On the Gratifying Spectacle of a Confederate Statue Dismembered and Melted Down to Kingdom Come

In a grim October that has been filled with news of war abroad and the continued march of far-right extremism at home, the story of how Charlottesville’s statue of Robert E. Lee met its 21st century Appomattox in the melting fires of a furnace is both salve and warning for our besieged union. Once the focal point of right-wing protests that culminated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville that took the life of one counter-protestor and injured dozens of others, the statue had been dethroned from its public display and passed into the possession of the Charlottesville black history museum. The museum subsequently agreed to a plan to melt down the general-astride-his-horse combo and to use the resulting stock of bronze to create public art in Charlottesville; the first part of the plan was successfully carried out earlier this month, at an undisclosed Southern foundry somewhere outside of Virginia.

Information about the transport and destination was closely guarded, as organizers of the effort wanted to avoid violence or intimidation — and this is the first remarkable fact that we need to note about this remarkable event. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, those who believe that the United States should not valorize a man who engaged in treason had legitimate fears that General Lee still retained admirers who would resort to violence to defend his statue. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, what rightly should have been a highly public ceremony and celebration was forced to take place more or less underground, for fear that the inheritors of the Confederacy might kill in defense of a mere representation of their degenerate hero. This circumstance alone should fill every decent American with revulsion, and anger — not only due to the unforgivable baseline threat to Americans’ ability to go about free from physical harm, but because of the way this threat has deprived a broader public of participating in a righteous ritual of exorcism and renewal. The recycling of the Lee memorial was a blow against white supremacism and in favor of a pluralistic, egalitarian America, and there is tremendous power in the fact that it happened at all; yet it is a sure sign of our times that to destroy the mere statue of a Confederate general required such caution.

Yet this context of underlying threat makes it all the more important that we publicize and celebrate the fact that Lee’s furnace-fired Waterloo did in fact happen; to this end, the Washington Post’s account is invaluable for capturing the event. A few aspects in particular stand out to me. The first is the commentary by participants in this righteous meltdown, who make clear that they grasped the gravity of their project (amazingly, the Post notes, this may be the first Confederate monument ever to have been melted down). Jalane Schmidt, a University of Virginia professor, commented that melting it was superior to sending Charlottesville’s “white supremacist toxic waste” to another town, and that, “We are taking the moral risk associated with melting it down in the hope of creating something new.” As metal-workers began to cut up Lee’s head, one remarked that, “It’s a better sculpture right now than it’s ever been. We’re taking away what it meant for some people and transforming it.” And the African-American foundry owner told the Post that, “It is time to dismantle this hate, this infection that has plagued our beautiful country. It is time to rid these icons of hate.” The sense of mission, of seriousness of purpose, is inescapable; these are fellow Americans who not only took seriously the individual parts they played, but recognized the victory it represented against dug-in structures of white supremacism and in favor of an America which possesses the power to literally forge a better future out of a broken past. This feels like democracy in action: ordinary Americans playing their small parts in making the country a better place.

And so the deep ritual of the event is likewise striking. In order to fit into the furnace, the statue of Lee astride his horse first had to be cut into pieces — a dismemberment that you can’t help but read as deeply symbolic, as is the satisfying big melt that turned the fragmented statue into molten metal and then ingots as the metal cooled. The videos that accompany the Post article convey both the practical mechanics of the operation and the tangible reality of reducing the statue into the pools of bronze from which it came. As the metal-workers zap and heat the chunks of statue, you’ve got a perfect tableau of humankind using primal forces to make and unmake the world. Seeing the general’s face heated to a demonic glow before its final undoing, I had a notion of false gods and idols being consigned to their proper fates. And the plan to turn the recovered bronze into public art — art that will presumably be far more inclusive and benign than the Lee statue — is a beautiful and heartening recycling of the very worst parts of our country into something hopeful, humane, and uniting.

Symbols play an enormous role in how we collectively understand the meaning and power structures of our world. The longtime ability of defenders of the Lee statue to argue on behalf of its innocuousness in defense of a vague “Southern heritage” was an exercise of white supremacist power, a way to present it as a natural aspect of American life while reminding African-Americans that their revulsion, anger, and fear were part of the point being made by the statue’s public display. The past several years have seen an increasing public awareness, driven in large part by African-American activists, that monuments to the Confederacy aren’t just harmless tokens but active reminders on behalf of white supremacist strains in American society — and that they have continued to exist both because Blacks lacked the power to remove them and because enough whites appreciated, consciously or not, the message of racial subjugation that they projected. 

I believe the story of Charlottesville’s General Lee statue carries lessons for those on the progressive side of American politics who wish for the triumph of a more egalitarian America. Democrats have shown an aversion to “culture war” politics, but as the fight over the Lee monument shows, fights over symbols do matter — both for the clarifying focus they can place on broader discussions of momentous political questions, and as a way to display the nature and extent of one’s political power. The cost of the battle here was truly terrible — the death of counter-protestor Heather Heyer and the injury of many others — and the willingness of democracy’s enemies to resort to violence was a preview of more horrors to come. But was it really a sideshow to American politics for protestors to call for the removal of this Confederate monument, when their effort revealed the extent and ferocity of the white supremacist forces still alive and well in the United States — including then-President Trump’s complicity with this reactionary movement, as he tried to excuse the actions of the worst among us with his noxious “both sides” comments? In retrospect, it’s clear that civil rights protestors and others sparked a confrontation that did the rest of us a favor, by exposing democracy’s most dedicated enemies as the extremists and freaks that they ultimately are: less a group of heartland “real” Americans, and more a gang of tiki torch thugs who bear more than a passing resemblance to Nazi brownshirts and KKK foot soldiers.

Establishment Media Bamboozled on the Oregon Trail

The deeply problematic Greater Idaho movement, which seeks to cleave off the majority of Oregon’s territory and a tenth of Oregon’s population to join the state of Idaho, has received another white-washing treatment by major media, this time by The Washington Post. As I’ve discussed before, and as experts on Western U.S. politics and right-wing extremism have pointed out, the movement is shadowed by the white supremacist motivations of prior secessionist movements in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond this, its proponents have sought to soften its image with the rhetoric of irreconcilable “rural” or “cultural” differences with the rest of the state, when even a quick look at the movement’s website reveals a bevy of MAGA-adjacent positions like anti-immigrant animus and extremist views on abortion rights. As journalist Leah Sottile has written, “Greater Idaho has slowly revealed itself to be something of a poisoned apple: framed as a gift to discontented rural people, but actually a front for far-right culture war talking points, including racist ones.”

Very few of these sordid and problematic aspects are highlighted in the Washington Post’s contribution to the Greater Idaho coverage, which takes more or less at face value the stated motivations of the movement’s organizers and sympathizers. It notes that, “The push to change the border is rooted in policy differences and a sense that, in Oregon, there will be no way for conservatives to influence the laws and regulations made by the elected representatives of the far more numerous Democratic voters who live on the western side of the Cascades.” It notes differences over gun control regulations, abortion rights, and electric vehicle regulations as concrete examples of this. The piece also cites the vaguer notion of a cultural rural-versus-urban divide driving proponents to seek secession, with an Eastern Oregon University history professor noting “the idea of ‘rural’ as a stand-in for deep cultural touchstones.”

The article captures some of the vaguely anti-democratic strains in the movement that I’ve tried to highlight previously, but without offering dissenting perspectives on these alarming elements. It quotes one Oregon state senator who represents an eastern Oregon district as saying that, “What we’re looking for is local control, not foreign control. And by foreign I mean Portland, Salem and the rest of those in the west who have decided they know better than we do how to run our lives.” Putting aside the fact that Senator Dennis Linthicum is being provocative in his language choice, the idea that Portland and Salem are akin to foreign countries highlights a basic contradiction at the heart of the Greater Idaho movement. By referring to the rest of Oregon’s population not as fellow citizens but as a foreign power imposing its will on eastern Oregon, such rhetoric turns the basic premise of Oregon’s democracy on its head: majority rule is in fact tyranny when viewed from the perspective of those who don’t agree with its outcomes, and this tyranny should be obvious because such a majority consists not of fellow citizens so much as a hostile nation.  

Not surprisingly, such language echoes that found on the Greater Idaho website, which quotes at length a statement by a Harlan County supporter who writes:

The Portland metro area is home to 47 percent of Oregon’s voters and covers a mere 3,776.41 square miles of Oregon’s 98,466 square miles, that’s less than 4 percent of its land mass, 3.83 percent to be exact. Five of Oregon’s 36 counties now control 100 percent of Oregon’s legislative activity. None are rural. None are east of the Cascades. None are outside the Willamette Valley. 

The political diversity in this state is becoming unpalatable. Since 1988 Oregon’s urban dwellers have elected a group of individuals that represent nothing short of an aristocracy of political power, they have switched their role in democracy from servant to lord. These people have successfully disenfranchised and subjugated the people occupying everything not Portland or the Willamette Valley. They have enacted laws with little or no debate and no amendments.

Eastern Oregon residents are “subjugated” because majority rule prevails in Oregon: let that sink in for a moment. This is a breath-taking indictment of democracy, suggesting that laws promulgated by Oregon’s state government lack legitimacy because a minority disagrees with them. But this is actually exactly how democracy works. Underlying the passion of this complaint, though, is the implication that the majority is ruling in a way that violates the fundamental rights of eastern Oregonians. (We should also note the emphasis on the relative geographic smallness of Oregon’s population centers, repeating the right-wing trope that implies that it is land mass, not people, that counts when considering the truth of what really constitutes a majority).

But this is not the argument that the secessionists make. Instead, their cause consists of a litany of complaints about cultural differences resulting in policy differences that actually don’t add up to anything reasonably adding up to oppression or tyranny on the part of Oregon’s majority. There are complaints about gun control legislation, but no specific arguments about how these have adversely affected eastern Oregonians’ right to possess firearms.  There are complaints about “illegals” receiving driver’s licenses, but no arguments about how this harms eastern Oregonians.

And for all the emphasis on the violated rights of the eastern Oregon minority, I have yet to read or hear of a Greater Idaho proponent taking their arguments to their logical conclusion and worrying about the oppression of any Oregonians who disagree with their policy choices or values being suctioned up into an expanded Idaho. Neither has such a concern been extended to the residents of Idaho, particularly in urban areas, who lean more progressive and according to the logic of the Greater Idaho movement are being oppressed by a hostile foreign power in the form of rural Idaho. Would it not make sense for residents of cities like Boise to seek to secede and join their liberal brethren in western Oregon, perhaps joined by a safe passage corridor like the one that allowed West Germans and others passage to and from a divided Berlin during the Cold War?

Tantalizingly, the article provides a few hints of the darker forces at work in the movement. University professor Howard, talking about the term “rural,” notes that, “There’s a dog whistle in the term [. . .] It is conservative versus liberal, but the issue of race is also baked into it. It gets to the idea of ‘rural’ as a stand-in for deep cultural touchstones [italics added].” How, exactly, is race “baked into it,” one can’t help but wonder? Similarly, the author notes that, “Idaho offers a much more comfortable political home for eastern Oregon’s conservatives, who live in many of the most racially homogenous counties in the state. In nearly every county that has voted to explore joining Idaho, White residents account for more than 80 percent of the population.”  Yet these observations are not pursued; indeed, the point about the whiteness of Oregon’s secessionist eastern counties is not even followed by the obvious data, about about how very white Idaho is as well (answer: whites make up around 82% of the population); and so this promising paragraph pops out as something of a non sequitur. Yet the idea that white Oregonians would have “a much more comfortable political home” in Idaho simply screams for more exploration.

I will go out on a limb and identify this as an example of the way obvious evidence of white supremacist factors so often repels and evades mainstream media coverage, as if it creates a sort of reality distortion field that induces in the reporter feelings of amnesia, disorientation, or perhaps simple blindness. What is more remarkable in the instance of the Washington Post piece is that elementary research about possible racial aspects of the Greater Idaho movement would have yielded at least Leah Sottile’s excellent piece on its white supremacist underpinnings. If a professor at Eastern Oregon University was interviewed for the report, why not others who have been tracking this movement and have a deep understanding of other such efforts in the Northwest?

I’ve previously talked about the clear white supremacist strains and echoes of the Greater Idaho movement, so will not try the reader’s patience too much here by repeating myself. But one point I haven’t highlighted before is the possible connection between the sense of “alienation” suffered by overwhelmingly white Oregon counties and the rapid rise of the state’s Latino population. A recent article in the Seattle Times gives a sense of the magnitude of the change:

[Oregon’s] Latino population grew by more than 30% over the last 10 years as Oregon added nearly 140,000 Latino residents, numbers from the 2020 census show. That growth came after Oregon’s Latino population jumped by 144% from 1990 to 2000 and grew by another 63% from 2000 to 2010.

Oregon’s Latino population now stands at 588,757 and has grown faster than the national rate in each of the last three decades. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the state, accounting for nearly 14% of the state’s population. Among Oregonians under 18, Latinos make up 23% of the population, according to Census redistricting data, a sign that their numbers will continue to climb in the coming years.

While the majority of the Latino population lives in the western Oregon, a look at the changing demographics of the city of Ontario, located near the Idaho border and featured centrally in the Post article, also offers some suggestive numbers. In 2010, Hispanics or Latinos of any race composed 32% of the population; in 2010, 41%; and in 2020, 43%, while the white percentage was 49%.  Remarkably, 2022 US Census Bureau estimates put Ontario’s Latino population at 48.5%, and the white population at 48%, suggesting that a plurality of city residents are now Latino. Even taking into account the nuances of mixed race respondents and varying definitions of “Latino,” these statistics show a dramatic downward shift in the proportion of white residents. These are remarkable changes for any Oregon city, more so given Oregon’s dark beginnings as a state that enshrined white supremacism in its constitution and its many decades of existence as an extremely white state.

I think it’s fair to speculate (though reasonable minds may differ on this) that a white eastern Oregon resident unsettled by such demographic shifts — more and more people who don’t look like what they expect fellow Oregonians to look like, more and more people not even speaking English as their first language — might not be entirely comfortable sharing such discomfiture with a reporter from a big national news organization. Remarkably, looking back on the other stories on the secession movement from CNN and the New York Times, neither the reporters nor anyone interviewed has noted these enormous demographic changes affecting the entire state.

It’s also worth noting that among the grievances listed on the Greater Idaho website are multiple complaints against undocumented immigrants, including Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state, and its issuance of driver’s licenses and provision of “free health care” to “illegals.” Oregon’s great distance from the southern border, coupled with rural areas’ dependence on “illegals” to harvest their crops and perform other agricultural labor, make these particular complaints worthy of a more critical eye when assessing the less advertised grievances of the secessionists.

While the Post and other pieces tie the Oregon secession movement to the “red-blue” divide found in other states and across American politics, neglected in mainstream coverage has been the fundamental role of demographic change in supercharging right-wing, MAGA politics and the very existence of the red-blue split nationwide. Much political science research and analysis has pointed to American’s shift into being a far more diverse country over the past decades as key to the rise of a right-wing politics — a politics that, not coincidentally, places at its center the primacy of white political power and the subversion of non-white groups’ political clout. This is such a basic fact about our national political dynamics — indeed, about a national political crisis in which an authoritarian GOP seeks to stymie and reverse the power of an increasingly diverse American majority — that to set it aside when looking at the politics of an individual state like Oregon is nearly incomprehensible. But as I said earlier, properly highlighting the white supremacist underpinnings of right-wing politics is an enduring blind spot of political reporting, a blind spot that has played no small part in the United States’ careening course over the past decade toward right-wing authoritarianism, most nauseatingly embodied by Donald Trump’s attempted coup in 2021 with the assistance of white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. 

Along these lines, we should also note the elements of menace that shadow the Greater Idaho movement — as one interviewee in the Post story says, “We’re not angry, and we do not want this to come to violence. We want to do this peacefully, but there is no doubt there is a lot of anger out there. This movement can be a release valve.” The threat of violence is hardly abstract. Right-wing extremists occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon in 2016, and the insurrectionist Proud Boys rehearsed their violent tactics in the city of Portland during the Trump years.

The suggestion that violence is lurking beneath the surface of the Greater Idaho movement again points to the idea that an unspeakable and untenable oppression is being inflicted on eastern Oregon — an oppression that is not readily apparent in reality. The nature of this oppression in the secessionists’ minds, though, and of the existentially high stakes, begins to make more sense when you introduce the perspective of white supremacy and fears of demographic change, and take notice of the motivations and schemes of white nationalist organizations who have proposed the idea of an enlarged Idaho that closely echoes the designs of the Greater Idaho movement. If you place the highest importance on white Americans claiming primacy in the hierarchy of American society and power, then perhaps violence doesn’t seem out of the question to maintain this order of things. Certainly this is the conclusion that white nationalist groups have reached.

Finally, it is striking that coverage of the Greater Idaho movement — including the Washington Post’s recent foray — has consistently downplayed the loss of actual rights that thousands of Oregonians would suffer should the Idaho land grab succeed. I would highlight first and foremost the right to an abortion — a right that, subsequent to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, has been eviscerated in Idaho (abortion is illegal after six weeks of pregnancy; as most women don’t know they are pregnant until around the five-week point, this is a de facto full ban on abortion (the Idaho law also contains exceptions for rape and incest)). Given the deprivation of bodily autonomy such laws inflict on women, it’s fair to say that Oregon women who became Idaho residents would also automatically become second-class citizens, considered unfit to exercise the same control over their bodies as Idaho’s more privileged menfolk. Consideration of such losses reminds us that, as much as secession proponents aim to frame their effort as a fight for democracy and self-determination, key elements of what they consider freedom would, objectively speaking, actually constitute true subjugation and oppression for thousands.

The Degradation of the Supreme Court Is Also a Degradation of the American People

In assessing the apparently endless stream of revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas’ corrupt receipt of thousands if not millions of dollars in benefits from sugar daddies with business before the Supreme Court and other such unbecoming behavior, Jamelle Bouie offers a modest first step for Democrats to take: to begin talking about the need to impeach the wayward justice. Bouie acknowledges the hard road ahead for such an effort — including a House controlled by the opposition party — but argues that putting impeachment on the table would essentially be a way to signal to the public that what the justice has done is neither ethical nor proper, and that Thomas deserves to face repercussions for his actions.

Given the head-in-the-sand approach that so many Democrats have taken towards Clarence’s disqualifying actions, Bouie’s suggestion feel solid, if for no other reason than that Democrats need to take some first steps in moving the discussion around Thomas from outraged acceptance to a public dialogue about its basic unacceptability. But I do wonder if too many elected Democrats are overly worried about the implications of raising too big a stink about Thomas. If they truly want to constrain his behavior, and, in an ideal future world, remove him from the court, then rousing public opinion into a groundswell of outrage over Thomas’ corruption is the essential ingredient. But between such outrage and removal lies a range of possible outcomes that may make faint-hearted Democrats hesitate. For instance, a Supreme Court with a justice deemed by much of the public to have betrayed his public trust and put the interests of his corporate donors over those of justice could quite plausibly corrode the public’s faith in Supreme Court decisions in which Thomas plays or has played a part — particularly cases where he was the deciding vote. Impugn Justice Thomas, in other words, and you might just end up impugning the whole Supreme Court as an institution.

But I think fears of de-legitimizing the Supreme Court wrongly underplay what actually ends up happening in the real world — what is happening, even now — when such corruption is not properly addressed and the baseline attitude is to continue along as if nothing has gone awry. As the American people and the American political system continue to grant legitimacy to a corrupted Supreme Court, it implicates both the public and the overall system — including Congress and the presidency — in this corruption. Our willingness to play along essentially green-lights the wrongdoing — because if it was so wrong, wouldn’t someone try to do something about it? Even worse, from the public’s point of view, it makes us complicit in our own collective degradation, as we simply accept Supreme Court rulings despite the taint of improper influence that surrounds them.

I’m not saying that Americans should start picking and choosing which laws they follow depending on whether Thomas was the deciding vote on a relevant Court decision - but I am saying that it’s far from crazy for Americans to talk openly and seriously about what it means to follow rules made by people who themselves refuse to follow any rules themselves. If this makes people angry, or feel like suckers, then that would seem to be an appropriate response. And if this makes people realize that the Court needs to be reformed, through mandatory ethics rules, expansion, or term limits, then that would be an appropriate, and I’d say necessary, response as well.

Right-Wing Hate Campaign Demonstrates Homelessness is Central to U.S. Politics

You don’t need to have been paying particularly close attention, at least here in Portland, to sense an atmospheric shift in public attitudes towards the unhoused over the last few years. Most consequentially, politicians voicing retrograde critiques of the homeless — that they are barely distinguishable from criminals, that they are vectors for disease, that the main cause for concern is the aesthetic blight they impose on the city rather than their actual forlorn circumstances — have won election in the Portland metro area, a locale otherwise known for fairly liberal politics. The turn has been a bit head-spinning, given that area voters had in recent years passed a significant bond measure raising property taxes in order to supercharge affordable housing. Certainly the rise of visible homelessness and public disarray has played a part, but has something else also shifted in the broader culture?

In a recent article at The Nation, Ned Resnikoff shines an illuminating light on this question by pointing to the role a group of far-right ideologues have played in recent years to introduce hard-line rhetoric and policies into otherwise mainstream discussions of the issue. Resnikoff observes that, “the rise of state and vigilante attacks on unhoused people isn’t an inevitable reaction to metastasizing homelessness; it’s at least in part the byproduct of a successful propaganda campaign. For years, a network of right-wing demagogues has been depicting unhoused people as subhuman, parasitical, and intrinsically criminal.”

Resnikoff points to the writings and public rhetoric of right-wing figures like Christopher Rufo, Michael Shellenberger, and Tucker Carlson as painting the homeless in demonizing and dehumanizing terms. Beyond this, a focus on the unhoused has also allowed such commentators to attack the liberal politicos and cities that are home to much of the country’s homeless population; Democratic failure to deal with homelessness became an easy attack line for the right. But Resnikoff points to a deeper and more synergistic motive behind this rhetorical push — it provides an opening to attack particular populations that are also over-represented in the unhoused population: 

Racism, homophobia, and transphobia aren’t incidental to the anti-homeless smear campaign; they’re part of the point. Disgust with unhoused people is a gateway into an entire politics built around the murderous contempt for subaltern groups. Conveniently, Black and queer people are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness in America; to reactionaries, homelessness becomes both a consequence of their subaltern status and an explanation for it.

With an instinct for the divisive and the predatory, the right sees misanthropic attitutudes towards the homeless as a way to divide Americans against each other, and to help paint minority and vulnerable populations as not as human/American/decent as the rest of us. Put bluntly, the right sees demagoguery around homelessness as a path to inciting Americans into hatred of their fellow citizens and fellow human beings.

On the flip side, all of this perversely reinforces my intuition that a more just and democratic American politics would do well to mirror the right’s obsessions in this instance, and aim directly at the complex of issues that we think of as “homelessness,” rather than treating it as a side issue to manage or downplay — not only as a way to counter the right’s abuse of this humanitarian challenge, but because the right has rightly seen it as a potent fault line for manipulation within American society. But where the right seeks to make that fault line tremor and shake, the left should see an opportunity to stitch this wound back together. The right to housing is fundamental, necessary not only to living a life of dignity but also to one’s ability to live to the best of one’s potential and to contribute to society, whether economically, socially, or politically. For any American to go unsheltered is an offense to our common humanity and to bedrock rights a democratic government should protect.

Just as it should be no surprise that a right wing in love with the discipline of the market and the reign of the powerful would see homelessness as the fault of the homeless, so no progressive movement can call itself truly progressive if it doesn’t tend to the basic rights of even the least powerful members of our society. It’s a matter of principle, yes, but also of practicality: when a society and a politics says that no one will be left behind in terms of the basics of life, you promote a solidarity that even the most determined right-wingers will have difficulty corroding.

Resnikoff notes that, unsurprisingly, right wingers have been training their fire on the purported failures of the Housing First model, which he summarizes as “a strategy that prioritizes moving unhoused people into subsidized permanent housing, along with social services as needed.” But as he correctly observes, shortcomings in Housing First’s deployment are due less to a problem with prioritizing the humanity and basic needs of people without homes, and more with problems of funding, coordination, and our economy’s ongoing failure to create sufficient housing (and, I would add, government’s failure to offer proper aid to those in poor economic straits so that they can avoid falling into homelessness in the first place). It is not unexpected that the right would go after policies that get to the root of the homeless crisis, as such extremists have an interest not only in perpetuating the crisis and exploiting it politically, but also in attacking the basic premises of dignity and equality that underly something like Housing First.

It’s fair to say that right-wing efforts to subvert and inflame discussions of how our society should approach homelessness should make progressive and Democratic politicians think twice about their own embrace of punitive language and policies. Demonizing the homeless is clearly a weapon in the authoritarian playbook increasingly deployed by the Republican Party and its right-wing allies; those on the left who echo such language and policies amplify attitudes that run contrary to basic progressive values, and that serve a broader agenda of degrading vulnerable groups beyond just the unhoused.

Why Isn't Rolling Back Child Labor Exploitation at the Top of Democrats' Agenda?

Adam Johnson has written a righteous and right-on piece identifying the blatant hypocrisy among so-called “tough on crime” politicians who demand prison time for shoplifters, yet refuse to demand any jail time for corporate miscreants who illegally use child labor. Johnson is correct: the difference in attitudes demonstrates an unwarranted deference towards law-breaking corporations, and a notable ambivalence towards being tough on all crime.

Johnson was (rightly) provoked by news of the Biden administration’s latest announced plans for dealing with the scourge of exploitative child labor (which comes half a year after staggering pieces from The New York Times on the wide extent not only of migrant child labor in particular, but of injuries to migrant children illegally hired by companies). After all, the new plan appears to be more of the same old non-plan: more fines for corporations that engage in this immoral activity, even after years of experience have demonstrated, again and again, that too many companies see such fines as simply the price of doing business — or even as a slamming good deal in exchange for being able to underpay, injure, and otherwise exploit young workers.

I have to confess that the Times’s articles by Hannah Dreier on abuses of child migrant labor agitated me deeply when I first read them — I tried to express some of my outrage here — and the stories she recounted and the broader crisis described have continued to haunt me. This really isn’t an issue with a lot of grey area, and what grey area there is (such as young undocumented workers helping to support their impoverished families in the U.S. or back home) is essentially irrelevant to the foundational question of whether or not the federal government should act in ways that actually eliminate both child exploitation and concomitant child workplace injuries. 

The double standard that Johnson identifies in politicos’ attitude toward child labor is indeed glaring, and seems essential to point out if we are to ever see any movement on real punishments that would deter this immoral practice. If a thief should go to jail, then surely an employer who repeatedly illegally hires underage workers should as well, given the physical and emotional risks to the children and the inevitable power differential that makes it difficult for kids to stand up for themselves in the face of adult authority. But I’ve found myself befuddled in particular by Democrats’ resistance to taking a hard line on this issue. GOP politicians? I can understand Republican lack of concern just fine — the deference to business interests, the wish to undercut growing labor power as the economy nears full employment, the generalized lack of concern about child safety (witness the analogous lackadaisical attitude towards gun violence’s maiming and killing of American youth), the racism-informed not giving two shits about young undocumented workers in particular being injured on the job. Indeed, as Sonali Kolhatkar writes at In These Times, the GOP’s assault on children’s well-being and freedom reaches far beyond retrograde views on child labor:

Republicans claim they care about protecting children. But their actions speak louder than words: they have made it easier for mass shooters to kill children in schools, and they have attacked the rights of LGBTQ children to play sports, to use the bathrooms of their choice, to access gender-affirming care, and to learn about their community. They have barred children from learning accurate history about racism and white supremacy and unleashed police into schools in spite of evidence that school cops are targeting Black and Brown children. 

So while child labor is on-brand for the GOP, the Democrats’ reluctance to act against it in a decisive fashion is harder to fathom — not only in light of the nauseating, freshly-reported details of what child labor means in America (kids not regularly attending school, getting maimed and even killed in jobs far better performed by adults) but also in view of the GOP’s recent spate of state-level policies actually doubling down on child labor by lowering age restrictions and broadening the range of jobs that children can work. From Iowa to Arkansas, the GOP has surveyed the state of America’s youth and determined that what they truly need is less protection, not more, from an economy ready to exploit them. Both morally and politically, it would seem that the ground has been set for meaningful action that would draw a line about what is acceptable in American society and what is not — showing that government can perform the basic function of protecting its most vulnerable citizens from harm while also wrong-footing a political opposition that seems to be phoning in its policy positions from the darkest days of the 19th century.

The logical inference here is that the Biden administration, and Democrats more generally, wish not to antagonize segments of the business community, and potentially be falsely blamed by the GOP for labor shortages and inflationary pressures should they press forward with legislation that would send economic exploiters of children to jail (Johnson reminds us that a Democratic bill earlier this year that would have imposed significant jail time for repeat child labor offenders ended up going nowhere). We can also infer that they consider these goals as more important that actually stopping the ongoing exploitation of child workers.

Yet even as a cynical political calculation, this really doesn’t make sense to me. Relatively few Americans are rooting for businesses like slaughterhouses and fast food chains to maintain the de facto right to hire kids in order to maintain their profit margins — and the people who are mostly consist of those very businesses and a bunch of right-wing ideologues who, frankly, would never vote for Democrats under any circumstances. Moreover, insofar as the GOP effort to unleash child participation in the workforce is part of a strategy to undercut the labor power of adults, Democrats have a glaring interest in defending the rights of adult workers to be paid what they deserve and to block the retrograde “solution” of bringing in vulnerable kids as a sort of surplus workforce.

Beyond this, “some labor advocates worry [relaxation of child labor rules are] just the opening salvo to a broader attack on government safety rules,” as Rachel Cohen notes at Vox; from this perspective, pushing back against such egregiously immoral policies can help stop a larger right-wing assault on safety regulations more generally. And Democrats likewise have an interest in pushing back on the highly misleading and sanctimonious “parents’ rights” arguments in favor of child labor, which essentially hold that parents have an absolute interest in directing their children into whatever types of jobs and working hours they deem appropriate. 

All of this adds up to child labor being exactly the sort of fight Democrats should pick — both as a matter of making good on the party’s identity as the defender of worker rights and fair labor practices, and as a way to highlight the moral black hole of GOP policies. Instead, there has been a lamentable decision here to pick no fights, to draw no bright lines on what feels to me like the ultimate bright line issue. In this sense, it feels drawn out of the same conflict-adverse well that characterizes much of contemporary Democratic strategy, from President Biden’s preference for countering the mass movement of GOP authoritarianism with a laser-like focus on marginal economic improvements, to the lack of a full-court press on pro-democracy measures that might at least throw into sharper relief the GOP’s reactionary turn against democracy. Yes, it is true that the House is controlled by the GOP and that the odds of meaningful child labor legislation passing are slim to none; but it is equally true that prioritizing this issue might rally public opinion and at a minimum prove a liability for the GOP going into the 2024 elections. Even short-term failure would cultivate long-term success, building public support for future legislation.

This also seems to be another example of the Democrats declining to engage directly with an emotionally charged issue out of self-defeating notions of decorum and overly-intellectualized notions of how politics works. We constantly see the GOP seeking the next hot-button issue that might not just mobilize but enrage its base — the cynically-constructed war on transgender people being perhaps the latest prominent example — to the point that it’s no exaggeration to say the party has become a movement based on the ever-increasing incitement of rage and desire for retribution against a host of identified enemies. It sometimes seems to me that the unbridled emotionality of the GOP has caused the Democrats to over-correct in the opposite direction, to over-emphasize politics as a realm of policy proposals and legislative progress, of decorum and calm, as opposed to a grand clash of values and identities. Yet there is a crucial difference between a party that incites negative, divisive emotions and even signals a comfort with any violence that might result, and a party that seeks to tap into righteous anger and idealism that might create popular pressure for meaningful, even structural change to the inequities of American life. 

It is easy to imagine politicians like President Biden and senior Democratic leaders assuming a “this is just the way the world works” attitude towards child labor — without taking sufficient stock of the notion that the world might be made to work differently if the proper standards of morality and punishment were applied to the wealthy and powerful as well as to the poor. If you are not willing to use your political power to protect children, even it means courting a fight with powerful economic interests, then what exactly is your claim to deserve to hold that power? When talking about the reasons he ran for president, Joe Biden often speaks about a fight for the soul of America, a reference to the conflict between the GOP’s racist and authoritarian divisiveness and an alternative, contrasting vision for America. Biden has correctly identified the central political conflict of our times, at least in general terms; but what I fear that he and other sympathetic Democrats are missing is that the alternative vision to Trumpism can’t just be assumed, but must both be described in detail and actively implemented in practice. There is no conceivable path towards a truly just America that honors equality and opportunity but that also includes the continued exploitation of children so that fast food chains and meatpackers can pad their profits and thrill their shareholders. 

Heading Out East on the Oregon Trail, Revisited

A few months ago, I talked about the pernicious ideas underlying a secessionist effort here in Oregon — the Greater Idaho movement — that aims to cleave the eastern part of the state to Idaho, and argued that a rancid white nationalism was an unacknowledged key to understanding its existence. Now Leah Sottile has written what should be considered the definitive critique of this “Greater Idaho” movement, correctly identifying its racist and right-wing roots and intentions, and providing bounteous evidence and context for its project:

[L]ess attention has been paid to its underlying motives and how they fit into the Northwest’s long history of racially motivated secessionism. Over time, Greater Idaho has slowly revealed itself to be something of a poisoned apple: framed as a gift to discontented rural people, but actually a front for far-right culture war talking points, including racist ones.

Among other critical points, Sottile reports on how current-day white supremacists are thrilled by the movement — a basic fact that until now has either not been reported, or has been severely underplayed, by more mainstream news coverage from the likes of CNN and The New York Times. But this is a crucial detail, and Sottile also provides a great history of previous white supremacist efforts in the Northwest to form what one modern-day observer describes as the pursuit of a “white ethno-state dream.”

Her reporting also makes clear that, contrary to the Greater Idaho movement’s own efforts to brand itself as vaguely seeking “freedom,” it backs a right-wing agenda and is fundamentally anti-democratic. Far-right expert David Neiwert captures the latter dynamic perfectly, telling Sottile that movement backers “don’t really want to put up with democracy. They don’t want to deal with the fact that if you want to have your position win in the political arena, you have to convince a bunch of people. They just want to take their ball and create a new playground.”

Worse, its alignment with far-right causes makes its bland self-presentation into a recruitment tool for extremism, a point made to Sottile by Gary Raney, a former sheriff in Idaho. This, alongside the under-reported white supremacism of the movement, shows the price that ordinary citizens pay when media institutions like CNN and the New York Times refrain from confronting the darker truths of such political efforts — they provide unwarranted cover for actors whose motives and goals are antithetical to an egalitarian society and to democracy itself.

Indeed, previous flawed reporting on the Greater Idaho movement demonstrates a larger inability among mainstream media to fully pick a side and overtly critique and expose what should be seen as glaring strains of white supremacism in American society. As I noted in my own piece about the Greater Idaho movement, the overwhelmingly white demographics of the Oregon counties attempting to join Idaho should have set off alarm bells for savvy reporters looking at the movement, even putting aside the long history of white supremacism-inflected secessionism. It is almost as if a taboo operates around the subject, the benefit of the doubt extended to those who either directly or indirectly advance white nationalist causes.

As I noted before, one glaring clue that this is a wildly insufficient and immoral approach is the fact that so much reporting on the Greater Idaho movement has been overly credulous towards the vague freedom talk of the movement’s supporters, while bizarrely inattentive to the possible repercussions for non-white Americans unfortunate enough to be stuck in a de facto white nationalist state. Likewise, most coverage has shied away from noting the loss of actual freedoms that would result were to movement to succeed, such as Oregonians losing the right to an abortion. The reluctance to condemn white supremacist motivations for the abomination they are appears to be bound up with an inability to take a sufficiently critical view of those who claim to be lovers of freedom when they are actually nothing of the kind; a reluctance to look with clear eyes at the one seems linked to an inability to look with clear eyes at the other.

Oregon residents, as well as Americans more generally, need to take seriously the Greater Idaho movement — not because its chances of success are high (they are not), but because it is serving, as noted by those interviewed in Sottile’s piece, as a vehicle of division and as a Trojan horse for recruitment to the white supremacist and Christian nationalist causes. Based in claims of irreconcilable differences between those who live in eastern and western Oregon, it denies the diversity — political, ethnic, and religious — of the two regions while seeking to impose right-wing rule on a broad slice of the state.

There is also a lesson here regarding the operation of white supremacism — it requires some combination of complicity, indifference, and naivety from observers and the broader citizenry in order to thrive. In this case, this enabling has appeared through a willingness to accept the Greater Idaho’s movement’s talking points and to ignore the larger history that would give it proper context. Likewise, any legitimacy granted to the argument that eastern Oregon residents are simply different and have their own values they’d prefer to live by must contend with the way that many of those values contradict bedrock beliefs and rights possessed by all Americans, regardless of where they live. 

The Start of a Migration Towards a Smarter Democratic Stand on Immigration?

I recently wrote about the horror show of migrant abuse being perpetrated by Texas authorities along the southern border who have begun to usurp, in violent fashion, the border security role properly carried out by the federal government. Among other things, I noted that the aggression and obsession exhibited by the broader GOP in its anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies requires a massive countervailing effort by the Democratic Party.

In this vein, I wanted to recommend this recent post by Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr., titled “The left needs to win, not duck, the immigration debate.” Assessing the Democrats’ immigration stance, Bacon notes that conservatives will continue to win on immigration — “pushing policy to the right and bludgeoning Democrats electorally whenever immigration is in the news” — unless and until Democrats and the left “forcefully defend the idea that immigration is good for the United States.” Bacon does a great job of digging into the specifics of how the Democrats have allowed Republicans to dominate the public discourse on immigration, with the end result that the discussion is continually being pushed to the right, and with the Democrats themselves adopting a muddled and arguably conservative-lite position on this vital issue. He reminds us of current and shockingly extreme Republican policies, such as those “allowing local and state law enforcement officials to deport people from the country and declaring that children born on U.S. soil are not automatically citizens and “cruelly flying and busing immigrants to left-leaning areas and then dumping them off like garbage.”

Bacon points out the basic hopelessness of the Democrats trying to avoid talking about immigration while the GOP focuses on it relentlessly. To this we should add the tsunami pressure of right-wing media’s supporting fire, so that lies and propaganda about migration are continually fed into the public discourse. These are both things over which the Democrats have no control, and we could go so far as to say that their efforts to avoid a full-on confrontation echo the self-defeating magical thinking that if you close your eyes, the thing that threatens you will obligingly disappear.

Bacon zeroes in on a basic element of this imbalance: “neither senior Democratic officials nor those on the broader left are articulating a clear vision of immigration policy to contrast with the right.” He suggests five grounds on which Democrats can make the case for immigration: a moral case, in which the U.S. is historically the refuge for those fleeing violence and discrimination; as a source of national pride and identity; solid economic reasons; as a basic method of countering the right-wing populist drift of immigration discourse; and as a way to appeal to increase turnaround amongst left-leaning voters who are sympathetic to more immigration. These are all sound and persuasive points, and the Democrats would do well to take heed.  

I noted last time that hostility to (brown-skinned) immigrants flows naturally from the white supremacism and white nationalism that have fully overtaken the Republican Party, but I think it’s worth coming at this point from another direction. Currently, there is some sheen of pretense — abetted both by the media and a Democratic Party that’s pulling its punches — that the GOP is acting in a somewhat reasonable manner in its opposition to immigration, out of a sort of hard-assed assessment of the national interest; that it is simply applying a tough-love approach to would-be newcomers who supposedly pose a drain on the nation’s resources and job availability; that it is opposed to immigration for the good of the country rather than on the basis of riling up and perpetuating the unfounded fears of its white base.

Denying the GOP this plausible deniability feels key to the project of unwinding GOP dominance on the immigration front. To do so, Democrats need to draw a line between the GOP’s dehumanization (and violence towards) migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande, and a whole host of policies aimed at restricting the vote and erasing the history of non-white Americans. They also need to make it clear that the GOP’s border policies are tainted by the same illiberalism that characterize the Republican Party’s attitudes across a whole range of areas, from subversion of elections, to anti-environmental policies, to attacks on women’s rights — that they flow from a predominantly white, Christian minority’s wish to asserts its dominance over the American majority. 

Recent Cruelties Against Immigrants at Texas Border Are Logical Outcome of GOP Strategy

Recent reports of grave human rights violations and state usurpation of federal border security responsibilities in Texas are a wake-up call for Democrats to pursue a far more confrontational strategy against GOP fear-mongering about the southern border. In particular, moves by Governor Greg Abbott to militarize border enforcement and portray the flow of unarmed, poverty-stricken immigrants as an actual invasion of the United States constitute a challenge to bedrock American values that cannot be allowed to gain further traction or prevail.

Over the last week, the Houston Chronicle and the New York Times have reported on extreme efforts by Texas law enforcement and National Guard members to repel immigrants from crossing the U.S.’s southern border. Among other evidence, the Chronicle and the Times obtained an email from a state police medic who “described exhausted migrants being cut up by razor wire, a teenager breaking his leg to escape the barriers and officers being directed to withhold water from migrants struggling in the perilous heat.” The medic also described a pregnant woman caught up in concertina wire, as well as a young girl who was literally pushed back by authorities, subsequently passed out, and ultimately required assistance from medical workers. At least 3 other state police officers offered similar accounts, including receiving orders to refuse water to migrants. There are also reports of migrants drowning in deep river water in efforts to avoid obstacles placed in shallower reaches by Texas authorities.

Notably, several immigrants interviewed by the Times, including some who had been involved in such incidents, have offered corroborating accounts of state border personnel cruelty. In one incident, an apparent Texas state trooper removed a blanket placed over concertina wire by those attempting to cross it, leading a female to slip and gash her head. Immigrants have also described being lacerated by concertina wire strung underwater, on which they unwittingly stumbled.

I suppose there are some who would say that these immigrants have simply gotten what they deserve — that bloody wounds, physical expulsion, and terror are proper penalties for daring to seek asylum or a better life in the United States. And so it is vital that the rest of us, who constitute a decisive majority of the country, offer not the slightest quarter to the deranged sadism and willful inhumanity wielded against our fellow human beings seeking a better life in the United States.

Abbott and his kind make a fuss about how they’re only seeking to protect the country against drugs and criminals. But their eagerness to treat all migrants at the southern border as criminals, as invaders, to dehumanize people who may very well have solid legal claims to asylum and a pathway to eventual citizenship, gives their sordid worldview away. No legitimate “defense” of the United States can possibly involve entangling pregnant women in cutting wire, physically pushing away young girls, or denying water to parched immigrants in punishing heat. In attempting to project toughness, they instead broadcast their own moral failures, essential cowardice, and lack of understanding of this nation’s fundamental character. 

As disturbing as these recent actions are, they are merely a piece of a larger story about the Republican Party’s turn against liberal democracy and increasing comfort with authoritarian policies tinged with violence in the service of a white supremacist vision for America. When GOP politicians like Abbott attempt to foment hysteria about the U.S. being overwhelmed by dark-skinned migrants seeking to rob the rest of us of our birthright, they are activating white fears that they are on track to lose their majority status in the U.S. in the coming decades. At its most extreme, such politicians indirectly or directly invoke the idea of the Great Replacement theory, in which demographic change is viewed as a sinister plot by Jews and “globalists” to replace white Americans. 

It is not coincidental that the Texas GOP’s pursuit of an anti-immigrant agenda increasingly involves an effort to undermine and challenge long-established prerogatives of the federal government at a time when a Democrat holds the presidency. Specifically, the recent abuses appear to be outgrowths of Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s attempt to use the Texas national guard and other instruments of state power to patrol the border in a de facto challenge to the federal government’s responsibility for border security — as well as a blatant attempt to curry favor from right-leaning voters and media, as Greg Sargent recently noted.

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein, in a recent continuation of his must-read series on how the GOP is building up a “nation within a nation,” points to Abbott’s machinations as fitting into a larger phenomenon of red states carving out power based on right-wing principles and in opposition to federal power. But I believe the attempts to usurp federal powers around immigration and border controls should be viewed even more harshly, as another aspect of a slow-rolling insurrection in which much of the GOP has been engaged since the latter days of the Trump administration. As Brownstein and others have described, Republicans have aimed squarely at rolling back and reversing key aspects of American democracy, including voting rights, the power of the federal government to set basic standards in areas such as the economy and environmental protection, and civil rights for disfavored groups, with the aim of ensuring minority (i.e., white Christian) rule over a diversifying America. But rather than constituting politics as usual or some sort of harder-edged tactics (which seems to be the default position of mainstream news organizations like the New York Times) or as an attempt to insulate GOP-majority areas from the broader American majority, these efforts in fact aim at the wholesale subversion of majority rule and inevitably aim at corrupting democracy at the federal level to achieve their aims.

The recent border actions, even outside the human rights violations and possible crimes committed by Texas authorities, fit even more persuasively into an insurrectionary perspective, involving not only a direct challenge to established federal legal authority around border control and foreign affairs, but the use of National Guard troops as something akin to the governor’s personal army against (imagined) foreign invaders. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch effectively conveys the scale of the operation:

It’s the governor of America’s second-largest state building up his own military force that’s as suitable for Kandahar as for Eagle Pass — deploying Blackhawk helicopters and C-130 cargo planes to support the specially trained soldiers of what state officials called the Texas Border Tactical Force. Texas has spent an astronomical $4.5 billion on the project so far, deploying about 10,000 troops and law-enforcement officers at any given time — with no end in sight.

[. . .] 

It’s not only the massive scale and cost of Operation Lone Star, but the fact that these Texas troops aren’t working in concert with the federal government.

So the more consequential story here is not the flow of migrants across the border, which ultimately is the predictable result of the combined forces of climate change, poverty, and foreign political repression intersecting with the fundamental appeal of the U.S. as a land of wealth and freedom. Rather, it is the frenzied urgency with which leading GOP politicians foment a false sense of crisis about immigration, and increasingly embrace tactics that have less to do with actually controlling it and far more to do with eroding federal power while enacting a grotesque vision of white supremacism.

But while what’s happening at the border needs to be viewed as part of a larger story about a GOP-abetted reactionary movement, it has a special, even unique, importance to this movement — and to the American majority’s countervailing efforts to blunt and defeat it. There is a very good reason right-wing politicians like Abbott have chosen to make immigration such a focus of their efforts and propaganda, and the dehumanization of brown-skinned immigrants central to their political appeal. They grasp that current-day conflicts over immigration form a wedge issue with which to derange and possibly destroy a vital American consensus with which they disagree. This consensus holds that immigration has been essential to the growth and vitality of the United States — and equally importantly, that one’s claim to being an American has nothing to do with one’s place of origin or the color of one’s skin. 

Moreover, as the GOP has shown itself to be increasingly motivated by white grievance politics, the war on immigrants is in some way the ultimate expression of such politics, combining the literal and the symbolic: an opportunity for politicians like Abbott to make actual war on the dusky specter of demographic change, by targeting immigrants of color and also symbolically sending a menacing signal to non-white Americans better protected by the rule of law — while simultaneously stoking the demographic fears of white Americans about the supposed threat posed by darker-skinned citizens and non-citizens alike. You can’t fully make sense of what is happening in Texas without acknowledging the role of white supremacism and GOP fears of demographic replacement. It helps explain the viciousness and the tenacity of what we are seeing; but it also make the border and immigration essential territory for fighting back against this perverted and stunted vision of America's future. 

To date, the Biden administration has pursued a cautious path towards Abbott’s provocations, issuing a stern denunciation of the allegations but taking only limited actions to actually rein in the state’s various abuses. It is not difficult to see Abbott’s crude political game — for him and other Republicans, the play is to bait the Biden administration into denouncing and attempting to roll back his retrograde policies, so that GOP politicians can in turn pronounce the Democrats as being pro-illegal immigrant, soft on crime, and more concerned with the rights of immigrants than the needs of YOU, a real honest-born-and-bred everyday American. It is a familiar dance, only with an enhanced level of sadism and higher stakes than ever for our country.

Throughout the Biden administration, the president and Democratic leaders have generally opted to dampen rather than seek confrontation with a radicalizing GOP, seemingly rooted in a belief that the American majority prefers calm after the tempestuous Trump years, and will reward Democrats for being the low-drama party. Yet what Texas is doing along the southern border demonstrates the limits of this political strategy. The offenses against human rights and federal power are too outlandish to ignore; letting them stand implicates all Americans in their cruelty, while eroding long-established principles of federal power in the service of an insurrectionary spirit. And as I noted above, the larger stakes involve no less than a confrontation over whether a white supremacist vision will be allowed to gain further sway over American politics, with all the cruelty, authoritarianism, and destructive policies it entails.

Clearly, it is time for Democrats to find a way to pop the “Democrats are weak on border security” nonsense that only encourages GOP aggression and makes Democrats themselves think twice about responding to the sorts of horrors happening along the Rio Grande. The idea of an emergency at the border, and that there is a full-fledged “invasion” underway, is a triumph of right-wing propaganda fueled by nativist fantasies that have become central to the GOP’s political appeal. The Democrats need to bring the hammer down on the hateful actions by Texas authorities while also openly discussing and unraveling the various fantasies — of white supremacism, of “invasion,” of faceless hordes coming to take Americans’ jobs — in which right-wing politicians’ actions are grounded.

This is not just a battle over policy — it’s a battle over what America is and what it should be, and to avoid it is effectively to cede the field to the GOP’s noxious ideas and inhumane acts. And so Democrats will not only need to expose and deconstruct the Republicans’ dark vision for America, but will also need to put forward their own alternative — one that provides inspiration for Americans chilled by the tired themes of racism and fear on which the GOP relies. Fortunately, a powerful narrative of an America made great by immigration and diversity is close at hand — because it’s the reality that most of us are living every day. The great majority of Americans can trace their origins to other lands; an attack on immigration is ultimately an attack on all of us actual Americans with mongrel roots and tangled family trees. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, it has put itself in opposition to the values that actually bind most Americans: compassion; solidarity; a love of democracy and the belief that every voice and vote counts; and agreement that we resolve our differences through talk and debate, not by storming the Capitol, turning the National Guard into personal armies, or impaling women and children on concertina wire.

Urgent Need for Supreme Court Reform Is Rooted in a Legitimacy Crisis

With the Supreme Court’s recent one-two-three punches striking down affirmative action and debt relief for college students, as well as undoing equality for LGBTQ Americans, only the most Pollyanaish of observers would deny that we’re deep into a rollback of fundamental rights and democratic governance at the hands of a reactionary court. The overwhelming question for an American majority victimized and betrayed by these decisions is what to do about it. Two broad choices lie before us: to concede the authority of the Court’s decisions and accommodate ourselves to their impact as reflecting an inescapable new order of American life, or to determine a way to reverse and resist them as effectively and expeditiously as possible.

Given the fundamentally anti-democratic spirit of this reactionary court’s decade and more of harmful decisions, finding a way forward should be the obvious path.

The question of the Court’s relative legitimacy will be central to coming battles to reverse a string of decisions that have savaged individual rights (abortion, LGBTQ equality) and the government’s ability to engage in majority rule (rollbacks of environmental laws, the reversal of student debt relief, the evisceration of labor and gun control measures). For those looking to restore balance to our system of checks and balances, the argument that the court has exceeded its proper role and expanded into illegitimate exercises of power will need to be made convincingly to the American public. Sadly for the country but happily for supporters of reform, powerful arguments abound.

Let’s start with a point that’s fundamental to rallying public support for Supreme Court reform. Rebecca Solnit has written that the court “can dismantle the legislation but they cannot touch the beliefs and values. We still believe in these rights.” Solnit’s point is foundational to the work of growing a mass movement to push for court reform: rights that the Supreme Court has purported to negate, such as equality for gay Americans or a woman’s right to control her own body — are still our rights, even as the court has now empowered government to act to take them away. Such rights have been won by mass, democratic actions and hard-fought legislative battles across the decades, and the court has acted in an illegitimate fashion by trying to take them away. Similarly, the court’s restriction of the government’s ability to act on behalf of the majority on a variety of fronts, from environmental protection to the preservation of labor rights, represents an anti-democratic pushback that defies the halting but steady progress of the United States towards greater democracy.

Then there’s the matter of the Supreme Court substituting itself for the role of Congress — no longer just adjudicating disputes between other branches of government, good-faith disputes about legal interpretation, and questions of constitutionality, but creating new policies and extra-constitutional concepts wholesale. As Mehdi Hasan puts it, the Court “takes issues decided by the people’s representatives and then re-decides them in a manner that pleases the conservative supermajority on the bench. So an elected, and Democratic-controlled, Congress can write and pass a progressive law, but an unelected and very conservative Supreme Court can just rewrite it.” Hassan points to the vast array of areas in which the Court has acted in such a manner, spanning “student loan relief, climate change, voting rights, labor laws and gun control.” This substitution of the Court’s positions for those of Congress has been abetted by the spurious “major questions doctrine,” which requires “Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” But as Vox’s Ian Milhiser points out, this doctrine has simply been conjured into existence by the conservative court majority.

The Supreme Court’s use of made-up rules to arrive at its preferred ideological conclusions is another powerful argument in favor of constraining its overbearing exercise of power, and is part of a larger issue still — the court’s increasing preference for deciding cases not based on constitutional principles, but simply in alignment with the partisan needs of the Republican Party. Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler writes that, “Its fixations fluctuate in near perfect conformity with the fleeting and manufactured resentments of the organized right, which makes anticipating in advance whose ox will be gored, and on what time table, a challenge even for scholars.” I think it’s safe to say that most people’s sense of the Supreme Court’s proper role does not include it acting as an adjunct of Republican Party political priorities — yet that’s the role it’s increasingly played, most recently by deciding against gay rights in a case that appears not to have even been fit for a Supreme Court hearing in the first place, but that aligns neatly with the GOP’s current push to demonize the gay community.

In the same piece, Beutler set out a comprehensive case for why a full confrontation with the Court by the president and Congress is the proper way to resolve this ongoing crisis of a rogue judiciary, arguing that, “Expanding the court, or at least credibly threatening to, is the only surefire way to sever it from the political and financial influences that currently control it.” I think this is correct, but in terms of making the public case for such reform, Beutler zeroes in on a key observation — that we need this because of a crisis that the Court itself has created, so that President Biden and the Democratic Party more broadly have “no choice but to embrace” actions to restrain the Court’s power. This is an argument that should resonate powerfully with the American public, and create a feedback loop in which open and frank discussions of the court’s out-of-control nature will build public support for meaningful reforms.

This is a point I can’t stress enough — any effort to reform the Supreme Court necessarily must do so not just under the framework of restoring abstract checks and balances to American government (no matter how important that goal is), but specifically under the banner of democracy and the Court’s subversion of Americans’ political choices and rights. Any reform effort must, on grounds both practical and moral, involve an open acknowledgment of the way six Supreme Court justices has set themselves into a sort of feudal opposition to the values, beliefs, lives, and livelihoods of millions upon millions of Americans. The Supreme Court, with its lifetime appointments and legacy of presidents no longer on the political scene, has sometimes been described as the dead hand of the past emerging into the present; what we need now is for the very much alive population of current American voters to grasp the travesty of the current Supreme Court, and slap that skeletal hand back.

Then there is the stupefying behavior by certain justices that calls into question both their baseline ethics and their judicial independence in arriving at particular rulings — not to mention the ethics of Chief Justice John Roberts, who to date has seemed mostly indifferent to staggering breaches of propriety. Most recently, reports have shown that billionaire sugar daddies with business before the court have provided both justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas with thousands of dollars in benefits. At a minimum, the willingness to countenance the appearance of impropriety must be considered shocking: Supreme Court justices, as the highest embodiment of the judicial branch, should be expected to adhere to the highest ethical standards — they have an unavoidable role to play in setting an example to other judges and government officials, a role that the public should reasonably count on them to embrace with good-faith efforts and even pride.

Instead, Alito and Thomas have demonstrated contempt for this basic responsibility to be role models; worse, they have introduced reasonable doubts about the corruption of their votes on matters before the Court involving their big-spending benefactors. While it is extremely unlikely either would ever be impeached and removed by the Senate, the justices’ open disdain for an American public that rightly perceives impropriety in Lear jet ride-alongs and millionaire-funded mortgage payments can be wielded as a tool in the battle for overarching Court reform. Advocates for a reformed court should argue that ethics rules for justices going forward cannot heal the appearance of, or actual impropriety, in the past; even the strictest new rules would not make right the judicial corruptions already inflicted on American law and society. And so the glaring need for ethics reforms to govern the Supreme Court also becomes an argument for increasing the number of seats on the court, so that honest judges may be impaneled to balance out the dubious presence of compromised ones.

As I said above, we need to fundamentally view the battle to restrain the Court as a battle for democracy and for the individual rights of the American citizens who are the living, breathing substance of our democracy. It is not without significance that some conservative justices appear to assume that most American are rubes if not outright morons — just look at Alito’s pathetic defense that there was nothing wrong with him accepting a flight on a millionaire’s jet to an all-expenses-paid Alaskan fishing trip on the grounds that the seat would otherwise have been empty (I have read his comment a dozen times, and believe me, it makes less sense every time. To extend his (il)logic, there would be nothing wrong with a Supreme Court justice accepting money from a millionaire if the money otherwise would have just been sitting in the millionaire’s bank account). It is completely within bounds to remind the American people that justices’ indifference to the unethical spectacle of hoovering up financial benefits is of a piece with the justices’ indifference to hoovering up Americans’ hard-won rights and democracy: both positions are grounded in contempt for ordinary citizens and an unacceptable abuse of their power.

One note of caution — we should be careful not to allow discussions of ethics reforms on matters such as accepting financial benefits from bazillionaires to be confused with the broader reforms required to reign in the Court’s out-of-control power exercised in the service of reactionary and partisan ends. From this perspective, ethics reforms might even run the risk of restoring a broader legitimacy to the Court it certainly doesn’t deserve; there’s a tension between these two goals that I haven’t seen acknowledged nearly enough, if at all. Surely the venality of justices like Thomas and Alito needs to be addressed — not in order to restore a legitimacy to an otherwise unreformed Court, but as one part of a much broader effort to put the Court back into its proper place and ensure it is doing the people’s business, not the business of sugar daddies and ideological whips.

In his essay I quoted above, Ian Milhiser argues that reversing this corrupted court’s bad decisions will require Americans to stay upset and angry about those rulings over the long term, since reversing the damage will realistically take years. This cultivation of a “grudge,” he points out, has after all been central to how conservative interests have gotten sympathetic justices onto the court and helped yield favorable rulings. As I’ve lamented before, though, the Democratic Party generally resists riling up voters, with a technocratic, low-drama approach preferred by many elected officials. However, the fundamentally pro-democracy project of reforming the Supreme Court needs to acknowledge and channel people’s anger at Supreme Court betrayal, and to recognize that this anger is ultimately an outgrowth of powerful beliefs and emotions — like a love of justice, fair play, and mutual respect. To build and sustain the momentum for change — whether adding seats to the court, imposing term limits, restricting the court’s jurisdiction, passing laws to overturn bad decisions, or some combination of the above — we will all need to hold fast to our sense of injustice and desire for fairness. Remembering that millions of us are upset and fired up for identical reasons is an important way that democracy will sustain itself and find its way to reform the self-serving legalisms and reactionary bent of this corrupt Supreme Court.

Liberal Portland's City Leaders Adopting Iliberal Attitudes Toward Unhoused Population

In recent weeks, multiple news organizations in Portland have reported on the surprisingly tenuous future of Portland Street Response, a 3-year-old program described by Oregon Public Broadcasting as providing “an unarmed response to mental health crises or 911 calls related to people experiencing homelessness.” Rather than send police officers to address issues involving unhoused Portlanders, “the idea was to reduce over-policing of homeless Portlanders by dispatching mental health experts, social workers, or physicians to certain 911 calls.”

PSR was expanded several-fold last year, so that multiple teams of employees went out on more than 7,000 calls in a one-year period ending in April (a more than 500% increase compared to the previous year). OPB notes that an astonishing 98% of these incidents would have previously been within the purview of the Portland Police Department.

Given such impressive statistics — to which should be added the cost savings from sending an unarmed response, not to mention the concomitant reduction in the possibility of a police response escalating into a violent or deadly confrontation — why on earth are city officials and others questioning the program’s viability and future? After all, a recent report by Portland State University indicates that the program is largely meeting its goals (though it also identified problems in need of redress). And though it’s still new, the program has already fueled a wave of interest from other cities looking for alternative approaches to the vexing issue of homelessness (though to give credit where credit is due, PSR was modeled on an established program in Eugene, OR). It’s even received a national push thanks to some of Oregon elected federal officials, who helped make $1 billion available for like programs across the country.

The official city motto for Portland is “the city that works.”  This is a program that’s working.

Yet those most directly involved with overseeing the program, particularly Interim Fire Chief Ryan Gillespie and city council member Rene Gonzalez (who oversees the Fire Bureau), have recently cast doubts on the program’s long-term future. Most decisively, Gonzalez, who ran for office on get-tough policies towards the city’s homeless population, has indicated ambivalence about the PSR’s core mission and concern that it’s siphoning money better spent on other public safety priorities, such as improving the city’s 911 response system. Crucially, Gonzalez defeated the city council member who pushed PSR into existence, so that there is now no strong advocate for its existence left among Portland’s elected officials.

As startling as it may be, recent reporting suggests that it is the program’s very success that has left it bereft of allies and beset by doubters and outright opponents. You will look in vain for any substantive criticisms of the program, such as its failure to help the population it’s intended to help.

Rather, its critics rest their case in part on the notion that the program has grown too fast and lacks proper structure and procedures, so that it is time to hit pause and figure out what steps to take next. Such is the position of Gillespie.

More decisively, though, firefighters and Commissioner Gonzalez have indicated that PSR’s approach to the homeless is “enabling” those without housing. Simultaneously, acting chief Gillespie has restricted PSR from buying new supplies to hand out to the unhoused, pointing to PSR staff’s lack of proper requisitioning procedures and Fire Bureau budget limitations. But the critiques of humanitarian assistance that builds trust and immediately helps the homeless seem closer to the heart of the PSR skeptics’ issues with the program. Last winter, Commissioner Gonzalez actually ordered PSR to stop distributing tents in the wake of a spate of tent fires, stating that “Firefighters’ job is to protect people. The concept of handing out tents to a population that has high rates of mental illness and very high rates of heavy drug use, is mind-boggling.” This, in a city that lacks sufficient shelter for its homeless population on any given night.

More recently, PSR's practice of handing out clothing to the unhoused was also criticized as “enabling” by some firefighters interviewed for the recent Portland State University report — a criticism that helps us better see the more fundamental philosophical conflict driving the moves to undercut and even sabotage the functioning of PSR. You can’t help but wonder what exactly is “enabled” by giving clothes to a person in rags or even naked in the midst of a mental health crisis - a sense of dignity?  Becoming the object of the most rudimentary compassion and humanity?  The mind boggles at anyone who would callously refer to this a  “enabling” activity; it’s a turn of phrase that lays bare the cruelty behind the criminalization of homelessness.

It is not too much of a stretch to speculate that Gonzalez, who successfully ran for office on a punitive approach to the unhoused, simply sees PSR as both a waste of money and an unsettling challenge to his preferred approach to dealing with the homeless. His more old-school approach intersects neatly with his desire to maintain the support of the firefighters union that helped fund his run, and so he kills two birds with one stone by portraying the homeless as enemies of firefighter safety, vilifying the former while valorizing the latter. With the PSR unfortunately embedded within the Fire Bureau, he is also able to signal his loyalty to firefighters by suggesting its funds would be better spent on other Fire Bureau matters, while working to undercut a program whose very existence suggests a more humanitarian and long-term alternative approach to the unhoused.

Gonzalez has said that PSR has a place in the city’s homeless response, yet has already declined once to try moving the group into another department that might spare it unhelpful competition with funds for other Fire Bureau needs. But even as we see Gonzalez using PSR as a punching bag to build up his own tough-on-crime and homelessness bona fides, the lack of any vigorous defense from the other four city council members or Mayor Ted Wheeler speaks to a “tough love” turn in the whole elected city government’s approach to the unhoused. This attitude is most strikingly shown in the city’s ban of daytime camping, which went into effect this past week — despite apparently running afoul of a court ruling prohibiting such bans when there’s insufficient accommodations for the unhoused population. After years of an escalating crisis of the unhoused on Portland streets, city leaders appear to be embracing the failed policies of criminalization that arguably helped get the city to this crisis state in the first place. This is a dark turn for a city that not long ago had seemed to collectively understand the importance of housing-first, compassionate policies to resolve the agonizing issue of the unhoused.

Navigating the GOP's Post-Indictment Onslaught

The federal indictment of Donald Trump for his alleged mishandling of secret documents has provoked a savage deluge of propaganda and threats from his supporters in the Republican Party. This pushback aims to undermine the legitimacy of the case against the former president, suggesting Trump is the victim of a politicized Justice Department under the tyrannical thumb of a tinpot despot named Joseph R. Biden. Not only have some Republicans argued that Trump should essentially be considered above the law, but others have taken the opportunity to suggest that the entire judicial system is somehow out to get conservatives. Combined with some Trump allies’ hints at the necessity of violence to protect the former president, the whole spectacle signals that the GOP’s acceleration towards authoritarianism shows no signs of slowing down. As I contended last week, the outrageous GOP response is an even more important story than news of the federal charges against Trump.

I was hardly alone in lamenting both the media’s and the Democratic Party’s inability to grapple adequately with this larger context of Republican extremism, so that they might make fully comprehensible the news of the indictment to the broader public. Far too much coverage urged readers to take note of the “sad,” “somber,” and “unprecedented” nature of the charges, as if it’s a worrisome thing when the rule of law applies to the rich and powerful — but the good news is that lots of people seemed to notice this ridiculous trend. As Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum riposted in a tweet, “The horrible precedent isn't that Trump was indicted. The horrible precedent is that we had a president who repeatedly broke the law.” Other media coverage tried to spin the GOP response as a vague “polarization/test of our democracy” moment — but as Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent observed, “Stop saying the indictment "tests our democracy." The actual "test" we face is Trump's apparent crimes and the unhinged GOP defense of him, which effectively posits that any/all law enforcement activity involving Trump is inherently illegitimate, no matter what the facts show.” And though some sources implied America was at a crossroads for doing something that had never been done before (i.e., indicting a former president), they mostly never bothered to point out that plenty of other democracies have charged and convicted heads of state, from Japan and Israel to France and South Korea — facts no further away than in a recent primer by Flux’s Matthew Sheffield on the topic.

As for the Democrats’ strategic decision to refrain from anything like either a full-throated counter-offensive against GOP disinformation or a solid defense of the American justice system, the passage of time has shown how perilous this conflict-averse approach truly is, as the GOP has only continued to blast its illiberal message of distrust in those who administer the law. As former Obama administration official Dan Pfeiffer has warned, “Democrats need to go on offense to push back on Trump’s messaging before he discredits the investigations and distracts the public.” In the absence of a coherent Democratic strategy, the odds increase by the day that Pfeiffer’s dark scenario will come to pass.

In an assessment of the indictment, historian Thomas Zimmer notes a recurring pattern in which the GOP reaches certain crossroads with Donald Trump — such as the attempted January 6 coup — only to choose the path of adherence to Trump and the greater radicalization inherent in such a choice. Zimmer is right to suggest that the GOP’s defense of Trump in light of the federal indictment is another such branch in the road to greater radicalization, this time involving a wholesale denunciation of the justice system as corrupt and antithetical to the interests of Trumpist conservatives. Democrats could do worse than to take Zimmer’s powerful contextualization of the GOP reaction as a starting point, and provide a narrative that reminds Americans of the previous decisive points at which the Republican Party chose to increase its devotion to authoritarian means and ends. It seems that an accurate, dynamic portrayal of GOP devolution would be a more powerful message that simply saying “MAGA Republicans don’t share our values” (though the latter message certainly has its place). It’s critical that Democrats not only describe what the GOP is becoming, but convey the degree to which the party is still radicalizing, to borrow Zimmer’s phrasing. Not only would this allow the American public to better understand the nature of the current GOP, it would offer a powerful context for interpreting future GOP actions and rhetoric, given that the party only ever moves in one direction these days — ever more to the right.

Likewise, Democrats would do well to play up the corruption and criminality inherent in the GOP’s defense of Trump, a point emphasized by Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler, who writes that, “Democrats should (finally, at long last) wield Trump’s corruption as a wedge—make his crimes a liability not just for him but for any GOP pretenders who defend him”:

What could be easier? Whatever the charging documents allege, we know more or less what Trump’s exposure is. He mounted a coup against the U.S. government, and when the coup failed, he stole a bunch of state secrets.

Democratic leaders, with the possible exception of Joe Biden himself, can choose to exploit that division. They can note that Trump’s defenders have sided against the country with someone who tried to destroy it. They can mount a political offensive based on the importance of protecting these prosecutions from Republican sabotage and force votes on measures that affirm DOJ independence.

Like Zimmer, Beutler gets that the importance in the Trump indictment lies not so much in the crimes of Donald Trump as in the grand demonstration of GOP extremism and corruption it has provided. And as Jamelle Bouie highlights in a recent New York Times column, it’s not like this Republican corruption and criminality have come out of nowhere, as if Trump brought a blushingly innocent GOP to the dark side. Bouie suggests that Trump is in fact the culmination of long-running trends in the GOP:

Most things in life, and especially a basic respect for democracy and the rule of law, have to be cultivated. What is striking about the Republican Party is the extent to which it has, for decades now, cultivated the opposite — a highly instrumental view of our political system, in which rules and laws are legitimate only insofar as they allow for the acquisition and concentration of power in Republican hands.

[. . .] there is also the reality that Trump is the apotheosis of a propensity for lawlessness within the Republican Party. He is what the party and its most prominent figures have been building toward for nearly half a century. I think he knows it and I think they do too.

As with the points by Zimmer and Beutler I noted above, Bouie provides valuable context, in a way that breaks simplistic narratives that what is happening in American politics is unprecedented (Trump’s alleged lawbreaking) or incomprehensible (such as the idea that the GOP is going against its (undeserved) reputation as a “law and order” party). Again, it would behoove the Democratic Party to work more vigorously to remind the American public that GOP tendencies towards corruption are long-standing, and in the present day extend far beyond Donald Trump (just take a look at the steady flow of reports of Supreme Court corruption — a new one is out just this week! — to get a sense of how far and wide it goes within the party).

But broadening the field of what Democrats feel comfortable targeting about GOP-wide malfeasance and authoritarianism is only part of the challenge for the party. They can’t just argue about the Republicans as an abstract threat to the rule of law and democracy, no matter how important it is to defend those principles (and goodness knows I’ve made that abstract argument enough times). Democrats also need to grab the imagination of Americans, and provide an easy-to-understand narrative of what the GOP’s decayed state means for them personally. As Dan Pfeiffer observes in the same piece I quoted above, “If we want people to care about Trump’s criminality and corruption, we have to show how it affects their lives”:

Donald Trump isn’t running for President to help your family. His first priority is to protect himself from accountability and pardon his political allies, including the people who assaulted the Capitol on January 6th.

Instead of working to lower costs and raise wages, Trump promised to spend his time and energy using the power of the government and your taxpayer dollars to seek revenge on his enemies with pointless investigations and political prosecutions. Donald Trump doesn’t care about you, he only cares about himself.

This emphasis on bringing the consequences of Trump’s (and the GOP’s) corruption down to earth is spot-on, just as when people talk about the erosion of the rule of law it’s important to describe the everyday consequences of the rich getting away with crimes while the rest of us are victimized by them. As Pfeiffer notes, “We must turn the conversation towards accountability for the rich and powerful” — a principle the great majority of Americans should be able to get behind, being neither rich nor powerful themselves.

It’s crucial that the Democrats rev up both their rhetoric and their substantive fight against the lawlessness promoted by the GOP in the wake of Trump’s indictment, for a whole host of reasons. Such an aggressive stance would help dilute the damage GOP propaganda will otherwise do to the public’s understanding of the important stakes in holding Donald Trump accountable; it will help alert the public to the dangers posed by a lawless GOP; it will help protect American institutions from further damage by the Republican Party; and it will defend the Democrats themselves from baseless accusations of corruption. The post-indictment GOP firestorm is a good enough reason in its own right for the Democrats to step up the tempo — but we also need to bear in mind that what we’re seeing now, from both the GOP and the Democrats, is something of a test run in the event of far more existentially serious charges against Trump in connection with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. I would hazard that what we’ve seen so far will rate as a tempest in a teacup compared to what the GOP will say and do should Donald Trump finally be indicted for his insurrectionism.

Going Haywire About Trump Indictment, Republicans Double Down on Anti-Democratic Politics

Without question, the 37-count indictment of former president Donald Trump for his mishandling of highly classified documents is an historic and momentous event. It’s the first time a former president has been charged with federal crimes, and the fact that Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination means this indictment may have serious political consequences. Yet, as significant as it is, the indictment is overshadowed by an even more consequential event: the effort by broad segments of the Republican Party to attack the charges as illegitimate, up to threatening and inciting possible violence to make their point.

This deranged response, in turn, is part of even larger story, arguably the biggest one in American politics: the ever-increasing radicalization of the GOP into an authoritarian entity, one in which cult-like worship of Donald Trump, white supremacism, the specter of violence, and a growing rejection of democracy are central to the party’s identity. This ominous drift of the GOP was cemented in the days after Trump’s January 6 attempted coup, when the bulk of the party’s congressmen and senators rallied around their leader and refused to support either his resignation or removal from office. And in the years since that day, we have witnessed the party at both the state and national level take up the insurrectionary cause of demolishing democracy, from blatant efforts to restrict the votes of Democratic-leaning voters to the stripping of rights from American citizens, perhaps most strikingly in the abortion bans passed by GOP-governed states in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

The problem is not so much that the media isn’t reporting the actual events that are happening, but that they are consistently failing to provide the larger context for them. For instance, entities like the New York Times have reported on the immediate torrents of threatened violence that emerged from the right, such as failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s statement that, “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.” The Times has also noted the way that Trump allies “have portrayed the indictment as an act of war, called for retribution and highlighted the fact that much of his base carries weapons.” These are hugely important parts of the story of Trump’s indictment, and the Times and other news sources are doing a public service in highlighting them.

Yet the Times article noted above is also emblematic of the limits of so much of this coverage. Among other things, there’s a general reluctance to draw a through-line from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to this current round of threats; they are treated with an air of abstraction rather than as familiar inciting rhetoric that has already led to violence in the past, and so in this respect constitutes more of the bloody-minded same. (Notably, the day of Trump’s arraignment, far-right House Republicans held a pseudo-committee hearing aimed at painting the January 6 insurrectionists as martyrs, as described by Dana Milbank in a scathing Washington Post piece.) Tellingly, the Times article largely relies on experts on political violence (and indeed this perspective is also framed in the title, “Trump Supporters’ Violent Rhetoric in His Defense Disturbs Experts”) to describe what’s going on. I’m all for relying on professionals, but such framing distances the reader, as if it requires training and particular sensitivity to understand what’s happening here. The article’s point that violent political language can incite violence is a crucial one, but aren’t millions of American citizens also disturbed by this violent language? And aren’t Democratic politicians and (potentially) some Republican ones as well? More importantly, such reporting also ends up abstracting the GOP’s threats of violence from the larger authoritarian agenda involving rollback of voting and civil rights around the country that is already well underway, as if it were an unrelated phenomenon when in fact it’s part of the same anti-democratic juggernaut.

Media coverage of the indictment has also been plagued by a tendency to present this news as not just objectively serious, but as a “somber” or even “sad” day for the United States, and to highlight the supposedly ever more fraught state of American politics and “polarization” to which it contributes. But such editorializing and appeals to a sort of mythic median voter actually serve as a substitute for news organizations taking a more decisive position towards a GOP response that has emphasized lawlessness and lies, as well as towards Trump’s essential long-standing criminality. Instead, the indictment has been broadly presented as being a vaguely dark event for America — an actual (former) president has been accused of criminality!  How low we have fallen! — to which the American public should presumably respond with a round of soul-searching and possibly garment-rending. 

But as Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo, the “sheer ordinariness of the whole story” is a key aspect of the indictment itself: “if you commit crimes repeatedly and brazenly you’re very likely to get charged with one or more crimes, particularly if you’re in the public spotlight.” Even acknowledging the gravity of the alleged crimes, the federal response in fact reflects the ordinary and proper working of the justice system: if there is credible evidence that a person has committed crimes, then there should be no surprise that they are prosecuted. As I discussed recently, this humdrum process is in fact how a democratic society protects itself: by punishing wrongdoers and deterring others from similar crimes in the future. From this perspective, the indictment should rightly be seen as a sign of the health of our government and democracy. The law is working to hold an accused wrongdoer to account, even though he is rich and powerful. This is hardly anything to feel sad or somber about: if anything, it’s something to be proud of. A powerful argument could be made that the day of the indictment was actually a good day for America — a day not to rend your garments, but to pick out a nice new shirt or even a pair of slacks to commemorate the day.

If anything is saddening or sobering, it’s not the indictment but a GOP response in which broad swathes of the party indicated they would rather attack the rule of law than accept that Donald Trump might actually have done things that merit a trial and judgment by a jury. There are plenty of other, arguably more appropriate responses to the Republican turn from democratic politics, including feeling disturbed, angry — or even determined to resist and defeat this retrograde movement.

A subtle dose of artificial amnesia has also been worked into the general coverage of the indictment. While it is a bedrock principle of American justice that every defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty — a principle that also applies to Trump in this case — this rule should be weighed against the degree of corruption and open criminality Trump displayed throughout his business career and his presidency. The prime example, of course, is his incitement and organization of an attempted coup in more or less plain view of the American people and press in late 2020 and early 2021. Whether or not he is ever convicted on charges related to January 6, Trump’s attempt to overthrow our government is by now an established fact, despite the propaganda of his defenders.

So we are not starting from some vague zero hour when reacting to the indictment, but from within the context of our existing, well-established knowledge of Trump. And that knowledge would suggest that we should not at all be surprised, or sad, that a former president has been charged with a crime, when that former president is specifically Donald Trump with his horrendous record of terrible offenses against the country. Again, the real cause of concern should be not the indictment but the Republican reaction to it — the effort by so many in the party to deny the charges or to attack the Justice Department and the rule of law more broadly.

The media tendencies I’m describing are driven by a set of incentives and constraints that have been well described and documented over the years. Certainly a desire to appear unbiased is central to the media’s inability to more accurately present the nature of the current GOP, as is an institutional inability to fully internalize the virulent, anti-democratic changes that have overtaken the contemporary Republican Party. So we should not be totally taken aback by the media failures I’ve described to properly contextualize and describe the relevance of the GOP’s indictment reaction to American politics.

What we should be surprised by, though, is the relative absence of the Democratic Party from the national dialogue in the week or so since the indictment was revealed and the Republican onslaught began. While it is understandable that Democrats would want to avoid feeding Republican claims that the charges are due to Biden’s or Democrats’ abuse of the justice system, some Democratic engagement with the charges against Trump seems warranted. The ex-president’s open contempt for the rules around top secret documents involving the “defense and weapons capabilities” of the U.S. and American “plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack” is staggering, and his allegedly blatant (and occasionally Keystone Cop-style) attempts to hide the purloined state secrets from the FBI are deeply incriminating.

It is even less clear why Democrats would want to avoid taking on the larger issue of Republican radicalization that’s so sharply delineated by the GOP’s coordinated reaction to the charges against Trump. At a minimum, this creates a highly unbalanced public narrative in which one party makes outrageous claims about Democratic corruption, while the Democrats don’t defend themselves, much less attempt to flip these attacks around into a narrative of Republicans corruption and unfitness for office. Too many Democratic politicians seem to view this indictment and its aftermath with the simplistic perspective that it is just about Trump, drawing the conclusion that the best thing is to stay out of the way and let justice run its course. In this, some Democrats seem preoccupied with avoiding any inadvertent validation of claims that this is a biased prosecution unleashed at the behest of the Biden administration.

But this strategy makes a lot less sense when we see that the GOP response is itself a more momentous event than the indictment itself — that it represents not a defense of Trump so much as a wholesale assault on the rule of law. This includes claims that no charges against Trump can ever be considered legitimate, but reaches much further. No less a “moderate” GOP figure than South Carolina Senator and presidential aspirant Tim Scott has asserted that in the justice system, “the scales are weighted” against conservatives — either a delusion or a knowing lie on the senator’s part that manages to make the case against Trump into a symbolic case against all Republicans. And though some reporting has credited him with not offering a full-throated defense of Trump in his hour of legal peril, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has fully embraced Trump’s talk of a deep state opposed to conservative rule, reportedly telling donors recently that as president he would “break up the Justice Department and the FBI and root out what he and other far-right politicians, like Donald Trump, are convinced is a cabal of “weaponized” bad actors working to go after their political enemies.” Meanwhile, House majority leader Representative Steve Scalise tweeted that, “This sham indictment is the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump.” And no less a figure than House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went all in on a defense of Trump, with Dana Milbank summarizing his commentary thus: “McCarthy began by calling the indictment a “brazen weaponization of power” and a “grave injustice.” He threatened to block funding for a new FBI headquarters in retaliation. This week, he accused Biden of stealing classified documents from a secure facility, and he said that Trump’s handling of documents (piled in a bathroom) was superior to Biden’s (in a garage) because “a bathroom door locks.”” 

This undermining of the rule of law also encompasses the violent and inciting rhetoric deployed by Trump’s defenders, whether it’s Kari Lake with her suggestions of an armed MAGA army ready to stand in the way of justice, to GOP Representative Andy Biggs’s “eye for an eye” tweet in response to the indictment. The good news is that the last week has brought a heartening reality check on Trump’s ability to stir up mass violence on the part of organized groups as on January 6, but those who study domestic terrorism and right-wing extremism warn of the future dangers posed by lone wolf terrorists inspired by the rhetoric of Trump and his allies.

Politically, though, it matters very little if it’s only a segment of the GOP indulging in the most incendiary rhetoric. As I noted above, even so-called moderates are participating in the erosion of respect for the law and basic accountability through paranoid and fictitious tales of a deep state out to get conservatives. Every point on this continuum, from outright incitement to mealy-mouthed talk about government bias against the right, forms part of a unified attack on the rule of law, and by extension, on the democracy it serves. And as I noted earlier, such attacks are just one facet of a much broader assault on American democracy occurring at the state- and Supreme Court-level to lock in permanent Republican rule and strip citizens of their voting and civil rights. Democrats should feel free to tar all GOP elected officials with the language of the most extreme, in no small part because they are all fairly well united in working towards the same anti-democratic goals. And not only are the furthest-right representatives and senators hardly being rebuked by their fellow Republicans — as the most ardent defenders of Trump, they also represent the center of gravity in the current GOP, where the former president’s popularity still stifles most criticism of his many offenses against the American people.

As has been the case before, a story in which Trump is the apparent center can be re-purposed by the Democrats to tell a more comprehensive narrative about Republic corruption and authoritarianism. A party that continues not only to defend Trump in the face of all that we know of him, but that has enthusiastically taken up the anti-democratic cause that he has done so much to advance, simply cannot be considered an equal or legitimate partner in government. The GOP’s rush to defend Trump, once again, at the expense of the nation is a fresh opportunity for the Democrats to rouse the American majority into a righteous fury at these corrupt men and women who would break our democracy and replace it with some grotesque polity cast in Donald Trump’s sociopathic image. Paired with a determined and comprehensive effort to name and tame America’s great challenges, from climate change to income inequality to unaffordable higher education, the Democrats might just find out what it’s like to win big again.

Malevolent Pledges to Pardon Insurrectionists Disqualify GOP Presidential Candidates

In recent campaign appearances for their respective presidential nomination campaigns, both former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pledged to pardon participants in the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. In doing so, both candidates sent a terrifying but salutary reminder to the American public that the insurrection that burst into public view on January 6 continues, in altered form, up to the present day. Coming from Trump, the promise means that he sees nothing wrong with his 2020 coup attempt, and would view a return to office as an opportunity to complete the demolition of American democracy. Coming from DeSantis, the pledge demonstrates how the rot of this same insurrectionary mindset has infected even GOP politicians generally regarded as mainstream; his defense of the January 6 attackers constitutes a not-so-subtle denigration of our American democracy, and an endorsement of the idea that our system of government deserves to be replaced.

Both Trump and DeSantis have tried to obscure the plain meaning of their words and anti-democratic animus by pairing their declarations with explicit attacks on the American justice system. Specifically, they attempt to move the focus of discussion from the crime of the January 6 insurrection to the supposed injustice inflicted on the insurrectionists. And so when Donald Trump began making the pardons part of his campaign last year, he “accused the justice system, which he described as “this radical left system,” of mistreating the defendants,” as summarized by the Washington Post. In a similar vein, DeSantis recently remarked that, “We’re going to find examples where that government has been weaponized against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate,” echoing a right-wing talking point that the federal government is persecuting January 6 malefactors for their political views. 

Unfortunately for Trump and DeSantis, these are fairly transparent attempts to distract the public and the press from the terrible events of January 6. The defendants are being prosecuted because they have been accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol, the attack itself being part of a larger scheme orchestrated by Trump and his allies to undo a free and fair election that he lost. There has been no credible reporting of bias or corruption in the prosecutions. To say that the defendants have been mistreated is to say that insurrection should not be punished, which is another way of saying that insurrection is fine — which of course makes sense for Trump, since he’s the one who instigated it in the first place.

Similarly, you don’t have to dig very deep to get to DeSantis’s insurrectionary premise. The phrase “government has been weaponized against disfavored groups” intimates some awful abuse of power — but when you stop to consider that the “disfavored groups” are right-wing rioters who tried to reverse an election and seriously injured scores of police, you can see why DeSantis would want to hide his actual meaning behind lawyerly palaver. It only gets worse for DeSantis when you realize that “weaponized” is his way of saying that the Justice Department is simply prosecuting these people for their crimes. DeSantis’s words attempt to turn reality upside down, to have us believe that the government is engaging in criminal behavior by trying to prosecute those who tried to overthrow our democracy. In doing so, he allies himself with their cause.

But by pairing their pardon intentions with explicit attacks on the American justice system currently working to bring those insurrectionists to justice, Trump and DeSantis aren’t just retroactively trying to validate the Capitol attack — they’re actually working to advance its ends in another way. The justice system is a central part of how the country defends itself — in this case, by putting behind bars those who have sought to damage and overturn our government, and by signaling to American society at large that we as a nation do not tolerate such actions. To falsely claim that the federal government cannot be trusted to prosecute those accused of such threatening crimes is tantamount to saying that the country must not be allowed to defend itself — a breathtaking and frankly absurd proposition.

But it’s even worse than this. In emphasizing their planned use of the presidential pardon power, both Trump and DeSantis suggest that justice is better served by a single strongman making decisions, rather than a system of juries, judges, and lawyers. And so, beyond asserting that the legal system can’t be trusted and that the country can’t defend itself, they end up making a case for authoritarian government — the same apparent goal as the January 6 coup attempt by Donald Trump, which if successful would have seen him remain in power indefinitely despite his election loss.

So we need to understand that this pardon talk is no run-of-the-mill political pandering, like talking about the unsurpassed beauty of ethanol at an Iowa barbecue or promising Wisconsin dairy farmers to slap stinky French Brie with a hefty tariff. These are appeals that expose the fundamental unfitness for office of the candidates who make them. They signal both Trump’s and DeSantis’s clear comfort with the violent methods and anti-democratic ends of the January 6 attack, made all the worse by the way they also attempt to gin up doubts about our legal system and make martyrs out of the grotesque band of militias, white supremacists, and Republican extremists who attacked the Capitol.

Not insignificantly, the discussion of pardons also demonstrates their belief that the key to victory lies is inciting elements of the Republican base with a dark fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from Republicans, a theft so awful that violence was necessary to rectify it on January 6. But more damningly, this talk also works not so much as a dog whistle as a rebel yell to extremists that their dreams and plans of violence are legitimate; after all, if people who attacked the Capitol didn’t do anything wrong, what can’t a patriot do to take back the homeland? Both candidates’ words threaten to incite terroristic violence against the American government and the American people. Trump and DeSantis are giving aid and comfort to extremists, reassuring right-wing militias that major figures have their backs and want their support, and creating a permission structure for future acts of violence. They are also acting as de facto recruiters for violent extremists, by signaling that the U.S. president stands ready to pardon them for future crimes. In the case of Trump, his past actions argue that he’s aware of and indifferent to these horrific downsides of his words. In the case of DeSantis, he’s witnessed Trump’s relationship with right-wing extremists, and appears to be interested in making them his own allies.

It’s bad enough for Trump to be making this pardon pledge — after all, the self-serving elements are obvious, since he has every interest in pretending that he committed no crimes or offenses in connection with the January 6 attack. But DeSantis’s adoption of it should make clear that even supposedly mainstream alternatives to Trump subscribe to the same authoritarian playbook as the former president, in which violence is fair play and a president rules best when he’s unfettered by the rule of law. It’s notable that DeSantis also indicated he’d consider pardoning Donald Trump were the latter to be convicted: pardoning a lawless president would in itself be an act of lawlessness, but just as importantly shows how DeSantis views Trump’s authoritarian attitude toward the presidency as creating a template for him to follow.

DeSantis has also been keen to highlight the white nationalism that motivated many of the January 6 actors, and that he believes will motivate Republicans to vote for him. He noted in an interview that, “some people may have a technical violation of the law. But if there are three other people who did the same thing but just in a context, like [the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020] and they don’t get prosecuted at all, that is uneven application of justice, and so … we will use the pardon power.” By referencing supposedly lax treatment of BLM protestors, DeSantis reminds the Republican base that it is white nationalists and white supremacists whose cause was particularly well served by the January 6 attackers, and mainly White Americans who are now behind bars for their actions that day. But DeSantis isn’t creating this connection on his own — he’s drawing on the text and subtext of widespread right-wing discussions of the BLM movement and the attack on the Capitol, though with his words he has given these racist messages his personal imprimatur.

To stay with DeSantis with a little longer — it’s startling to note that he made some of his remarks about pardons the same day that Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in January 6. Whether or not DeSantis timed his remarks to coincide with the sentence, it’s an ominous reminder that those who would stand to receive pardons include those convicted of organizing to disrupt the outcome of the presidential election. For DeSantis to not even bother to carve out an exception for high-level offenders like Rhodes in his public remarks is remarkable. At Rhodes’s sentencing, Judge Amit Mehta remarked that, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to the republic and to the very fabric of this democracy.” I would be curious to know whether DeSantis agrees with this assessment, and if not, why. It is yet more extraordinary when you consider that DeSantis, a Navy veteran, seems to feel no outrage at members and ex-members of the military who betrayed their oaths in attacking the Capitol, including members of the Oath Keepers led by Rhodes. Much mockery has been unleashed around DeSantis’s lack of the basic people skills that seem to be standard issue for most politicians, but weirder still is his robot-like lack of outrage at fellow veterans who tried to kill democracy.

Pardon talk by Trump and DeSantis constitutes nothing less than an attempt to re-write the history of January 6 into something heroic and patriotic, aimed at feeding the paranoia of Republican voters about a stolen 2020 election while sending clear signals to violent extremists that their support is desired and their methods are sound. Such talk is unambiguously disqualifying for both men’s presidential candidacies.

The fact that the press has not focused its coverage more on these statements is part of a broader degradation in the public discourse that is tending to normalize behavior that should be considered by all to be illegitimate in a democratic nation. When the media fails to give such anti-democratic attitudes proper weight, politicians take notice, and are either encouraged to amp up the rhetoric (in the case of Republicans) or discouraged from making it into a bigger issue (in the case of Democrats). And when the public doesn’t hear either Democrats or the media calling something out as taboo, this cultivates confusion, indifference, and cynicism. Yet an ability to identify lines that can’t be crossed is essential to the health and survival of any democracy.

For Democrats, this is not to say that they should just obsessively reference January 6 and the Republicans’ general wish to douse that day in amnesia, misinformation, and martyrdom for the insurrectionists. As I’ve written elsewhere, January 6 is very much a skeleton key for elucidating the GOP’s broader agenda. Talking about Republican radicalism around the attack on the Capitol is both necessary in itself and also provides a way to illuminate other elements of the GOP’s anti-democratic and reactionary worldview. For instance, the violence of that day casts an even more sinister light on more peaceful and legalistic means of unraveling our democracy, such the GOP’s widespread state-level efforts at gerrymandering and voter suppression. As the right remains obsessed with whitewashing and advancing the goals of January 6, Democrats are also well positioned to ask why the GOP doesn’t have more interest in addressing the actual challenges of the nation, from climate change and health care to an economy hobbled by immigration restrictions and citizens unable to afford a college education. Why are Republicans like Trump and DeSantis so deeply concerned about the freedom of insurrectionists who are rightly doing time for their crimes against the nation, while remaining so unconcerned about the freedom of millions of Americans to live their lives with economic security, political equality, and dignity? 

Broken Oath Keepers

There are many contenders for the lowest point of January 6 — mobs of feral attackers brutalizing Capitol police; senators and representatives hiding in their offices, afraid for their lives; bands of insurrectionists hunting for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence; the sight of a Confederate flag in the halls of Congress — but one in particular always stood out to me: the way the insurrectionists were allowed to peacefully leave the scene of the crime rather than be arrested that day, shadowed by official assurances that federal authorities would pursue charges and take them into custody at a later date. Against the relief that the Capitol siege had ended and Donald Trump’s coup attempt had failed, a dark undertow flowed: would there be no punishment for these lawless men?

Yet after this inauspicious start, the Department of Justice has steadily pursued charges against the attackers. According to the Washington Post, “prosecutors say [the investigation] is the largest in U.S. history and has netted about 1,000 charges and more than 650 convictions.” The average conviction has involved a prison sentence of 45 months.

The last couple of weeks brought the longest sentence to date, as Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years. Rhodes wasn’t the only member of his right-wing militia to get serious time: his confederates Kelly Meggs, Jessica Watkins and Kenneth Harrelson recently received 12, 8 and a half, and 4 years, respectively. Not only the length of Rhodes’ sentence in particular merits particular notice — his conviction on charges of seditious conspiracy make him worthy of special attention as we collectively assess January 6 and its aftermath (Meggs, too, was convicted of seditious conspiracy).

In Rhodes’ case, the basis of the seditious conspiracy charge was “conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transition of presidential power,” and the details of the government case fleshed out in disturbing and infuriating detail the extent of this conspiracy. The Washington Post notes that, “Rhodes spurred followers with growing urgency to be ready for an “armed rebellion,” organizing members who came to Washington with firearms prepared for violence,” “warned repeatedly that “bloody civil war” was necessary to keep Trump in office if the election results were not overturned,” and was in close contact with Oath Keepers members as they breached the Capitol.  One measure of the seriousness of the seditious conspiracy charge is that Rhodes was not charged with entering the Capitol or engaging in violence, but for being an organizer of violent efforts to derail the transfer of power; this level of planning and direction was viewed by the government, and a jury, as meriting such a harsh punishment.

At the outset, the seditious conspiracy charge was not viewed as a slam-dunk by the Justice Department, with the Washington Post reporting that, “Bringing the politically charged count posed a higher risk at trial because it required that prosecutors prove the defendants harbored an intent to forcibly oppose the federal government, compared to the charge of conspiring to obstruct a proceeding of Congress [. . .] But the department calculated it was worth the risk to try to send a public message by charging the defendants with committing one of the most serious political crimes in a wider attack on democracy.”

Such details of Rhodes’ offenses and the Justice Department’s successful prosecution make his conviction a milestone in the history and public understanding of January 6. It helps cement our understanding that the events of that day were very far from a spontaneous event by overeager Trump enthusiasts. Rather, far-right extremists allied with the former president targeted our government for dismemberment, both literally and metaphorically. They knew what they were doing, they planned to do it, and they attempted to implement their plan. 

It’s also vital that we call out the particular heinousness of the actions of Rhodes and members of the Oath Keepers organization, an anti-government militia that specifically recruited members of law enforcement and the military into its ranks. The perniciousness of such a group was evident from its earliest days, and the events of January 6 validate every criticism and fear ever leveled at the Oath Keepers (and indeed every other anti-government militia in the country). When a group pegs itself as anti-government, ordinary Americans need to understand the full implication of that attitude: we can now reasonably understand it to mean armed destruction of our democracy, and support for leaders like Donald Trump who might satisfy their dreams of an entirely different kind of government: one that is authoritarian, white nationalist, and willing to use violence to asserts its dominance.

But the Oath Keepers deserve a still deeper level of scrutiny and contempt from their fellow citizens. For veterans, or even active duty members of the military, to join such a group is a profound act of disloyalty to the nation as well as to the armed forces. And for people like Rhodes, to essentially use their military training — training given to them to defend the United States — to orchestrate and engage in violence aimed at overthrowing the U.S. government is a special category of treason. The same special contempt applies in equal measure to members of law enforcement who grotesquely apply their publicly-funded training to the subversion of the laws they’ve sworn to defend.

True to his low character, Rhodes was unrepentant at his sentencing, telling the court that, “I’m a political prisoner, and like President Trump, my only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country. Rhodes also said he would “expose the criminality of this regime” while in prison. Unfortunately for his cause, Rhodes’ continued determination to essentially continue his insurrectionary activities from behind bars should spur politicians and the public to apply unrelenting pressure on organizations like the Oath Keepers and their supporters. At a minimum, we need federal and state laws that ban any current or former member of the Oath Keepers or other anti-government militia from serving in the U.S. military or law enforcement in any capacity.

Pursuing the perpetrators of January 6 to the full extent of the law isn’t simply about abstract notions of justice. The insurrectionists tried to assert through violence that the rule of law no longer obtained, that political decisions and by extension the operation of our society should be decided by men with guns. For them, murder, mayhem, and intimidation by the armed few were to replace dialogue, majority rule, and social solidarity. It is a powerful thing to stop a man with a gun with the force of a law, and that is what the United States is doing with insurrectionists like Stuart Rhodes. The prosecution of Rhodes and his ilk is how our democracy defends itself, how we defend ourselves: we are collectively powerful enough, and secure enough in the rule of law, that we can go a long way in defeating their guns without ever needing to fire a shot.

Taking a broader view, the Justice Department’s stated interest in sending a public message about the seriousness of the crimes is laudable. More than this: broadcast of such a message should be taken up the media, Democrats, non-MAGA Republicans, and other believers in American democracy as an essential way to combat the insurrectionary and anti-authoritarian forces that are still alive and well more than two years after the Capitol attack. This is not the same as saying that justice has prevailed via these convictions; far from it. Rather, such condemnation needs to be paired with an awareness that the same forces that engaged in insurrection continue to exist, and that those who attacked the Capitol to stop democracy from prevailing are on a clear continuum with those in the GOP who subvert election systems, suppress Americans’ votes, and incite violence against the LGBTQ community. In particular, publicizing the sentences of those like Rhodes needs to be linked to the threat posed by pro-insurrection politicians, most prominently Donald Trump, who seems likely (at least as of today) to be the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee.

At Rhodes’ sentencing, Judge Amit Mehta condemned Rhodes for his actions in unvarnished language, telling him, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the Republic and the very fabric of our democracy.” In putting Rhodes away for 18 years, the justice system has defended the United States from this single “ongoing threat” and “peril,” but plenty of other insurrectionists remain unpunished and at large to this day — most significantly, those higher up the food chain of rebellion, including Donald Trump. We cannot consider the country safe until the legal system, thorough-going political defeat, or some combination of the two comes for them as well.

Sexual Abuse Verdict Against Trump Rightly Shocks the Conscience of Decent Americans

After a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation in writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against him earlier this month, various political commentators rushed to declare that the verdict would have minimal or even zero impact on Trump’s tight hold on Republican voters. Just as with past revelations, such as the infamous recording of Trump talking about grabbing women by the “pussy,” they asserted that his supporters would simply dismiss or ignore the latest indictment of this terrible man.

But such assertions are too clever by half, awarding Donald Trump impervious power that he’s only too happy to claim. While it’s indeed likely that the vast majority of die-hard Trump supporters will not be swayed, there’s something tautological in staking this claim — after all, the basic definition of such a supporter is indeed someone who wouldn’t change their mind, no matter what new facts they’re presented with.

The far more relevant and worthwhile question to ask is whether more moderate GOP voters might turn against Trump due to this verdict, and on that I think an honest answer must be that the jury is still out. Certainly, if many in the media and political world repeat the line that it’s commonsensical for no minds to be changed, it could well end up having no impact. Alternately, though, one could envision a world in which opponents of Donald Trump talk up the verdict, argue for its salience, and even make direct appeals to non-MAGA Republicans that emphasize this unprecedented evidence of the former president’s essential depravity.

In a closely divided electorate, every vote counts. With Donald Trump leading in polls of GOP primary voters, the American majority should brace itself for a third Trump presidential candidacy, and prepare to defeat him and his party once more. Whatever might diminish the size of the GOP base and GOP sympathizers should be pursued; attempting to capitalize off a legal verdict that lends greater credibility than ever to the miasma of sexual allegations around Donald Trump is the very definition of a no-brainer. 

But as has so often been the case over the last few years, a focus on Trump’s loyal base and the GOP political class’ continued obeisance to him contributes to a narrative that over-emphasizes the agency of the Trumpist movement, and reduces the role of all other Americans to passive bystanders before the dark pageantry of this reactionary movement. With the Carroll verdict, a more compelling question to ask than the effect on Trump supporters is whether the judgment might further galvanize opposition to Trump and the authoritarian movement of which he’s the de facto leader. I believe the answer to this lies somewhere between a cautious and a firm “yes.” Rather than frame the verdict as just another example of unchangeable political dynamics, we should be looking at how it might impact the people who are even more important to America’s democratic future than die-hard Trump loyalists — literally every other American of voting age, who, of course, steeply outnumber those unpersuadables.

From this perspective, the verdict can be viewed as a powerful event with which to persuade, and equally importantly, to energize the pro-democracy, anti-MAGA coalition that has beaten or kept at bay reactionary forces over the last few election cycles. First, it’s a reminder that the legal system is starting to hold Donald Trump to account, augmenting the official record of his perfidy and suggesting the possibility of criminal charges being pursued to conviction in the future.

This is not the same as saying that we should be relying on the justice system to take care of Trump for us — but it is completely legitimate to point to this verdict as offering further justification for unremitting opposition to Donald Trump and the political party that continues to defend and venerate him. It is no small thing to receive such official notice that justice is on your side.

While some Republican politicians spoke out against Trump following the verdict, a sufficient range of GOP officials defended or refused to condemn him to suggest how the verdict fits into a broader case against the corruption of the Republican Party. It is the lowest of low bars to disparage a person found liable for sexual abuse, yet leading lights in the Republican Party simply could not bring themselves to do so. Some Trump loyalists spoke up for him forthrightly; according to the New York Times, Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said the verdict was “yet another act in the ongoing legal circus in Manhattan to take down Donald Trump,” while South Carolina GOP. Senator Lindsey Graham remarked that, “I think you could convict Donald Trump of kidnapping Lindbergh’s baby.”

Among candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, Mike Pence remarked that he “really can't comment on a judgment in a civil case,” yet could not help throwing Trump a lifeline by saying, “I would tell you, in my four and a half years serving alongside the president, I never heard or witnessed behavior of that nature.” Meanwhile, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and (likely candidate) Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declined to criticize Trump. (To their credit, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie both attacked Trump in the wake of the verdict, though both are long-shot candidates). In doing so, politicos like Pence and Haley signaled that they are more afraid of this abuser and what he might say about them, and more interested in their doomed quests to entice Trump voters, than about the maintenance of the most minimal standards of human decency. Taken as a whole, such defenses and strategies of avoidance demonstrate a basic indecency, cowardice, and unfitness for power, and remind us that the GOP’s vision for America remains one of misogyny, violence, and immorality.

Finally, and most critically, the verdict can help the pro-democracy majority see itself more clearly as America’s dominant force, by providing it an opportunity to not only define itself by what it’s against, but by what it’s for. The American majority supports equal rights for women, and mass solidarity against rich and powerful men who would try to convince the country that misogyny and sexual violence are simply the natural order of things. Behind the verdict lies the irrevocable physical violation and psychological abuse of E. Jean Carroll, and the decent majority can empathize with her experience and judge the perpetrator accordingly. The American majority supports justice and accountability, not the propaganda of the powerful and the gaslighting of abusers. Downplaying or dismissing the import of the Carroll verdict is to play Trump’s own cynical game, and to undercut the power and moral clarity of an American majority that stands against his return to power, and stands for a more egalitarian, free, and peaceful United States.