GOP's Insurrectionary Spirit Stalks the Halls of Congress

As we look back on the past year, and ahead to what might unfold in 2023, the crisis of democracy still dominates any efforts to follow and understand U.S. politics. After a midterm election in which avowed Republican opponents of democracy fell short in various critical elections, including secretary of state and gubernatorial races in swing states, it’s reasonable and healthy to conclude that Americans’ belief in democracy outperformed cynical expectations. Yet the Democrats’ ability to hold losses in the House to a minimum still resulted in the Republican Party re-taking power in that chamber (a victory greatly enabled by GOP gerrymandering — but it is also a fact that GOP candidates won more votes than Democrats, lending an undeniable democratic legitimacy to their victory). That the Democrats, two years after a coup attempt orchestrated by a Republican president and retroactively embraced or downplayed by a majority of GOP house members, have not been able to convince a decisive American majority of the illegitimacy and danger of Republican rule remains perhaps the second-most unsettling facet of American politics, close behind the essential fact of Republican authoritarianism.

To win the fight not just to defend democracy, but to expand it in ways that ensure that this anti-democratic movement is decisively crushed and deprived of the oxygen it needs to continue, we need to keep the terms of this fight front and center as much as possible. As I’ve argued over the last couple years, an illuminating lens is to view the post-January 6 Republican Party as essentially insurrectionist, the political wing of a broad right-wing movement in rebellion against modern America, in favor of conservative Christianity, misogyny, and white supremacism. Its insurrectionist credentials were forged in the fires of January 6, when, for the first time in American history, a president attempted a coup to stay in office, and his party not only failed to rebel against him, but in the weeks that followed made clear that Donald Trump remained the party’s leader. Broad support for Trump continues to brand the GOP as insurrectionist in spirit and intent, but its range of anti-democratic actions and rhetoric demonstrate that this insurrectionism burns brightly quite apart from the party’s obsession with the former president, and lives on in possible successors like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. GOP efforts to subvert elections through denialism, voter suppression, and the spreading of lies about nonexistent Democratic fraud constitute an unarmed rebellion against American democracy as the majority of the citizenry understands it. Meanwhile, GOP complicity in manifold threats and outright violence against election workers, educators, and racial and sexual minorities tilts the party into support of an uprising against American democracy and society while maintaining a thin veneer of plausible deniability.

It’s the job of democracy’s proponents — starting with the Democratic Party — to deny the Republican Party this layer of plausible deniability, and to describe the actions and goals of the GOP in explicit, unforgiving terms.

The repeated unsuccessful attempts by Republicans (as of this writing, they are up to 13 votes) to elect a House speaker is providing a test case for how such coverage might, or might not, play out. The dominant theme in reporting has been a sense of chaos emanating from the GOP, a party that managed to win back the House yet can’t decide amongst itself who should lead in the chamber, despite having had several weeks to get their ducks in a row. But reporting has correctly settled on the 20 or so holdouts who have so far refused to support Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid, despite the well-reported fact that he has essentially given in to every extreme demand they have made of him — including a proposal that it would only take a single House member to call for a new leadership vote, which as many pointed out would seriously hamstring McCarthy even if he did win, as well as seed the ground for future chaos.

As outlets like The New York Times have reported, there is a direct link between these holdouts and extremist, anti-democratic politics. Most prominently, nearly all of them either deny the 2020 elections results and/or “voted to overturn the 2020 Electoral College results.” And now, apparently, they are running the show in the House, so that the there is a clear link between insurrectionist sentiment and the chaos they are inflicting on their party and their country. That the GOP House majority will likely be at the mercy of such extremists is a non-controversial statement, and the Democrats should keep this fact front and center in their messaging about the unsettled House situation. Among other things, it helps answer the question, “What do these guys want, anyway?” As the holdouts continue to withhold their support despite McCarthy bending over backwards (and then some) to meet their demands, we already know what they want, because they’ve voted and talked about it before: they want to throw out the results of free and fair elections. And remember — a majority of their fellow House Republicans also voted to throw out the 2020 presidential results, so that this group is merely the most extreme manifestation of a general antipathy to democracy among GOP House members. Extreme as they are, on matters that count, it is fair to say that they are not a lot different than the rest of the House majority.

That the House leadership vote is still in progress as of the second anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol makes it all the more important, and resonant, to draw connections between the GOP’s inability to get its act together and the party’s complicity in Trump’s coup attempt. Indeed, a House member even nominated Donald Trump to be House speaker (there is no requirement that the Speaker be an elected official). As Josh Marshall noted at Talking Points Memo, the Democrats can and should object to such a nomination, on the basis of the 14th Amendment’s prohibition of those who have engaged in insurrection from holding public office. Indeed, this feels like the ultimate no-brainer, a way to keep the GOP’s endorsement of insurrection in plain view, and to force the GOP to either back down or explicitly embrace armed rebellion against America.

And in a more general sense, Democrats and others should make the case that the GOP, riven by extremism, isn’t actually able to participate in democracy, and through its current House shenanigans is undermining our shared stability and prosperity.  As a New York Times analysis puts it:

to see [Republican struggles] play out repeatedly on the House floor this week has left little doubt that Congress as an entity would struggle to carry out even its most basic duties in the coming two years, such as funding the government, including the military, or avoiding a catastrophic federal debt default.

Already, the functioning of the House had ground to a halt before it even began, rendering the body essentially useless. Without a speaker, lawmakers were unable to pass bills, form committees or even get sworn in. And Mr. McCarthy had promised still more concessions to the hard-right group that would substantially weaken the speakership in exchange for their votes, effectively giving them new tools for disrupting business in the House — and the ability to hold him hostage to their demands.

While it’s well within the structure of our democracy for parties to vote for leadership, as has been happening in the House, what is not compatible with democracy is for one of those parties to have a critical number of members who don’t appear to have any particular investment in governance — who, in fact, seem to be motivated by a desire to burn down our structures of democracy, finance, and defense. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat tweeted earlier this week, “Today's spectacle is what happens when you give up compromise, cooperation, and solidarity in politics. This party, now wedded to authoritarian methods, can no longer manage democratic procedures.”

Rollback of Service Member Covid Vaccinations Is a Defeat for National Security

It seems like forever that Democrats have been on defense when it comes to matters of national defense, despite the fact that the greatest military blunders of our century have been committed by a Republican president, with the disastrous and fruitless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Past Democratic presidents have even made a point of nominating Republicans as Secretary of Defense, as if to highlight GOP slander that Democrats are “weak on defense”; needless to say, Republican presidents have declined to return the favor. As far as defense spending goes, the Democrats have largely chosen to shovel obscene amounts of money into the maw of the Pentagon over the decades, despite levels of corruption and waste that seem incompatible with actual patriotism and actual national security. In a way, all this spending has been an act of superstition and propitiation against allegations of Democratic weakness. 

Last week brought the latest episode in the Democrats’ absurd retreat from asserting themselves more strongly and sensibly in matters of military spending and strategy. To pass a new defense budget, the Republican Party not only insisted on billions more in spending than the Biden administration requested — so that the budget is now a staggering $858 billion, an amount which, mysteriously, inflation hawks on the right appear to have no problem with — but also succeeded in including a repeal of the covid vaccine mandate for American service members (the bill has been passed by Congress, and now awaits President Biden’s expected signature). This repeal, of course, comes while covid is still one of the leading killers of Americans and appears to have left millions of sufferers with long-term symptoms — but which can be slowed and minimized by miraculous vaccines.

The reason for this repeal is the same reason that the country has suffered hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from covid, a pointless toll that continues to this current day: because, for perceived reasons of political advantage, the GOP has from the start of the pandemic downplayed the severity, risk, and impact of covid. This began with President Trump, who despite top-notch scientific advice declared covid to be no threat to the United States, a mere annoyance that would go away in a month, and who steadfastly downplayed the danger of the virus out of fear that the measures necessary to combat it would derail his re-election campaign. Trump-friendly GOP politicians took up the cause, transforming a downplaying of the virus into a political litmus test, with GOP governors and others racing each other to eliminate mask mandates, abandon social distancing mandates, and, most incredibly and damningly, cast doubts on life-saving vaccines. In doing so, the party condemned thousands of Americans to painful, unnecessary deaths — a political and moral crime with which the country has still to reckon.

One major reason the country has still not held the GOP to account for its covid insanity is that, at some point, the Democrats more or less gave up the quest for such accountability. For a mix of reasons — fear of further politicizing the pandemic and a distaste for conflict being prime ones — the Democrats let slide an issue that could have proved a powerful weapon in making the case for the Republican Party’s unfitness for power: that it backed covid policies that were immoral, illogical, and, most unforgivably, literally murderous.

Apart from the shortcomings of this approach, as measured in lives lost, economic damage inflicted, and political advantage unscrupulously gained by GOP politicians (including the sustained damage to the American economy as the spread of covid continued — and continues — to be enabled by such Republican efforts as vaccine skepticism), this Democratic reluctance has also resulted in the GOP being emboldened to continue its insane crusade on behalf of the pandemic. GOP politicians’ success in eliminating the covid vaccine mandate for the military is the latest example, and an ominous one it is.

With this move, GOP antivax madness has now been allowed to harm national security. The rescinding of the vaccine mandate means more members of the military will sicken and die, which means fewer members of the military available to do their essential jobs of defending the United States. Remember — service members have long been required to receive a host of vaccines; The New York Times notes that, “Starting in basic training, recruits receive shots protecting them from hepatitis A and B; the flu; measles, mumps and rubella; meningococcal disease; polio; tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis; and chickenpox in addition to Covid-19.” Against this long-established health regime, the GOP has now introduced the mendacious notion that covid vaccines are somehow different. This rebellion against service member safety will lead not only to inevitable death and disease among American troops, but will also strengthen the GOP base’s antagonism to covid vaccines while adding fuel to broader anti-vax efforts among party members and others.

But that’s not all. This Democratic retreat has now, predictably, opened the door for further sabotage of common sense health measures. The Times reports that, “Republicans highlighted the provision as a victory, but said they intended to press the issue even further when they took control of the House in January by looking for ways to reinstate or provide back pay for service members who were dismissed for refusing to take the vaccine.” In other words, the GOP intends to paint as martyrs service members who misguidedly and selfishly chose the lies of anti-vaxxers and Republican politicos over loyalty to country. This GOP initiative will publicize the notion that there must be something wrong with covid vaccines, to the great detriment of public health. Ironically, the very politicization that the Democrats feared has now been enabled by the Democrats’ weakness in the face of the GOP’s shamelessness. (Not incidentally, reinstatement of service members for previous covid defiance would serve the GOP’s politics of grievance, painting a group that very likely consists of Republican-leaning voters as victims of overbearing Democratic governance.)

The alternative faced by the Biden administration has not been a great one — vetoing the defense bill — but the vaccination mandate for military members is a stand worth taking. Do the Democrats really think that they couldn’t win a public fight where they could demonstrate the GOP places anti-vax zealotry and pro-pandemic policies over the literal defense of the nation? Sadly, the Democrats’ long-internalized defensiveness on national defense has opened up the country, and the party, to needless damage and danger, with more surely to come from an emboldened and extremist Republican Party.

Postscript to Terminator 2022

Since last week’s post, I’ve encountered a couple pieces of commentary that go well with my contention that the Democrats should see Donald Trump’s insane calls to “terminate” the Constitution as an opportunity to continue making their case that the broader GOP is tainted by its continued support for the former president. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall takes a phlegmatic approach to Trump’s statement itself, seeing it as of a piece with previous things Trump has said and done, but zeroing in on how crucial it is that Democrats draw attention to his remarks: 

As long as Republicans don’t abandon the extremism of Trumpism — and there’s little sign that that is anywhere on the horizon — Democrats should keep it front and center, in front of voters at every opportunity. Put simply, they should use it to defeat Republicans just as they used it to defeat Big Lie supporters last month.

What Republicans elected officials think and say is really all that matters. Because the only meaningful metric, the only potential impact of any of this is whether it makes Republican elected officials more likely to lose office.

  I like this emphasis on the concrete — Democrats need to use Trump's self-incriminating words in ways that help them win elections, not just to score abstract points against Trump and the GOP. 

Marshall also rightly goes on to point out that over the last couple elections, there have been clear indications that a decisive number of Americans care very much about Trump and the GOP’s turn against democracy. Trump may not be president any longer, but he’s vying to be the GOP’s nominee in 2024, while the broader GOP authoritarian assault on American government continues through the present. Marshall reminds us that the GOP has attempted to perform a two-step maneuver, trying to project an image of normalcy while also engaging in extremist politics when appealing to its base —but that reminding voters of statements like Trump’s recent “terminate the Constitution” talk can short circuit this strategy.   

As I’ve said before, there’s no point in leaving unused powerful weapons against the GOP — this fight takes everything we’ve got, and all the better if Trump can’t stop indicting himself and the GOP is too cowardly to cut loose this mad captain who’s lashed himself to the party’s wheel.

The importance of opposition to GOP extremism and authoritarianism is a point taken up by Perry Bacon Jr. last week, as he makes a case for the Democrats making repudiation of the modern incarnation of the GOP central to their electoral appeal. He write that the last few elections “have clearly shown that Democrats can win by casting Republicans as a party of bigotry, intolerance and radicalism. They should embrace that approach — and give up on strategies that Democrats wish would work but don’t.”

Bacon points to two competing strategies — class-based appeals to voter and appeals to centrist policy positions — as not having had the same electoral success as what he sees as having worked in recent election cycles: “Affirmatively running as the pro-tolerance, anti-Trumpism party — as some Democrats did, including Biden, right before the election,” which “both galvanizes the Democratic Party base and also wins over people who voted Republican in the past but are turned off by today’s version of the party.”

It is hard to argue with success — but is it enough, particularly for the long-term, or if Trump leaves the scene? I agree with Bacon that a “drumbeat about the terribleness of the Republican Party, particularly on issues around race and identity, is likely to keep many voters from backing the GOP,” but I’m not so certain that the Democrats should not take the logical next step, and articulate an affirmative vision for the U.S. that even goes so far as to tie concrete policies to this vision. As I’ve written before, it seems that the Democratic coalition already embodies a positive idea of America — one that isn’t just opposed to retrograde Republican values, but embraces a countervailing set of beliefs that include racial and gender equality, freedom of sexual expression no matter your gender identity, a baseline government role in promoting economic equality and opportunity, and a commitment to protecting the environment, particularly against the existential danger of climate change. There are always risks when you articulate a more concrete vision, but these seem like risks worth taking. As the GOP grows more extreme, and as the social movements it represents grow more regressive and cruel, it seems to me that the nation is badly in need of a social and political revival that pairs decency and basic human equality with an ambitious vision of the United States’ multicultural, multiracial, and prosperous future. Maybe I’m just tired of playing defense against racists, misogynists, and religious extremists, but I’d like to see the Democrats rally an American majority by articulating a positive vision for the country that might even better expose and break down this right-wing backlash that we’ve been living through — a backlash that would rather end democracy than accept its compromises, and that sees violence as preferable to the ballot box when there’s a chance of losing. 

Ultimately, I’m not sure if this is really a disagreement with Bacon, so much as a difference in emphasis. I can’t totally disagree that, “What is actually galvanizing people is anger, not positivity — and issues such as separating children from their families at the border and banning abortions, not ‘kitchen table” concerns’” — but I see the way forward as combining both the anger and the positivity.

I also wanted to note Bacon’s great, corrective description of conflicting visions of swing voters among Democrats:

The image I suspect Biden, Pelosi and Sanders have of a voter who could swing from Democrat to Republican or the other way is a 50-year-old White man without a college degree who lives in suburban Philadelphia, works as a fireman and supports raising the minimum wage but opposes late-term abortions.

Sure, that’s one kind of swing voter. But the kinds of people who have been swinging to the Democrats are White women who have office jobs and college degrees and strongly support abortion rights. And the kinds of people who could swing to the Democrats are people who already have decent jobs and don’t really like all of the spending that the Biden administration is doing to boost the economy, but hate intolerance and bigotry even more.

Not only do I think this is accurate, I think it’s a terrific reminder of how slow politicians can be to adjust to new political realities, even when they’re staring them in face. Bacon’s summation also serves an always-necessary reminder that the time for a generational change in the Democrats’ leadership is now.

Terminator 2022

Ten years ago, a statement by a major politician calling for the termination of the Constitution would have been greeted with incredulity, condemnation, and contempt by virtually every member of the Democratic and Republican parties, with permanent excommunication of that politician from American life. Flash forward a decade, though, and Donald Trump’s treasonous social media message last weekend calling for just such an overthrow of the constitutional order has operated as an X-ray on both the brokenness of the GOP and the ongoing reluctance of the Democratic Party to accept once and for all that the Republican Party poses an acute threat to democracy, and to act accordingly.

Rather than spur a firestorm on the right, Trump’s comments have so far provoked at best a Fourth of July sparkler level of dissent from his party. Some GOP senators have condemned his remarks, but most of them are either departing the Senate or declined to actually identify the president by name. More damningly, even when a high-profile Republican like Mitch McConnell spoke out, he still — incredibly — refused to rule out supporting Donald Trump in 2024. The inability of the GOP to clearly and definitively separate itself from a bonkers statement designed to appeal to the extreme right and their insurrectionist ilk demonstrates both the party’s continuing subjugation to Donald Trump, and its divorce from the basic principles that grant legitimacy to a political party in the first place — among others, respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, and free and fair elections. If the GOP can’t respect these baseline principles, why should any American respect the GOP?

Though Democrats hit hard at the president’s remarks — a White House spokesman said that Trump’s assertion “anathema to the soul of our nation, and should be universally condemned” — what we haven’t seen is a wholesale effort to use Trump’s insane remarks to paint the GOP with the same brush of authoritarianism, insurrection, and, frankly, insanity. Such comments by a former GOP president are a priceless gift to Democrats, if indeed one of their highest priorities is to defend our democracy and our constitution. That Donald Trump could essentially declare war on America and not get kicked out of the GOP is the real story here, and the Democrats should run with it. It is difficult to overemphasize how very much like a loser the Republican Party now appears, unable to separate itself from a man who doesn’t even believe in America. The party is weak, cowardly, and anti-American, and a day shouldn’t go by that the Democrats don’t broadcast these facts.

But this latest outrage from Donald Trump shouldn’t have been necessary to catalyze a more robust Democratic response to the GOP’s embrace of lawlessness, violence, and authoritarianism. Part of the disconcerting nature of this episode is how Trump’s remarks have been treated as somehow something new, when in fact they are simply a distillation of what he’s already said and done. After all, what was Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6 but an attempt to “terminate” the Constitution? And what was the GOP’s subsequent embrace of Trump but a retroactive endorsement of his termination attempt? This time around, the former president didn’t say anything we didn’t already know, although he may have been more explicit than ever. 

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Trump’s stated wish to throw out the very foundation of the rule of law comes at the same time that the rule of law is starting to close in on him. Just days after his tweet, the Trump Organization was found guilty of criminal tax fraud, while recent reports indicate that the various Justice Department investigations of Trump are proceeding apace under the leadership of special counsel Jack Smith. And coming so soon after the dinner involving Trump, anti-semite Kanye West, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, it’s hard not to see the links between calls for lawlessness and a social and political order in which white people reign supreme. 

This is all to say that Democratic hesitance to connect the dots and sharpen their indictment of a GOP still besotted by Donald Trump feels cautious to the point of masochistic. Even if, as some recent stories suggest, there is true and growing disenchantment with Donald Trump in the wake of the Republican Party’s relatively poor showing in the midterms, it is entirely in the Democrats’ interest to continue insisting their really is no daylight between the GOP and Donald Trump, because at bottom the loyalty is not due to the man but to the hideous ideas he has been shameless enough to say out loud. The Democrats can’t let the GOP wriggle out of this trap of its own making by letting the party simply scapegoat Donald Trump and pretend it’s a mainstream political party again. 

Gun Crazy Like a Fox

In a recent piece, The Nation columnist Jeet Heer explores the connections between the right’s incitement of violence against the LGBTQ community and massacres like that at Club Q in Colorado Springs. In particular, he draws a compelling parallel between the phenomenon of lynchings in the Jim Crow South and our contemporary scourge of anti-gay killings. In the South, Heer writes, laws suppressing the rights of Blacks were accompanied by a regime of extra-judicial killings that also worked to maintain the “racist status quo.” Heer argues that the Republican Party and its right-wing supporters are currently working to enact a similar system of enforcement today:

The lynching culture of Jim Crow America had both a legal and an extrajudicial side. The legal side was all the laws that affirmed white supremacy. The extrajudicial side was the actual lynching, which was often winked at by the police and respectable society.

In 21st-century America, the right-wing push to reinforce heteronormative cultural domination has both a legal side and an extrajudicial side. The legal side can be seen in the anti-gay and anti-trans laws passed by governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas. The illegal side comes from hate crimes like the Club Q massacre.

A particularly chilling parallel Jeet draws is how, under both systems, the victims were blamed for their own targeting. In the case of Blacks, for not knowing their place and for being falsely accused of violence against whites; in the case of the gay community, for being a community of child abusers.

It’s been clear for a long time that the GOP and far-right extremists share a similar antipathy to the gay community, but the parallel dynamics that Jeer describes are eye-opening. The current anti-gay jihad might not be as extensive as the terror states established in the Jim Crow South to repress and discipline its African-American citizens, but the similarity in strategies and goals is nauseating and reprehensible. And in the present case, we can see how the wave of anti-gay laws are themselves serving to encourage and perpetuate anti-gay violence, resting as they are on dehumanizing and slanderous notions about a specific population of Americans. Perversely, in the right-wing mindset, violence then retroactively makes the laws still more justified, because there must be something wrong with gays if they keep provoking people to kill them.

Pull back the camera a bit more, though, and you can see that the strategy of legalistic methods twinned with threats and violence undergirds the wider GOP assault on American democracy and society, which I’ve argued constitutes a slow-rolling insurrection against this country. Even as multiple Republican-controlled state governments have worked to subvert the conduct of elections and undermine the votes of Democrats, their effort has been accompanied by a wave of intimidation against election workers and politicians. Even as enormous numbers of Republican officials maintain that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and suggest Democrats are the enemy, not simply political rivals, Democrats are targeted by actual violence, such as in the attack that injured Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Just as African-Americans and gays have been blamed for their own victimization, so the GOP has suggested a general perfidy on the part of the Democratic base and leadership, accusing it of stealing elections and encouraging voting by illegal immigrants — not to mention of being fundamentally un-American for the crime of living in urban areas. 

*

Despite the horror of high-profile racist and homophobic shootings, the United States in reality faces twin assaults from gun violence. In the more widespread and prevalent one, guns are involved in the deaths of tens of thousands of American annually in a wide variety of crimes, accidents, and suicides. And in a narrower but politically explosive phenomenon, of which the Club Q attack is the latest example, guns are used by domestic terrorists and other extremists to slaughter African-Americans, Latinos, Jews, and gays in an endless series of deadly hate crimes. Both strains of shootings are eroding our basic expectations that we should be safe from violence in living our lives and conducting our daily business. And though only the latter form of violence is overtly political in nature, all gun violence serves the ends of a far-right movement that has an interest in destabilizing American society, undermining faith in the government’s ability to provide for public safety, and promoting mutual fear among the citizenry in order to foster a racist tribalism.

Moreover, both strains of violence are rooted in a permissive and idolatrous gun culture that emanates overwhelmingly from the right side of the political spectrum. Legally, this culture has been made possible by deliberate misreadings of the Second Amendment — endorsed by a far-right Supreme Court majority — which substitute a broad individual right to be armed to the teeth over the clear constitutional intention to protect the ability of states to organize militias in their defense. But the roots of this culture seem to me to come from interrelated feelings of fear and of a desire for domination among millions of right-leaning Americans: a fear of people unlike themselves, and a wish to overcome this fear by dominating those otherized fellow citizens. And so the land has not only been flooded by firearms, but by a normalization of the very idea that it is perfectly reasonable, as you go about your day, that you might decide it’s necessary to shoot a fellow citizens for vague but ever-present reasons. Beyond this, the gun rights movement has made it not only legally simple for those inclined to violence to buy guns, but through this very easy access helped normalize the idea that killing itself is an ordinary and justified activity.

But massacres like the one at Club Q, accompanied by right-wing rhetoric that blames the victims for meriting their own demise, help us see a bleaker dynamic at play in the right’s unflinching support for unfettered gun rights. For if violence is viewed as necessary to keep certain Americans in line, like gays and African-Americans, then you can see how the broader mayhem enabled by easy gun access and the culture of violence it promotes might be seen as simply collateral damage to this terrorizing purpose. Sure, tens of thousands of Americans may be killed by criminals and relatives every year — but is this not a price that must be born in order to ensure adequate repression of America’s domestic enemies?

It is screamingly apparent that the country needs the strongest possible counter-offensive against this flood of guns and strategy of incitement coming from the Republican Party and its right-wing allies. If there is any silver lining to be found in these rivers of blood, it’s that the GOP’s complicity in extremist violence can’t be disentangled from its support for lax gun laws and whole-hearted embrace of gun culture as a central tenet of the party. A determined opposition can make the straightforward case that the right-wing’s obsession with guns is increasingly indistinguishable from support for a plague of domestic terrorism. The immediate goal should not be seen as eliminating guns or gun violence in the near term— the sheer number of the former, and the deep cultural embeddedness of the latter, make this a long-term project — but the process must begin. Rather, the nearer-term goal is deeply political — to make the GOP pay a serious and escalating price at the ballot box for integrating murder and mayhem into its political playbook. It should be obvious that a party that sees violence as a route to power deserves no seat at the American table, and that its complicity in mass shootings and general mayhem in pursuit of a quest for racial and religious domination is utterly disqualifying.

But to impose such a price, the Democrats must rid themselves of an institutional reluctance to confront the GOP or to escalate the unavoidable conflict between the two parties. Though centrist commentators would doubtless tut-tut were the Democrats to aggressively accuse the GOP of murderous incitement against vulnerable groups of Americans, or to describe in unambiguous terms the interplay between persecutory laws and unleashing of violence against such groups, I simply don’t see any other way to stop these horrifying dynamics. So far, the GOP and the right have had no incentive to question their strategy because it’s working; they are giving their base an enemy to hate, and in doing so are feeding a process of dehumanization and scapegoating that will inevitably lead to more violence — violence that right-wing propagandists assert is deserved by the victims. As political observers like Thomas Zimmer have written, this is a right-wing movement that will not stop on its own, but will only be stopped by a countervailing political force.

Second Biden Terminology

In the wake of the midterms elections, Will Bunch has laid down a powerful case, against those who say Joe Biden is too old and unpopular to run again, that Democrats would be crazy to reject him as the party’s candidate for 2024. As a once-reluctant Biden supporter myself, Bunch zeroes in on an idea that I hadn’t been able to fully articulate: that Biden is the special ingredient holding together a Democratic, pro-democracy coalition that has now stepped up to support the party and reject GOP radicalization in the last three consecutive election cycles. In Bunch’s reckoning, he’s still able to function as a consensus candidate for a diverse group that includes younger voters, women, African-Americans, and other Americans repelled by the anti-democratic GOP; the implicit point is that there’s no guaranty another Democrat could play this role, or that we’d end up with such a candidate, following what Bunch describes as a potential “chaotic free-for-all” of an open Democratic presidential primary.

But equally important to Bunch’s argument is why it’s important to hold this coalition together: that there is a very good chance that the GOP candidate in 2024 will be a committed authoritarian whose election would very likely mean chaos and extreme damage to democratic government in this country.  Whether it’s Trump redux, Ron “God annointed me with an Italian last name so I’d appear even more of a fascist than otherwise” DeSantis, or Tucker “Great Replacement Theory” Carlson, it’s a safe bet that the GOP will maintain its current anti-democratic trajectory at least through 2024.  As Bunch puts it, referring back to Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign for a fourth term in the climactic days of World War II, why change horses in midstream, when the American struggle over democracy versus authoritarianism is still very much in play, and the forces of extremism are still gunning for power?

This latter part of Bunch’s case gives form to my particular sense that the Democrats would be foolish to overly discount the power of Biden’s incumbency in 2024. As the sitting American president, he would be able to counter the GOP candidate’s lies and authoritarian aims with the authority of his office and the example of his conduct. With further election subversion and right-wing violence likely in the lead-up to the election, Biden’s presence on the ballot would make the stakes crystal clear, and allow his leadership to provide a real-world, real-time refutation of MAGA madness. In a worst-case scenario, which unfortunately cannot be ruled out, a Republican attempt to overturn the election results by violent or extra-constitutional means would be less likely to succeed with Biden already in the White House and in control of the executive branch.   

Of course, this line of argument highlights the fundamentally defensive nature of the case for Biden running again in 2024 — it rests on an idea of preservation of what Bunch describes as a “fragile” coalition that has been able to beat back the MAGA threat over the last four years, and the notion that the highest priority is to protect our democracy. Bunch observes that such a defensive strategy is in fact the point:

This is all very much in keeping with the groundbreaking research by the Harvard political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, the authors of 2018′s How Democracies Die, who showed that the countries that successfully thwarted dictatorships were the ones in which rival factions dropped their ideological differences to instead rally behind a defense of democracy. It wasn’t 100% clear before Tuesday’s midterms, but the Biden coalition — the Democratic base, joined by Gen Z voters who might normally prefer the democratic socialism of a Sen. Bernie Sanders, and white suburban “Never Trumper” ex-Republicans — is beginning to look exactly like what the authors described. This alliance must be preserved at all costs.

Nonetheless, it’s worth entertaining the counter-argument that what the Democrats really need is a candidate of and for a new generation, who would energize the existing coalition, plus supercharge younger voters who are key to the continuation of Democratic victories into the foreseeable future. And, indeed, in normal circumstances, this would be a healthy and natural development for our democracy. But the biggest problem I see is the risk involved, since we don’t have a guaranty that such a leader would emerge, or would be in a position to win a general election following a competitive primary. In this sense, arguing for a second Biden run means foreclosing the possibility of an even better candidate out of fear of the tremendous downsides; you might even say that the fight against GOP authoritarianism is causing a short circuit in the democratically healthy process of generational leadership change.

But I think this would be exaggerating the defensive and conservative nature of a second Biden run and term in office in a couple of ways. First, although the presidency is a singularly powerful position in American government, it’s hardly the only consequential office in the land. While only one person can be president at a time, we can have up to 50 states governors who can simultaneously demonstrate their visions for the future and their leadership skills to the American people — not to mention hundreds of representatives and senators. To state the obvious: a Biden run in 2024 would merely postpone the necessary generational hand-off at the highest levels of U.S. government — one that we are already seeing occurring in the House, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepping down and making way for new leadership (though, it should be pointed out, leadership that is hardly a radical departure from her own). 

We also need to understand more clearly that the future fight for democracy, and for social and economic progress, will depend not just on a president who understands the stakes, but a mass progressive movement that can push back on the interconnected layers of white supremacism, misogyny, and Christian nationalism that are driving the radicalization of the Republican Party. Just as the GOP is propelled by such forces, the Democrats need the assistance of millions pushing for gender equality, environmental justice, and further democratization of American government at the local and state levels. I think a case can be made that the existence of such a movement, inchoate though it currently is, constitutes a significant reason why the centrist Biden has worked to push through a raft of legislation and policies — including the climate change-combatting Inflation Reduction Act and the forgiveness of some student loans — that we might not have otherwise expected (such policies also speak to Biden’s responsiveness to his base, a significant clue to his once and future popularity among Democratic voters). 

For those of us who have been worried by Biden’s age, and by fears that a certain lack of energy has leached into his administration at large, the midterm results provide some needed reassurance, and bolster the case that Biden should run again. Somewhat counterintuitively, the willingness of so many citizens to vote for Democrats despite Biden’s atrociously low approval ratings provides a ray of hope for 2024, offering the prospect that many millions would still be willing to vote for Biden against an unacceptable Republican candidate, even if they don’t personally like or support him. In this sense, I think those who have pointed out that Biden is far less of a lightning rod than figures like Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton are spot on; he simply doesn’t generate similarly extreme emotions from either his party or the GOP. Of course, his current low popularity is hardly ideal, and I hope that circumstances change to revive his fortunes over the next couple years, whether it’s through a steady lowering of inflation, a turning of the tide in Ukraine, or confrontation with a Republican House of Representatives that is sure to bring the MAGA crazy in all its mendacious, racist, gun-toting glory. 

Midterminology

When I think back to my early November sense of dread about what the midterm results might be, it’s safe to say that my expectations did not encompass spending the week after the 6th holding off on writing about the midterms as the race for the House stayed too close to call. For that matter, I also didn’t expect to become the New York Times’ House election results page’s most dedicated user, hovering and clicking over the races to be decided, the map of squares gradually abstracting from a vague outline of the United States to dangling bunches of grapes of political wrath, the results slowly ripening to digestible red or blue under the pressure of democracy’s judgement. And I certainly didn’t expect my concerns to move so dramatically from fear of a GOP blowout to agonized recognition as how close the House results turned out, and the reality that Democratic leaders likely gave up prematurely on winnable seats like Oregon’s 5th congressional district.

But with their relative show of strength in the midterms — holding House losses almost to a draw, holding the Senate with the chance to gain a seat in the Georgia runoff, and increasing power in critical states like Michigan and Pennsylvania — the Democrats have gained the country some breathing room in the fight for democracy. GOP gubernatorial and attorney general candidates who lied about 2020 election lost in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan; and the GOP as a whole got a huge wake-up call about the costs of the far-right takeover of the party.

Though I just mentioned Democratic strength in the elections, the actual strength of our democracy was ultimately manifested by the American people, enough of whom shook off predictions of economic determinism, GOP trash talk, and Democratic pessimism to essentially vote for democracy, freedom, and equality over authoritarianism, white supremacism, and religious bigotry. The key tasks now are to study what in particular motivated voters, and to keep the democratic movement energized and growing as we head into the existential stakes of the 2024 elections, in which failed insurrectionist Donald Trump is currently the presidential candidate to beat in the Republican primary.

It does appear that the Democrats’ attacks against the GOP on abortion rights and the more general issue of democracy did break through to voters — or that voters had seen enough to render anti-GOP judgments on them. Indeed, as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall observes, it should be clear that abortion and anti-democracy are not really separate issues, but should be seen as parts of a whole:

[T]he election results point to something different that many observers missed in the narrow and perhaps over-literal way these issues were siloed in polls and election commentary: abortion, election denialism and other elements of GOP whackery melded together into a broader fear of Republican extremism that was larger than the sum of its parts.

This is not to say that abortion on its own is not a fundamental right that energizes many millions of American in its defense, but that this energy is even greater because people understand how closely it ties into the GOP’s larger war on democracy.

Yet the threat of GOP extremism remains great, and so, at the risk of striking a sour note, it’s important to note that this election was nonetheless far too close a thing. Some GOP advocates of election lies like gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in Arizona were only narrowly defeated by their Democratic opponents (even as there were more reassuring blow-outs in other places, such as Josh Shapiro’s victory over Doug Mastriano in the race to be Pennsylvania’s next governor). The Democrats’ inability and unwillingness to more thoroughly make the case that the GOP, post-Trump and post-January 6 coup attempt, is unfit for power continues to be one of the great frustrations of our time.

And though there are some hopeful signs that important elements of the GOP are beginning to sort of, kind of question Donald Trump’s domination of the party, in light of the sheer number of losers he backed and a general perception that he weighed on the party’s results, Democrats and the general public shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the struggle for democracy and a free society is far broader and deeper than the fight to deny Donald Trump and his acolytes a political future. The great bulk of Republican elected officials are fully supportive of a wider reactionary movement that goes beyond election subversion and anti-democratic animus, to encompass a backwards vision of the United States that sees conservative Christianity, white supremacism, and retrograde gender rules as the preferred state of American society and economy. As Ron Brownstein notes in an important midterms post-mortem, even as Democrats outperformed in some states and voters rejected a conservative cultural agenda, “in red states where Republicans have actually imposed that agenda over the past two years, GOP governors cruised to reelection without any discernible backlash.” Indeed, in the wake of the election, GOP-led state government are set to continue implementing culturally conservative agendas like anti-transgender laws, book bans, and, of course, abortion restrictions.

The clash between a backwards looking cultural movement that places white Christians at the apex of American culture and a more egalitarian vision shared by the American majority underlies the clash between proponents of autocracy versus democracy, as we see the Republicans use their victories in red states to cement their power, via gerrymanders and voter suppression, into an unassailable hold on government which they can then use to further implement a far-right cultural and economic agenda. But though observers like Brownstein see an increasingly deep divergence in the lived realities of freedom in blue versus red states, this split is anything but stable. The logic of this right-wing cultural and political backlash means that it will seek to impose its vision on blue states via national politics; as Brownstein writes elsewhere, “Congressional Republicans, with little notice, have introduced a flotilla of proposals to impose onto blue states the red state social restrictions on abortion and other issues, such as the prohibitions DeSantis championed on teachers discussing sexual orientation particularly in early grades.” And as we’ve already witnessed in the sheer number of Republicans who claim elections are rigged in Democrats’ favor, the GOP clearly sees election subversion and anti-democratic measures at the national level as essential to carrying out their cultural revolution. In other words, the divergence between states does not mean we are tending to a stable equilibrium between GOP and Democratic governance. Rather, the parties’ respective attitudes towards democracy and to fundamental issues of freedom and equality are in fundamental, irreconcilable conflict.

This is all to say that while the Democrats’ ability to more or less hold the line in these past midterms is cause for celebration, the conflict with the authoritarian, white supremacist GOP is far from resolved. Democrats, the media, and ordinary citizens need to discuss and broadcast the pro-democratic meaning of the midterms, so that voters understand the power and breadth of the pro-democracy, pro-freedom movement in this country. But there also need to be proactive efforts by the Democrats and progressive organizations to seek to channel this energy into further pushback against the far-right counterrevolution that proved itself down but not out last week. It should be obvious that efforts to institute national and state-level rights to abortion should be at the top of the list. Every day that goes by with the terrible Dobbs decision still in force is another day that American women are denied a basic right to bodily autonomy and health care in multiple states. This is an affront not just to those women, but to the conscience of the nation. Likewise, Democrats also need to pursue efforts to protect gay marriage, as well as the transgender youth, school teachers, and librarians who have been targeted for particularly vicious treatment by GOP politicians and activists.

Yet, still more so than was true two years ago, the Democrats must also place a pro-democracy agenda front and center in the national conversation and in their own list of political priorities, and be clear that strengthening our democracy is inextricable from fighting a GOP rollback of our fundamental freedoms. This last election should hammer home once again that GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression are key to the party gaining power, particularly in close elections. National legislation banning gerrymandering and setting election standards would not only protect majority rule at the national level, but could help restore democratic governance to states like Texas and Wisconsin, where Democratic-leaning voters have been robbed of their ability to elect the governments of their choosing. Congressional Democrats, and a Democratic president, cannot simply sit idly by while vast numbers of Americans find themselves living in states that are functionally no longer democracies.

At the same time, Democrats have an electoral and moral responsibility to energize and activate American voters to recognize the stakes — politically, economically, and culturally — and to act on behalf of an American majority that communicated in this election that it doesn’t want election subverters in charge of elections, Christian nationalists in the governor’s mansion, and politicians telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. To sharpen a point I made above — there can be no compromise with a GOP that differs from the American majority on so many fundamental issues. The only logical path for Democrats is to continue to work toward building a durable majority that can crush, once and for all, the Republican Party’s misbegotten dream that it can rob the country of its freedom and its democratic destiny. 

You Can't Fight An Authoritarian GOP With Abstract Appeals

If you’re interested in a snapshot of how far the authoritarian Republican threat to American government and society has advanced, and how inadequately the Democrats, the media, and the public are responding to it, President Biden’s speech about democracy and political violence last week may qualify as the political Polaroid of the week.

Biden’s speech was remarkable for the crisis it describes and its willingness to describe it. Essentially, Biden accused “MAGA Republicans” not only of looking to subvert elections and overturn American democracy, but of using violence and intimidation to accomplish their goals. He drew a direct line from Donald Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen 2020 election, to the January 6 coup attempt, to the current wave of Republican voter suppression, right-wing political violence, and GOP voter intimidation, including the recent attack by a right-wing radical that hospitalized the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He warned that the U.S. stands on a precipice between democracy and autocracy, and urged Americans casting their votes to weight decisively whether a candidate has pledged to accept the election results.

A speech in which a president simply warned the public that the U.S. risks becoming an “autocracy” would itself be noteworthy; a speech that simultaneously indicts the opposing party as an agent of violence and authoritarianism is extraordinary. Yet the speech has already largely disappeared into the media and social spheres like a pebble slipping beneath the ocean surface (though we shouldn’t rule out that it may have energized some Democrats who pay closer attention to presidential speeches). The GOP refused to engage its critique, with Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel remarking that it was “divisive,” “[d]esperate and dishonest,” and that “Biden promised unity but has instead demonized and smeared Americans.” Media coverage has appeared minimal, with little acknowledgement of its extraordinary content or import.

But the third failure — of the Democrats themselves to amplify or better integrate Biden’s critique into their closing message in the midterms — is the one I want to focus on, because it’s what the party has the most control over. As political observers like Brian Beutler and Will Stancil have repeatedly argued, the Democrats seem not to understand that they can’t get a message out effectively if they can’t get the media to amplify it. In this instance, the speech disappeared into something of a black hole, despite its frankly shocking nature, partly because other Democrats weren’t out repeating its themes to reporters and otherwise trying to engage media attention.

More damagingly, despite the deadly serious and largely accurate (more on this below) assessment of our political crisis, the president himself hasn’t consistently and repeatedly made the case that he made in the speech. Even put together with his equally striking Independence Hall speech in September, and various comments since then, the president has not been making his argument against Republican extremism nearly as often as he could. This lack of consistency is echoed by the larger Democratic Party, which has struggled to integrate a compelling and consistent description of rising GOP authoritarianism into its midterm appeal.

As I’ve written before, one glaring reason the Democrats have shied away from making a steady case that would stand a better chance of impacting media coverage of the GOP threat is that they haven’t wanted to fully engage on the substantive reasons that are pushing the GOP towards authoritarianism.  Instead, they’ve presented a somewhat abstract indictment of the Republican and right-wing threat — an abstraction that also ended up running through, and undermining, Joe Biden’s recent speech. It is not that anything that Joe Biden said was false, but rather that it was incomplete. It’s not enough to say that the GOP doesn’t want your vote to count or wants to be the only party that wins elections; I think it’s also important to tie this to the actual reasons the GOP has concluded that democracy is now the party’s enemy. The Republicans, first under Trump and increasingly in ways that will survive the former president, represents a coalition of white supremacism, Christian nationalism, and misogyny that doesn’t just want to wreck democracy for its own sadistic pleasure, but in order to impose on the rest of us the values that motivate them. Among other goals, the party seeks second-class status for non-whites, cultural primacy and deference to conservative Christianity, and a reversal of the past century’s gains for women’s rights (achieved in part already by the Supreme Court’s elimination of the constitutional right to an abortion). 

Now, I can understand why Biden would want to keep his defense of democracy remarks separated from these more substantive goals of the Republican Party, since including the latter would introduce the possibility that Democrats’ conflict with GOP authoritarianism is actually more of a partisan objection to GOP values and objectives. Indeed, this is a case you seem some centrists and Republicans making. But I think this caution is misplaced, in the first place because no citizens of any country, including the United States, actually live in an abstract democracy. Rather, they live in a democracy that encompasses living, breathing people, and a society that holds certain values which that democracy is a vehicle for promoting and protecting. More to the crux of our current situation, democracy also becomes the means by which inevitable conflicts between values are negotiated and, ideally, resolved or at least mediated.

It is not merely incidental to the GOP’s war on democracy that the party also objects to a host of social and political advances and developments over the last half century, from civil rights to environmental protections to greater gender equality — advances that generally can be said to have the support of the American majority when gauged by the laws that have been passed and public opinion polls. In this sense, the GOP is waging a dual war against America — first, by attempting to subvert our democracy, and second, by attempting to leverage that subversion into an anti-democratic reversal of the last 50 (or 100 years) of progress on a host of fronts, in favor of a white supremacist, pseudo-Christian, and misogynistic vision of this country. The two attacks can’t really be disentangled — and when President Biden tries to separate them, he reduces the strength of the case that can, and I think should, be levied against the current Republican Party.

Instead, for understandable but ultimately erroneous reasons, Biden continues to stress that the authoritarian bent is not shared by a majority of Republicans, even as he made clear in his recent speech that authoritarianism is in the driver’s seat of the GOP. He clearly wants to reach those Republicans he believes can still be reached, and to make this into a fight about democracy, rather than about policy positions and other values that go beyond the question of whether your vote will count or not. In this sense, his strategy has a logic to it — by asking Americans to vote based on candidates’ allegiance to democracy above all else, he is asking GOP and GOP-leaning voters to essentially put their love of country above partisan loyalties and their support of certain values, such as opposition to abortion. From this perspective, the president’s decision to include GOP-incited political violence as part of his indictment makes a lot of sense — even if some Republican voters don’t agree with Democrats’ policy choices, surely they can draw the line at supporting a party that encourages violence as a path to winning elections? But realistically, I just don’t see how Biden and the Democrats can thread the needle of keeping the fight for democracy separate from a host of positions supported by the party and opposed by the GOP, since, again, the ultimate motivation for the GOP’s turn to authoritarianism is to advance their own preferences against those of the Democrats and majority rule.

In some sense, I think the Democrats have tried to thread this needle by sending separate messages to separate audiences. With Democrats, they are more wont to draw the direct connection between the GOP ending democracy and Democratic voters losing a host of rights — the most notable and recent example being the right to abortion. To the small group of persuadable Republican voters and independents, they aim speeches like Biden’s last week, where the struggle is pitched as a high-minded one of democracy versus authoritarianism.

But while both pitches are in themselves true, together they form a more muddled whole, in which the Republicans are portrayed as both largely decent and as necessary partners in governance, and also as existential threats to democracy. Moreover, the stakes of losing our democracy end up getting abstracted from the basics of our lives that most of us frankly take for granted, whether it’s the right to an abortion, to apply for a job without fear we will be discriminated against because of our gender or the color of our skin, or to send our children to school without worrying that they’ll be forced to say prayers to a god they don’t recognize or be shot by a gunman emboldened by the GOP’s radical views of the Second Amendment. Threats to democracy aren’t just morally abominable in and of themselves; they also open the door to existential threats to our dignity, our livelihoods, and our lives — but the Democrats’ mixed messaging has helped keep them from stating matters as bluntly and clearly as they need to be.

***

Biden and Democrats also back away from fully identifying the motivation of the GOP as inextricable from the party’s anti-democratic turn because this would require a confrontation with the burning heart of white supremacism and Christian nationalism that drives the Republican Party. This strategic decision, while rational, is also a mistake. The Democrats seem to fear running the risk of becoming identified as the non-white people’s party, and driving more whites into the GOP by making white Americans choose between their racial identity and their loyalty to the country. While there’s certainly a basis for such fears, I also think there are ways to talk about white supremacism that aren’t the same as telling every white voter in America that they’re racist if they don’t vote for the Democratic Party. What I do know is that when the right has placed openly white supremacist ideas like the Great Replacement Theory at the center of its appeal, it is simply crazy for the opposition not to make explicit the role of that white supremacism when making its case against the GOP.

Likewise, I suspect a fear of having the GOP and right-wing media machine distort Democratic attacks prevents the party from more fully calling out the Christian nationalism driving the GOP. Just as the Democrats don’t want to be accused of “hating white people” if they were to fully condemn the role of white supremacism in GOP politics, so they likely worry about being accused of anti-Christian attitudes were they to name Christian nationalism as a threat to the country. Yet this also seems like a case where the benefits would outweigh the costs. While a majority of Americans still identify as Christians, I think most American understand the difference between actual Christianity versus a right-wing Christianity that is a shell of its sacred self, subverted by racist hatred, fundamentalist and anti-human readings of the Bible, and an appalling misogyny. Americans are absolutely free to practice whatever religion they wish, but the corollary to this is that they absolutely have no right to impose their views on others (though we are indeed seeing such an imposition happening now in a rollback of abortion rights that, at its core, is about the political victory of sectarian Christian beliefs).

So I think the benefits of calling out the full illiberal agenda of the authoritarian GOP outweigh overblown risks of inadvertently aiding the right-wing cause by inspiring a white Christian backlash against democracy and the liberal society it has helped nurture — in part because that white Christian backlash is already underway and self-reinforcing. We need now a massive pushback against the backlash, and the way to do this necessarily includes exposing to public view and debate what’s motivating the reactionary backlash in the first place. The indictment of the GOP needs to be substantive as well as procedural — that the reason to oppose the GOP isn’t just because the party wants to subvert democracy, but also because this subversion is driven by priorities that run against the fundamental beliefs of most Americans. The GOP’s odds of victory are enhanced when the Democrats fail to talk about what is fundamentally motivating the current GOP.

And lest this sound as abstract as talking about a context-free “defense of democracy,” I would add that talking about what the GOP really wants opens the door to highlighting the GOP’s lack of interest in actual policies to benefit the material existence of ordinary Americans. A GOP that prioritizes disparagement of minorities and the elevation of white Americans isn’t going to prioritize an economy that works for all, since that would inevitably mean policies that help, well, everyone, no matter the color of their skin. A GOP that talks so much about supposedly stolen elections does so to distract from the reality of wages stolen from workers or stagnant over the last several decades. A GOP that believes the earth was made in seven days by an omnipotent God and rejects science doesn’t have anything to offer Americans who are already suffering the effects of climate change, from supercharged storms hitting Florida to supercharged forest fires across the West.

It seems to me that in the midst of our profound democratic crisis, more truth-telling, not less, should be the order of the day. If America has deep conflicts, then let’s actually talk about those, not cover them over because it might offend some people, backed by faith that as open a discussion as possible will rally a majority, sooner or later, to defend the society we’ve built together. We’re not going to win this fight through idealism and abstract appeals to principle alone; we also need to root it as firmly as possible in our actual lives, the things we cherish, and the challenges we face together. 

Even After Pelosi Plot, Press and Democrats Still Can't Talk Honestly About Right-Wing Threat

Four days out from an attempted kidnapping and attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that turned into an assault on her husband, we continue to see the dysfunctions of the Democrats, the malevolence of the GOP, and the shortcomings of the media interact around this story in toxic fashion. Even as prosecutors have quickly brought charges against assailant David DePape, right-wing media have promulgated insane conspiracy theories and other falsehoods around the attack.  For instance, The New York Times reports that “Charlie Kirk, the conservative radio and YouTube host, expressed hope on Monday that some “amazing patriot” would post bail for Mr. DePape and become a “midterm hero.” Figures like Donald Trump, Jr. and Elon Musk have promoted a theory that Pelosi was actually assaulted by a gay prostitute he had hired, while Fox News has tried to make the attack seem full of murky questions and suggested it was just another crime in crime-ridden San Francisco.

Meanwhile, GOP politicians have stood by and tacitly endorsed the lack of accountability for right-wing media’s role in the attack, let alone the party’s own participation in years and years of inciting language directed against the House Speaker. And the Democrats appear eager to put the story behind them, once again deciding against confrontation of a Republican Party that has clearly placed incitement of violence at the center of its political strategy. By ignoring the political dynamite of a right-wing freak coming close to kidnapping or killing Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats have ensured there’s space for conspiracy theories to thrive; where there should be a summoning of mass public and outrage and a blizzard of rhetorical attack against the right’s inculcation of violence, we instead see a right-wing emboldened to double down on hateful and destabilizing rhetoric.

Columnist Will Bunch has written a thorough-going critique of the fourth estate’s coverage failure around this attack, making a case for the media’s complicity in the right’s ongoing assault on democracy. He writes:

The problems with shrugging off the political implications of growing, violent extremism are two-fold. A muddled voice from America’s leading newsrooms won’t help in quashing the inevitable right-wing conspiracy theories about what happened in San Francisco which — you will not be shocked to learn — spread within hours of the news. But the muted response also gave wide license for TV pundits to “both sides” this assassination attempt when almost all of the political violence in America, as well as the threats to our election, are coming from one side, which is the far-right movement driving the Republican Party.

Crucially, Bunch fits the coverage of the Pelosi attack within the context of a larger media failure to provide accurate coverage of the 2022 midterms, “from the rise of unabashed Christian nationalism to the number of Republicans running for key offices who believe (based on zero evidence) that President Biden was not legitimately elected to the threats to the election like the armed men patrolling an Arizona voting location.”

I have to admit that the basic unwillingness of the Democrats to confront, and of the media to accurately report, the right-wing threats and violence across the nation has begun to take on a nightmarish quality — of something outlandish and logic-defying transpiring in the real world without any sign that there will be a self-correction. Press coverage that continues to insist that we are in a situation where the main takeaway is that violence is being incited by both political parties and both sides of the political spectrum is simply dishonest. It is like reporting on World War II and saying that the most salient fact is that invasions have increased worldwide.

And even accounting for crazies on the left who threaten and commit violence, such a “both sides” description is night and day from the fact that the GOP, as one of America’s two major political parties, clearly now sees incitement and violence as key strategies for gaining and maintaining power. THIS is the heart of the difference between the two, which not incidentally divides them into the categories of an authoritarian versus a democratic political party. In contrast, the Democrats, if nothing else, have been unwavering on insisting that violence and violent rhetoric have no place in a free and democratic society. Any false equivalence between the parties serves the interests of the Republicans, full stop.

It’s worth continuing to ask why the Democrats, in particular, simply seem unable or unwilling to meet this crisis. I have to assume that part of the reason is that they think it will somehow blow over — that, to use familiar phrasing, the right-wing fever will break. But this disregards the alternate possibility that we are seeing play out in real time — that there are no apparent limits to the depravity and bloodlust of the GOP and the authoritarian movement behind it, and that every step forward that they are permitted only emboldens them further. You need look no further than this incident yesterday in Arizona, where gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake managed to crack up her audience with laughter by telling them, “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection." Expecting ordinary people to at some point reach their limits with violent rhetoric and violence itself sets aside the reality that such speech and events are conditioning Americans on the right to accept more of it, not less. Such expectations also set aside the reality that this is a conscious right-wing political strategy based on activating and encouraging the worst, but very real, aspects of human nature: our capacity for cruelty, for revenge, for violence. The Democrats continue to apply an overly rational, and frankly overly optimistic, view of politics and human nature to a political reality that is quickly turning into a case study in how a fascist movement can spread when the political opposition refuses to identify it for what it is, or to treat it with the appropriate contempt, condemnation, and above all, righteous pushback.

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.