and the GOP have been able to counteract the party’s increasingly explicit self-identification as a white supremacist party and actually make some gains among Latinos and other non-white voters.

As a possible answer, Brownstein surveys evidence that economic concerns were big drivers among Latino voters in 2020, and are now playing an outsized role in Biden’s depressed approval numbers (as, indeed, economic concerns are hurting him among other voting groups as well). This data strikes me as persuasive for explaining the small but significant shifts we saw in 2020 and that we see today, even as they don’t necessarily portend a larger, decisive break in line with the arguments of those who say that cultural reasons are the primary factor driving reduced support for Democrats.

But just as the state of the economy exerts an enormous gravitational pull on all voters, and may have added weight with Latino voters, the two parties’ respective identifications as the party of racial equality and the party of white supremacy exert an enormous pull on non-white voter sentiment as well. While it is entirely conceivable that some cultural factors might shave away Latino support for Democrats — an increase in fundamentalist religious observance, say, or shifts in socio-economic identification so that increasingly wealthy Latinos identify their interests with the plutocratic GOP — basic common sense says that the GOP has a tough road ahead in significantly increasing its share of the Latino vote, much less ever becoming the preference of a majority.

Ruy Texeira, who has analyzed demographic trends for decades, largely sides with those saying cultural issues are sending Latinos into the GOP camp, and he tells Brownstein that Democrats should talk less about things like gender and race. But I think this misses the forest for the trees, for issues of race, and racism, are central to the Democrats’ currently powerful lead among Latino voters. Even if Latino voters do have strong preferences for Democratic positions on central issues like abortion and gun control, and are hardly single-issue voters, the Democrats’ role as the party of racial equality, alongside Republicans’ role as the party of racial inequality, is a powerful cement for ensuring this block’s strong support for Democrats. And if this is the case, then it seems obvious that it is very much in the Democrats’ interest to talk about the GOP’s white supremacist core, and about how the Republican Party views Latinos as less American than white people, even as it seeks Latinos’ votes. Concrete demonstrations of the GOP’s actual contempt for Latinos are legion, from opposition to the DREAM Act giving citizenship to young immigrants, to gerrymanders in states like Texas explicitly designed to suppress their political clout. 

The GOP and the right-wing media that support it have increasingly staked the party’s political future on supercharging the votes it receives from working-class white Americans who constitute an ever-dwindling proportion of the overall electorate. To do so, they incite racist hatred among these voters, telling them again and again that they are being replaced by non-whites, and that the Democrats care only about minorities. To put it mildly, this is a very weak position from which to then claim to be the supporter of the very same values that most Latinos hold. White supremacism is the elephant in the room, rendering moot more superficial GOP appeals to minority voters. In this context, the Democrats have a great incentive to make unambiguous not only their role as the party of racial equality, but the Republican Party’s embrace of white supremacism as its guiding spirit. One has to wonder whether a stronger Democratic indictment of GOP white supremacism in 2020 might have stanched some of the drop-off in Latino support that occurred.

In other words, it would be foolish for Democrats themselves to buy into any shallow talk about the fickle preferences of Latino voters. If anything, recent Democratic weaknesses with Latino voters should lead the party to hew even more strongly to the party’s racially egalitarian principles, and not allow the GOP to get away with white-washing its white supremacism and lying to Latino voters about sharing their most basic values.  

GOP's War on Democracy Can't Be Separated From Its War on Democrats

From its inception, the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee has been shadowed by various threats: that it would be subverted by the bad faith of Republican members, say, or that its inquiries would be stymied by uncooperative witnesses. But such practical concerns have not fully come to pass — for example, the GOP’s efforts to undermine the committee were too outrageous for Speaker Nancy Pelosi when Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to include supporters of the insurrection as members, leading to a committee that only includes a pair of GOP representatives (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) who have proved to be no friends of Donald Trump. Likewise, not only the committee’s findings, but its effective public presentation of those discoveries, have exceeded the expectations of many skeptics. It has provided a comprehensive and comprehensible narrative of the events leading up to and on January 6; above all, it has made a fairly waterproof case that Donald Trump was an active participant and conscious wrongdoer in attempts to overthrow the 2020 election results, whether by orchestrating schemes to send fake electors to Congress or inciting mob violence to accomplish what his pseudo-legal machinations could not.

But the thorough placement of culpability on Donald Trump for the events leading up to the Capitol attack is in tension with a disquieting reality that has emerged in the weeks and months since that dark day. Just as Trump lit a fuse that led Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and hundreds of others to assault Congress, he also lit a fuse that has led the bulk of the GOP’s leadership to openly embrace his goals of election subversion and democracy destruction. As I’ve argued before, the insurrection of January 6 never ended; rather, the torch was passed to a broader array of actors who share its goal of imposing minority rule on the American majority. Whether through gerrymandering of congressional districts to ensure Democratic voters aren’t able to send representatives of their choosing to Washington, illicit purging of voter rolls to eliminate likely Democratic voters, or schemes to replace fair-minded election officials with partisan hacks more than happy to put their thumb on the scale (or worse) in favor of Republican candidates, insurrection is now the official stance of the Republican Party. And though I would argue that a movement to overthrow U.S. democracy merits the term “insurrection” whether or not it involves violence, this GOP movement clearly contains its violent elements, with Republican politicians strengthening ties to armed militias that now constitute a sort of paramilitary arm to the Republican Party in multiple states. Likewise, the GOP and the conservative media that supports it are in a full-time mode of inciting violence against their fellow Americans by suggesting that Democrats are simply a mob of BLM protestors, baby killers, and harridans aiming to emasculate the white men who deserve to rule America. (The party’s absolutist opposition to gun control, and the apparent indifference as American society is destabilized by both random and targeted shootings, should also be considered an aspect of a GOP political strategy that sees violence as fair play in achieving its goal of partisan domination.)

Without question, there’s an enormous public interest in understanding the events of January 6 and ensuring that those responsible are held to account (though, as we’ll discuss shortly, this public interest is predominantly on the Democratic side of the populace). Specifically, there’s a great need to inform the public of the full depths of Donald Trump’s depravity and treason. In this respect, the committee is performing a valuable service — a service that will become even more precious if its findings spur the Justice Department into pursuing a legal case against the former president and his high-ranking accomplices, rather than simply against the foot soldiers who did the president’s dirty work.

But now that we are reaching the end of the committee’s planned public hearings, and have been able to grasp its strategy more or less in full, it is pretty clear that it has hewed closely to a mission that prioritizes an excavation and accountability for past events, placing Donald Trump at the center of its story. The far more serious political problem we face as a country, though, is that the insurrection documented that day continues into the present, posing immense dangers to life as we know it, and that it involves many more Republicans beyond Donald Trump. The challenge for Democrats, then, is to ensure that they don’t allow the thorough and objective findings of the January 6 committee to overwhelm the larger political indictment that needs to be pursued against a Republican Party that has simply taken up where Donald Trump left off. Serving justice against Donald Trump may be necessary both on its own terms as well as for the larger push against the insurrectionary GOP, but it’s hardly sufficient on its own. Democrats need to be sure that excavating the past doesn’t come at the expense of explaining the present.

Recent comments by novelist Joseph O’Neill about the January 6 committee highlight a central challenge for Democrats should they choose to make the transition from the committee’s Trump-centric framework to one more focused on the broader GOP’s anti-democratic animus. O’Neill observes that the committee has not only made Trump the central guilty party, but has simultaneously downplayed the actual targets and victims of Trump’s plot: 

I’ll say it again: there's something deeply wrong with these proceedings, in which all roads lead to Trump and away from the GOP, and in which R officials and uniformed men and women are relentlessly lionized and Dems--the victims this political aggression--are erased [. . .] Our votes were the ones being overturned. Our candidate was the one being wronged. Our people were the ones under attack. And yet we are nowhere to be seen.  [. . .]  This was an attempted coup by the Republican Party officials and supporters for the benefit of the Republican candidate and the Republican Party.

O’Neill is spot on about the danger of the committee negating the culpability of the GOP, but he also gets to something else crucial about the limitations of the work of the January 6 committee: in making a case that Donald Trump was trying to overthrow American democracy, it has prioritized a true and important but somewhat abstract offense over an equally true and important but far more concrete one — that Donald Trump was seeking to negate not simply the general will of some theoretical and composite American voter, but the will of living, breathing Democratic voters. O’Neill’s point about this effectively being a GOP assault from the get-go is correct — Donald Trump was indeed not just serving his own interests, but those of the GOP. This fact has by now been definitively validated by the Republican Party’s subsequent willingness to cover for Donald Trump’s actions — a willingness that encompasses a majority of House Republicans voting to reject the election results even after the coup; the GOP’s eagerness to subvert the January 6 investigation; and, most damningly, the party’s continued embrace of Donald Trump as the party’s de facto leader and its continued determination to finish his war on American democracy.

And this leads us to the central challenge that the Democrats need to navigate if they are to pursue the necessary fight against GOP authoritarianism: they must clearly communicate to their voters and other persuadable Americans that this Republican war is not just being pursued against democracy, but specifically against Democrats. It is the difference between rallying people around a more abstract threat, and rallying them in a way that unites their personal and altruistic interests.  The second strategy is simply far more effective than the first, and is essential to mobilizing Democratic voters against an authoritarian GOP.

To pursue the most effective defense of democracy, then, Democratic leaders must understand that they also need to rouse Democratic voters on an openly partisan basis. To defend democracy, they must be honest with their supporters, and name not just Donald Trump but the Republican Party as being opposed to the basic notion that Democratic voters should be able to shape the country’s future. Rallying the American people to oppose the GOP’s war on democracy necessarily involves communicating to them that the GOP is also at war with Democratic Party values. From public education and accessible, affordable health care to stopping climate change and ensuring women have bodily autonomy, the GOP’s war on democracy is inextricable from a war on the most essential elements of a free and fair society backed by the Democratic Party and Democratic rank and file.

The Democratic establishment must also understand that it needs to be an unabashed advocate for the interests of its voters, not just for an abstract vision of democratic fairness. The GOP is already doing a bang-up job of ensuring that the minority it represents is able to assert a disproportionate amount of power in the country. Democratic leaders need to concentrate more on making sure they’re representing the interests of the people who sent them to Washington in the first place, and less on worries about alienating unpersuadable voters. Being open to the partisan nature of the GOP’s war on democracy also means Democrats accepting that for millions of Republican voters, this war is a feature, not a bug. Millions of Republicans have now repeatedly shown their clear preference for Republican rule at the expense of basic democratic ideals, up to and including broad support for a president who came close to pulling off a coup. These are not people who can be persuaded to join a defense of democracy, particularly when they view democracy as prioritizing the interests of their perceived enemies (aka fellow citizens who happen to be Democrats) over their own.  

Conversely, failing to emphasize that the GOP’s war on democracy is properly understood as a war on millions upon millions of Democratic voters who in fact constitute an American majority should be seen as a dereliction of duty by Democratic leaders — an inappropriate demobilization of voters who have shown repeatedly over the last several years that they stand ready to defend both democracy and their personal interests at the polls. In 2016, they rejected Donald Trump, who only managed to attain the presidency through the vestigial stupidity of the Electoral College; in 2018, they gave the Democrats congressional majorities; and in 2020, they put Joe Biden in the White House. Even now, with polls showing Joe Biden at deeply low levels of personal popularity, enough Democratic voters are still energized enough to show the race for control of the House in a dead heat; as observers like CNN’s Ron Brownstein point out, the anti-Trump coalition seems to have enough juice left in it to somewhat counter the headwinds of economic uncertainty and Biden’s deep unpopularity.

Democrats must avoid the dead end of letting the January 6 committee be the last word on Donald Trump’s coup attempt, and on the way his war against democracy and Democrats has been enthusiastically adopted by a GOP that is busily cutting loose its few remaining ties to American democracy. The GOP is coming for Democratic voters — coming for their most basic rights, from their ability to marry who they choose to whether they live in a land that isn’t constantly befouled by burning forests, killer hurricanes, and inhuman temperatures. Democratic leaders have a commitment to defend their voters, or make way for leaders who understand this non-negotiable responsibility.

How to Start Talking About Supreme Court Reform

With the overturning of Roe. v. Wade, the 6-3 conservative majority Supreme Court has fully declared war on the freer and more egalitarian society forged in the social advances of the past century. Alongside other decisions, the Court has demonstrated its loyalty to partisan Republican ends over settled precedent, reason, and democratic governance as the bedrocks of the American project.

Confronted with such a Supreme Court, the Democratic Party has an urgent need to prioritize reform of an institution so corrupted and opposed to the American majority’s views of a free and healthy society. And key to the Democratic establishment making this necessary about-face will be encouragement of a vigorous conversation within the Democratic base and among the American people more generally about the necessity of Court reform.

This conversation will have to reckon with twin obstacles: widely-held beliefs that nothing should or can be done. A couple recent pieces by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo and Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times suggest possible paths forward for what such a conversation might look like, and how to address common misperceptions that we are stuck with this Court and that attempts at reform would somehow destroy the constitutional order. Both writers get back to basics, rooting their arguments in the logic of the U.S. constitution and the fundamental role of the American people in determining their own form of government.

Marshall makes the essential observation that the current Supreme Court has sabotaged its own legitimacy at this point, noting that, “The legitimacy and power of the Court rests on the public’s belief that it is making a good-faith effort to wrestle with the numerous questions arising from the Constitution, governmental actions and the law-making process. But what we have seen in this last decade [. . .] is something specific and different. It is a Court operating expansively, routinely overruling the actions of the other branches not according to any coherent set of principles but to advance the ideological and, increasingly, the nakedly partisan goals of the Republican Party.” 

This basic concept — that the Supreme Court majority possesses loyalty not to the law but to the GOP — cannot be repeated often enough. It has the virtue of being true, and is essential to persuading Democrats and other Americans to take seriously the importance of restoring balance and legitimacy to the Supreme Court, against the corrupt behavior of its current majority. In this sense, Court reformers are the true conservatives, loyal to the constitution and the rule of law, against those who seek to turn the law into a puppet of raw power.

Marshall also makes the key point that, as with the executive and legislative branches of government, the Supreme Court is not meant to be some sort of supreme power outside the bounds of checks and balances. Our system of government only makes sense if the Supreme Court can be constrained by its rival branches. But Marshall rightly points to the American people themselves as the ultimate arbiters of our constitutional order, so that “corruptions of the Court are to be addressed ultimately by the political process, by the people, who own it.” I think it’s also accurate to say that if the American people think the Supreme Court is acting corruptly, then it’s indeed acting corruptly. And right now, the corruption of the Supreme Court is staring the American people in the face, as if daring them to recognize it, even as the conservative justices likely believe that no recourse is either possible or legitimate against it.

But as Jamelle Bouie reminds us, the Constitution does in fact contain various provisions that make clear the ability of Congress, and by extension the American people, to limit the reach of the Supreme Court and the judiciary more broadly. These include Congress’ ability to regulate what kinds of cases the Court can hear, to require a supermajority for certain types of decisions, and even to increase or decrease the size of the Court. In other words, the tools are available, for those willing to use them, to push back against a Court that has seized too much power for itself against the interests of majority rule and commonly agreed-upon conceptions of freedom and equality. What we are experiencing today are basic power struggles that the framers anticipated we might well experience, and we are fully empowered by actual constitutional provisions — as well as by basic ideas of fairness and morality — to set matters to right by new laws that protect the public interest.

A Sinister Conjunction (Dark as Oil, It Was)

You don’t have to look too hard these days to find events rooted in the broader crises we face, but two pieces of news last week, reported within 24 hours of each other, form a particularly dark but instructive conjunction. The first was Joe Manchin’s final torpedoing of a slimmed-down climate bill before the end of this congressional session; the second was Joe Biden’s immoral trip to Saudi Arabia to essentially beg for that country to open its oil taps, with photos of his fist bump with MBS capturing the essential humiliation and defeatism of the visit. Taken together, these two events handily evoke the straitjacket in which the U.S. has placed itself in terms of its ability to respond to global warming and climate chaos. 

In the first instance, we see a nearly-united Democratic Party stymied by the corruption and anti-science attitudes of a single member. But less noted is that Manchin holds such a veto because his pro-fossil fuel attitude is shared by all 50 Republican senators, none of whom are willing to cross the aisle and give their vote to even the most limited plans to save the planet from indescribable damage and suffering. In this respect, Manchin’s scuttling of the bill can be seen as an outdated and self-destructive mindset reaching out and throttling plans for a better future that would actually take into account the reality that adding more carbon to the atmosphere heats the planet. In other words, as loathsome and corrupt a character as Manchin is, his actions are being conducted on behalf of a broader constituency and worldview that cannot see past the profits to be made by pumping ever more oil and natural gas, despite the clear dangers of doing so to the continued viability of life as we know it. It’s not too much to say that he represents a movement that has embraced a sort of nihilistic madness, in which the reality of human lives and the glorious but fragile web of life possess no reality next to the abstract flow of dollars into bank account.  

In the second event, we see not only the price of Joe Biden’s lack of vision, but how our country is hamstrung by the terrible decisions of the past — specifically, the many times our political leaders chose not to start weaning us off of oil starting many years ago. And so, in the absence of a saner energy foundation, Biden becomes a supplicant before a corrupt oligarch who has already demonstrated his dark alliance with America’s dictator in waiting, Donald Trump, let alone his complete indifference to the necessity of slowing global warming. That Joe Biden, a man who has indeed made a good faith effort to achieve a green energy package, is simultaneously pressing other nations to pump more oil, is a sad and excruciating sight. If there is one thing the world needs more than any other right now, it is that we pump (and burn) far less fossil fuel. For Biden to achieve success in achieving the opposite, while failing to pass a climate bill, represents less a personal failure by the president, and more an illuminating encounter with the structural baggage and insane death wish mentality that has long haunted the politics of energy.

But in this dark conjunction of a single openly corrupt senator blocking essential progress, and our president simultaneously demeaning the nation by begging an enemy of democracy to pump more oil, we can at least try to use these events to better grasp the essential incompatibility between these two world views: one rooted in greed, fantasy, nihilism, and domination; the other in facts, reality, cooperation, and a basic prioritization of, well, life on Earth. One approach is illegitimate; the other is essential to protecting life as we know it. One makes not a lick of sense; the other is the only path forward.  

Out of the Breach and Into the Fray

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling taking an axe to the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions only strengthens the blunt case that Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. makes in a recent column: that long-time Democratic leaders have failed on multiple fronts against a radically conservative Republican Party that is in the process of dismantling America’s democratic and social progress of the last half century. While the Democratic Party, with its big tent constituency and diversity of interests, always has plenty of fertile ground for internal conflict and displeasure about the party’s direction, Bacon gets at the big picture of the last few decades: he correctly sees a sclerotic and increasingly elderly party leadership repeatedly making unforced errors, helping lead the country to the brink of an authoritarian precipice as the Democrats’ losses have been Republicans’ gains. As he puts it, “on their watch, a radicalized Republican Party has gained so much power that it’s on the verge of ending American democracy as we know it.”  Bacon has written one of the most straightforward, persuasive indictments of this generation of Democratic leaders that I’ve seen.

Bacon describes the Supreme Courts’s overturning of Roe. v. Wade as the culmination of the Democratic leadership’s failures, a point I believe will be proven out as the decision’s shock waves continue to reverberate through the Democratic Party and American society. In a single ruling, the Court has reduced American women to second-class citizenship, denying them control over their own bodies and not incidentally ensuring that thousands of women will die due to their inability to get abortion procedures, or by desperately seeking illicit, unsafe alternatives to previously-legal medical care. The Court has thrown out a half century’s precedent, and gone against the spirit of advancing rights for American women, in effect giving legal cover to a right-wing, conservative Christian backlash against the fundamental principle that women are the equals of men in our democracy.

For the American political party most closely identified with and responsible for advancing women’s rights, the Supreme Court’s decision can only be counted as a massive failure and setback. And given that eliminating abortion has been a Republican goal for half a century, the Democratic Party leadership’s apparent disarray in the face of the ruling almost constitutes a separate indictment in and of itself. The failure to articulate a plan to expeditiously restore abortion rights for all, while mobilizing the federal government to protect these rights in the meantime (for instance, by funding travel to states where the right has not yet been lost), is simply mind-boggling. Horrifically, President Biden and congressional leaders are behaving as if this fundamental right is somehow not worthy of drastic action. Democratic leaders have failed both to take the proper measure of Democratic grassroots fury, or to register the full monstrosity of a Supreme Court ruling that, by the Court’s own admission, relies on bogus precedent and superstition, like the misogynistic claptrap of a 17th century “expert” who also believed the proper way to deal with a witch was to put her to the flame. Christian theology has been substituted for the constitution — an abomination that should fill every decent America’s heart with rage and a fierce desire for urgent redress.

Yet it would be fine for Democratic leaders not to express such anger, so long as they had a concrete plan to restore this basic right. You may have heard the common-sense idea put forth by politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren, as well as by various pundits, arguing that the way forward is for Senate Democrats to pledge to enshrine abortion protections in law if two or more additional senators are elected in November (this number would allow the party to eliminate the filibuster in the face of sworn opposition from at least two current senators). This is the most basic action that needs to happen, is in fact the only credible way forward to quickly restoring abortion rights — and yet the Senate leadership and President Biden are actually dithering about this (to be fair, Biden said a few days ago that he’d support filibuster reform to protect abortion rights. It’s also important to note that the House, under Nancy Pelosi, already passed abortion protection legislation in 2021. But we still have not seen Biden and other Democratic leaders promote a coherent, concrete strategy to overcome the Court’s ruling).

I would guess a central reason we have not seen greater decisiveness from Democratic leaders on abortion is the same reason that we have not seen them act more boldly on other critical fronts — because they understand that to truly protect abortion rights, they will have to confront the radical and corrupt Supreme Court, and by extension, will have to enter into a knock-down, no-holds-barred fight with the Republican Party that will make the inter-party conflicts to date look like a venerable grandma’s tea party. They will have to assert a vision of a modern, moral American against a retrograde Christianist, white supremacist movement, in which their opponents have already shown a willingness to use propaganda, hate, and violence to get their way — as most recently and decisively shown by Donald Trump’s attempted coup to remain in office, and by how most Republican elected officials have subsequently joined those insurrectionary efforts. They will have to engage in a level of conflict that, temperamentally, experientially, and perhaps morally, they are simply incapable of engaging in.

My mind keeps going back to President Biden’s speech commemorating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, when he said he would “stand in this breach” against America’s domestic enemies. It was a bold and essential statement, proper to the danger of our times and to the president’s crucial role in protecting the constitutional order. Yet those words now threaten to turn into a hollow mockery of themselves, as the president apparently fails to grasp that an out-of-control Supreme Court poses as much danger to American democracy as Trumpist insurrectionists storming the Capitol; as he fails to grasp that these are two sides of the same phenomenon, a right-wing, authoritarian movement that seeks to place white men at the top of the political hierarchy forever and ever, no matter what it takes, whether that means using physical violence, or the moral violence of stripping American women of long-standing constitutional rights. This is an existential, non-negotiable conflict, but the Democratic establishment, exemplified by Biden, seems essentially unable to fully grasp it, believing that somehow there must be a bipartisan way forward, hoping against hope that the Republicans really don’t mean what they’re doing.

Relatedly, the Democratic establishment appears completely averse to actually mobilizing the Democratic grassroots in such an existential struggle, in a way analogous to what the GOP has long done with its own voters. There seems to be a deep reluctance to engage in the give and take that is necessary to any democratic party, in which a healthy feedback loop exists between voters and elected officials. Even as Democratic voters have become more progressive and more diverse, the party’s upper echelons have failed to keep pace. Instead, as Bacon points out, too many Democratic leaders seem more committed to making war on leftist figures like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez than on the Republican politicians who are literally trying to end democracy. Yet, the confrontation necessary to defeat this right-wing, white supremacist reactionary movement will require the activation and mobilization of the American majority against it — something that the Democrats’ tradition-bound leaders seem unable to countenance, out of fear of being too confrontational towards the GOP and an unease that such a mobilization would inexorably lead to their displacement by younger, more vigorous generations.

If I have one critique of Bacon’s excellent essay, it’s that he may underemphasize the importance of the substance of the politics with which the Democrats need to oppose Republican authoritarianism; they must re-think more than the style and vigor of their political engagement. Clearly, Bacon thinks they need to oppose Republican authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism, but I believe this means Democrats also need to coalesce around and articulate an affirmative vision for America that can negate and overwhelm the GOP’s retrograde project. This is a conversation that every democracy-loving American should be a part of, but a few basic elements seem pretty obvious, since they’ve been underlying Democratic Party principles for many years.

First, the party must trumpet at every opportunity that the United States is a democracy, where the majority must govern, and that the Democratic Party is the defender of our democracy. It must emphasize that being an American has nothing to do with skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin, and everything to do with commitment to the common good and mutual respect despite our inevitable differences. It must very consciously describe the progress in social equality made over the last several decades, as well as the work still to be done to achieve greater equality, freedom, and prosperity for all Americans, and affirm its role as the nation’s primary political advocate for these advances. And it must not be afraid to describe in stark, vivid terms the white supremacism, extremist Christianity, and anti-environmentalism that have taken full possession of the GOP, rendering it an enemy to the kind of country the overwhelming majority of Americans want to live in. In particular, the party must explicitly declare its opposition to white supremacism, and make clear that the party’s goal is to defeat this ideology that has poisoned so much of our national life. There need to be straight talk about the way the GOP’s version of America would leave the nation debilitated, with those at the top of the Republican’s twisted social pyramid exploiting and immiserating the rest of us. Finally, the party should broadcast that its goal is not simply the defeat but the destruction of the authoritarian GOP, along with the wholesale discrediting of its retrograde ideologies.

The good news is that there’s already a general philosophy in waiting ready to be hammered out to guide the Democrats forward; the bad news is how very desperately we need the Democrats to do so.

Supreme Court Goes All Medieval on America

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion marks a hinge point in American politics, as much as did the attempted coup a year and a half ago by the president whose judicial appointments made this ruling possible. Today, as on January 6, we are faced with concise, irrefutable proof of an ongoing political and social crisis, rooted above all in the retrograde visions of a largely white, Christian, and conservative American minority. Today, as then, all of us are reminded that progress towards a more democratic, freer society can never be taken for granted, can never be viewed as irrevocable. 

As with the attempted coup that culminated in the January 6 insurrection, today’s ruling leaves us with a clear choice about what sort of country we want to live in, and a clear injunction to either act collectively to make a democratic America a reality, or to be dominated by a right-wing coalition united by misogyny, fundamentalist Christianity, and the centuries-old sickness of white supremacism.

The Republican Party has made no secret of the importance to it of overturning Roe v. Wade. This ruling was made possible by a decades-long effort to seize control of the Supreme Court in order to make this day a reality — an effort that has only come to fruition through the anti-democratic aspects of our government, with the decisive votes to eliminate women’s right to bodily autonomy were cast by justices appointed by presidents who failed to win the popular vote.

The fight to restore abortion rights, and the larger, inseparable fight to restore American democracy, won’t be won by talking about the Republican Party as an equal, legitimate partner in American governance. It won’t be restored by asking the American people to respect the legitimacy of a corruptly constituted Supreme Court. It won’t be restored by counseling patience to the American majority, or by vague promises to do something someday, maybe, if Americans vote for Democrats. And it certainly won’t be restored by avoiding necessary, profound conflict for the sake of illusions of bipartisanship that Republican politicians use as a fig leaf for carrying out their broader anti-democratic goals.

Rather, it will only be won by laying bare the fundamental clash of values represented by the Republican and Democratic coalitions, and by the Democrats making the case that they represent the interests of an American majority in which all are ultimately considered equal citizens, against a radicalizing swathe of the populace that opposes democracy in favor of the interests of a diminishing, white conservative minority that believes men should rule women, Christians should rule non-Christians, and white people are the only real Americans. This is not a simple clash of debatable ideas, like what the most effective tax mechanism would be for funding road repairs, or whether we should eliminate daylight savings time. The Supreme Court has just imposed medieval conceptions of gender rights on American women in the 21st century. This is nonsensical, this is illegitimate, and it is, by the reckoning of the American majority, simply immoral. And so this fight will also only be won by accepting the reality that the Democratic Party needs to rouse, rile, and otherwise recruit the American majority to the banner of democracy — a necessary energization that may well challenge some in the party who are more comfortable with the status quo and their position in it.

The tendency of the Democratic leadership to avoid conflict with the GOP, to seek consensus and to paper over such a schism in fundamental value systems, is simply no longer appropriate to where we find ourselves. Democrats are now at an inevitable reckoning point, the current leadership demonstrably having failed to protect the constitutional right to an abortion. This is not to say the Democrats are to blame for this decision; but the leaders who failed to defend this right need to be held accountable, and give way to a new generation of elected officials who understand the stakes and the bare-knuckled conflict necessary to beat back and defeat the authoritarian GOP. If congressional Democrats don’t have the votes to pass a bill now to protect abortion rights, then they must promise to repeal the filibuster and pass such a law if the American people return them to Congress in November with an enhanced majority. Failing to do so, and more generally, failing to take seriously what a non-negotiable right many millions of Americans consider abortion to be, will surely rip apart the Democratic Party in ways that benefit only their authoritarian opponents.

Likewise, the refusal and reluctance to back the necessary structural changes to restore abortion rights and democracy more generally are now indistinguishable from simply accepting whatever shit sandwiches of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial hatred the Republican Party chooses to serve up. It is also undeniable that the Democratic Party will need to expand the Supreme Court in order to prevent it from simply striking down federal abortion protections — an expansion already necessary due to the corrupt Supreme Court appointments of the Trump administration and the Court’s rabid right-wing extremism on so many other issues. As The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote today about the Court’s referral of abortion questions back to the states, “the idea that this will be determined through the democratic process is a cruel joke since this Court has also systematically dismantled the federal protection of voting rights and fair representation from state lawmakers who seek to limit both.” The current Court has become the enemy of democracy and commonly understood ideas of American freedom, and Democrats can either remove it as a roadblock or submit to an authoritarian future.

We’re in an existential fight for what sort of country — and in light of our ability to confront climate change, what sort of world — we want to live in, not just now, but decades and even centuries from now. A minority of Americans, under the banner of Republicanism, wants to drag us back through time, to when men were men, women were women, and minorities knew to keep their place. It is a nauseating mashup of the 1950’s, the 1850’s, and the 1550’s. The rest of us know better, though. The rest of us aren’t so narrow-minded, or afraid of people who might not look like us, or feel compelled to carry a gun everywhere we go because someone of a different race might make us feel nervous. Most of us, in short, are decent people, not moral cowards who’ve lost the ability to think for themselves and have submitted to the diabolical propaganda of right-wing media and churches that preach a gospel of hate in place of actual Christian beliefs.

I’ve seen a lot of talk today about how this ruling proves that the Republicans are winning, but it’s crucial that we understand the Court decision today, and the larger authoritarian GOP movement, as a backlash to halting but tangible progress in the direction of greater rights and freedom for all. The source of the danger is also a major clue to how we will defeat it — a minority of Americans are using un-democratic institutions like the Supreme Court to turn back actual progress because their views are fundamentally unpopular and cannot withstand the scrutiny of debate or the verdict of majority rule. They are certainly punching above their weight, but with the repeal of Roe v. Wade, this far-right minority is now in the position of the proverbial dog that has caught the car by the bumper. The American majority needs to remind itself that it’s in the driver’s seat, put the car in reverse, and run the dog over.

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.