Some Brief Speculations on the MAGA-Progressive Dialectic and All It May Portend for the Future (Or At Least the November Midterm Elections)

In a recent column, Perry Bacon, Jr. writes that President Biden and the Democrats “are running a markedly more progressive and partisan campaign than they did in 2018 and 2020.” His piece is a great elaboration of a point I made last week about Biden’s Independence Hall speech, in which the president not only escalated his rhetoric against Republican authoritarianism but crossed a threshold by identifying it as a clear and present danger to American democracy. As Bacon describes it, not only are fellow Democratic politicians more willing to call out the MAGA Republican threat, but are also more broadly foregrounding “liberal,” partisan issues like gun control, abortion rights, and filibuster reform.  

As I tried to make clear in my post about President Biden’s Independence Hall speech, it’s 100% advisable for Democrats to draw a clear line in the sand and call out the MAGA-dominated GOP for the threat that it is to American democracy and freedom, simply for the sake of the country’s good. But I think Bacon makes an illuminating point about the sort of synergy that occurs between the Democrats standing up for democracy and also standing up for progressive positions that have broad public support. He sees that the Democrats are moving forward on both fronts, in particular collectively leaning more into progressive positions than in 2018 and 2020, when the campaign theme was more pronouncedly one of moderation alongside defense of democracy and opposition to Donald Trump. 

But I don’t think it’s simply a coincidence that Democrats are getting more progressive as they’re also choosing to confront Republicans more aggressively on their anti-democratic turn. After all, the Republicans’ authoritarianism isn’t just for its own sake, but is a method of imposing substantive policies and ideas on the American majority: from abortion restrictions to unbending opposition to gun control, authoritarianism is a means to an end — a way of overcoming majority beliefs and imposing minority policies on the rest of us. The Republicans’ anti-democratic push has ever been accompanied by a push to impose a raft of unpopular policies.

The clincher here is that those policies have exposed, or even to some extent have provoked, strongly held contrary opinions among the American majority, so that positions like support for gun control and abortion rights have now become not simply progressive positions but widely-held, majority ones. If the MAGA movement represents a backlash against a diverse, egalitarian modern America, then I think we are also simultaneously witnessing the development of a backlash against the backlash — one that is clarifying the values and ideals of the American majority in ways that were not so clear before.

Another way of thinking about the dynamic going on is that, once the Democrats start really foregrounding the idea of democracy, then there is a certain logic and momentum in them also foregrounding substantive policies that have majority backing. And this dynamic, again, is strengthened by the fact that the Republicans are making so clear the connection between the unpopular ideas they hold and their obsessive need to subvert majority rule. Short version: by clearly defining their opposition to MAGA Republicanism, Democrats are also clarifying their own fundamental values and what they stand for.

But putting aside my speculation on the dialectic between MAGA craziness and the development of the majority’s self-awareness, I think Bacon correctly points out the benefits of a more coherent Democratic agenda now in comparison to 2018 and 2020. As he writes, if the Democrats manage to hold Congress, there will be much more clarity about the need for them to protect abortion and pass democracy-protection legislation. He also notes that, “The party has now clearly described Trumpism, not just Trump, as an existential threat, so it will be hard for centrist members to continue to bash the left and triangulate between left-wing members like [Representative Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez and Trump-aligned Republicans.” This would indeed be a welcome development, and I’d note a further benefit for those who support progressive causes: if the party can indeed neutralize or at least soften the conflict between its progressive and centrist wings, it’s hard not to think that this won’t ultimately benefit the progressives, as their advocacy of burning issues like abortion rights and environmental protections, not to mention defense of democracy, align closely with the current public energy.

Assessing the Impact of President Biden's Independence Hall Speech

I’m happy to see that there’s been some good follow-on coverage and analysis of President Biden’s Independence Hall speech, in which he condemned MAGA Republicans as a clear threat to American democracy and political stability. As I wrote in my own reaction to the speech, the address seems to have marked or even catalyzed a turning point in how Democrats are thinking and talking about the authoritarian menace posed by the Republican Party. But as Amanda Marcotte lays out, the groundwork for Biden to give it in the first place had been laid by other Democrats and other developments over the past several months. From the January 6 hearings to the purloined national security documents that the FBI seized in a raid at Mar-a-Lago, to Donald Trump’s attempts to incite his supporters to engage in violence to defend him from the consequences of his illegal actions, the public sphere has been awash in evidence of the former president’s anti-democratic shenanigans and violent intimidation from the right. With the public thus made more receptive to a stronger message about GOP authoritarianism, Marcotte notes that Biden’s speech could well have a further galvanizing effect on public sentiment. And as she notes, a Reuters/Ipsos poll a few days after the speech found that 58% of respondents agree that “Trump and his movement are undermining democracy” — positive news that the public is paying attention to the news and perhaps to Biden’s speech as well. The whole piece is well worth a read, including her take on Biden’s navigation between calling out MAGA Republicans and leaving a path for remaining mainstream Republicans to abandon the party.

Meanwhile, historian Thomas Zimmer rightly notes the historical significance of the speech, and fits our current moment (and the need for the speech) into a long-running struggle over the nature of American democracy and society. He also provides some necessary overview of the conflicts that have led to this time of crisis:

Both the attempts to subvert the political system and to impose conservative social and cultural ideals on the entire country are indeed part of a broader reactionary counter-mobilization against egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy. The conservative vision for America is one of maintaining traditional hierarchies, of 1950s-style white Christian patriarchal dominance in all spheres of American life: the political institutions, the public square, the workplace, the family. And conservatives understand that they are pursuing a minoritarian project.

For me, the most striking observation that Zimmer makes is that we are now at a point where “the status quo is untenable [. . ] there is no stable equilibrium in sight”:

While Republicans claim to be representing “real America”, their agenda of entrenching a white Christian patriarchal order lacks majority support – and the gap between what most Americans want and what the Republican party is implementing wherever it gets the chance is rapidly growing. Some form of stability can only be achieved by either overcoming reactionary rule – or through ever more authoritarian measures and increasingly violent oppression. The fact that a shrinking minority of white conservatives is consistently being enabled to hold on to power against the will of the majority of voters is causing a massive legitimacy crisis. And unless the system is properly democratized, it is only going to get worse.

This is a succinct and clarifying statement of the basic dynamic of American democracy right now. The country is ultimately in a state of conflict not due to some fuzzy “polarization” or “partisanship,” but over real, irreconcilable conflicts over whether we live in a democracy and a pluralistic society, or in an undemocratic regime that privileges the morality of a white, Christian minority. We can be one thing or the other, but we can’t be both. Part of the danger and imbalance of our politics lies in the fact that more people on the right have grasped the nature of this struggle than in the middle and on the left. The defense and expansion of our democracy will only succeed if not only Democratic politicians, but concerned citizens at all levels of society, work to get the word out about the full dimensions of our conflict. 

A Belated Labor Day-Related Post

At The Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman make a strong case that Democrats should start talking a lot more about the importance of unions and the party’s support for them. Pointing to surveys showing positive attitudes towards unions at decades-long highs (one Gallup survey shows 71% favorability), they note that the time is ripe for contrasting the party’s general pro-union stance with the GOP’s ideological resistance to the labor movement.

In one sense, the recent wave of unionization efforts, and what appears to be a positive public reception, suggest profound changes in how most Americans identify their place in the economy. I’d speculate that more Americans are identifying with fellow workers than with management, perhaps amplified by workplace conflicts during the covid pandemic, and almost certainly related to inexorably increasing inequality in this country.

Of course, the Democrats can also do more than just talk about unions. With control of Congress currently and possibly again after November, the party can move forward legislation that makes it easier to organize and harder for companies to punish workers who do so. The Democrats’ general reluctance to foreground the GOP’s anti-union attitudes as a way of peeling off white working class voters in particular has been a source of deep frustration for me, an attitude that speaks to the enduring hold of neoliberal, pro-management beliefs among a substantial number of Democrats. At this point, such reluctance has become self-defeating, a refusal to read a sea change in public sentiment and the reality that the Democrats are stronger when unions are. In this sense, the party’s ability to respond to a significant shift in the general public’s support for unions is also a test of the party’s broader ability to adapt and change with the times.

This test is all the more important when you consider that unions, and public support for them, is a clear countervailing trend to the reactionary movement led by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans that seeks to undo the last 50 years (at least) of social and economic progress. It’s a reminder that the American majority wants to move forwards, not backwards, toward greater equality and fairness in American society, and that as frightening as it is, the MAGA movement is a minority backlash to real progress and commonly-held ideals. From this perspective, it’s even more important that Democrats lean into the pro-union tide, and consider that the tools for defeating the GOP’s authoritarian movement may be closer at hand than they thought.

With Independence Hall Speech, Has President Biden Signaled a Sea Change in Approach to GOP Insurrectionists?

There is no single more important issue in American politics today than strengthening U.S. democracy and defeating the authoritarian movement that has rallied behind Donald Trump and the Republican Party. After the violent attempted coup by Trump on January 6, the Republican Party not only rapidly united around the former president, but made his war on American democracy fully their own. By promulgating Trump’s Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election, and forging ahead with voter suppression and election sabotage efforts in state after state so that what failed in 2020 might succeed in 2022 and 2024, the GOP embraced insurrection by other means. 

And so, for the last 20 months or so, the United States has essentially faced a rebellion by one of its two major political parties — a slow-motion insurrection that neither the public, nor the media, nor (most critically) the Democratic Party seemed to fully recognize or acknowledge. This imbalance has been all the more agonizing when you stop to consider how very aware the GOP has been of its subversive aims throughout this time. 

So let’s hope that President Biden’s speech last week at Independence Hall marks the start of a sustained, effective strategy by the Democratic Party to fully engage in the necessary fight against America’s homegrown authoritarian movement. From start to finish, it was simply a startling and historical speech for an American president to make (and to have to make), in which Biden identified the dominant faction of a rival political party as scheming to destroy American democracy:

MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people. 

They refuse to accept the results of a free election.  And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

[. . .]

 They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

In other words, Biden identified the MAGA movement as a clear and present danger to American democracy — he even quoted conservative Judge Michael Luttig saying this exact thing. The seriousness of such a charge can’t be understated; it is equal to the seriousness of the threat, and, as throughout the speech, Biden seems to recognize that the U.S. is in an existential struggle for its future; at one point, he described how we’re at a national “inflection point.”  

Crucially, Biden paired his attack on the MAGA movement with a path to solving it — the political involvement of the overwhelming democratic majority whose wishes the Trump Republicans seek to overcome. Again and again, he talked about the “will” of the American people, and insisted that our fate is in all our hands. Such advice is democratically sound and realistic, and accords with the advice I’ve seen from experts on authoritarianism who stress the importance of broad coalitions in turning back such movements. In a similarly productive vein, Biden enumerated the solid accomplishments of his administration to date — the economy recovery bill, the infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act with its enormous downpayment on a green energy-fueled economy. Against the Trump Republicans’ goals of dragging us backwards, he spoke optimistically of American potential.

That Biden recognizes the gravity of this moment could also be seen in his sustained riff on the impermissibility of political violence in America. He both condemned the violent rhetoric of the Trump Republicans (appearing to specifically reference not only January 6 but recent comments by politicians like Senator Lindsey Graham about riots in the streets if Trump is ever indicted) and the incompatibility of violence with democracy — both points I’ve been desperate to make and publicize here at The Hot Screen. You could also see Biden tying this condemnation of violence with his larger point that the majority must rule, pushing the idea that the vast majority of people oppose violence and that it’s the tool of those who seek to thwart their will.

Critiques that Biden was overly partisan are simply farcical; Biden bent over backwards to narrow his critique to MAGA Republicans, and he couched his remedy in terms of American coming together, not in terms of telling the public to vote blue or else. But I do think the criticism that Biden spoke in front of a backdrop in which two Marine guards were visible is worth noting and addressing. Commentary that Biden was somehow himself appropriating the pageantry of authoritarianism doesn’t really hold up, insofar as Biden’s speech communicated a message antithetical to the idea that we need a strongman in charge to restore law and order (witness the various times he noted that the power to fix things is in the hands of the American voter). But why did the White House choose martial imagery, also echoed in the red backdrop, with its connotations of danger? My guess is that the inclusion of the Marines was a deliberate message meant to signal that American’s constitutional government is indeed prepared to defend itself, including against those who would use violence to overthrow it. One strategy we’ve been seeing from the right is to paint federal agencies like the FBI as heavy-handed state agents stamping on American liberties; this is part of a larger effort to undercut the very agencies of state power charged with protecting us from insurrectionists, violent white supremacists, and their ilk. If the Biden White House wanted to signal that the country is in something of a war with insurrectionist forces, I’m all for it.

It was a bit trippy to listen to a presidential speech that sounded a lot like a Hot Screen column, but I won’t object to feeling included in the mainstream on this most vital of topics. But in the spirit of encouraging Biden (and the rest of the Democratic Party) to sound even more like THS, here’s the more critical commentary that you may have seen coming.

First, even the trenchancy of this speech will matter little if Biden and the rest of his party don’t continue to repeat and articulate its ideas going forward. It’s hard not to shake the memory of Biden’s speech commemorating January 6, in which strong language about democracy under attack wasn’t paired with a specific-enough indictment on who was doing the attacking, and was certainly not followed up by a sustained effort to repeat its message of an endangered republic. I’m cautiously optimistic it will be different this time, in that Biden very specifically identified a significant percentage of the GOP as seeking to destroy American democracy. Dropping the topic would be nonsensical and noticeable to Democratic partisans and their GOP opponents alike, respectively liable to dishearten and encourage these two groups. Staying on this message is all the more important in light of the faltering performance of major media organs, such as in the decision of big networks not to broadcast Biden’s speech live.

Future speeches and comments by Biden and the Democrats also need to dig deeper into the specifics not only of what the MAGA movement is doing that is so objectionable, but into motivations. Biden touched on the GOP authoritarians’ goals mostly in broad terms, such as in saying that they won’t accept elections results when they won’t win and their willingness to court violence. These are important points, but politics isn’t just about abstract ideals. When Biden mentioned that the MAGA movement opposes the right to choose, the right to privacy, and the right to marry, he conveyed more of the concrete threats it poses — more of this in the future would be productive. In a similar vein, it is time to start naming names, and identifying those particular GOP politicians who are most involved with taking a wrecking ball to democracy and the rule of law, and holding them to account in the court of public opinion.

Just as importantly, the Democrats and defenders of American democracy need to truly engage in publicizing what’s driving not just the MAGA politicians but the larger reactionary social movement that fuels the rise of authoritarian politicians like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis in Florida, and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. They need to directly talk about conservative fears of demographic change and the browning of American, along with the fundamentally white supremacist mindset behind such fears; the anxiety of Christian Americans who feel that the country is becoming increasingly secular; and worries around the rising power of women in our society. It’s not enough to describe the MAGA forces as a vague malevolent menace; Democrats also need to hold a mirror up at what's actually motivating this violent anti-democratic movement. On the one hand, this might help promote a national dialogue in which the exaggerated and bigoted fears of a white American minority don’t exist in a self-reinforcing feedback loop of paranoia conducted solely by the bad faith conservative media and politicians on the right. And on the other, talking about the reactionary religious, gender, and racial motivations of the right would also help the American majority recognize the fundamental soundness of the more diverse, publicly secular country that most of us live in and enjoy living in, and to recognize that most of us already stand united by ideals of tolerance, equality, and freedom; it would also ensure that the American majority understands, and rallies against, the very specific threats posed by this reactionary movement, which represents the worst, most intolerant strains of American history and culture.

Joe Biden needs to step up with not just words, but with actions, to actually prosecute and win this struggle against domestic extremists. It’s on point for him to tell us that the solution to defending American democracy is for Americans to get involved in politics and vote — but he must also be aware that such exhortations are meaningless if there aren’t laws in place that ensure that our votes count in the first place. This isn’t just a chicken and egg problem — the Democrats do currently hold Congress, even if by an excruciatingly narrow margin, and it’s in their power to either press forward legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, or to start talking about it a hell of lot more than they have been recently. I can understand how Biden would want to refrain from putting himself forward as the solution to our democratic challenges — like I noted above, this starts moving into strongman, “I alone can fix it” territory. But I’m not sure if he gets the balance right when he downplays the role he does need to play in advancing the concrete changes we need, like an end to gerrymandering, same-day voter registration, stronger protections for election administrators, and other democracy-strengthening measures.

Finally, Biden and the Democrats will have to continue negotiating the line between condemning the MAGA faction of the GOP, and grappling with the reality that much of the rest of the GOP has essentially embraced or allowed itself to be dominated by the party’s most extreme elements. I cannot see a tremendous amount of difference between a Republican politician who claims to be middle of the road, but still does nothing to speak out against the party’s embrace of a criminal hooligan like Donald Trump. At some point, you have to face the fact that the GOP appears to be corrupted beyond redemption, a point that even some conservatives are now making.

The Reality-Erasing Illogic of New Civil War Talk

One of the most disturbing developments over the past several years has been the political right’s increasing embrace and use of violence to achieve its ends, to the point that many Republican politicians have now tacitly embraced such tactics and given them a patina of mainstream appeal. Early in the Trump administration, we saw a mass expression of intimidation and violence by white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, which culminated in the death of a protestor against the right-wing demonstrations there. And on January 6, we all witnessed the ominous culmination of this trend, with a mob spearheaded by white nationalist and fascist paramilitaries attacking the U.S. Capital at the instigation of a Republican president who aimed to stage a coup to remain in power. Since then, right-wing activists aligned with the Republican Party have employed threats of violence to harass and terrorize teachers, election workers, Democratic politicians, and others that such extremists have identified as the enemies of America.  

So on the face of it, it’s not surprising that we would encounter the occasional think piece or Twitter thread that asks whether the United States might be veering towards a civil war; after all, our country already suffered through such a conflict a century and a half ago, so that we can’t dismiss the idea as simply unprecedented. But to consider the possibility of civil war means to consider that two opposing political sides might resort to violence to resolve their differences or impose the will of one over the other — and that, I would argue, is far from the actual situation in the United States.

In fact, I would go even further, and suggest that haphazard assessments of a possible “civil war” actually risk providing cover for right-wing extremists, Trumpist conservatives, and, increasingly, those mainstream Republicans who wink and nod at violence and intimidation so long as it’s carried out for ends that benefit the GOP. By suggesting that Democrats and the left are also, or might soon be, champing at the bit to let loose the dogs of war, such speculation creates a sort of anticipatory justification for the violent acts and rhetoric of the right — sure, it might just be the right embracing violence now, but pretty soon everyone will be doing it! In this manner, speculation that jumps ahead to civil war speculation skips over the very much one-sided reality of the present.

In this present-day reality, political violence is overwhelmingly being directed and instigated against Democrats and Democratic-leaning populations (African Americans, Latinos, the LGBTQ community) by right-wing actors, not the reverse. There is simply no analogue in the other direction. Our country is now home to a far-right, fascistic movement that sees violence as a necessary way to overcome their advantages in numbers, ideas, and basic morality.  Crucially, the embrace of violence that we increasingly see on the right has very little to do with fighting equals on a field of battle, but rather wielding violence to intimidate and harm ordinary citizens of opposing political beliefs going about their daily business. The name that we would apply to such violence in any other country is “terrorism,” and its aim, insofar as such acts are meant to short circuit or destroy democratic governance, is more properly described as “insurrection.” Even when you hear of right-wing groups talking about an imminent “civil war,” the term is misleading; they are either deluding themselves that their political opponents are as bloody-minded as they are, or that they intend to fight this nation’s police, domestic security (i.e, the FBI), and armed forces. But the first is a fantasy, and the second is not civil war, but, again, a form of insurrection. In this sense, the concept of civil war is deeply self-serving for the far right, providing a cover of legitimacy for what are actually fantasies of murder, mayhem, and terror against unarmed civilians.

Frankly, I sometimes wonder if even continuing to talk about the generic rise of “political violence” at this point can obscure as much as it illuminates, even when we are clear to name those committing this violence. When the right engages in violent actions or intimidation against civilians, it is not simply engaging in violence but specifically conducting terrorism: it is attempting to create political change by violent methods against civilian targets.

*

This parsing of terms isn’t just a theoretical exercise; the language we use to describe our fraught reality will impact how the American majority thinks about the violent rhetoric and methods increasingly prevalent on the right side of the political spectrum. At best, arguments that the country is “headed for civil war” assume that while Americans on the left may not be resorting to violence presently, they will at some point either see no choice, or be unable to resist the urge, to physically fight their political opponents. Such speculation makes it seem natural for citizens to, at some point, just take up arms and start killing their opponents. But skipping ahead to such a conflict, when our current reality is that it is the right — including mainstream politicians — who are naturalizing political violence, serves to take our eyes off this current, one-sided reality in which the right’s position is in fact deeply self-incriminating and delegitimizing, so long as this country holds itself to be a democracy. The nation as a whole is not becoming more politically violent; the American right is. And that violence reflects an anti-democratic, authoritarian, and bloody-minded mentality that should supercharge the majority’s efforts to defeat this movement through democratic politics, as well as via law enforcement’s efforts to prosecute anyone who uses violence or violent intimidation to effect political change.

But even when they are more accurate, discussions of the violence and violent rhetoric coming from right-wing actors can obscure an arguably more threatening truth — that now even mainstream GOP politicians see violence and intimidation as key to gaining power, most clearly evidenced in the party’s continued fealty to Donald Trump despite the former president’s coup attempt and years of incitement of violence against minorities, the press, and the political opposition. For more recent examples, we need look no further than this week’s news, with Senator Lindsey Graham warning that any prosecution of Donald Trump will result in “riots in the streets” by the former president’s supporters. This is hardly a neutral prediction by Graham; rather, it’s his attempt to game the legal system, by warning federal prosecutors from doing their duty lest they provoke a violent backlash, while also sending a message to Trump supporters as to what they might do to help the former president. Even if politicians like Graham don’t directly instigate violence, they have no compunction in harnessing it to serve their political ends.  

Perversely, an over-emphasis on political violence as a threat to American democracy, up to and including speculative talk about civil war, distracts from a broader, far-likelier danger: that violence will be used by Republican politicians as a tool in a quasi-legal push to dismantle American democracy, so that the GOP, with its dwindling share of the electorate, can still have a shot at holding the various branches of the U.S. government. As you know, we’ve experienced a wave of Republican voter suppression and gerrymandering across the country, which aims to ensure that Americans are not given fair representation in future elections in states like Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin. At the same time, we’ve also seen attempts to harass and intimidate election officials, a complementary effort intended to help tilt the field in favor of Republican candidates. And at the more extreme end, there have been instances of right-wing extremists attacking pro-life marches and BLM demonstrations by driving cars through protestors, which have the political aim of terrorizing their political opponents from exercising their rights to assembly and to organize politically. To relate this back to the civil war discourse — the more likely future for America is not that we might devolve into civil war, but that the GOP and the right use violence as an adjunct to an illegitimate deformation of American democracy. To talk about violence coming from the right — let alone civil war — without talking about this larger, more consequential Republican movement to subvert our political system obscures the dangerous synergy between the two, and helps the GOP evade accountability for its incriminating behavior in the here and now.

Big F*cking Dark (BFD) Brandon Energy

After an agonizing year in which high inflation, stalled legislation, and self-inflicted pessimism seemed to combine into an inevitable wipeout for Democrats in the 2022 midterms, the political tide seems to have turned over the last couple months. It’s not only progressives who are seeing solid evidence that the long-anticipated Republican wave for November has been caught in an undertow, even if the odds are still in the GOP’s favor to take at least the House of Representatives. Smart observers point to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and better-late-than-never actual progress on the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda synergizing into more than the sum of their parts; not only have the stakes of November been made crystal clear by the far-right justices’ overturning of Roe v. Wade, but the Democratic Party is showing that it can be make real, if delayed and imperfect, progress even with a gossamer-thin majority.

An equally influential factor, though, is that the ongoing reality of Republican radicalization — evident not only in the Dobbs ruling, but in the myriad GOP assaults on voting, the rule of law, and essential rights — is exerting a quite logical and irresistible influence on the mindset of Democratic elected officials and Democratic and independent voters. For example, Dobbs didn’t just happen in a vacuum, without repercussions. Immediately, multiple Republican states took the opportunity to enact laws that instituted the de facto abortion bans permitted by the Court’s judgment. The threat wasn’t just theoretical; rather, Republicans at the state level quickly began actually building the misogynistic world that the ruling permitted. Democrats really never even had a chance to talk about the theoretical harms of the ruling, because the GOP skipped right ahead to making those harms part of the fabric of daily life for millions of American women. Even if you didn’t live in a state where GOP legislatures passed such laws, you certainly heard about it in the news. And of course, this didn’t just happen in one outlying state, but in states all around the country, including highly-populated ones like Texas. To top it off, Republican senators and representatives in Washington have begun making noise about passing restrictions, effectively nationalizing what they long claimed was a state issue and reinforcing the new reality that abortion will be front and center in the congressional midterms.

So Republican offensives against our basic rights are now present in the everyday lived realities of million of Democratic voters. This undermines the preference and premise of overly-cautious Democratic leaders, who would prefer to make the midterms primarily about “kitchen table,” economic issues. This isn’t to say that Democratic voters don’t have economic concerns, too — with inflation at a 40-year high and the threat of recession in the air, Democratic politicians have an urgent need to demonstrate that they have a path forward on the economy. But the Republicans themselves are helping ensure that questions of constitutional freedoms, and the larger national conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, also have a seat at the proverbial kitchen table.

The Plum Line blog’s Greg Sargent points to the recent win of Democrat Pat Ryan in a special congressional election in New York State as evidence that voters are concerned about the GOP’s assault on their rights and democracy more generally. In an interview with Ryan, the newly-elected representative told Sargent that the number one question from voters he talked to involved a woman’s right to choose. Significantly, Ryan also told Sargent that “the ‘visceral’ reaction of voters isn’t just about abortion. While [Ryan] said inflation and economic pain continue to weigh heavily, he also encountered voter angst about gun violence, ongoing threats to democracy, and the insurrection attempt incited by Donald Trump.”

Again, I think we need to take stock of how logical, and I would argue, inevitable, such voter priorities might be. Even people who are hardly news junkies are hearing about abortion rights being lost, hearing about Republican authoritarianism (via the January 6 hearings), hearing about mass shootings enabled by Republican enthusiasm for limitless gun rights, and hearing about the continued lawlessness of Donald Trump, who as the de facto leader of the Republican Party casts a significant influence on voters’ ideas of the GOP. (I mentioned the idea of synergy earlier, and I would speculate here that the synergy between the resumed January 6 hearings in September and continued revelations of Trumpian lawlessness that continues through the present day may well add up to more than the sum of their parts in public consciousness. Not only will this keep the threat of Trump front and center, it will remind voters of how the GOP as a whole has willfully tied itself to this criminal and want-to-be despot.)

Faced with such extraordinary evidence of a GOP gone off the rails of mainstream American politics, it’s logical that people would want the GOP’s opponents to demonstrate that they offer a real contrasting choice in the upcoming election. Significantly, in his piece about Ryan, Sargent notes a recent NBC News poll of registered voters that shows “threat to democracy” ranking as high as cost of living and the economy as the most important issue facing the United States. With the cautionary note that we don’t want to make too much of a single poll, such a finding makes sense in our current political situation. Not only is the Republican drive towards authoritarianism resulting in measurable, easily viewed restrictions to basic constitutional rights, but the Democratic Party has also helped highlight this GOP lawlessness via the January 6 hearings earlier in the summer.

Being surprised by a shift in voter sentiment that reflects fears about the fate of democracy means being surprised that millions of Americans are actually patriotic citizens who believe the rhetoric and ideals that all of us have heard throughout our lives. If there is one cardinal sin the Democrats have committed over the recent past, it’s underestimating the commitment of Democratic voters, as well as the American majority, to a national ideal of actual freedom and equality that’s deeply at odds with the constrained GOP vision of a country dominated by white, Christian Americans. Again, this is not to say that defense of democracy is the only issue Democratic voters are concerned with — but it is to say that the vast majority of them are smart enough to understand that everything they might want their government to accomplish, from the economy to the environment to health care — will come to naught if our basic political freedoms and rights are not protected. Most people instinctively see the connection between being able to vote for state legislators, and whether their state legislature passes laws protecting or banning abortion. This is just democracy 1A.

Which brings me back to a point that you have heard from me again and again over the last several years: The Democratic Party must make clear to the public that it’s the sole major party in the U.S. committed to democracy and the broad set of freedoms backed by an overwhelming majority of Americans, and be unafraid to name the GOP as the party of racism, revolt, and misogny. Certainly after the attempted coup by Donald Trump and the GOP’s subsequent continuation of his insurrection up through the present day — this time enabled less by marauding Proud Boys and more by voter suppression, gerrymandering, and a corrupt Supreme Court — the national interest and Democrats’ partisan interests are closely aligned.

I would argue that the recent sea change in support for Democrats is a strong endorsement of the idea that the way forward through our current crisis of democracy is to emphasize the conflict between a democratically-minded Democratic Party and an increasingly fascistic GOP, and to make clear that in this conflict, the Democratic Party embodies the values and aspirations of a decisive American majority. I think we are seeing this in how the post-Dobbs abortion fight is playing out, where arguably the single greatest threat to Democratic prospects in November would be for the party not to commit wholeheartedly to restoring abortion rights should they be returned to power in November. There is no bipartisan solution possible on abortion rights; rather, the path forward involves beating the GOP as thoroughly as possible and using that victory to reinstate rights that the radical Republicans on the Supreme Court took away in a fit of religious fury and contempt for America’s women.

President Biden’s executive order on college debt offers a less dramatic but similar lesson on the importance of drawing a clear contrast with the GOP, even if it means courting conflict with the Republicans. While Biden’s decision was far from the wholesale cancellation of college loans that many advocates had pressed for, it clearly constitutes a blow in favor of many Americans not generally prioritized by the federal government. For instance, the $20,000 debt relief for Pell grant recipients ensures that lower-income and minority Americans get substantial relief from exploitative loans, and the cap on payments at 5% of income helps balance out the fact that many millions of Americans will still carry tens of thousands of dollars in college debt even after this order.

But to hear the Republicans describe it, the president’s decision was actually a handout to Yale and Harvard law and medical school graduates, practically designed as a poke in the eye of working class people who never went to college in the first place. The success of this line of attack, though, depends on literally millions and millions of Americans actually ignoring their own lived experience of having their debt burdens relieved — including those of working-class people whose technical degree debts have also been lightened or discharged by the president’s action. Perhaps it’s less dramatic than the fight for abortion rights, but the GOP has equally placed itself at odds with the reality of American majority opinion and lived experience, this time in favor of a Scrooge-like mentality that insists that countless Americans who sought higher educations are actually ne’er-do-well spendthrifts who should count themselves lucky that we don’t have debtors’ prisons in this country.

Putting aside the basic justness of freeing people from loans that straitened their life prospects, it’s hard to see the Republicans as the political winners in this matter, which required that Biden draw a clear contrast between Democratic Party values and those of the GOP.  Yes, the decision created conflict and an impression that Biden was working against his bipartisan bona fides; but the conflict actually created the outcome of demonstrating GOP weakness and immorality, as well as the impression that Biden acted out of a pro-worker, pro-freedom basis supported by an American majority (even if Americans who did not receive debt relief might still be conflicted about the appropriateness of the decision). Sure, many people may not agree with Biden’s decision; but the Republican response has exposed the GOP once again as the party of plutocrats and big banks against the American majority.  The conflict was worth it!

I don’t doubt that the strains of caution and a wish to maintain bipartisan appeals among the Democratic leadership will continue to make themselves heard, as the party debates the best strategy leading into the midterms. But reality itself — including the GOP’s unmistakable turn to authoritarianism and its implementation of radical abortion restrictions that shred long-established rights — will continue to push the Democrats to make their contrasting views clear, even as voters bear witness to GOP radicalization and demand that the Democrats protect their threatened rights by protecting American democracy. This is a tremendous tailwind for Democrats heading into November, and they need to fight their lingering instincts towards conciliation, and instead get to work on transforming that tailwind into a fearsome transcontinental jet stream.

A Climate Showdown in the Caribbean

As the United States, after inexcusably long delays, finally begins to make a real downpayment on fighting climate change with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, an important piece out from ProPublica shines a light on the struggles of our near-neighbors to cope with the catastrophic changes that are already underway. Describing Barbados’ attempts to simultaneously cope with climate-related damage while also struggling with onerous debts, it’s a timely reminder that our moral responsibilities to mitigate global warming don’t stop at the U.S. border, and that the IRA must be the start of a wave of further investment and justice-minded reforms.

Like many of its Caribbean neighbors, Barbados finds itself trapped in an increasingly untenable cycle, in which climate change-related storms and flooding cause massive economic damage, which requires these countries to take on even more debt for the sake of reconstruction, the repayment of which drains funds from measures that might mitigate damage from future storms.  Author Abrahm Lustgarten writes:

The warming planet has turned this into a self-perpetuating cycle: Were it not for the disasters worsened by climate change, much of the region’s debt might not exist in the first place. Jamaica’s debt, for example, can be tied to the response to Hurricane Gilbert more than three decades ago. Grenada’s is in part because of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Dominica’s 2017 loss, relative to its GDP, was the equivalent of a $44 trillion hit to the U.S. economy.

Truly hideous is the underlying reality that countries like Jamaica and Grenada are paying the human and financial cost for climate change they have had a negligible role in creating. As Lustgarten writes, “Caribbean nations are being asked, in a sense, to pay not only their own debts but the rest of the world’s debts, too, for all the progress it made while leaving the Caribbean behind.”

The piece is a great crash course on the world of sovereign debt and the role of finance capital in making money off the legacy of colonialism; what can be dry and abstract economic analysis takes on a far more urgent and accessible quality as Lustgarten relates it to the climate dangers facing Caribbean nations. In particular, the story of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s efforts to renegotiate her country’s debts, so that they take account of the increasing number of natural disaster her nation is going to face, is both heroic and I think likely to be historical, a crucial battle in the fight to shake off the shackles of neo-colonialism and reform the self-destructive, profit-at-any-cost mentality of finance capital.  

To its great credit, the lens of the reporting is wide enough to contemplate the long-term end game of this collision between the functioning of capital markets and the basic survival needs of dozens of Caribbean nations. In particular, it makes clear that there are profound and inescapable moral dimensions to what many corporations would prefer to think of as abstract business transactions between borrowers and lenders. There is much to chew on in Lustgarten’s assessment:

There is an argument to be made, though, that the loss of the money owed is a minimal price in the context of the profit that has been made, and that there is justice to this form of mercy. BlackRock, for example, is now among the largest holders of Barbados’ publicly traded debt, having purchased large blocks of it once Sequeda and the creditors settled. Consider what BlackRock, which is also the largest global financier of the oil-and-gas industry, has earned directly from the processes that have caused climate warming.

In a capitalist society, it is fair to ask why anyone should get anything free. But Barbados and the countries of the Caribbean are paying a tangible price now in lives and in dollars because of the emissions of wealthier nations. Perhaps the suggestion that lenders forgive debt isn’t about kindness but about obligation — about seeing it as a kind of back tax that they owe to society and to front-line societies, in particular.

It is difficult to come away from this report without a renewed appreciation for the inexorable moral logic of debt forgiveness for countries like Barbados, and of the necessity for radically reforming systems of power and capital that have led so many of the world’s countries to the brink of disaster, both in environmental and financial terms. Given the U.S.’s central role in supporting the current framework that leads to hopeless debt loads and underfunded climate mitigation in so many nations, we clearly need a far more public and vigorous discussion here of whether this country’s higher priority is to protect the profits of finance capital or the lives of our fellow human beings.

Democratic Leadership's "See No Evil" Stance Is Increasingly Untenable

In a recent issue of his newsletter, Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler calls out what might initially seem like merely a curious misstatement by President Biden a few weeks ago, as he was giving a speech that touched on the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Speaking of Donald Trump’s role that day, Biden remarked that:

The Capitol police, the DC metropolitan police, other law enforcement agencies were attacked and assaulted before our very eyes, speared, sprayed, stomped on, brutalized and lives were lost. And for three hours, the defeated former president of the United States watched it all happen as he sat in the comfort of the private dining room next to the Oval Office. While he was doing that, brave law enforcement officer subject to the medieval hell for three hours, dripping in blood, surrounded by carnage.

Face to face with a crazed mob that believed the lies of a defeated president. The police were heroes that day. Donald Trump lacked the courage to act. The brave women and men in blue all across this nation should never forget that. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro cop. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro democracy. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro American. [Italics added]

Amid this strong condemnation of the events of January 6, the assertion that “Trump lacked the courage to act” sticks out like a sore thumb; it is, in fact, a complete reversal of what happened on that day. The January 6 hearings have established that the former president “proved that he directed the attack, fueled it as it was ongoing, and let it play out until it was clear it had failed.” Beutler writes:

That is a big and important distinction! [. . .] The truth is far worse and necessitates a totally different response. Trump wasn’t frozen. He wasn’t indifferent. He was gratified! The proper way to alert voters about what happened isn’t to attack Trump as a coward or even to try to divide the GOP into pro-cop and pro-insurrection factions. It’s to state the truth plainly: Donald Trump organized the largest violent assault on police in U.S. history and Republicans have unified around covering it up.

Chalking the prolonged violence up to Trump panicking absolves his abettors, with a version of events that they’ll still reject because they actually support the insurrection. The place to drive the wedge isn’t between the GOP and Trump, it’s between the lot of them and the national anti-1/6 supermajority.

Now, I don’t actually think (and I don’t think that Beutler thinks) that Joe Biden is somehow not aware of the January 6 committee findings. In particular, it strains credulity to think he’s not cognizant of Trump’s role in inciting and encouraging the mob that stormed the Capitol, or that Trump saw it as an instrument for disrupting finalization of the 2020 election results. And so, as Beutler suggests, painting Donald Trump as a coward is best seen a political stratagem, to encourage other Republican politicians to not be cowards like Donald Trump — instead, to be brave, and to stand up in defense of democracy. But as Beutler points out, the basic problem is that much of the GOP “actually support the insurrection,” and that it would be better to divide the insurrectionary GOP from the large majority of Americans who actually support democracy.  

So I agree that Biden’s odd phrasing isn’t insignificant at all; rather, it helps illuminate the degree to which Democratic leaders remain in denial about the lack of meaningful difference between Trump’s insurrection of January 6 and the Republican Party’s decision to continue that insurrection by embracing the Big Lie of a stolen election and moving forward with a multi-front plan to subvert future votes. Most GOP politicians have already made a choice to undermine future elections, via voter suppression, disinformation, sabotage of nonpartisan election oversight roles, and threats of violence. The problem is not that Joe Biden let Trump or the GOP off the hook amid an otherwise strong condemnation of the January 6 insurrection; it’s that his comments reflect a broader Democratic leadership failure to come to terms with the threat posed by the current Republican Party and the reactionary social movement that is helping fuel the GOP's radicalization.

***

Donald Trump’s presidency made many millions of conservatives fully aware of the idea that it might be possible to actually make their preferences the law of the land, even against the will of the majority, if they would only be collectively bold enough to attack and destroy the democracy that stands in their way. Before Trump, the collective right-wing imagination was still somewhat limited in its ambition, seeing its objectives more in the vein of slowly gnawing away at the major structures of democracy, by means such as gerrymandering and voter suppression. But by staging a violent attempted coup, accompanied by a mass disinformation campaign to convince millions of Republican voters that a sinister Democratic plot had robbed them all of victory, Trump vastly widened the range of tools it is conceivable and acceptable to use, and made the possibility of final victory not a gradual goal but an imminent thing, shimmering on the near-horizon, there for the taking for those strong enough to do so. In particular, by introducing mass political violence as a tool of anti-democratic politics, Trump showed how close it could bring an authoritarian movement to victory; for did he not come agonizingly near to disrupting the election certification and moving the country into a state of constitutional crisis that he could have well used to his advantage?

But not only did Trump lay the groundwork for future violence, the violence itself helped clear space for a whole range of other anti-democratic strategies, from the mass GOP embrace of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, to the widespread tactic of replacing honest election officials with partisan hacks willing to throw future votes to the GOP, to pushing gerrymandering to new extremes in order to secure state GOP governments from voter backlash and accountability.  

As Dana Milbank argues in a recent opinion piece, the GOP’s embrace of authoritarianism has been decades in the making, so that Donald Trump should rightly be seen as the logical culmination of pre-existing currents in American society and politics. But while Milbank traces the roots of our current crisis to the advent of Newt Gingrich and his scorched earth politics, the rage of conservative Christians, blue-collar white Americans, and other elements of the conservative movement currently burning up our politics trace back even further, to what they see as the abomination of the civil rights, women’s liberation, and gay rights movements and the increasing secularization of American society — with all of these resentments simultaneously amplified by an economy whose inequalities, their politicians and right-wing media have long told them, were caused not by the bottomless greed of business executives and the inequities of American capitalism, but by these very same minority groups whose growing power they already loathed.

This is the daunting reality that the Democratic Party leadership appears unwilling to face — the existence of a mass (yet minoritarian) movement that is now essentially at war with American democracy and society. And so the idea that American democracy might be saved by turning enough Republicans against Donald Trump catastrophically miscalculates the degree to which not only the GOP, but the larger social and business interests propelling it, are the true threat to the rest of us; that Donald Trump was the inheritor of the worst aspects of the GOP, and now that he has been cast out of office, the GOP has eagerly picked up the tools he engineered and the hatreds he amplified, twisting them into new, fascistic weaponry against our government and society.

As political scientist Thomas Zimmer writes in a recent column for The Guardian, the conflict between this reactionary movement and the American majority simply can’t be resolved by the usual workings of democracy:

There’s no appeasing those who are behind the reactionary crusade, no bargain or truce to be had. The refusal to compromise with the vision of multiracial pluralism, with anyone who deviates from their idea of the natural and/or divinely ordained order, is at the heart of their political project. They are not looking for a consolation prize, partial victories, or an exit ramp. They will keep going – until and unless they are stopped.

The current situation necessarily marks a turning point. It is a veritable crisis because it will have to be resolved, one way or the other. America will either overcome this reactionary counter-mobilization and make the leap to multiracial, pluralistic democracy – or the country will regress, and let democracy perish before it’s ever been fully achieved in this land.

Now, let me pause and note that it’s overall a very good thing that pro-democracy, pro-modernity Democratic politicians generally lack the extremism and absolutism of their Republican counterparts — this, after all, is part of being democratically-inclined. You can admit errors, change your mind based on evidence, and lose today with the idea that you might win tomorrow.  But on the question of whether the United States remains a democracy, or whether it gets pulled into a sort of Christian, white supremacist authoritarianism, there are no shades of grey, only black and white.  Either the majority rules, or it does not. 

There are dozens, even hundreds, of distinct ways that we can and must roll back this authoritarian movement, but they must all begin with the recognition that such a movement exists in the first place. Remarks like those in Biden’s recent speech at worst suggest that even the president of the United States doesn’t grasp the challenge before us, and so can’t be counted on to fight the necessary fight. At best, such a watering down of the threat posed by the GOP suggests an unwillingness to talk straight with the American majority and to instead promote unrealistic and indeed damaging notions of the sort of common purpose achievable with a political opposition that doesn’t share the same basic premises for American democracy and society. It is language that demobilizes rather than mobilizes the American majority. A continued emphasis on finding compromise with politicians who don’t want our votes to count, who favor the lives of imaginary babies over actual women, who see non-white Americans as less than human and gay Americans as worthy of contempt, and who view violence as a legitimate means for gaining and holding power, will only lead to further chaos and disaster. We need Democratic leaders to clarify the stakes, not to obscure them; to mobilize the pro-democracy American majority, not feed it pablum about a redeemable GOP.  

As Zimmer notes, the authoritarian movement propelling the radicalized GOP will keep going until it’s stopped. I think this gets to the heart of the Democratic leadership’s misjudgment of our current political era. Democrats are still of the mindset that they are competing with the Republican Party under a stable democratic framework; that the GOP is an equally legitimate partner in governance, and that its ascension to power would be followed at some point by future Democratic victories. Unfortunately, the GOP can no longer be counted on to give up power once it holds it. Beyond Donald Trump’s depraved coup attempt and the retroactive endorsement it has gained from so many Republican politicians, one need look no further than states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Texas, where gerrymandering has resulted in impregnable Republican majorities no matter the will of the voters; such unassailable power has in turn fed increasing radicalization among GOP politicians, as they no longer fear being cast out of office by angry citizens. In other words, in great swathes of the country, Democratic voters are already seeing their rights stripped away, and their states transformed into “laboratories of autocracy,” to borrow David Pepper’s memorable phrasing, with nothing near an adequate response by Democrats in Washington to protect democracy at the state level. Such will be the future for the entire country if this movement isn’t stopped. In the face of such an overwhelming challenge, Democrats need to transform their mindset, from the goal of competing with the Republican Party, to discrediting and destroying it in its current incarnation.

A Turning of the Tide

Although we’ve learned over the last year and a half that caution is always warranted where imminent Democratic legislation is concerned, the current glide path of the Inflation Reduction Act is a cause for optimism, not cynical commentary about how it will surely be blown up at the last minute. On the one hand, the inclusion of hundreds of billions of dollars to combat climate change should be seen as a triumph of science, reason, and the tireless efforts of those involved in pushing this existential issue to the political forefront. Writing about those who have fought to prioritize global warming, climate activist Bill McKibben reminds us that “this is a win engineered by everyone who ever wrote a letter to the editor, carried a sign at a march, went to jail blocking a pipeline, voted to divest a university endowment, sent ten dollars to a climate group, made their book club read a climate book. It’s for the climate justice activists who brought this fight into whole new terrain, the scientists who’ve protested, the policy wonks who wonked, and the people whose particular fights may have been sacrificed by the terms of this deal.” McKibben also makes the broader point that the entire zeitgeist around climate has evolved, so that “there’s no longer a real public doubt about climate change [. . .] the public mood is finally strong enough to at least begin to match the political power of the fossil fuel industry.” Whatever the ultimate fate of the IRA (and god I hope it passes), the ability of climate legislation to perpetually revive and fight on like some sort of benign Schwarzenegger Terminator (Gaia edition) is well worth being cheered by, and deriving hope from.

McKibben and others observers have also been pointing out the clear ways that environmental legislation, once it begins to be implemented, will start to build support for further action. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes that, “As long as serious climate policy was a proposal, not a reality, it was vulnerable to attacks from right-wingers portraying it as a nefarious plan to undermine the American way of life. But those attacks will become less effective once people start to see the real-world effects of climate action (which is why the right is so frantic about trying to block this legislation). If Democrats can pass this bill, the chances of additional action in the future will rise, perhaps sharply.” In a similar vein, McKibben outlines the various knock-on effects of passing the IRA, which include more momentum for international climate cooperation, fresh federal funding for state and local climate efforts, and further legislation (perhaps encouraged by the green energy sectors that will become more politically powerful as a result of this bill).  

Let’s be clear — the climate provisions in the IRA represent merely a down payment on combatting climate change. The reductions in comparison with the defunct Build Back Better legislation amount to something like 75% of what the BBB Act would have achieved. The importance of continuing to press all levers of power to create rapid reductions in carbon emissions is as high as ever; the emergency is still upon us. But just as the climate has now changed to the point that disruptions are evident in the lives of millions of Americans, so that the issue seems real in a way that can’t be denied, so the IRA will change the reality of what is understood as possible in American politics. The fight is on to continue marginalizing the deniers, the do-nothings, the Christian dominionists, the oil CEOs and natural gas profiteers as the fantasists that they are, out of touch with the world as it is, and to build an enduring American majority that prioritizes actual life on earth over dreams of ill-gotten profit and self-destructive exploitation of the natural world. 

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.