Targeting Transgender Representative, Montana GOP Joins Insurrection Against U.S. Democracy

With their decision last week to ban a transgender Democratic legislator from the statehouse floor, Montana Republicans have provided a fresh demonstration of the Republican Party’s full transformation into an authoritarian wrecking ball lodged in the heart of American democracy.  Coming just weeks after the GOP-controlled Tennessee legislature’s ignominious vote to expel two African-American legislators, it is clear that the anti-democratic radicalism of the GOP has only continued to accelerate since the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020.

Few people would dispute that a state legislature should be able, under certain circumstances, to discipline or even expel members. But the bar for doing so should always be kept extremely high, as such actions always threaten the will of the voters who elected these representatives. Most obviously, for instance, it seems reasonable that a legislator who threatens or harasses his or her colleagues should face sanctions.

But in Montana, we are seeing an entirely opposite situation. GOP legislators accuse Representative Zooey Zephyr of abetting disruptive protests at the state capitol, and of employing “hateful rhetoric” that might result in violence, thus violating Montana House rules. But what was this alleged “hateful rhetoric”? Zephyr told her colleagues that they would have “blood on your hands” if they passed proposed regulation banning transition care for minors who identify as transgender. In her defense prior to the vote to restrict her from the floor, Zephyr refused to withdraw this language, noting that, “When the speaker asks me to apologize on behalf of decorum, what he is really asking me to do is be silent when my community is facing bills that get us killed; he’s asking me to be complicit in this Legislature’s eradication of our community.”

Given the high rates of suicide and suicidal ideation among transgender youth, and the violence directed at transgender adults, Zephyr’s offense is not due to speaking inaccurately or in an inciting fashion, but entirely the opposite —her offense is because she has spoken truthfully, by referencing the violence at the center of the right-wing and GOP war on transgender Americans. The GOP is punishing Zephyr precisely because she has used accurate, illuminating language; the GOP considers it out of bounds because it is true, and reveals their own position as immoral and cruel.

The Montana GOP’s attempt to describe accurate language that specifically opposes violence as itself violent echoes the rhetoric of Tennessee Republicans who voted to expel two Black Democrats from that state’s legislature. There, the GOP took revenge on the men for engaging in peaceful protest specifically targeted at gun violence, claiming that such protest was actually violence. But even this doesn’t fully capture the Republican Party’s attempts to invert public notions of peaceable conduct versus violence. In Tennessee, Republicans went so far as to describe the Democrats’ actions as akin to the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, equating a protest against violence with an actual, armed rebellion against the American government. Weeks later, Montana Republicans are repeating this inversion of rhetoric and common sense, bluntly accusing Zephyr of “encouraging an insurrection.”

In both Tennessee and Montana, the insurrection language is another instance of the GOP attempting to twist public perceptions of reality through lies and propaganda. In fact, the GOP actions in both states provide far more compelling evidence that it is the Republican Party that is engaging in insurrection, by an abuse of state power meant to disenfranchise and disempower the citizens who had the temerity to elect Democrats to the legislature. In both cases, the fact that the GOP is in the majority doesn’t make this any less of an insurrection — the party’s actions constitute attempts to subvert basic mechanisms of democracy (e.g., the results of elections) in pursuit of one-party power and the suppression of dissenting perspectives.

Despite the lopsided 68-32 vote in favor of keeping Zephyr off the House floor, the GOP’s attempt to assert its dominance suggests weakness and incoherence. The move to silence and disappear a transgender person may have succeeded in the context of this session of the Montana legislature, but it is hard to see how this clearly bigoted power play serves the GOP in the context of national politics, or even in Montana politics over the long term. At the most basic level, it makes the GOP look not like the defender of traditional western values so much as a party of bullies who can’t bear it when a single political opponent chooses to speak truth to power. As in Tennessee, the Montana GOP has made it that much easier for ordinary Americans to observe the moral rot and anti-democratic spirit driving the Republican Party, and for the Democratic Party to drive home a message of how GOP intolerance and hate leads directly to an assault on American democracy itself — a story that we saw play out dramatically on January 6, 2020, but now which continues to reverberate from statehouse to statehouse.

 The GOP legislators’ grotesquely disproportionate response on Montana’s sole transgender legislator also inadvertently calls into question the broader edifice of the Republican’s celebration of “traditional” patriarchal and Christian values. Among other things, the inability to grapple in any honest fashion with Zephyr’s essential charge — that GOP policies are hurting, even killing, transgender people — is ultimately a sign of weakness, not strength or confident belief in the morality of their position. Rather than engage in an actual debate — which one would assume the Republican legislators would welcome, so convinced they appear of the rightness of their anti-trans sentiments — the GOP is simply aiming to short-circuit discussion, by silencing and shaming the one legislator who has a unique and powerful perspective on the laws being pursued. At an easily-grasped level, the Montana GOP is acting like a gang of bullies; and as with bullies everywhere, it’s easy to discern a basic cowardice seeping around the edges of the mob’s bravado.

Against such corrupt and immoral behavior on the part of the Republican majority, Zephyr’s refusal to back down appears righteous and principled. The GOP legislators may be thrilling their hard-core supporters with their performative cruelty and authoritarian tactics, but most Americans should feel contempt and revulsion at their power play.

Recent Shootings Highlight Paranoia and Lies of Extremist Gun Culture

The past few weeks have provided another dose of senseless American gun violence, with a mass shooting in Alabama and a trio of random yet thematically similar shootings elsewhere in the country gaining some measure of national attention. Missouri, New York, and Texas were the sites of egregious gun violence where innocent acts were met with urban warfare: in St. Louis, where a Black youth accidentally rang the wrong doorbell; in Hebron, NY, where a young woman drove into the wrong driveway; and in Elgin, TX, where a high school cheerleader mistakenly tried to open the door of a car that wasn’t hers. But rather than simply decrying these as random acts of violence, the similarities in these shooting open a door to lines of attack against the gun rights extremists that hold sway over the Republican Party, and as a prod to a Democratic Party that treats gun violence as calling for only the most incremental reforms.

Alongside the obvious point that the nation is awash with weaponry, the trio of shootings noted above point to a culture of paranoia, vengeance, and racism that ready weaponry turns deadly at the least provocation. We all need to be talking about these aspects of the shooters’ motivations — the way that all three appear to have been primed to shoot to kill at the least provocation, projecting dark fantasies of home and auto invasion onto innocent citizens going about their daily lives.

This perspective also highlights a fundamental lie propagated by gun rights extremists — that we are all somehow safer if everyone is armed. The truth is more sinister — that the arming of America goes hand in hand with a paranoid notion that one needs to be armed, and is justified in shooting first and asking questions later. This places the unarmed population in the position of unwitting and unwilling targets for the hair-trigger brigades peering through their screen doors and windshields at imagined terrors outside. The truth is the opposite — the more armed Americans there are, the less safe we all are.

But what of the idea that if only everyone were armed, then we would all exercise restraint in our interactions, leading to a more peaceable country? The circumstances of the three shootings give the lie to this canard as well. In all cases, if the victims had been armed, it would have made no difference to whether they suffered unprovoked, sudden attacks. Was it young Ralph Yarls’ god-given responsibility to be armed that day, and to have struggled for his sidearm to shoot back as he lay bleeding on the ground? Were the cheerleaders remiss at not having AR-15’s close at hand, so they could have laid down suppressive fire against their attacker as they lay bleeding in their vehicle? Did Kaylin Gillis deserve what she got because she didn’t have a Glock in her glove compartment?

This is the GOP’s recipe for American peace, which is actually a recipe for American mayhem.  

In fact, I think we can reasonably speculate, given the paranoid nature of the attacks, that the shooters may well have acted as they did in part because they assumed their targets were themselves armed, and so felt it was better to get the drop on their perceived enemies.

In Missouri, the authorities’ need to consider whether the alleged shooter was protected by the state’s Stand Your Ground law highlights how pernicious and inciting such laws really are. As Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas put it, “If Stand Your Ground really lets somebody just shoot somebody that rings a doorbell [. . .] that puts the life of every postal worker, every campaigner, every Amazon delivery person at risk in this country.” But we could safely amend this list of potential victims to any American who ever has a reason to go up to a stranger’s — or a neighbor’s — door. 

Our collective ability to identify with the situations in which the victims of these three shootings found themselves — going about their daily business, making innocent errors — is a powerful weapon for challenging and changing the culture of gun violence in America. We can’t let the paranoid, the racist, the trigger-happy define the nature of society as a war of all against all, in which no action is innocent and the penalty for making a paranoid person feel threatened is death or serious injury. There is no reasonable definition of a healthy society that fits this scenario.

These are the stories that the gun control movement must tell — of innocent Americans targeted not only by guns but by the paranoia and hatred amplified and incited by the gun rights movement, the way guns inevitably fetishize the violence they’re built for, and the way they empower extremists and racists to interfere with our fundamental right to go about our daily business.  Though they may only be a small percentage of shootings in the country, they are happening on a regular and not widely reported basis. Encapsulating all the sickness and derangement of the armed and ready mentality, these shootings may be wielded as a hammer with which to wake Americans up to the lies, fantasies, and paranoia of gun rights absolutists. 

The Right's Calculated Hatred of Transgender Americans

A Republican and cultural conservative war on transgender people is under full steam, and recent reporting brings into sharper focus the fundamental immorality of this regressive movement. As the New York Times details, conservative leaders see the targeting of transgender Americans as a way to rile up and invigorate their right-wing base. Since previous efforts to demonize gay Americans have been swept away by majority acceptance of such crucial markers of equal rights as gay marriage, and as a backlash to eliminating abortion rights threatens to turn current success into a Pyrrhic victory of epic scale, the conservative movement sees fear-mongering around transgender issues as a key way to drive fundraising and votes.

Particularly sinister is how right-wing politicians re-tooled early efforts to target transgender Americans when those initiatives met with widespread rebuke and failure, such as North Carolina’s “bathroom bill.” A little polling and cynical calculation later, Republican politicians and right-wing activists have seized upon the idea of parents’ rights and the protection of vulnerable children as the most efficient fuel for their anti-transgender hate machine.

Nowhere in this whole sordid effort is evidence of actual Christian values purportedly held by these social conservatives, which would at a minimum entail compassion towards the transgender community, and certainly not the demonization on clear display. Also absent is any real attempt to try to understand transgender Americans’ point of view, or to engage with the issues of identity and sexuality they provoke. Instead, what we’ve seen is a knee-jerk response on the part of millions of ordinary conservatives, seized upon and further incited by the calculations of amoral political operatives, in an effort characterized by sadism, scapegoating, and willful ignorance. With the religious right quickly shifting from complaints about transgender Americans playing in girls’ sports to outright bans on gender-affirming care, fear-mongering has quickly shifted into what is better characterized as hatred and repression — having decided that transgender people should not exist, multiple Republican statehouses and governors are now working to twist the law to deny the basic right to determine one’s own sense of self in the world.

As with the movement to eliminate abortion rights, extreme religious beliefs are being passed off as unimpeachable morality in the defense of innocent children. Look beneath the surface, though, and we see fear and bigotry masquerading as sanctity, cruelty cloaked as kindness, and immorality resold as righteousness. The fact that the rhetoric and actions of this movement are feeding stigmatization, cruelty, and violence toward the transgender community — that this purported movement to protect children is leading to actual, measurable harm to both children and adults — seems to matter not a whit to its proponents. This tacit embrace of violence is the final clue we need, as if more were needed, is that this is a movement that now only sees Christ in the rear view mirror.

Not surprisingly, the “parents’ rights” quackery of the anti-trans crusade has not been satisfied to stop with this line of attack. As the executive director of a Florida anti-discrimination group told the Times, there is “a direct line from the right’s focus on transgender children to other issues it has seized on in the name of “parents’ rights” — such as banning books and curriculums that teach about racism.”” The common thread is an urge to impose the right’s own hatred and ignorance — against non-whites, against non-Christians, against sex and sexual expression — onto everyone else.

Cultural conservatives, having been on the wrong side of every major cultural fight of recent memory, have now chosen to target one of the smallest and most vulnerable targets possible — transgender Americans. Bullying is among the least of the indictments that can be leveled against this movement, but ganging up on a population perceived as relatively defenseless and powerless provides a gut-level measure of how cynical this war on transgender people truly is. Anyone with even a minimal sense of justice should be appalled and enraged by this hideous scapegoating by immoral right-wing crusaders who, like a roving band of political junkies, are ever on the lookout for the next fix to incite hatred, goose vote counts, and divide Americans against each other.

Heading Out East on the Oregon Trail

What small state resident doesn’t get a thrill when the national media flick their gaze towards one’s beloved home, even if ever so briefly? Oregon had a sweet run of such sugar rush coverage in the early 2000s, propelled by Portland’s excellent food scene, the cultural caché of Portlandia, and, well, Portland’s excellent food scene. But then the coverage soured, particularly after long-running civil rights protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were distorted by right-wing media into a story of antifa run amok and a city aflame. More recently, after Walmart’s closure of its remaining stores within Portland city limits, Texas Governor Greg Abbott went back to that same smoldering well, landing one more sucker punch on our city and state by blaming, yes, Portland lawlessness for Walmart’s departure.

Yet Abbott’s early March put-down is not the latest instance of Oregon’s recent parlous run in the national media. No, that honor belongs to a pair of recent stories out from CNN and The New York Times that highlight a movement among some residents of eastern Oregon to break free of the state and join Idaho. As the Times reports, 11 Oregon counties have now passed resolutions requiring local government meetings to discuss secession; and in February, the Greater Idaho movement gained a measure of legitimacy as the Idaho legislature voted in favor of opening talks on the topic with Oregon (the Oregon state government has thus far declined the invitation to parlay).

The possibility of eastern Oregon counties joining Idaho remains a long shot: not only would the Idaho legislature need to consent, but so would the Oregon legislature and the U.S. Congress. Given Democrats’ strong hold on the state government, it seems unlikely that at least Oregon would ever consent to such a divorce, which would essentially strip the state down to a Pacific littoral. 

Does this mean the movement should be dismissed as a stunt, an ostentatious exercise in letting off steam by disgruntled Oregonians? I believe that treating it as such would be a mistake — not simply because its chances of success are not technically impossible, but because many of the ideas motivating this movement are wrong-headed, misleading, and inflaming of the very political divisions the movement purports to seek to cure or at least ameliorate. Permitting illiberal notions of statehood and community to spread unchallenged — treating this as a fever that will simply burn itself out — is the same sort of head-in-the-sand mentality that has seen too many refuse to fully push back against a whole host of authoritarian, racist, and misogynistic ideas that now animate millions of right-wing voters across the land. What we are seeing in Oregon is part of a larger national story.

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To their credit, both The New York Times and CNN articles on the Greater Idaho movement take a serious-minded approach. But in foregrounding the voices of those in the secessionist movement, the Times in particular excludes important context for the meaning and goals of the effort. As with the CNN piece, the Times presents analysis and interviews that suggest this push is due primarily to a rural-urban, liberal-conservative divide — as, above all else, as a conflict of irreconcilable cultures, in which the western Oregon majority imposes its values on unwilling eastern Oregonians.

In doing so, such coverage adopts the basic premise of a primarily cultural divide that the secessionist movement itself claims as its motivation. The Greater Idaho website itself is rich with such vague cultural language, stating that, “If the United States were governed as a single state, we wouldn’t have the opportunity for state governance to vary according to the culture of a local area. The purpose of having state lines is to allow this variance,” and going on to note that the current state line “makes no sense in its current location because it doesn’t match the location of the cultural divide in Oregon.”

Yet, as you read further into the website, as well as the words of secession supporters in the media coverage, the vague references to “cultural” differences between eastern and western Oregon end up hiding as much as they reveal. Rather, those favoring secession seem motivated by specific political issues, as well as a sense of powerlessness and resentment. On the website, a comparison of the advantages of being part of Idaho versus Oregon highlights a cross-section of contemporary right-wing concerns, naming Oregon’s actual or supposed support of: transgender rights (“males in girls’ sports leagues”); school “Critical Race Theory”; sanctuary, driver’s licenses, and “free health care” for “illegals”; “Taxpayer-Funded Abortions,” and “Fossil Fuels being phased out.” 

The Times’ conversations with eastern Oregonians echo this theme of cultural issues that are better described as political conflicts. Of one such interviewee, the paper notes, “But even here, where she now runs a Christian camp amid the foothill pines overlooking the Grande Ronde Valley, she cannot help but notice how the values of western Oregon are held over the eastern part of the state by way of laws making guns less accessible and abortions more accessible.” Another interviewee “cited gun control and decriminalization of drugs as two major issues where the lesser-populated rural and vote-rich urban divide collide.” And another Greater Idaho supporter tells CNN that, “The problems [. . ] begin with rural Oregonians living fundamentally different lifestyles than people in the city of Portland. At the ballot box, due to the population strength of the cities, the rural region is outnumbered in every major statewide vote.”

Describing such differences — on abortion, gun control, and punishments for using drugs — as simply cultural or lifestyle conflicts, in which some people should presumably be free to live as they choose, is to present a misleading conception of the conflicts at play, and who stands to win or lose. Whether a woman can have an abortion; whether schoolchildren are protected from weapons of war being used for mass slaughter; whether a Black teenager should have his or her future ruined for smoking a joint: all are profoundly political questions involving the basic rights accorded citizens in our country, and the fight over which rights trump others.

By describing their wishes to secede in the more anodyne language of cultural differences, supporters of Greater Idaho are obscuring conflicts over basic rights, aiming for a generalized, libertarian proposition that everyone should be free to live true to their own beliefs. But as even a cursory look at say, abortion, reveals, it appears many in eastern Oregon are less concerned about their own relative rights around abortion, and much more concerned about whether they control other people’s rights to an abortion. In other words, while supporters of the Greater Idaho movement essentially talk about the ability to live according to their cultural beliefs, doing so arguably would mean restricting the political rights available to all individuals in their part of the state, should the secession effort succeed. The list of grievances I noted above only hammers home this point: illegals have too many rights, transgender people have too many rights, women have too many rights.

Crucially, the cultural conflict terminology obscures the degree to which the secession is essentially a rebellion against majority rule. The idea that the “values of western Oregon are held over the eastern part of the state” can be clarifyingly re-stated as “a government based on the votes of Oregon’s majority passed laws that apply in all parts of Oregon.” Not to be overly blunt, but this is just a basic description of American democracy; this is how things are supposed to work. Like a black hole at the center of the Oregon secessionist universe, we find a malignant and explosive assertion: that democracy, if it doesn’t yield the outcomes you favor, is indistinguishable from political repression.

This notion of oppression by the state majority is paralleled by another argument made by Greater Idaho proponents: that because they don’t agree with laws promulgated by representatives of the Oregon majority, many in eastern Oregon thus lack “representation” in the state. But this is simply not true. Eastern Oregon votes for and sends to the legislature representatives and senators who are involved with the legislative process in Salem. While it is true that they might not be able to get majorities to support their positions, the idea that eastern Oregon is without representation is a falsehood — but an illuminating one: it suggests that some who support the movement aren’t as much concerned with representation as they are with wanting to get their way. But in a democracy, it’s simply not the case that a minority of voters are going to be able to do so. Again, that’s just how it works.

But talking about the lack of political power does get us somewhere — from this point of view, it’s not crazy that some eastern Oregonians wouldn’t want to keep living in a state where they lack the votes to win the day on issues they see as important to them (the Oregon legislature has been dominated by Democrats over the last decade, and a Republican governor has not won in the state for 40 years). But this is also where we can see the distorting effects of framing this as a cultural conflict, because on issues like abortion and gun regulation, what’s really at stake are fundamental rights that belong to everyone, not just fundamental cultural beliefs held by some. What some eastern Oregon secessionists describe as political oppression is actually, from another and I believe more persuasive point of view, more accurately described as the assertion of basic rights on behalf of all Oregonians.

And this gets us to a third critique of the secessionist movement: that it seeks to erase the perspective and rights of those residents of eastern Oregon who don’t support secession, and who would stand to lose rights as Oregonians that they hold as precious — most prominently in my mind, the right to an abortion. Strip away the “self-determination” language, and what we see instead is a movement by some Oregonians to deny the rights of other Oregonians. This is certainly a perspective its supporters would rather other Oregonians not take, but I’d argue that this is exactly the lens through which we should be viewing this movement — as an effort to strip women of their rights, to impose radical notions of gun ownership on vast swathes of the state, and to roll back common-sense drug laws aimed at preventing the whole-scale criminalization of addiction and harmless drugs like marijuana.

If you’re an Oregonian who believes that every resident deserves the fullest rights possible, then beware the siren song that eastern Oregonians are so very different from the rest of the state that maybe it would be better to just let them go their own way. Secession would not just mean the cultural liberation and “self determination” of those who support the movement; it would mean the stripping of rights and benefits from thousands of unwilling Oregonians (among these benefits being in-state tuition to institutions of higher learning like the University if Oregon and Oregon State University). Reporting that leans too far into the secessionists’ perspective ends up downplaying the actual, current democratic reality of the state. Certainly equally important of representation is whether the Oregon majority agrees or not that a minority can hive off a chunk of the state and so deny eastern Oregon residents their full rights and benefits?

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There is one final element of the Greater Idaho movement that the media coverage has severely underplayed, but that arguably looms largest and most ominously: the role of race as a factor in the impulse towards secession. None of the supporters interviewed say it outright — but just as stark differences about political rights are cloaked under talk of rural culture, racial resentments nonetheless swirl below other stated concerns. The repeated slams against not simply western Oregon but specifically the city of Portland, with its relatively high minority population relative to the rest of the state (particularly if you consider the greater Portland metropolitan area), are particularly notable. This is not to say that such disdain doesn’t also involve anti-liberal and anti-urban sentiment, but it would be practicing a certain naiveté to not suspect that the diversity of these areas is part of the concern. And when you look at the specific issues identified by the movement — critical race theory, the supposed coddling of immigrants — the same preoccupations of the white supremacist sentiment animating enormous swaths of the contemporary GOP snap into focus.

The failure of media coverage to more fully contextualize the Greater Idaho movement within the broader developments of conservatism and the Republican Party is striking, particularly when you consider that the eastern Oregon counties that have already voted to explore secession are overwhelming white (nearly all are around 90% white), while the parts of Oregon they wish to leave behind are far more diverse, and in the process of diversifying further, with its Latino community growing dramatically in size and political power over the last couple decades (Oregon’s overall population is around 75% white). Here, again, we can see the distorting effects of framing the conflicts between eastern and western Oregon as “cultural” — racial explanations are subsumed and repressed under vaguer talk of a rural-urban divide.

The significance of racial factors is amplified given Oregon’s shameful history of white supremacism (to its credit, The New York Times briefly nods to this history, but leaves the role of race to the imagination when it concludes that “modern extremist groups have harnessed lingering grievances over a changing culture or a government incompatible with their own aims”). Laws excluding African-Americans from the state were passed in the mid-1800’s, and it was admitted into the Union in 1859 as the only state with a constitution that excluded African-Americans from living within its borders. In the 1940’s, extreme racial segregation contributed to the destruction of a 20,000-strong African-American community located in a vulnerable flood plain. And in the past half century, the city of Portland has repeatedly dispossessed the African-American community via large-scale construction projects and gentrification. To this day, the percentage of Africa-Americans in the state remains smaller than in other Western states like neighboring Washington and California.

The omission of race from the coverage of the Greater Idaho movement becomes yet more striking when we consider that white nationalists have long fantasized about turning the greater Northwest into a white ethnostate, under the rubric of the Northwest Territorial Imperative. To be blunt, the fusing of overwhelmingly white regions of Oregon into overwhelmingly white Idaho feels just a wee bit white homeland-y — and maps on the Greater Idaho website showing a “phase 2” in which southwestern Oregon and parts of northern California are absorbed into a yet more corpulent Greater Idaho don’t exactly dispel this unsettling coincidence. And when the leader of the Greater Idaho movement, Mike McCarter, asserts that states should be based on “the idea of organizing like-minded people and can be adjusted to conform with evolving communities,” and cites how “divisions between the eastern and western parts of Virginia led to the creation of West Virginia,” one is not really reassured. After all, West Virginia split from Virginia when the latter seceded from the Union in defense of slavery, hardly an example of “evolving communities” relevant to the present day, and a reminder that secession has ineluctable associations with racial animus in our nation’s history.

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All this said, it would also be a profound mistake to dismiss the alienation and anger of thousands of eastern Oregon residents, whether or not one believes all the roots of this alienation are sympathetic or credible. From one perspective, the Greater Idaho movement is hitting on long-standing tensions between democracy and individual rights, with many in the movement essentially believing that the Oregon majority is quashing their rights. No one should feel without redress for legitimate grievances in an American state, and part of the challenge in considering this movement is disentangling the objectionable from the legitimate. It’s also necessary to view this effort through the prism of recent political violence in the West and nationally; I am thinking in particular of the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2015, and the January 6 insurrection led by Donald Trump. A movement that is seeking through peaceful, process-oriented means to change its political circumstances should be accorded a basic respect, particularly when alternatives of violence have been increasingly mainstreamed by other political actors, up to and including a former president of the United States.

Yet, in addition to the criticisms I’ve already made, supporters of the Greater Idaho movement have embraced a flawed and unrealistic conception of what statehood means. They suggest that states should be communities that share a common culture, but this is a tendentious and largely ahistorical prescription for themselves and the country at large. America contains multitudes — racially, religiously, politically, and along class lines, among other categories — and desires for some sort of vaguely defined cultural commonality as the basis of a community are problematic on multiple levels. Rather, we should see our diversity as a strength, not a limitation; at any rate, it is our lived reality, and desires to deny or suppress it are always suspect. The path the secessionists are pursuing is not only anti-democratic, but rooted in a view of rights and values at odds with the more egalitarian society most Oregonians — and most Americans — support. The danger that a secession would drag eastern Oregon residents who oppose it into a regime of straitened rights and benefits is alone reason for the Oregon majority to take seriously, and seriously oppose, this movement.

But this does feel like an opening which Oregon politicians and citizens, particularly those from the western and urban parts of the state, should explore. Indeed, the coverage I’ve cited relays such sentiments from Oregon politicians and some of the Greater Idaho supporters themselves; some of the latter hope that even if their efforts don’t come to fruition, they might at least lead a reset with their western neighbors.

First and foremost, Oregon politicos should think more about prioritizing economic revitalization for rural areas that have been left behind compared to more urban and economically dynamic parts of the state. This might not address conservative Oregonians’ distress that abortion rights persist in Oregon, or that undocumented immigrants aren’t treated more harshly, but it could at least ameliorate the sense that the state is ignoring their needs. Among other things, the state could send far more money to rural schools, with the twin aims of improving education and boosting local economies (indeed, this is a basic measure every state should pursue, and that the federal government should subsidize).

But those who believe that Oregon is stronger when all parts of it feel included and respected should also think a lot harder about promoting a vision of the state’s common values and interests. The Greater Idaho movement is fixated on differences, some of which are indeed difficult or even impossible to bridge, but a countering case can be made that commonalities among all Oregonians remain far more powerful. Among other things, we all face together the challenges of slowing and adapting to climate change. We all want the best education possible for our children. We all want jobs that pay at least a living wage and provide a dignified workplace. The idea that Oregon’s differences are irreconcilable is rooted in resentments and narratives that may yet prove susceptible to the force of logic, compassion, and shared purpose.

Culture War, Real World Damage

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: You’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not a regular reader of Jamelle Bouie’s columns. He reliably offers up finely researched and reasoned essays that often emphasize the role of historical context for understanding our current political conflicts. I really can’t count the number of moments of clarity and revelation I’ve experienced reading him.

I had one and very possibly two of those “Aha!” experiences recently, as Bouie addressed the Republican Party’s relentless and escalating war on transgender and gay people. Citing in particular the writings of Frederick Douglass, he suggests that it’s productive to view the GOP’s attacks as an attack on the dignity of these citizens. Bouie describes how the concept of dignity can be seen as central to the meaning and purpose of a democracy, illuminating as it does both one’s self-perception of worth and the interrelatedness of how others view a person. From this perspective, attacks on the transgender and gay communities not only deny these groups’ dignity, they baselessly deny them full participation in democracy. Beyond this, such degradations open the door for more to come; as Bouie writes, “To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest [. . .] There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.”

His discussion of dignity and the necessity of defending it for all is compelling; but it was Bouie’s comments of the idea of “culture war” in the context of the dignity discussion that particularly grabbed my attention. First, though, a little background: probably more than I’ve written about, the whole “culture war” terminology has increasingly vexed me (even more so because I’ve had trouble drilling down precisely to my problems with this term). Generally, it has seemed somewhat arbitrary to label issues that encompass political rights as profound as bodily autonomy, religious freedom, and gay marriage as somehow not as real as economic or voting rights issues (this seems to be the hierarchy that many in the Democratic Party have tended to follow). It’s also seemed inaccurate to say that the GOP simply deploys such cultural fights as a distraction from more “important” matters (even if it is true that distracting voters from less popular parts of the Republican agenda, such as its economic policies, is a major reason for the party’s foregrounding of such cultural issues). Opposition to abortion and gay rights are extremely compelling concerns, in and of themselves, to millions of Republican rank and file; equally to the point, it is difficult to see how a woman’s right to control her own body, or a gay person’s right to have sex or marry whom they please, are somehow less consequential to women and gays than whether they are able to afford college or find remunerative employment. Such are the connotations of “culture war” that have seemed misleading and unhelpful to me.

So it got my notice when, talking about the attacks on transgendered people, Bouie writes that, “Politicians and those of us in the media tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.”  Exactly!  And this is where the discussion of dignity sheds some light on the stakes — if dignity is a centrally important element of democracy and of what makes our lives meaningful and whole, then labeling them as some sort of “culture war” sideshow is profoundly misleading.

Bouie makes another observation in this piece that raises a second critique of the “culture war” label. Writing of GOP attacks on transgendered people’s right, he observes that, “the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people.” This raises what we might call the material consequences of robbing people of their dignity and political standing — without equal rights under the law, they stand to lose not just rights, but physical security and the ability to physically sustain themselves. And so culture war effects bleed into “real world” consequences. If the GOP convinces enough people that gays are perverts, their economic interests will be harmed, as fewer employers will hire them for the jobs they want. If a woman if forced to carry a baby to term against her wishes, she may well suffer economic harms due to inability to work. There is no clear, easy distinction between material and cultural issues; one flows into the other, and vice versa.

POSTSCRIPT THAT MAY BE LONGER THAN WHAT YOU JUST READ: Just as I was initially about to post the above, Jamelle Bouie came out with a new column that seems, at least at first glance, to sort of dynamite some of the conclusions I’d drawn from his recent pieces, and, via the power of the transitive property, some of my own rambling observations. Taking stock of the widespread GOP and right-wing media effort to label the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as the result of the bank’s supposedly “woke” policies (e.g., the bank was allegedly more concerned about hiring diversity than keeping track of its loans), Bouie contends that there’s a direct link between such frenetic cultural warring and GOP culpability for the actual regulatory issues revealed by the bank’s blow-up. Noting the Trump era rollback of regulations that could have prevented or mitigated SVB’s problems, Bouie writes:

All of this is to say that if you want to understand the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, you have to understand the political environment that led Congress to loosen regulations on regional banking institutions [. . .]

The people who blame wokeness for the collapse of a bank do not want you to understand or even think about the political economy of banking in the United States. They want to deflect your attention from the real questions toward a manufactured cultural conflict. And the reason they want to do this is to obscure the extent to which they and their allies are complicit in — or responsible for — creating an environment in which banks collapse for lack of appropriate regulation [. . .]

Put simply, you show me a scene from the so-called culture wars, and I’ll show you what’s behind it: a real issue with real stakes for real people.

So does this contradict what Bouie was talking about in the column I discussed above? Does he actually believe that culture war attacks by the right are about fake issues, as opposed to the real ones they serve to obscure? I don’t think so; rather, his more recent points in his column about wokeness bring into focus the fuller dynamics of GOP culture war talk and aims.

First, Bouie’s observation about the distracting intentions of rhetoric like the GOP’s obsessive talk of “wokeness” echoes a broad critique of Republican strategies made over the past few decades by people like Thomas Frank, and that you can find elaborated in books like Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. For me, this is a basic, solid perspective on how the GOP conducts politics.

But one reason Democrats and progressive forces in the U.S. haven’t been able to just make this “culture wars as distraction” case and drop the mic as millions of formerly unpersuaded Americans rushed to repudiate cynical GOP politics is because these more cultural issues have tremendous appeal to many, and because, as I discussed above, they actually matter to the quality of people’s lives. Many Americans do seem to care more about issues like cultural standing and their place at the top of the racial hierarchy than they do about whether the GOP has a plan to return manufacturing to the United States.

So I think the really diabolical and effective aspect of the GOP’s prioritization of cultural wars, at least rhetorically, is that it ends up serving not just one purpose, but two: it distracts us from what Bouie refers to as the political economy of the United States, while also serving the very real cultural interests of millions of GOP-aligned voters. In other words, it is the perfect two-fer, as it allows the GOP to act as the party of the rich while also plausibly acting as the party of the people, by delivering two different sets of goods to two different constituencies. Culture wars are a distraction, but they are also a thing in themselves that require a response from Democrats — not simply to lift the veil and get people to see what issues are being obscured, but because oftentimes they do reveal vital conflicts whose outcomes can have deep and meaningful impacts on people’s lives.

On the one hand, the GOP’s line about Silicon Valley Bank’s corrupting “wokeness” falls far closer to the smokescreen than substance end of the spectrum, and talking about it as a distraction without engaging in a prolonged substantive exchange on the deliberately protean term “wokeness” feels more or less like the right response. But something like the GOP’s demonization of trans and gay people can’t simply be treated as a distraction from other issues — it’s a real challenge in its own right, threatening as it does not only to strip civil rights, but physical safety, from millions of Americans. Even if it serves as a distraction from other GOP ends, “cultural” issues like gay rights must be engaged much more directly and thoroughly. Democrats need to learn to thread the needle, both engaging in cultural fights that are worth having while also ducking and deflating the truly misleading ones like the “woke” fight and pointing the citizenry to see what catastrophes the GOP seeks to hide.

Child Migrant Labor Is a Form of Child Abuse

A recent NYT exposé on migrant child labor in the U.S. is essential reading, both for its enraging descriptions of exploitation and for its portrayal of the systemic elements that enable this abomination. We’re not talking about a few isolated incidents — rather, the piece describes “a new economy of exploitation,” with migrant kids “ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.”

Exhaustion, injury, and even death are the fate of these children, who have often been abandoned on multiple fronts: by corrupt sponsors who get them into the country only to exploit them; by amoral businesses that flout the law by hiring on a child workforce; by a federal government that has allowed this systematic exploitation to mushroom; and by parents who sent their children northward with the intention that they work in the U.S. in the first place. As the Times notes,

The growth of migrant child labor in the United States over the past several years is a result of a chain of willful ignorance. Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And H.H.S. behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.

But I would argue that when the results are so egregious, “willful ignorance” risks missing the depravity of some of those involved. Particularly glaring is the general absence of caring by the companies that hire these children — to wit, a broad absence of incidences of adult employees and managers taking a stand and reporting their companies for child exploitation. As others have pointed out, both the Times’ reporting and the behavior of those involved make it seem as if this as a story mainly of non-criminal violations, punishable by fines and other financial penalties. Instead, it seems far more reasonable to trust your gut here, and label those who “turn a blind eye” or knowingly hire child workers as monstrous, criminal figures who have broken the basic societal contract of ensuring the young are protected from harm.

Indeed, “child abuse” is a truer description of what’s going on here than the more generalized “child exploitation.” This is activity that abets or directly results in physical and psychological harm to children. One’s culpability in turning a “blind eye” is just the same as if one were to see a parent beating a child in a parking lot and choosing inaction. On this point, it’s important to note that the law does reflect these basic values of protecting children from abuse; the problem is that it has not been sufficiently enforced and that the penalties are far too light. The Times writes that:

Federal law bars minors from a long list of dangerous jobs, including roofing, meat processing and commercial baking. Except on farms, children younger than 16 are not supposed to work for more than three hours or after 7 p.m. on school days.

But these jobs — which are grueling and poorly paid, and thus chronically short-staffed — are exactly where many migrant children are ending up. Adolescents are twice as likely as adults to be seriously injured at work, yet recently arrived preteens and teenagers are running industrial dough mixers, driving massive earthmovers and burning their hands on hot tar as they lay down roofing shingles, The Times found.

One positive development in the wake of the Times’ exposé is that it apparently got the attention of the Biden administration, with a subsequent article reporting that, “Officials plan to initiate investigations in parts of the country more likely to have child labor violations and ask Congress to increase penalties.” Yet given the systemic nature of the problem, it seems a far more fundamental re-thinking is called for.  As Jeet Heer writes at The Nation, “Against the background of repeated failed attempts at immigration reform, many American companies have become reliant on the cheap labor that migrants provide whether they have legal status or not.” Addicted to this cheap labor, companies will have a continued incentive to flaunt the law unless the punishments are sufficiently strengthened.

Heer also points out the key role that years of failed immigration reform have played. He writes:

 The normal pattern of immigration is for parents to go abroad and send money back to their families. But the United States government, since passage of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in 2008, has created a perverse incentive structure that makes it easier for children to gain entry than for adults. The Trump administration exacerbated this problem with its child separation policy. The Biden administration was unwilling to change the reality of child separation, but didn’t want the bad optics of children in cages. Under Biden, therefore, the Department of Health and Human Services settled for a policy of rapidly and carelessly releasing child migrants to sponsors. This easy-release policy coupled with the current labor shortage (itself partly intensified by the Trump era tightening of immigration) created both the supply and the market for child workers.

Even as we can heap justifiable scorn on the Republican Party for its racist and nativist opposition to humane and economically beneficial immigration reform, it’s important to note that no one forced the Biden administration to engage in a policy of  “rapidly and carelessly releasing child migrants to sponsors” or otherwise continuing bad Trump-era immigration policies (all the more perverse given the labor shortages the U.S. is currently facing that are contributing to inflation and thus threaten Biden’s likely re-election effort).

Likewise, it’s worth considering the immoral tendencies in American capitalism that make such exploitation likely and even inevitable absent clear laws and stringent penalties. Jared Yates Sexton has written a great piece homing in on how the broader pro-child labor movement (of which exploitation of child migrant labor is an important part) rooted in the GOP should be seen in the context of a broader pushback against labor rights. He notes that, “Putting children into these positions is a perfect and insidious way to begin lashing out against and undermining the developing labor movement that is scoring victories with every passing day,” and that effort to deregulate child labor are of a piece with an assault on the minimum wage and 40-hour work week.

The Times exposé shocks the conscience, and raises multiple red flags about the ethics of many American businesses and the sufficiency of current laws that fail to deter abusive behavior. 

Walmart is the Health of the State

After Walmart announced its decision this week to close its two remaining stores in Portland, Oregon, we all received a reminder of how tightly wound and bound together the right-wing media ecosystem is with the contemporary GOP. Rather than simply treat it as an economic story, some on the right have used this opportunity to revisit tired ideas that the city of Portland is a lawless wasteland mostly burned to the ground during the civil rights protests of 2020. Among those moved to speak out is Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who tweeted, “All Portland Walmart stores to permanently close in late March. This is what happens when cities refuse to enforce the rule of law. It allows the mob to take over. Businesses can't operate in that environment, and people can't live in it.”

The context for these remarks is Abbott’s apparent intention to run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination; with them, he’s doubling down on his right-wing bona fides — and the specifics of how he’s doing so are worth noting. It’s not simply that Abbott’s embracing a right-wing trope about Portland.  More specifically, he’s repeating and reviving a story line that the main importance of the 2020 social justice protests was not that millions of Americans were furious about unforgivable police abuses against African-Americans and other minorities, but rather that the protests were a nihilistic, violent explosion of leftist radicals with no motivation save for a communistic love of mayhem. The point is to erase all context, all substance from this recent history. Lies about protestor violence are used to cover up the reality of racist police violence. Propagating lies about Portland, Abbott is aligning himself with white supremacy and the police who enforce its order.

Abbott and others are also demonstrating another major tactic of American’s insurrectionary right wing — identifying blue parts of America as lawless, and their residents as lying outside the true American citizenry. Integral to this is an attempt to turn Americans against each other — in this case, to incite conservative rage and contempt against Americans living in urban areas. To Abbott and his fellow traveling politicians, the point of politics is not to rally the country to a common purpose, but to divide and conquer, to denigrate and dehumanize. As I’ve noted before, this should not really be considered democratic politics, but a form of authoritarianism.

In this case, the effort feels borderline absurd. Walmart itself has closed stores in Arkansas, Washington, D.C., Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, and Wisconsin this year; yet Abbott has nothing to say about the business-hating depredations of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Arkansas Governor Sara Huckabee (in Walmart’s home state, no less!).

But most ridiculous to me is the glaring role that Walmart has played in devastating small town main streets from coast to coast, as its big box empire put out of business thousands of small local competitors. These towns are home to much of the GOP base, yet politicians like Abbott not only seem indifferent to the destruction that Walmart has wrought, but are openly encouraging Republican rank and file to see Walmart as a victim of out-of-control liberalism. Save your tears for the Walton family, not yourselves! In this sense, Abbott is going for a two-fer with his comments — erasing the reality of police violence against Blacks and the reality of economic violence against white working class people in one cynical gambit.

Getting Rail Safety Back on Track

I wanted to flag Josh Marshall’s spot-on analysis of the East Palestine train derailment political fight (you can get the gist of it from the title). He captures the absurdity of the Republican attacks on supposed Biden administration incompetence, but more importantly, the clear space that’s been created for Democratic action on the actual issue of rail safety:

Republicans are simultaneously calling out corporations for not caring about ordinary Americans while carrying their anti-regulatory water on Capitol Hill. Democrats should run a freight train right through that contradiction. Only good things can come of it.

Democrats should pound on the fact at every opportunity that the Trump White House not only rolled back those regulations but Trump literally bragged about doing so on Twitter.

Marshall suggests that Democrats should immediately put forward legislation that enhances railroad safety regulations, as a clear example of doing the right substantive and political thing in one fell swoop. Indeed, as much as the Biden White House seems to have been caught flat-footed with the way the right-wing outrage machine has seized on the accident to air fantasies of a Democratic administration indifferent to the suffering of the derailment’s working class white victims, you can make the case that the GOP has extended itself way beyond any realm of credibility. As Marshall reminds us, we’re talking about a derailment plausibly attributable to GOP regulatory inaction that occurred in a GOP-governed state. It is, furthermore, an accident to which federal authorities did respond promptly, despite the obfuscations of local officials and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine’s decision not to ask for additional assistance when asked by the White House.

This is not to say that the Biden administration doesn’t deserve criticism for not strengthening rail safety over the last two years — but Marshall’s correct in that the best solution now is. . . providing solutions. As he suggests, there may or may not be enough Republican support for getting such a bill out of the house, but it would at least set the record straight on which politicians believe in rail safety and which ones prefer corporate profits over public health. Seeing as the majority of GOP politicians are ideologically opposed to federal regulation, this should be a clarifying exercise for the public’s understanding as to which party actually cares about getting something done (for a less jaundiced view on the possibility of support within the GOP for regulatory actions, check out this Greg Sargent piece). Indeed, it’s been an incredible spectacle to see elements of the GOP pretend it’s a party that believes in bringing powerful industries to heel and protecting the little guy — a sort of populist palaver indulged by Trump, copied even less authentically by his acolytes and allies, and not likely to survive first contact with either actual legislation or public scrutiny.

As on so many other political fronts for the Democrats, the best defense is a good offense. There’s no need to keep playing the GOP blame game — and as Marshall also makes clear, this is a case where, for Democrats, “the policy and the politics line up exactly.” This is no time for Democrats to be on the defensive; time to change the game in ways that aim to serve the public interest and reward the Democrats for doing so. 

McCarthy's Leak of January 6 Videos Shows That Trump's Coup Attempt Has Never Really Ended

I’ve got a bad feeling this story may slip off the radar in the coming weeks, but it would be a travesty if it does. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to leak 40,000 hours of January 6 Capitol footage to right-wing extremist and Fox media personality Tucker Carlson is a big, big deal — both in terms of providing a preview of further corrupt behavior sure to come from the newly-empowered Republican leader, and in terms of what it says about the GOP’s obsession with re-writing the events of January 6.

As The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent describes, Tucker Carlson is likely to cherry-pick and otherwise distort this ill-gained footage in order to advance right-wing ideas that January 6 wasn’t an attempted coup. Taking direct aim at GOP claims that the party is simply aiming at transparency, Sargent writes, “But if Republicans wanted transparency, why would McCarthy grant access to only Carlson? What makes McCarthy’s decision odious is the granting of special access to a propagandist with a history of serial deceptions about the attack.” Indeed — McCarthy’s selection of Carlson as his interlocutor annihilates any contention that he made this move in anything remotely resembling the public interest.

Columnist Will Bunch points out that behind McCarthy’s abuse of power lies the far right’s efforts since January 6 to recast the events of that day as something other than a physical assault on the Capitol. For instance, Carlson has claimed that the assault actually was “some type of “false flag” operation in which outside provocateurs — maybe FBI informants, or members of “antifa” — goaded peace-loving Trump supporters into entering the Capitol.”

From this perspective then, McCarthy’s action is best seen, as Bunch describes, as "extending and advancing a criminal cover-up of what really happened on Jan. 6, the date of an attempted coup against the U.S. government.” This is absolutely correct, and the case Bunch lays out is irrefutable (as well as a typically great read), but I’d go a step further by saying that covering up the attempted coup is not meaningfully distinguishable from helping advance its successor efforts.

After all, not only has the GOP largely committed to defending Trump since January 6 (including largely opposing his impeachment conviction and the salutory ban on holding public office it would have imposed on the former president), but has proceeded at the state level to implement voter suppression efforts and other corruptions of the electoral process to ensure a GOP presidential candidate won’t lose future elections. As I’ve written before, the coup attempt never ended, but rather has broadened into a lower-key but incredibly dangerous slow-motion insurrection that continues to this very day.

McCarthy’s release of Capitol Police video footage to a right-wing partisan is yet more evidence of this ongoing effort. Apart from providing a propagandist with fodder for a counter-narrative about January 6, the release apparently provides security risks for the Capitol, revealing as it does camera locations and other information. Indeed, this consideration may well stymie the Democrats from taking the obvious counter-measure of releasing the footage themselves to mainstream news organizations — a strategy that Sargent recommends.  But as Sargent notes, Democrats are concerned about this very security issue, which they’ve already cited to attack Republicans for the footage leak.

This detail goes to the heart of what Democrats and the country’s majority are up against — Republicans simply don’t care about security issues at the Capitol, since they’re pursuing a larger anti-government crusade that sees such issues as secondary. From an even more sinister perspective, why would someone like McCarthy care about Capitol security when he’s now applying his considerable powers to covering up an attempted coup at the Capitol? The footage is already out there, and security is already compromised — as Democrats can’t do more harm on this front, they need to fight fire with fire by releasing the footage more broadly. At the same time, they should fully internalize the meaning of GOP willingness to prioritize its political goals over what should be bipartisan commitment to not making it easier for rioters to attack the Capitol in the future.

The larger lesson, though, should be staring Democrats in the face. The GOP’s continued obsession with re-writing January 6 reinforces how very dangerous the truth of that day is to the cause of right-wing politics. The events of that day and its aftermath have revealed the GOP to be an insurrectionist party not averse to using propaganda and violence to achieve anti-democratic ends. So long as a majority of Americans believe the United States should be a democracy, such complicity should be disqualifying for the Republican Party, rendering suspect every GOP politico who is not credibly seeking to take back the party from the religious extremists, fascists, and white supremacists who are now calling the shots in Congress and in many states.

In other words, the lesson here is that Democrats cannot cede the fight over January 6 to GOP revisionism. As Sargent notes of the right-wing media efforts to distort the meaning of that day, “Amid such supercharged information warfare, Americans’ memory of the Jan. 6 hearings can’t be relied upon to help them sort everything out.” Indeed — a naive belief that the revelations of the January 6 commission will somehow stand as an unwavering barrier to ceaseless GOP propaganda will only aid the coverup and the ongoing insurrection.

Instead, as I’ve written before, Democrats should view the events of January 6 as a skeleton key for communicating to the American people how badly the GOP has gone off the rails, and how January 6 is in fact a template for understanding ongoing GOP tactics and goals. From the election results denialism that Trump used to rally his troops at the Capitol, to the fake “solution” of GOP partisans taking control of election machinery in multiple states, to the racist incitement embraced by up-and-comers like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the GOP is a party that has doubled down on the grievances and lies that brought us January 6. No wonder Republicans like McCarthy don’t want to stop fighting the last war — it turns out that war never ended. How very convenient it would be if Democrats didn’t fight back, or convinced themselves that this is just a minor skirmish about history.

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.