Sending Kids to Clean the Slaughterhouse

State-level efforts to roll back child labor laws are surely a sign of the times — not only of a tight labor market, but of contemporary American capitalism’s ceaseless erosion of basic principles of morality and basic humanity in the quest for profit. As the Washington Post recently reported, a proposed law in Iowa would legalize integrating children into some of the roughest and most exploitative industries in the U.S., most notably by allowing “children as young as 14 to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers.”

The Iowa law, not coincidentally, also seeks to make sure that businesses face no sanction for any harm that comes to working kids, as it “would shield businesses from civil liability if a youth worker is sickened, injured or killed on the job.” Such a provision, in fact, gives the game away as to why businesses would want an enhanced ability to hire kids — not simply to relieve labor shortages, but to assure a pool of easily exploited workers without rights or recourse. It is a dream of perfect exploitation, and a nightmare of human rights.

Labor experts make a distinction between jobs that young adults can hold safely and that increase skills that might help them down the road, and scenarios where kids work in dangerous industries and gain largelyu non-transferable skills. Think of it as the difference between baby-sitting and hosing down the blood from slaughtered cows in a 40-degree meat packing plant. Likewise, there’s a crucial distinction between working a few hours a week and working a schedule that impacts a child’s ability to attend school and learn effectively.

It’s more likely that children will be exploited than adult workers, given their natural deference to adult authority, as well as their lesser knowledge of workplace regulations and what to expect in the way of fairness. The power dynamic is not nearly that of two equals coming to a fair arrangement; in fact, you could argue that it’s impossible for a child to ever enter into an equal hiring arrangement in a workplace.

In fact, the facts on the ground bear out these dangers. According to a labor expert who spoke to The Guardian, “Young workers have much higher rates of non-fatal injuries on the job and the highest rates of injuries that require emergency department attention [ . . ] She argued that due to the vulnerability and inexperience of young workers, data on these workers is likely an undercount due to fears or barriers in being able to speak up and report dangerous situations or child labor law violations.”

Recent incidents shine a light on the reality of children’s vulnerability in the workplace. The Guardian reports that, “Several high-profile investigations involving child labor have been exposed over the past year, including the use of child labor in Hyundai and Kia supply chains in Alabama, at JBS meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Minnesota, and at fast-food chains including McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts and Chipotle."

The most striking of these may be Packers Sanitation Services’ payment of $1.5 million in fines for “illegally employing at least 102 children to clean 13 meatpacking plants on overnight shifts.” The Washington Post reports that the company:

allegedly employed minors as young as 13 to use caustic chemicals to clean “razor-sharp saws,” head splitters and other dangerous equipment at meatpacking facilities in eight states, mostly in the Midwest and the South, in some cases for years [. . .]

Investigators learned in recent months that at least three children suffered injuries, including a chemical burn to the face, while sanitizing kill floors and other areas of slaughterhouses in the middle of the night.

Such exploitation was against the law, but still went on for years (it is also notable that though the company is paying a fine, apparently no actual people are paying the price of harming children by facing charges or jail time). Yet now, states like Iowa appear set to ensure such horrors will not only continue, but proceed under the veneer of legality.

It’s no surprise that the charge to repeal and reduce child labor protections is largely being led by Republican-held statehouses and legislators, though some Democrats have also been getting in on the act. As a party that has long allied itself with business interests, the GOP now seems to be carrying corporate water in an effort to return us to the unregulated marketplace of the early 20th century and beyond.

It seems to me that politically and morally, prioritizing a pushback against this revivalist child labor movement should be a no-brainer for the Democratic Party. As the Republican Party blathers on about the non-existent dangers of “CRT” to children’s education, it would serve the Democrats well to start talking a lot more about the danger of GOP-enabled child exploitation to not only children’s education, but to their health and welfare. This would seem like the perfect time to move to strengthen child labor laws; as just one example, one child expert notes the need to close violations “existing loopholes that permit young workers, some as young as 12 years old, to work unlimited hours in many jobs in the agriculture industry with parental permission when school is not in session.” Such moves to restrict and protect child labor make even more sense in the wake of a pandemic that severely disrupted the educations of million of kids; now is certainly not the time to distract children from the ongoing work of educational catch-up.

And against the obvious counter-argument that some families need their children to work in order to make ends meet, Democrats can point to the urgent need for legislation that supports working families, such as an expanded child tax credit. The solution to poverty isn’t exploiting children, but cultivating an economy (including a fair minimum wage) and building a safety net that ensure that adults can properly provide for their kids.  

We should note how advocacy for child labor not only ties into the Republicans’ identity as the party of business, but equally so into what is arguably its dominant contemporary identity — as the party enmeshed with a broad reactionary conservative movement in the U.S. that advocates a mix of white Christian nationalism, reestablishment of patriarchal values, and a hatred for anyone perceived to deviate from gender norms. In such a right-wing conservatism, a family’s sway over its children is seen as more or less absolute, lending support to the notion that a child can work so long as the parents are fine with it, and suggesting the illegitimacy of legal protections perceived as interfering with parental rights. And with the movement's distaste for those of the non-white persuasion, the idea that immigrants from across the southern border might help fill our labor gaps runs a distant second to sending legions of teens to scrub out the slaughterhouse.

Relatedly, the resurgence of pro-child labor sentiment is further evidence that we’re living through a conflict of fundamentally conflicting values, one in which compromise isn’t really an option. It is hideous that we have to defend hard-won rights and protections, but here we are. To do so, we need to be able to articulate the basic principles at stake — in this case, the idea that children deserve fundamental protections, and that the government has an obligation to legislate and enforce those protections.

Ballooning Out of Control

It’s a little too perfect that an international balloon incident has led to a crisis of far too much hot air, but sometimes the universe feels obliged to show its support for the rightness of puns in ways no one can miss. Republicans and their right-wing media allies have spared neither overwrought hyperbole nor rifle-pointed-at-the-sky selfie to proclaim the migrant (!) Chinese airship a crisis of the first order, a challenge to American sovereignty, a declaration of war on unadulterated blue skies, and, of course and inexorably, a damning judgment on the presidency of one Joseph R. Biden, who should resign the presidency forthwith (this last demand brushing up uncomfortably against the right-wing fiction that Biden was not actually elected president, consistency not being their strong suit). The sky was literally the limit as conservative pundits suggested the high-flying airship might be seeding covid or worse over purple mountain majesties. Death could not come too soon or too harshly to the inanimate object, which meant its actual take-down had to be dismissed as too little, too late — even as it was reported that the U.S. military was able to jam the dirigible’s transmissions and that the over-ocean shootdown has given Navy divers a good chance at recovering valuable intelligence materials.

In other words, the Republican Party collectively demonstrated far less interest in defending America against actual danger (which did not exist), and far more in pursuing the party’s overriding project — undermining President Biden, and more broadly, breaking down American democracy using whatever blend of fiction, hysteria, and nonsense they could froth up. Baseless attempts to persuade Americans that they were in mortal danger, that the U.S. was demonstrating weakness that could be exploited by a nuclear power, and that danger loomed unless the president blew up (!!) the balloon RIGHT NOW share a common thread with previous GOP greatest hits that you may recall, such as Migrant Caravan, Ebola Virus, and Existence of Transgender People.

This last week brought a new low, though.  This last week, we were encouraged to fear a balloon.

As absurd as it sounds, the playbook remains doggedly the same — a multi-pronged attempt to scare Americans into a state of irrational fear so that they might look more favorably on the party that offers a perfect solution to the illusion of danger — the illusion of safety. In the case of the balloon, the GOP stayed on brand, as it turned out that the way to protect America was through overwhelming violence against an abstract and badly defined non-threat. It did not matter that the balloon was not an actual danger. It did not matter that the Biden administration engaged a plan that essentially allowed the U.S. to flip the script on the Chinese government. All that mattered was that Americans be made to feel afraid and helpless. These are not the words and ideas of a democratic party, but of an authoritarian one.

And so it would be a mistake to see last week’s drama as somehow separate from the GOP’s anti-democratic slide that’s blossomed into full-scale authoritarianism over the last half decade and more, a movement that crescendo’d on January 6 and has since surged anew, from laws to subvert elections to schemes to cause financial chaos by forcing the federal government to default on its debts. The GOP is desperate to undermine Americans’ faith in their government and in their personal safety, to create an atmosphere of crisis and lies in which their assertions of violence and hate might seem to make sense to a disoriented populace. The attempts to whip up hysteria about a goddamn balloon are the latest manifestation of the same awful strategy.

That said, another important context that we shouldn’t ignore is the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the Biden administration’s strong support of the defense of Ukraine — now including the transfer of battle tanks to that beleaguered nation — is a glaring repudiation of the idea that the president is somehow “weak on defense.” Rather, it’s the GOP that has major elements reluctant to support Ukraine, or who even express sympathy for the murderous Vladimir Putin (including their likely 2024 presidential candidate). So the China warmongering also aims to distract Americans from the party’s shaky support of doing the right thing in an actual, ongoing crisis — one that gives the lie to the idea that the GOP understands how to defend national security or defeat authoritarianism, whether it be of the Chinese, Russian, or domestic variety.

The Cast-Off Ken Doll of Mar-a-Lago

Following the U.S. government’s efforts to retrieve classified documents from Donald Trump, culminating in an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, and the former president’s legal peril for absconding with the paperwork and obstructing efforts at retrieval, The Washington Post recently published a deeply-reported overview of Trump’s post-White House existence. The article demonstrates a certain continuity with his presidential years; as the reporters put it, “In the two years since he left office, Trump has re-created the conditions of his own freewheeling White House — with all of its chaos, norm flouting and catering to his ego — with little regard for the law.”

Equally if not more compelling than those continuities, though, is the portrait of an out-of-touch, narcissistic, and deluded post-presidential Trump, whose days appear designed to distract the former president from his removal from power and convince him that he is a beloved and admired figure. The article observes that, “A longtime Trump confidant termed his Mar-a-Lago existence, where he has tried to re-create the trappings of the presidency, as “sad.” Comparing it to life at the White House, this person added, “It’s like a Barbie Dream House miniature.”” Other details in the article support this harsh assessment, with the president notably surrounded by lackeys and sycophants dedicated to shutting out bad news and to creating a warm bubble of approval.

One aide rides along for his daily golf rounds “in a golf cart equipped with a laptop and sometimes a printer to show him uplifting news articles, online posts or other materials.” Another aide “has called around to Trump’s network of allies across the country requesting that they dial the former president to boost his spirits with positive affirmations.” Events at Mar-a-Lago seem engineered to create a sensation of adulation — but to any sane outsider, the portrait that emerges is of a Potemkin village of an emotional support network for a pathetic man:

By evening, Trump emerges for dinner, surrounded most nights by adoring club members who stand and applaud at his appearance; they stand and applaud again after he finishes his meal and retires for the night. He often orders special meals from the kitchen and spends time curating the music wafting over the crowd, frequently pushing for the volume to be raised or lowered based on his mood. In the Oval Office, Trump had a button he could push to summon an aide to bring him a Diet Coke or snacks. Now, he just yells out commands to whichever employee is in earshot.

Of course, as the article notes, not all the former president’s time is spent golfing and getting high off his own adulatory supply. The article notes that he’s raised $150 million in political donations, and has endorsed and disparaged many, many Republican candidates. There is also the important fact that he is running for president again, though he’s yet engage in the tempo of political activities we’d normally expect from someone running for the highest office in the land.

So while Donald Trump continues to constitute a threat to our system of government and our society — whether through the threat of his return to the presidency, his ability to evade punishment for his attempted coup and purloining of confidential documents, or his ability to inspire and infect millions of Americans with his shamelessness and psychopathy — reports like this one should also remind pro-democracy strategists of the risks in behaving as if Donald Trump is the sole or primary threat to American democracy. At this point, the mixture of open white supremacism, misogyny, and corruption that Donald Trump ran and ruled on has become the lifeblood of the broader GOP — an infection that found an all-too-willing host. We now have a generation of Trump-inspired authoritarian politicians, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who carry on and deepen the president’s contempt for democracy and equality. Against this, a deluded and diminished Trump bumping around Mar-a-Lago on the fumes of idolatry and sycophancy must be properly gauged and prioritized.

Insurrection By Economic Means, Part 2

In my last post, I described how the Republicans’ willingness to use the threat of debt default to force the U.S. into severe spending cuts that would hammer the economy and reverse the legislative choices made by previous elected officials should be viewed within the framework of a broader Republican insurrectionism. But putting aside for a moment this rhetorical tool and handy analytical perspective, how exactly should Democrats ensure that the Republicans aren’t successful in using their illicit leverage — and also don’t end up plunging the U.S. and the world into financial chaos with dire and unpredictable consequences?

Many who see the Republicans’ debt default terrorism for what it is have pointed to a basic starting point: no negotiations with the GOP over potential cuts or other measures that might gain their agreement to lift the debt limit. Indeed, this has been the Biden administration’s position. But this begs another question — how then to persuade the GOP to back down? This fight, if it is to be won, needs to start now.

Over at Crooked Media, Brian Beutler outlines a strategy the Democrats might adopt to win this battle. He does a great job reviewing the state of play (including things the Democrats should have done already but have ruled out), and notes the party’s not-unreasonable strategy of forcing the GOP to damage and otherwise punch itself in the face by proposing unpopular cost-cutting measures, like gutting Social Security or imposing a draconian national sales tax. Crucially, he points out how the Democrats’ strategy perhaps unavoidably hinders the Democrats from making a more full-throated case about the illegitimacy of the Republicans’ position to begin with — a threat to blow up the U.S. and world economy if they don’t get what they want. As he puts it, “I think it’s a mistake to try and shoehorn a policy contrast into what is, at bottom, a straight-up attempted mugging. A mugging doesn’t become any more or less acceptable when a lot of loot is at stake. It’s an egregious crime even if only a penny changes hands. And that’s the nerve Democrats should want to strike.”

Beutler’s prescription is for Democrats to stick to their no-negotiation baseline while essentially opening a can of rhetorical whup-ass on the GOP, in an effort not just to win over the public, but to sway media coverage and turn powerful business interests against the House Republicans’ position. He notes that “[t]he best way to herd everyone into consensus is to treat it as self-evident and appalling that Republicans have thrust yet another crisis on the country.” Yes indeed! And here we sort of circle back to the idea that I started with — the need to view, and talk about, current GOP behavior on a variety of fronts as displays of a de facto insurrectionism, as behavior far outside the bounds of legitimate American politics. 

But whether you call it insurrectionism, authoritarianism, or something else, a basic conclusion should be staring the Democrats in the face: they should no longer be engaged in “normal” competitive politics vis-a-vis the GOP.  Rather, their aim should be to discredit and delegitimize the Republican Party before the GOP is able to irreparable damage to American democracy and society.

As Beutler helpfully points out, there are many Democrats who really don’t want to be seen as big spenders (by raising the debt ceiling too eagerly), or who don’t want try to play hardball with the media the way the GOP constantly does. These hesitations are symptoms of a larger party failure — to grasp the true nature of the struggle and stakes of American politics, and to let go of masochistic dreams of bipartisanship that only provide cover for a GOP that has transformed into a vehicle for authoritarianism and minority rule.

The Democrats should view the fight to protect the full faith and credit of the United States as a vital front in their war to dismantle the threat posed by the GOP — as an opportunity to sway public opinion against a party grown apocalyptic and anti-democratic, not just a burdensome fight the GOP has forced them to engage in.

Finally, I think it’s worth listening to those who suggest that Democrats “should reject the debt limit itself as an unconstitutional use of congressional power,” in the words of Jamelle Bouie. Bouie points out that, “When Congress authorizes a budget, the president is obligated to fulfill the terms of that budget once he signs it into law.” From this perspective, it’s arguably unconstitutional for the president not to spend money Congress has already authorized, and by extension for the House to try to force the executive branch not to pay for expenses already authorized by Congress. Moreover, Bouie goes on to write, there is added support in the Constitution for treating the national debt as inviolable, as Section 4 of the 14th Amendment states that, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

What leapt out at me in this language, and in Bouie’s account, is how this clarification of the validity of the debt was inserted into the Constitution as a direct response to an earlier act of insurrection — the rebellion of the Southern states in the Civil War.  Bouie summarizes the history behind the provision:

With the end of hostilities and the dissolution of the rebel army, the United States federal government repudiated Confederate debt, making it worthless to the creditors of the rebellion. But as former Confederates re-entered public life, there was real fear among Republican lawmakers that a future majority of Southern Democrats and their allies might invalidate Union war debt in retaliation. To prevent this and secure the nation’s public debt for the future, Republicans added the clause to their draft of the 14th Amendment.

In other words, 150-plus years ago, legislators amended the constitution to clarify that the nation was to always honor its debt in direct response to a potential threat posed by former insurrectionists. As our current debt and finances are now threatened by these insurrectionists’ inheritors, we’d do well to keep in mind — and broadcast — the link between insurrectionary sympathies and repudiation of the federal commitment to pay its bills.

Insurrection By Economic Means

As a price of gaining the support of far-right Republicans, newly-elected House speaker Kevin McCarthy has apparently promised to use the threat of a U.S. debt default to force draconian spending cuts in the federal budget. A debt default would have disastrous consequences for the U.S. and even world economy, destabilizing common faith in American financial stability, causing massive job losses, and catalyzing a recession. The fact that the Republicans would not only threaten this, but seem to be putting plans in place to advance an actual default, challenges all of us to stop, once and for all, looking through the Democratic-Republican conflict in Washington as politics as usual. This debt default brinksmanship, pushed by radical Republicans and supported by Speaker McCarthy, should rightly be seen as another aspect of the slow-motion insurrection the GOP has been waging ever since the events of January 6, in which all means are considered valid in an effort to overthrow American democracy and our free and open society.

A willingness to cause the U.S. to breach its debts is a direct attack on U.S. financial stability, on social cohesion, and on democratic governance. As we saw in 2011, when the Republicans pursued a similar path towards debt default in a showdown with the Obama administration, even the threat of a default can have perilous consequences, such as when the U.S. government’s credit rating ended up being downgraded as a consequence of the GOP’s failed gambit.

As nihilistic as this strategy might seem, there are in fact deeper purposes at play. Some Republicans doubtless see a damaged U.S. economy as key to taking back the White House in 2024, a situation of financial chaos and social dislocation they could exploit. But an appetite for deliberately harming millions of American in pursuit of political ends is not democratic politics in any meaningful sense, but more rightly described as authoritarian politics, in which the ends justify the means and citizens are reduced to objects and playthings of power.

There is a basic fact here that the Democrats seem not to fully face: the Republican Party is not simply not engaging in democratic, electoral politics in its pursuit of power. Rather, the GOP sees all possible tools as being at its disposal to gain and maintain power. And so, in the past several years, we have seen Republicans politicize a pandemic to score political points, embracing outrageous falsehoods about covid vaccines and the severity of the coronavirus, first in an effort to protect Donald Trump from the consequences of his incompetence, and later as a cynical effort to rile up Republican base voters against Democratic politicians. We have seen the GOP repeatedly embrace rhetoric and policies that excludes certain citizens from the American family, as in the demonization of LBGTQ people. Beyond rhetoric, the party has escalated into attacking democracy itself, with a Republican president attempting an actual coup to stay in office, and the party retroactively embracing that insurrectionary effort through efforts to deny the validity of the 2020 election and subvert future elections via voter suppression, gerrymandering, and continued propaganda about a supposedly rigged electoral system. Perhaps most damningly, the GOP has increasingly made clear that violence is just another tool in its toolbox: in its efforts to validate the objectives of the January insurrectionists, in its valorization of anti-civil rights vigilantism, in its incitement of violence against the gay community.

This damning history is the proper context in which to view the Republicans’ insane drive to force the country into a debt default. We are living through an uprising by one of America’s two major political parties against the nation itself, in service of a white supremacist, Christian nationalist vision of America. Feeling sanctified by God himself and freed of the mere laws and morals of man, this movement would destroy the nation itself in its perverted quest to save it.

Stalking Once More the GOP's Insurrectionary Spirit That Stalks the Halls of Congress

As the dust settles over the Republicans’ tortuous path to selecting Representative Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker, it’s clearer than ever that insurrectionism is key to understanding the party’s apparent chaos and conflicts. At the most basic level, the twenty or so House members leading the rebellion against McCarthy constituted a near-perfect Venn diagram overlap with those representatives most involved with supporting and retroactively justifying Donald Trump’s attempted coup two years ago. But the motivations of these coup-supporting and -adjacent representatives provide an even more direct link to insurrectionism. I think Josh Marshall nails one huge connection here:

The members of Congress who directly participated in the failed Trump coup forced McCarthy to cede control of the House to them. Beyond the atmospherics, that’s the reality of what happened [ . . .] They now plan to interfere and derail the investigations of and possible prosecution of the coup plotters using their control of key investigative committees. In other words, the attempted coup continues, now in a rearguard action to protect the perpetrators from accountability for their actions.

These GOP members’ interests in protecting themselves from further investigations is central to their interest in wielding power. Marshall is dead on in saying that “the attempted coup continues,” but I’d go a step further, and argue that the radical Republicans of the Freedom Caucus are also potentially laying the groundwork for a future coup attempt, by obfuscating and preventing full accountability for the previous one. This is a form of corruption, certainly, but a corruption tied at its core to subverting America’s democratic order — to insurrectionism.

Reflecting on the machinations in the House, Brian Beutler neatly describes how the House rebels embody a corruption that’s inextricable from a full-on assault against democratic governance:

Their aims as legislative terrorists, such as we can discern them, aren’t the kinds of nonstarter policy demands that marked Republican hostage taking in the Obama years (gut Medicare, defund the Affordable Care Act, etc). They are rooted in the realm of corruption. They want to steal elections. They want to sabotage criminal investigations that implicate themselves, Donald Trump, and January 6 defendants, current and future [. . .] They want to institutionalize a standard of impunity for Republicans caught in the reach of legitimate oversight, and a different standard of total compliance for Democrats, whether investigating them is merited or not.

“They want to steal elections” is a pithy distillation of what these House kingmakers want — a future goal verified by past behavior. But what makes this an existential problem for the United States, and a looming challenge for the Democratic Party, is that it should be clear by now that the entire House GOP has made itself complicit in this insurrectionary agenda. Again, Beutler gets to the heart of what’s happening here, writing, “[The broader House GOP’s] failure to confront the MAGA wing is an endorsement of the MAGA uprising over the alternative of conceding an inch to political reality or the national interest.” Describing advice he’d offer to newly-elected minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, he goes on to writes that:

it’d be timely for him to drive the wedge a little deeper. To make it clear that the GOP’s unanimous decision to reject any kind of consensus, to relinquish any claim on the right to set off bombs on Capitol Hill, constitutes a party-wide endorsement of the MAGA takeover. That what we’re witnessing here isn’t dysfunction so much as the entire party going through the stages of grief before re-embracing the politics of insurrection and MAGA-style fascism with open eyes.

There are some hopeful signs that using the lens of insurrectionism to describe the GOP’s behavior is growing traction, at least among liberal commentators like Beutler and Marshall. But in addition to this perspective needing to be adopted as a basic pro-democracy tenet of mainstream media, it’s essential that the Democrats hammer home this view. Thus far, at least some Democrats get it: Representative Ilhan Omar recently referred to McCarthy’s “deal with far right insurrectionists that would hold the entire US and global economy hostage to extreme cuts to everything from housing to education, healthcare, Social Security and Medicare,” while Representative Sean Casten had tweeted that, “If McCarthy wins tonight, it will be because - on January 6, of all days - he put members who were implicated in J6 in positions of great power. Will the so-called "moderate" Rs object, or will they simply repeat the "silence of our friends" mistake they made 2 years ago?” And writing of the agonized Speaker election, Representative Jamie Raskin tweeted that, “This once-in-a-century humiliation of a party’s nominee for Speaker is chickens coming home to roost for McCarthy, who whitewashed right-wing insurrectionism on the House floor. Nobody’s getting killed now, but the House GOP now sleeps in the bed they made with Trump and Bannon.”

Many others, like minority leader Jeffries, have laid down Democratic attacks that talk about the extremism of the Republicans running the GOP show — but without calling out the fundamentally illegitimate ends of Republican power. And so what still remains for the Democrats to do is to make a consistent and persuasive case to the American public that GOP behavior no longer constitutes American politics as usual, but is fully aimed at subverting democratic politics, free and fair elections, and accountability for those who commit heinous crimes against the public interest. It is fair and accurate to use the framework of insurrectionism to convey the true horror and danger of our political times.

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.