In Aftermath of Pelosi Attack, Democrats Duck a Necessary Confrontation with GOP Incitement of Violence

The apparent attempt to assassinate Nancy Pelosi last week is yet another sign that the United States faces a de facto insurrection against our democracy from the Republican Party, the revanchist movement it represents, and the violent actors it inspires. The refusal of the Democratic Party to talk about this violent anti-democratic movement as such, and the media’s automatic insistence on presenting increasing incidents of right-wing violence as a “both side do it” problem, indicate that neither institution is close to fully grappling with the depth of a political crisis rooted in GOP authoritarianism, or with their proper roles in responding to it.

Among other thing, the attempt, which ended with a far-right extremist taking a hammer to the head of Pelosi’s husband, should be seen in the context of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and Donald Trump’s broader coup attempt against the United States — as the latest chapter in an ongoing insurrection to overthrow American democracy by a combination of violent and legalistic means. The connection couldn’t be more direct — just as rioters at the Capitol shouted out for “Nancy,” with plans afoot to kill the Democratic leader, Pelosi’s would-be assassin shouted “Where is Nancy?” before attacking Paul Pelosi.

The basic brokenness of the media coverage is evidenced by the fact that this event simply has not dominated the headlines in accordance with its import; as David Roberts predicted, it’s become a one- to two-day story. Instead, the murder attempt has been subsumed into observations about the increase of violent threats against members of Congress, regardless of party. As one New York Times piece notes, of charges filed against those who threatened members of Congress, about a third were by Republicans or Trump supporters, and a fourth were by Democrats. But while we absolutely should not dismiss the reality of threats coming from Democrats as well as Republicans, a broad media default to talking about the “rise of political violence,” as if it is a problem equally common to both parties, is simply misleading. Only one party includes politicians who regularly dehumanize their opponents; only one party encompasses a universe of media outlets and pundits who routinely incite violence against the Democratic Party and its constituents; only one party has made common cause with far-right militias whose very existence is based in the violent overthrow of the United States government; only one party has rallied around a former president who committed a violent coup attempt against American democracy. It’s far too narrow a measure to look at threats against members of Congress; for when we widen our lens to take in the scope of violent political activity across American politics, the great majority of it is coming from the right, in a way that is increasingly systematic and integral to the right-wing’s hopes of rolling back the last 50 or 100 years of American social, racial, gender, and economic progress.

But while it’s disappointing to see this level of media failure, it’s not surprising, given that it’s on a continuum with the studied refusal to choose a side in the existential fight for democracy that we all lived through during the Trump years, and have subsequently experienced during the first two years of the Biden presidency as well. In other words, it’s nothing new, despite the hopes of many that there would have been more evolution, at least in the aftermath of January 6.

More puzzling to me is the obvious institutional decision by the Democratic Party not to foreground this assassination attempt as part of making a larger case against the GOP’s “ultra MAGA” or “semi-fascist” turn (to echo terms used by the White House in recent months). While there are obvious risks to such a tactic — among them, the counter-argument could be made that the would-be assassin was mentally ill and not a fully self-aware political actor, or that the Democrats were engaging in desperate opportunism in the closing days of the midterm campaign — there are also enormous benefits to pointing to a concrete example of the malevolent, murderous level of anti-democratic and anti-Democratic hatred that is now at the center of Republican politics. At a very basic level, how can we expect Democrats to defend America when they cannot even bring themselves to fully denounce the Republican rhetoric and incitement to violence that created this atmosphere in which an assassination attempt against their third-highest official was not only likely, but nearly inevitable? As some stories have pointed out, such as this one in the Washington Post, Pelosi has long been “a target of the collective rage, conspiratorial thinking and overt misogyny that have marked the party’s hard-right turn in recent years.”

Part of the problem is that to date the Democrats have not been making a strong case against GOP and right-wing incitement to violence, so that they were not able to immediately point to the attempted Pelosi assassination as further confirming evidence that they had been speaking the truth about the GOP threat. Instead, were they to make a point of calling out GOP rhetoric and strategies as the necessary preconditions for this attack, it would indeed run the risk of looking opportunistic, given the proximity of the November elections. This isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make a stand now — I think it would be — but to point out the importance of making a consistent, long-term case that the GOP is the party of violence. Beyond just being a crucial and accurate way to communicate the dangerous state of American politics and make clear what side the two parties respectively stand on, this would also prepare the Democrats to encourage a righteous backlash against the GOP whenever political violence occurs — which should be a key strategy in breaking the GOP’s sinister political momentum.

At this point, it should be clear that the GOP’s encouragement of violent rhetoric and violence won’t just stop on its own, since it’s reflective of the current nature of the Republican Party and the forces energizing it. Sure, Republicans might think, perhaps such talk also encourages a few crazy Democrats to threaten Republican members of Congress — but is this really too big a price to pay for the benefits of driving honest election officials out of their jobs, making Americans afraid to attend civil rights protests lest they be attacked by Proud Boys, and helping create a sense that America is beset by crime and violence that a self-declared party of law and order is quite happy to take advantage of?  

Another way of saying this is that the GOP has no incentive to stop encouraging violence, because encouraging violence is working for them. And a big part of the reason it’s working for them is that the Democrats have been unwilling to take a concerted stand that makes the GOP pay a political price for it. This, to me, sometimes feels like the single most frustrating fact of American politics. You can see it playing out in the aftermath of the attack on Paul Pelosi. Democrats are basically lamenting GOP rhetoric, and in some cases calling on Republican politicians to dial back their inciting language — which of course the GOP politicians refuse to do, because why would they ever apologize for something they actually believe in, or would want to show weakness to their base by backing down?

In the face of this, Democrats should draw the logical conclusion — that the GOP fully stands by its incitement of violence — and instead start talking nonstop about the GOP’s encouragement of mayhem and murder as basic facts about the party that every American should be aware of. Not incidentally, this would also have some chance of changing the current dynamic in which media largely refuse to take a clear stand on GOP incitement. The point, though, is not simply to hack away at the GOP’s credibility and legitimacy by tying the party to violent rhetoric in the abstract, but by also making the broader point that the violent rhetoric is the inevitable outcome of a party that has been overtaken by the most retrograde elements of American society, and that seeks to remake American politics in its cracked image. Just as violent rhetoric and outright violence serve the GOP by accomplishing what the party can’t achieve by democratic means, calling out this violence is a way of illustrating for the American people how backwards and unpopular the Republican Party’s agenda actually is.

Of course, keeping Republican incitement under public focus won’t be sufficient on its own to rally support for the Democrats. The party must also tie the Republicans’ violent rhetoric with their efforts to subvert elections, which ties into the GOP’s broader opposition to policies that most Americans support, from Social Security and affordable health care to the rights to unionize and marry who you love. The GOP seeks to promote mayhem because it has already lost so many of the battles for what sort of future most Americans want. The Democrats should point to Republican insurrectionism as not just intrinsically bad, but as a glaring indication that the GOP has lost faith in its ability to offer attractive policies that appeal to a majority of Americans.

The War Whose Outcome Could Depend on the Midterm Elections

Though it’s not at the top of most voters’ radar, the upcoming midterm elections could play a decisive role in whether Ukraine is able to continue repelling Russia’s invasion.  At the moment, Ukraine seems to have momentum in the fight, in significant part due to extensive arms deliveries from the United States and its allies. But as Greg Sargent discusses in a recent The Plum Line post, congressional Republicans are indicating they may well reduce or even cut off U.S. aid should the GOP regain control of the House of Representatives.

Although a majority of House Republicans have thus far supported aid to Ukraine, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently commented that a GOP-led House would not write a “blank check” for Ukraine aid. Sargent rightly points out that this isn’t just an idle threat, and that current GOP support for Ukraine could change quickly. Sargent writes that it’s politically naive of White House advisors to think that the GOP would fear the possibility of setting itself for blame should a U.S. arms cutoff be followed by Ukrainian defeat, and that the GOP would simply place the blame on Biden.

But I would push this line of thinking a step further, and point to the great incentives the GOP has for derailing the U.S.’s assistance to Ukraine if they could then pin any resulting turning of the tide on President Biden. I think the question is better posed as, “Why wouldn’t they do this?” After all, Trumpist elements of the GOP already avow sympathy for Vladimir Putin; most glaringly, the former president quite possibly owed his election to Russian intervention, and his consistent deference to the Russian leader throughout his term is well documented. And as Sargent observes, “Democrats need to take seriously the idea that a kind of pro-Russia axis, or at least an axis loosely allied with what you might call a developing right-wing authoritarian Internationale of autocrats, strongmen and illiberal democracies, is taking hold inside the GOP.” The first impeachment of Donald Trump should have established that the current Republican Party places party loyalty over national interest, having defended the president against his subversion of U.S. foreign policy for the sake of his re-election effort. I have no doubt there are sufficient incentives for a GOP House to stick the shiv in Ukraine if they thought it would hurt Joe Biden.

This is a big deal, because a persuasive case can be made that Ukraine has become the front line in a globalized struggle between a growing authoritarian movement and a democratic world rocked by covid, economic inequality, climate change, and fears of immigration and demographic change. Such is the case that historian Timothy Snyder made in a recent essay published in Foreign Affairs. And in a follow-up piece to the Plum Line post mentioned above, Sargent interviews Snyder about U.S. support for Ukraine and the threat of a Republican cut-off of aid. Snyder offers a cautiously optimistic view of the war, suggesting that Ukraine is “on the verge of winning,” and that similarly, the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism could be at a tipping point in democracy’s favor. But even at a more granular level, Snyder describes how the war in serving the United States’ concrete foreign policy interests:

By pinning down the Russian army and substantially weakening it, they are weakening China’s cat’s paw, which is Russia. By showing how difficult it is to carry out this kind of invasion, Ukraine is making the scenario for war with China — a Chinese invasion of Taiwan — much less likely. 

I would also add that we should not forget Russia’s attempts to intervene in the 2016 election, which have never been properly addressed or punished by the United States. I don’t think this country has ever fully grappled with the seriousness of Russia’s election subversion, which arguably amounted to an act of war against American democracy. Everything that has happened since 2016 has confirmed that Russia is a threat to global stability and the prospects for democracy, with Vladimir Putin acting as a sort of white Christian leadership figure for neo-fascist movements in Europe and the United States.

To date, I think the Biden administration has recognized the stakes in supporting Ukrainian sovereignty against Russia’s invasion, brutality, and terroristic violence against civilians, which includes mass murder, the kidnapping of Ukrainians, and the targeting of utility infrastructure like power plants. Unlike American folly in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. engaged in fruitless invasions that destabilized the region, this is a case of the United States pretty clearly standing in defense of democracy and against authoritarianism.

For these reasons, it was disturbing to read this letter to President Biden signed by 30 liberal House Democrats that seemed to suggest the United States is on an unsustainable path in its support for Ukraine; let us hope that the signatories’ retraction of the letter just 24 hours later, amid reports that the letter was not meant to be released and was actually written months ago, signals their lack of support for its content. The missive urged President Biden “to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire, and to “engage in direct talks with Russia.”

Coming bare weeks out from a close midterm election, such a message would have strengthened the hand of far-right Republicans critical of Ukraine aid, and could have emboldened the GOP into opposing further aid should the party regain the House. To her credit, Representative and letter signer Pramila Jayapal acknowledged this possibility, stating today that, “The proximity of these statements created the unfortunate appearance that Democrats, who have strongly and unanimously supported and voted for every package of military, strategic, and economic assistance to the Ukrainian people, are somehow aligned with Republicans who seek to pull the plug on American support for President Zelensky and the Ukrainian forces.”

Most of the time, representatives like Jayapal, Jamie Raskin, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez speak of policies and values that deeply resonate with The Hot Screen’s world view. But with this letter, in both its noxious timing and its pessimistic prognostications of a long war that is not worth the cost, they engaged in both a political and policy foul. This letter never should have seen the light of day. I am deeply curious to learn more details about what led to this letter’s original drafting and dissemination now, because it strikes me as just a really, really bad idea, even outside the snafu of its one-day cycle of release and retraction.

It's the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Three-Way Oregon Gubernatorial Showdown

If recent polls showing a neck and neck race between the GOP and Democratic gubernatorial candidates had not already galvanized Oregon Democrats, a new story out this weekend about the Republican push to take back the state Senate via huge infusions of campaign cash should act as a defibrillator to the hearts of party rank and file. Over the past decades, the Democratic Party has steadily increased its hold on power in the state, to the point that it achieved a supermajority in the house in recent years that provided it with additional legislative heft, while also holding a majority in the senate. No Republican has been governor since 1978; in 2020, the state went for Joe Biden by 16 points.

But it’s not just that the same adverse national winds over economic concerns and the direction of the country are handicapping Democrats’ prospects in the state. In the governor’s race, the Republican candidate, Christine Drazan, has pulled into a dead heat with Democrat Tina Kotek in large part because former legislator (and former Democrat) Betsy Johnson is also vying for the governorship. Beyond this, Kotek is likely suffering headwinds due to the unpopularity of outgoing Governor Kate Brown, who has been rated as the least popular governor in the nation (a standing that traces back in turn to political battles tied to her handling of the covid pandemic). And for voters disillusioned with Brown’s tenure, Kotek is likely not helped by her solid position in the state’s Democratic political establishment — she’s been speaker of the House for the last 10 years, making her the longest-serving speaker in Oregon history.

As The New York Times reports, the Democrats are also being hindered by the massive amounts of cash Nike co-founder Phil Knight has given first to Johnson’s and now Drazan’s campaign, as Knight has recently determined that Johnson is not likely to prevail. Nike is Oregon’s largest company, and Knight clearly feels a billionaire’s proprietary interest in the state, including keeping the taxes levied on billionaires as low as possible. 

But apart from these factors, Kotek is also running up against deep public concerns about crime, safety, and homelessness in the state — concerns that are largely focused on Oregon’s largest city, Portland. Indeed, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that both Drazan’s and Johnson’s bids for governor are based in significant part in running against the city of Portland as much as against the Democrats themselves, appealing both to fact-based and conjured fears of the city.  As the state’s only large urban area, and with the greater Portland metropolitan area home to two and a half million people, the city possesses an exaggerated dual existence — home to the lived experience of much of the population, and the object of resentment, fear, and desire for the other half. It’s a split the that echoes in amplified form the rural-urban divide found in various permutations throughout the United States.

But running against Portland has great advantages for those willing to turn Oregonians against each other, exploit economic and cultural resentment, and entertain racist fear-mongering. Like much of the nation, the city has experienced an uptick in crimes of various kinds over the last few years; homicides are at record highs, with the city hitting 92 killings last year, and it’s on track to surpass that number in 2022. A hugely disproportionate share of those deaths have afflicted the city’s African -American community; though Blacks make up 6% of the city’s population, they’ve suffered almost half the killings over the past year. Simultaneously, the city has experienced serious and highly visible homelessness for years now, a situation that worsened and became even more visible during the covid pandemic and its aftermath. Even as long-term but slow-moving initiatives are underway to house the houseless (including a $600 million-plus county building program approved by voters in 2018), the city has continued a pointless wack-a-mole exercise against homeless encampments, shutting down camps without providing long-term housing to those displaced, so that the whole cruel process of rousting the impoverished is simply repeated again and again over weeks, months, and years. For much of the voting public, the daily sights of chaos and suffering have become tied to fears around personal safety and increased crime.

There is also a not-insignificant aspect to the Portland story that ties back to the 2020 protests against police violence and racism, which fed a vision throughout the state that the city is a zone of anarchy, and which did indeed amplify the sense of abandonment and danger of the downtown area, which was already void of its usual foot traffic and activity due to the covid pandemic. In the aftermath of the protests, the Portland Police Department has fallen below its previous levels of staffing, leading to the city having one of the lowest number of police per capita of major American cities. The lack of police staffing has in turn led to increased police response times (if they respond at all), which both in practical and psychological terms contributes to a public perception that the city is in a state of semi-lawlessness.  

So while the many Oregonians who live in the Portland area have material reasons to lack their former enthusiasm for the local and Democratic leaders who they hold responsible for the state of the city, non-Portlanders are receptive to appeals by conservative politicians to protect the state from the contagion of Portland’s troubles. But when one stops to consider the relative poverty and lack of economic development in much of the rest of Oregon compared to the Portland metropolitan area, you begin to understand the useful function such scapegoating holds for those Republican politicians who represent areas of the state that face analogous challenges of drug addiction, rising crime, and economic hardship. It is all-too-convenient to tell voters that you will stand as a guardian against the Gomorrah of Portland when you don’t actually have a plan to bring prosperity to rural Oregon.

But let’s return to the specifics of the current governor’s race and the emboldened GOP in the state. First, I don’t think we can really overstate how much homelessness, and perceptions of elected Democrats’ failure to solve it, is damaging Democratic prospects in Oregon. The Oregonian just released a poll showing that a whopping 94% of Portland voters believe homelessness is a “very big problem.” Such perceptions suggest that Democrats will face challenges in driving the high Portland turnout they will need to put Tina Kotek in the governor’s chair. And outside of Portland, the continuing homelessness crisis supercharges the demonization of Portland, providing fodder for GOP politicians to point to the city as a sign of Democratic governance failure and the dangers awaiting the rest of the state. I would argue that the specter of homelessness is particularly resonant not simply for liberals in Portland who fear for their property values, but equally for less well-off voters in rural Oregon who can all too easily imagine falling down a few more rungs and finding themselves living out of their cars or on the street. It is in some ways the ultimate symbol of economic precarity, a sort of “living dead” state where you are still visible within our society but cast out into a state of maximum vulnerability and deprivation, to the point that even your basic humanity is called into question.

So I am not surprised if homelessness were to play a key roll in driving this supposedly blue state towards the decent possibility of a GOP governorship. On the one hand, it helps generate support among conservative voters (who, to generalize, tend to blame homelessness on the moral shortcomings and addictions of the homeless, and for whom homelessness amplifies fears of crime projected onto Portland).  On the other, it’s at the root of lessened Democratic enthusiasms, as visible evidence of Democratic leaders failing to deal with a very real problem that is also entangled with perceptions of economic malaise and the reality of rising crime — just as GOP politicians scapegoat Portland, some Democratic voters are scapegoating the homeless as the cause (rather than symptom) of real economic and social challenges.

The other factor I’d highlight is the relative openness of some Democrats and independents who previously supported Democrats to countenance voting for a GOP candidate in our age of a radicalized, Trumpified GOP. Part of the reason seems to be Drazan’s at least partially successful attempt to present herself as a moderate Republican; the New York Times points to Maryland Governor Larry Hogan as a GOP politician with a similar approach. But as Willamette University professor Seth Cotlar discusses in an insightful Twitter thread, Drazan is the representative of a state party that has in fact gone far to the right in recent years, with many in the county-level GOP power structure embracing Trump’s big lie of a stolen 2020 election. Cotlar writes that “Drazan is trying to keep the Bundy- and Proud Boy-linked activists and organizations at arms length, but at the county level you'd be hard pressed to find GOP activists willing to denounce election deniers or far right militias. This is Drazan's base.” So Drazan has hardly challenged these insurrectionist factions of her party; in fact, she understands that their support is crucial to her gubernatorial hopes. And as the Oregonian reported last week,

Drazan has made clear she wants to hold onto every possible Republican voter, notably declining to disavow QAnon conspiracy adherent and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jo Rae Perkins.

And in September, Drazan stumped at an event for Republican candidates at which B.J. Soper, who participated in the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and is now a leader of People’s Rights, a far-right group launched by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy, urged the audience to “stand united behind our Republican candidates.” Her campaign also accepted $50,000 from David Gore, a major funder of Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund, which helped pay for the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.

As Cotlar importantly highlights, beyond Drazan’s necessary reliance on the party’s far-right adherents in seeking the governorship, she has also engaged in fear-mongering about Oregon’s well-established mail-in ballot program. Without actual evidence, she has suggested that the state’s system is vulnerable to corruption, and has indicated she would “Establish a permanent task force on election integrity to examine vulnerabilities in our system and make recommendations on how to enhance the security of our elections.” Though couched in anodyne language, Drazan’s suggestion that such a task force is necessary posits a problem where none exists, and feeds the party-wide assault on elections and the ruse that Democrats only win because of fraud. In doing so, she joins the broader Trumpist GOP crusade to undermine public faith in the fairness of election outcomes in the service of a GOP vision of authoritarian, minority rule.

While such aspersions are clearly self-serving for a GOP that has increasingly found itself on the losing end of elections in Oregon, its dangers should quickly come into focus for Oregonians when we stop to consider how close this coming election might be, not to mention that Drazan’s victory would position her to sow further doubts about Oregon’s electoral system and give her the power to attempt to implement “reforms” that actually undermine the state’s citizens right to have their votes count. And as Cotlar points out, in the near term, “The most worrisome scenario is that the 2022 governor's race is very close (thanks to Phil Knight's multi-millions given 1st to a 3rd party spoiler & then to Drazan) and then the right wing militias aligned with the OR GOP grab their guns to "take back" a "stolen election."”

While Oregon Democrats bear their share of responsibility for not hitting Drazan harder on her alignment with some of the worst aspects of the Trumpist GOP and the party’s far-right elements, it’s important to understand that state politicians are ultimately suffering from the failure of national Democrats to tar the entirety of the GOP with the brush of Trumpism. Drazan has political space to claim moderate status because the Democrats haven’t pressed the case that such assertions by moderate Republicans are meaningless when those politicians lack the political clout or moral courage to stand up to the party’s growing authoritarianism, and that such politicians are in fact part of the problem insofar as they help provide a sheen of normalcy to a party that is clearly fueled by racism, misogyny, and a drive to preserve white Christian power at the expense of an increasingly diverse America. Even giving Drazan the maximum benefit of the doubt, and taking her at her word that she would steer a moderate course against the extremism of her own party, how would it make any sense to elect her to serve this role as opposed to a Democrat untainted by association with such craziness?

Georgia On Our Minds

The GOP’s closing of ranks around Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, following reports that the former football player paid for a girlfriend to abort their child and threatened violence against his family, deserves as much attention and explication as the media and the public at large can muster. As others have pointed out, this is not just a case of weapons-grade hypocrisy, coming as it does mere months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the Republican Party dead-set on banning abortion not just in states under its control, but across the entire nation. For a party that claims abortion is murder, the fact that basically every elected Republican official who’s weighed in still supports Walker should hit the voting public with the force of revelation: the GOP’s opposition to abortion is the ultimate long con, rooted not on its supposed claims about the preciousness of microscopic life, but in a determined and repugnant endgame of bringing women’s bodies completely under the control of men.

Indeed, as The Editorial Board’s John Stoehr points out, Republican voters appear to actually welcome and thrill at the fact that Walker has engaged in the very behavior the party supposedly condemned. Stoehr writes, “The scandal tells them that he’s just like them, to wit: standing for a political, legal and moral order that protects us but punishes them. There may be no better way to show group loyalty than by attacking abortion while brushing off one’s history with it.” In other words, far more important than Walker’s hypocrisy is his willingness to engage in behavior for which he simultaneously seeks to punish others. It is an expression of pure power and domination by males, who when it serves their interest are free to encourage behavior (abortion) which they’d otherwise claim is immoral and illegal when chosen independently by a female. And it is equally an expression of GOP power to assert that the law does not apply to upstanding members of the Republican Party.

The way that the GOP has seamlessly absorbed the Walker scandals, and has even strengthened its bonds with the candidate in their wake, should be a wake-up call to the American majority that this far-right party has in its crosshairs. Walker may be a senate candidate for Georgia, but the repercussions of the Republican bad faith that’s on such glaring display should be nationalized. There is no true morality on the right, no capacity to concede disqualifying behavior by candidates so long as they’ve been anointed by Donald Trump. As columnist Will Bunch observes, there is only an obsessive vision with keeping white males at the top of a fundamentally immoral and increasingly discredited racial and gender hierarchy. The Republican Party’s lockstep support of a candidate who defies the party’s most sacred policy positions, but reveals the party’s true nature and intentions, should be seized by Democrats and other defenders of democracy to advance a public discussion of the sordid, misogynistic, and undemocratic nature of the contemporary GOP.

Broken Oath Keepers

As prosecutors begin to make their case against five members of the far-right paramilitary group the Oath Keepers in federal court for their involvement in events around January 6, we are gaining a better understanding of the specious defense those on trial apparently intend to make. In an opening statement summarized by The New York Times, one of the group’s lawyers asserted that the accused “had never planned an attack against the government on Jan. 6. Instead [. . .] the Oath Keepers were waiting for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — a move, they claim, that would have given the group standing as a militia to employ force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.” In other words, the Oath Keepers claim to have been waiting for Donald Trump to essentially declare martial law so that they could then act as a paramilitary enforcer of the president’s coup attempt. The idea that the president’s possible invocation of the Insurrection Act might have magically granted a fascistic militia some sort of legitimacy captures in a nutshell the degree to which Trump and his supporters sought to overthrow American government by force of arms and quasi-legal claims aimed at clouding perceptions of their fundamentally treasonous nature. What makes their defense even more preposterous and self-serving is the basic fact that Oath Keepers participated in the violent assault on the Capitol even in the absence of any fictitious legal cover from the president.

Another detail from this NYT article is worth drawing attention to. It notes that, “Another key aspect of the trial will be the Oath Keepers’ relationship to Mr. Trump, a man they often supported as president despite their traditional antigovernment beliefs. The group, which was founded during the Obama administration to oppose what it saw as an overreaching government, mobilized to defend presidential power once Mr. Trump assumed office and embraced the deep-state conspiracy theories that marked his new administration.” This succinctly captures the fundamental bogosity of so many anti-government militia types — they are hell-bent against big government, until that big government is run by a fellow fascism-inclined individual, in which case they’re all in not only on big government, but big government under strongman rule. Dig a bit deeper, and you can see how this apparent reversal is at least consistent with their white supremacist leanings and will to power, particularly on behalf of white males — if it takes a dictatorship to defend white supremacy, then so be it.

Although the defense strategy of trying to “humanize” the defendants isn’t objectionable in and of itself, the detail that at least three of the five defendants are former members of the U.S. military feels like it could and should seriously harm their defense. It is bad enough to engage in insurrection against the American government; it is even worse when one betrays one’s military oath to defend the country, and employs that military training in service of a project so dark and frankly evil as to make the perpetrators a model of contempt for future generations of Americans.

A Vital Snapshot of Violent Intimidation Against Members of Congress

Recently, The Washington Post published a deeply disturbing article about a campaign of harassment and intimidation that a Seattle man engaged in against Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal. It’s an excellent corrective to the various vague reports we see of rising threats against elected representatives, capturing the menace and personal toll on politicians by focusing on a single incident. By extension, it also hammers home the overriding need to ensure our officials receive sufficient protection, and that the government response to the perpetrators must be swift and effective.

Disconcertingly, the story also captures how very much the wave of intimidation coming from the right takes advantage of and perverts the values of a liberal, open society: using free speech rights to go up to, and pass, the line into threats; using the fact that most political officials live openly among their constituents to stalk and threaten them; and using our society’s strengths to subvert those very strengths. 

As Volts’ David Roberts rightly notes, the article actually holds back from making clear that the vast majority of threats such as Jayapal underwent are coming from the right end of the political spectrum. Yet this wave of violent intimidation is in part the obvious consequence of a president who instigated violence throughout his term in office, and turned to violence on January 6 to remain in power. Over the last several years, Donald Trump and his supporters have not legitimized violence and intimidation so much as put them in play as ways to try to wreck democratic politics. We are at a point where we risk, if not legitimizing such harassment, then normalizing it, which would be a tremendous victory for the authoritarians and a deep, possibly fatal, wound to American democracy.

In this respect, the Post article indirectly highlights a glaring issue: the failure of the Democratic Party and other defenders of democracy to properly highlight and respond to the growing physical menace from so many on the right, and the way that mainstream Republican leaders cultivate and benefit from it. It should be obvious that you do not defend elected officials against a mass campaign of violence and intimidation by hesitating to discuss the extent of that campaign and its terrifying details. Yet this has effectively been the Democrats’ stance — to decry the intimidation in vague terms, and not to confront it fully, unambiguously, and ruthlessly.

In fact, the party should be proactively telling stories like Jayapal’s, drawing in detail the depravity and illegitimacy of these anti-democratic actors, and tracing their actions back to an atmosphere of encouragement spread from the highest ranks of the GOP. And if they are afraid of seeming too “partisan” by looking to place the blame where it lies — on GOP authoritarianism — then this must be seen as bipartisanship taken to a suicidal extreme. When the GOP engages in lies and propaganda that have as an inevitable result the incitement of violence against Democrats, nonpartisan officials, or even Republicans who refuse to bow to Donald Trump, then the Democrats need to be explicit in their criticism and unyielding in the objective of shutting this violence down.

This would hardly be politicizing security issues, but doing the right thing by weaponizing them, to hold to account a GOP that winks and nods, if not outright endorses, the use of intimidation and violence to make up for its steadily increasing unpopularity. Certainly after January 6, it is somewhat incredible to me that the Democratic leadership has not done a better job in publicizing ongoing existential threats to its own elected officials, not to mention to nonpartisan officials around the country who have been subject to similar harassment.

I don’t know if it’s disarray or incomprehension, but any attitude that violent intimidation will simply go away on its own misunderstands the nature of this violence and the forces behind it. The aim of these actions is to terrorize and to intimidate. The perpetrators are fueled in part by perceptions of their own impunity, and that their victims will not fight back, or are not able to. To disabuse them of their misperceptions, they must be confronted, exposed, and punished. A democracy must be willing to defend itself against its internal saboteurs, or it will not be a democracy for long. 

While action by law enforcement is a necessary part of responding to the direct perpetrators of right-wing intimidation and violence, it is totally insufficient on its own. For example, the Justice Department formed a task force last year that’s responsible for responding to and prosecuting threats against election officials. Yet, as of today, out of more than 1,000 cases referred to the DOJ, a bare handful have been prosecuted. Part of the reason appears to be the significant protections current federal law gives to verbal and written harassment, based on free speech considerations. But the basic fact that in the meantime, hundreds if not thousands of election officials have now been traumatized and terrified by even protected speech means that the country needs to confront those at the top of the political food chain who are inciting and encouraging such violent intimidation. To change the current dynamic, a political response must bookend the law enforcement response.

In terms of threats to lawmakers, it does not seem like a coincidence that the most effective communicators of what it’s like to have their lives threatened are females among the Democratic caucus. In part this seems directly related to the fact that they’ve received a disproportionate share of the threats, but there’s also the basic fact that they’ve actually chosen to share the details in a way that I haven’t really seen male members do. The Post article is so gripping partly because Jayapal herself is so open about her experience, sharing her fear and sense of vulnerability. Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also been forthright about the terror of January 6 and the emotional damage it caused, as well as how the harassment she has received over the years has been amplified by her history of sexual trauma. You have to wonder if other (male) Democrats’ general fear of appearing vulnerable and weak has kept more from speaking out and giving substance to the wave of harassment. In a larger sense, you also have to ask whether the wish not to appear vulnerable is helping keep the Democrats from making this right-wing violent intimidation much more of a campaign issue.

The irony is that the details in stories like the Post piece are enraging and activating. They don’t make the ordinary reader think the Democrats are weak, but that the right-wing forces perpetrating this campaign are sick and crazy. Once again, it seems that the Democrats are hesitant to touch an emotional issue out of a fear that it might make the party appear too partisan or too angry to a mythical centrist voter or (more real) middle-of-the-road pundit. Detailed stories of harassment might make some Americans scared of these violent forces, sure, but I don’t think it will amplify the terror campaign or lend it power. Just the opposite — I think the larger effect will be to make citizens angry and determined not to let these right-wing freaks poison our neighborhoods with their hate and bully our elected officials, and to drive from office those in the GOP who lend a sheen of normalcy to a de facto war on America. 

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.