Make Democracy Narratives Great Again

Addressing Donald Trump’s recent use of the word “vermin” to describe his domestic enemies — a term with hideous echoes of past fascist movements— Brian Beutler considers what it would take for Democrats to make sure the former president paid a proper price for his insane rhetoric and intentions. At the risk of oversimplifying a nuanced take, I’d say that Beutler points to the need for Democrats to hold Trump’s threatening words up for public view, repeatedly, and to help people remember the failures and treacheries of his first term in office. This is all essential advice, but what really snapped things in place for me was Beutler’s comment, after surveying the party’s misplaced faith that positive economic news will push Biden over the top, that what Democrats are missing is “storytelling.”

Beutler is rightly concerned about the Democrats’ failure to tell, and to remind people of, the story of the Trump years, with its endless threats and failures. But this got me thinking about a broader failure in storytelling — the lack of a Democratic narrative about the central challenges the country faces, and what the Democrats and Republicans respectively want to do about them, feels like a huge missing piece amidst the general angst about President Biden’s current polling woes and second-guessing by some Democrats about his upcoming re-election campaign. Democrats present fragments of these stories, but with no coherent whole, and with serious misfires. For instance, we see the preference of many in the party for economic, material explanations of how U.S. politics works, which has led some to point to the overall strength of the U.S. economy as a sign both of Biden’s success and his imminent return to relative popularity. This is not exactly not storytelling — but, as Beutler highlights, it involves the party scrambling from one excuse to the next about why public perceptions aren’t jiving with what they see as the overarching positive economic reality, which is another way of saying that the story the Democrats are telling isn’t actually believed by much of their intended audience. More productively, President Biden and other party officials have done a decent job of highlighting GOP extremism when they bother to do it — but the approach has been piecemeal and inconsistent, not telling a story about the GOP and American democracy so much as speaking from within the framework of an unarticulated larger narrative.

On the fundamental issues of freedom and democracy, the divergence in values between the parties has become chasm-wide and arguably cataclysmic — a situation both signified and embodied by the continued dominance of Donald Trump within the Republican Party and his likely nomination as the party’s presidential candidate for 2024. The GOP has united behind a personage who literally tried to stage a coup and overthrow American democracy, and who is currently campaigning on a platform of retribution, political violence, religious bigotry, and a more or less wholesale destruction of the rule of law. In a perverse but important way, this dead-on threat against democracy and against liberty, let alone the personal safety of tens of millions of Americans, simplifies matters greatly for the Democratic Party as it looks to articulate a story of democracy and freedom. Trump and the radicalized GOP offer a stark vision of what the Democratic Party is very much against; in doing so, it also throws into relief the values that the Party stands for.

A central question for American politics is whether the Democratic Party will take the obvious, and I believe necessary, step of fully articulating the nature of this conflict between democracy and autocracy, between freedom and threat. In terms of a narrative for the party to tell, this is a story rooted very much in the facts and events happening in front of us every day. In a hundred different ways, the GOP has signaled its wish to subvert majority rule and the right of individual Americans to have a say in how they’re governed. From overt voter suppression targeting Democratic-leaning voters, to propagation of the Big Lie that Trump actually won in 2020 and that our electoral system is corrupt, to ongoing efforts to sabotage the federal government so as to undermine Americans’ faith that democratic government can work for them, the GOP’s turn towards authoritarianism is undeniable.

Intertwined with this are the particularly virulent threats articulated by Trump, which form a logical extension and complement to pathologies burning within the Republican Party — ideas like the execution of shoplifters, concentration camps for undocumented immigrants, the abandonment of democratic allies to the predations of dictators like Vladimir Putin, the federal government’s prosecution of anyone Trump deems a political adversary, schemes to replace large swathes of the federal work force with partisan hacks, and plans to put down protests against a future Trump presidency with lethal force via invocation of the Insurrection Act. In other words, Trump’s announced and leaked second term agenda amounts to the intended imposition of an authoritarian regime that would threaten the lives and livelihoods of Americans, and lack the most basic legitimacy when weighed against the values of not just the majority of Americans, but by my estimation a sizable majority.

But to tell this central story of American politics effectively — that is, in a way that is persuasive and attracts voters to the party — Democrats need to do three things besides describe the GOP’s descent into madness. They need to expand the narrative to explain how the GOP got this way, what the Democratic Party stands for in contrast, and what the Democrats would do to serve the national interest and the interest of individual citizens.

Addressing the first would require an honest description of how white supremacism and fears of demographic change leading to a lessened status for whites constitute arguably the single largest motive forces behind the GOP’s radicalization. Likewise, the Democrats would need to acknowledge the role of Christian nationalism, and a related rigid adherence to gender roles and norms, in driving so many in the GOP to abandon democracy in favor of minority rule. In this respect, the Democrats — and the nation — would be well-served by bringing these factors into the clear light of day. It’s insufficient to say that the GOP hates democracy “just because” — the Democrats must lay bare the roots of the GOP’s turn towards authoritarianism for all to see, and to judge.

Against this, the Democrats need to make explicit their identity as a multi-racial, egalitarian party dedicated to protecting the freedoms of all Americans, and prepared to not only defend but improve and expand American democracy to ensure that the majority rules. This would encompass everything from strengthening voting rights and banning gerrymanders to re-affirming that the law is meant to protect all Americans, and not to be warped into a weapon with which to make millions of Americans live in fear. And Democrats can surely tie their advocacy for a government that works for all Americans to fighting for an economy that also works for all Americans, and not one that the Republicans would see corrupted in order to maintain current race- and class-based inequalities of wealth and income.

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Currently, there’s a clear narrative imbalance between the parties. The GOP’s race-based grievance politics is telling a more or less explicit story at this point: America was great until darker-skinned people started getting more populous, or, in the case of immigrants, until darker-skinned people started invading across the Southern border; until gays started coming out of the closet, and staying out; until women started putting on pants, going to work, and making a fuss about wanting bodily autonomy. The GOP also tells a story of economic abandonment of the (white) working class, but is sure to point the blame at racial others (the Chinese for taking our factories, Latinos for taking our jobs) rather than more impersonal global dynamics and the decisions of American companies to abandon their workforces. The GOP does not give two shits about the fact that this story brings the Republican base into harsh, even existential conflict with their fellow Americans, or that it breeds division and anger among GOP voters. Increasingly, the message is that any means are necessary — even undoing democracy itself — in order to retain a government that serves white Christians first and foremost.

In stark contrast, the Democrats seem deathly afraid of identifying the glaring fact that the GOP has effectively become America’s white supremacist and Christian nationalist party — perhaps born out of overblown worries of alienating white and Christian voters by coming across as anti-white and anti-Christian. But the price of this hesitance has been high — the Democratic Party has until now been forced to rely not on an articulated narrative, but one that is rather projected onto them by voters who are savvy or intuitive enough to connect the dots. In their hesitation to proudly proclaim their party the face of a diversifying and egalitarian America — in terms of race, religion, sexual identity, and sexual equality —  too many Democratic leaders are slowing the full emergence and cohesion of a coalition that solidly outnumbers the GOP base. Yes, this coalition has come out in force over the past several elections even as the Democratic Party has insisted on talking about health care over Republican insurrection — but what we will face in 2024 will be an order of magnitude harsher, with gales of propaganda and violence conjured by Trump and his supporters to confuse, alienate, and dispirit likely Democratic voters. One vital remedy, if not full-on antidote, to this oncoming wave is to tell a story that creates strong bonds of identity and interest among Democratic-leaning voters.

Unlike the GOP, though, the Democrats can’t put all their eggs in the basket of division and incitement, and tell a story that concludes with the endless division of America, where the Democrats end up with the bigger half. Yes, they should rouse and rile up a majority as part of making their case — but unlike the GOP, they also have a responsibility, as the country’s sole pro-democracy major party, to offer an entry point and path forward for current GOP supporters. Unlike the GOP, they cannot simply declare that those on the right are un-American or deserving of disempowerment.

This might at first blush seems like a perverse or unnecessary constraint — but offering a more universal and inclusive vision of America, where all are welcome to participate and influence our direction, is at the core of a pro-democracy appeal. I don’t want to understate how difficult it will be to thread this needle, but the effort absolutely needs to be made. Democrats must make clear that attempts to gain power and rule in anti-democratic fashion are fundamentally illegitimate, while taking pains to illustrate how much stronger the country is when everyone agrees to play by democratic norms and respect for basic freedoms.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Though it may be difficult for Christian nationalists to grasp, the projects of pretending that America is a Christian nation, and, even more outlandishly, believing that state power can be used to impose Christianity as the national religion, are doomed to failure. This is a faction that has lost touch with how deeply offensive and alienating its religious preoccupations are to most Americans — particularly when even a cursory examination of their beliefs suggests that they have left far behind ties to the actual fundamentals of Christian belief in favor of a grotesquely distorted version that substitutes dominance for equality, prejudice for understanding, and hatred for love. The idea that younger Americans in particular might be attracted to conservative Christianity if it were more forcefully thrust upon them is particularly laughable.

In fact, the far likelier outcome is mass revulsion against Christian extremism, and an eventual backlash that not only ensures that religion is kept to the margins of American government, but that casts doubt on organized religion as a desirable practice in the first place; this may happen sooner or it may happen later, but the notion that you can impose your beliefs on so private and fundamental a subject on fellow Americans through coercion is delusional. Such rationality might not appeal to Christian nationalists — yet the fact of the matter is that a broadly tolerant America will better allow religion to flourish than one that alienates and angers the broader population by pushing sectarian ideas into the faces of the unaffiliated. In other words, the Democrats can make a strong case that they are the party actually interested in defending the nations’s diverse faiths, and understand that politicization of religious belief is the enemy of both democracy and religious faith.

A Democratic narrative of American political conflict would go a long way to mobilizing a pro-democracy American majority and helping make comprehensible the true stakes of the 2024 election and beyond. At a practical level, it would contextualize the cascade of affronts and outrages issuing near-daily from the GOP and Trump. Rather than each attack requiring evaluation as to how Democrats should talk about it and respond, they would be able to use daily events as ongoing evidence for the story they are telling about Republican values and their own. To take the example that we began with — when Donald Trump described his enemies as “vermin,” a pre-existing, comprehensive Democratic narrative of Trumpist and GOP extremism could have quickly identified these comments as further evidence of authoritarianism, pointing out links to past fascist movements as well as previous GOP efforts to dehumanize and foment violence against their political opponents.

Rather than assume a stance primarily of outrage and shock, the Democratic Party would be in a much better position to say, “Here they go again. With every word out his mouth, Donald Trump proves that he’s still the same authoritarian monster who tried to overthrow American democracy on January 6. Donald Trump has once again confirmed he is America’s enemy and that he deserves no place on the American political stage. And through their silence, Republican politicians show that they’re willing accomplices in Trump’s war on America. But as the GOP continues to froth at the mouth with hatred and violence, the Democratic Party is fighting to build our democracy, not tear it down, and to expand our freedoms, not take them away, in the name of a country where all are respected, valued, and free to live their lives as they see fit, under a government that ensures they have the tools and resources not just to survive but to flourish.” Or something like that.

Pardon Us For Revisiting Trump's Corrupt Pardons

If you can stomach it, the Washington Post’s recent revisiting of Trump’s many corrupt presidential pardons is a gut-wrenching reminder of the former’s president’s widespread and insidious malfeasance. What makes the pardon abuses particularly galling is that Trump didn’t actually break any laws in issuing them, but rather twisted a constitutional prerogative into a weapon to undermine the rule of law, reward his allies, and advance his own power. And where such behavior would have done serious harm to any prior presidency, his overall bad behavior was so vast that this abuse was just one among many — reminding us that much of Trump’s malign power derived from his multi-front assault on American democracy, making it difficult for his opponents to prioritize what offenses to treat as the highest priorities.

The Post’s finding that many of those granted clemency by Trump have turned to supporting his re-election bid reminds us that Trump’s corruption was a poison that continues to seep into our political system, in a sort of self-perpetuating cycle, as his return to office with their aid would open up vast new vistas for further bad behavior; as the Post observes of his plans to return to the presidency, “some of his most important boosters were pardoned media figures — podcasters, talk show hosts, YouTubers and columnists — who have promoted his record and belittled his legal and political foes.” Just as unqualified Trump judges undermine the justice system years after his electoral defeat, so people who should be in jail are instead giving him money and working to get him back to the Oval Office.

In the Post’s examination of Trump’s pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the sadistic Arizona lawman who racially profiled Hispanics and detained migrants in conditions that amounted to torture (check out this Slate article for a fuller accounting of his truly evil behavior and abuse of office), Trump’s clear goal was to disrupt the execution of justice, not right an injustice or apply mercy in the usual way of pardons, as he first attempted to pardon Arpaio before he was even convicted. Arpaio was a very early supporter of Trump, but more significantly, was an ally in Trump’s white nationalist war on immigrants and darker-skinned Americans; in this, you could say that the Arpaio pardon was a precursor to the white nationalist-tinged January 6 attack on the Capitol.

The Post’s account is not without its dark amusements. The efforts by Trump defenders to spin his dubious pardons as acts of righteous justice are particularly laughable. When former White House press secretary Sean Spicer says Trump was “‘very personally’ moved by the ex-sheriff’s legal troubles,” and that “the president felt that [Arpaio] had been screwed over often in the media, as well, and so he felt that connection with him,” the glare of the former president’s narcissism, self-dealing, and circular logic are hard to ignore. Essentially, Donald Trump felt the urge to pardon people who had engaged in corrupt behavior like himself; the idea that he felt some sort of laudable emotional sympathy is absurd, and at any rate is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the president was primarily defending the principle that corrupt people besides himself should be able to do their corrupt thing without consequence. 

Likewise, there’s grim humor, but also grim illumination, when former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein remarks to the Post, apropos of Trump’s wide deviation from Justice Department clemency procedures, that, “If you don’t enforce the department’s rules, you get arbitrary decisions and corruption. Under Trump, the clemency process certainly appeared arbitrary because people with the right connections were able to get clemency. And to avoid the appearance of corruption, it’s important that the rules be followed.” I think Rosenstein inadvertently gets us close to the heart of things here — Trump’s behavior was so openly corrupt that it constituted a sort of meta corruption, so that the president was not simply breaking the rules but demonstrating the powerless of anyone to stop him, and to render traditional notions of justice a dead letter. As in so much else that he and his accomplices did, the strategy was an open demeaning of our constitutional democracy in favor of an autocrat’s playbook.

Trump was acting out of a plutocrat’s playbook as well, as the “wealthy and well-connected brought clemency requests directly to the White House, jumping ahead of thousands of people who had filed formal petitions with the department’s pardon office and in some cases had been waiting for years.” Here, too, the theme of corruption that opens the floodgates to yet more corruption is evident, as “a cottage industry of lawyers and lobbyists selling access to the White House emerged” (needless to say, the purchase and sale of presidential pardons was probably not what the drafters of the Constitution were aiming for).

The prominent and less-prominent pardonees currently helping Trump to re-claim the White House — whether through insurrectionist incitement around a supposedly stolen 2020 election, through donations of money, or through other political agitation — constitute a truly remarkable assemblage of America’s worst. You might say they form a de facto League of Extraordinary Rogues who seem to revel in their own crapitude and lack of repentance. For me — and this is really just a question of personal taste, other choices in this matter are equally valid! — the biggest all-around sad sacks are the execrable (if inimitable) former Illinois Governor Rod “I’ve got this thing and it’s [f’ing] golden” Blagojevich (who obsequiously labels himself a loyal “Trumpocrat”) and dim-bulb Big Lie propagandist Dinesh D’Souza. You might almost be tempted to pity them for their moral emptiness — until you recall their devotion to a man who still aims to replace American democracy with a lawless state of retribution, racism, and self-aggrandizement. Many of them profess that the American justice system is unfair, and point to this alleged fact to justify their pardons, but you only need to scratch below the surface to realize that what they view as unfair is in fact the very existence of the justice system in the first place.

I started off by noting how Trumps’s pardons never received their due attention, let alone comeuppance, given his multi-faceted assault on the law and decency. But I do think some attention to this strand of corruption is warranted as 2024 nears and Trump appears to be on a glide path to the Republican presidential nomination — not so much for the clemencies already granted, as offensive as those are, but as a warning for the pardons sure to come should he regain office. I am thinking in the first place of his suggestion that he would pardon the January 6 insurrectionists — a treasonous action that his earlier pardons suggest he is all too capable of carrying out. If those he has pardoned to date constitute a League of Extraordinary Rogues, then the insurrectionist army currently behind bars and awaiting trial constitutes — well, an actual insurrectionist army. Such mass clemency would signal an armed and dangerous open season on American life and government — a green light to far-right militias, white nationalists, and their fellow travelers that violent intimidation, insurrection, and even assassination would all find forgiveness from the chief executive. There are many paths to taking on Trump, but his plans to empty the jails of degenerate criminals who hate America seems like a pretty powerful thing to talk about.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Democracy

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr. recently made the case that many Democrats and others, including President Biden, talk too generally about saving democracy and about the Republican Party being anti-democratic. He notes that, “democracy” “is becoming a buzzword. It’s invoked too often and in imprecise ways, essentially as a synonym for “good” or “things I agree with.” We need less general talk about “saving democracy” and more about specific policies and principles that we want to defend and promote.”

Bacon’s argument comes down to making sure that talking about democracy doesn’t remain at a vague and ultimately abstract level, and it’s music to my ears when Bacon urges pro-democracy politicians and others to talk specifically about what they mean by democracy, and how to strengthen it. As I wrote last week, “when Joe Biden defends democracy either too abstractly or in a way that fulsomely embraces a political system that many millions see as corrupt or unresponsive, he undercuts what, superficially speaking, should be an uncontroversial point for most people and a rallying cry for the majority.” And as others have noted, democracy isn’t just an idea, it’s also a lived practice, and insisting on specificity is a way of instantiating democracy with meaning and direction. In the spirit of his own critique, Bacon writes that, “I want greater majority rule,” and goes on to enumerate the concrete ideas he supports to advance this, such as limiting gerrymanders and abolishing the Senate filibuster (and in President Biden’s defense, I think the idea that the majority should be able to exercise power is a key subtext of his pro-democracy speechifying, even if it’s not always articulated as fully as possible).  

But while talking more concretely about pro-democracy measures is a very good idea, there is an equal need for more wide-ranging discussions of what we mean when we talk about “democracy” or “American democracy” that go beyond its mechanisms or the basic concept of majority rule. Now, if this were “merely” a fight between the Democrats and an increasingly anti-democratic Republican Party — a party that sees democracy as increasingly problematic due to its reliance on a shrinking base of conservative white voters — then perhaps a battle over the mechanics of democratic representation would be sufficient, with faith that a majority would logically end up supporting reforms that advance the majority’s interests.

However, the continued presence of Donald Trump on the American political scene, and of his acceleration of anti-democratic tendencies in the GOP into a full-fledged authoritarianism, means that the country is in a state of conflict over whether democracy should even continue to be our form of government. With Trump’s reported plans to re-make the presidency into an office without guardrails, his accession to the Oval Office for a second time would very likely constitute a decisive rupture with the democratic (if often flawed) continuity that the nation has known since its founding. For proof of his intentions, we need look no further than the fact that he is already the first president in American history to attempt a coup to stay in office — an act so heinous that many in our country simply refuse to believe it happened. Were he to gain office again, why on earth would anyone ever expect him to leave willingly?

This means that when Democrats and others talk about protecting democracy against Trump and the GOP, they are effectively talking about two related, but distinct, anti-democratic threats. On the one hand, the American majority faces a combination of arguably undemocratic institutions like the Senate (which awards disproportionate power to low-population, generally rural states that hew increasingly to the GOP) and actively malevolent Republican measures, such as voter suppression and gerrymandering efforts meant to dilute and deny Democratic votes, which in turn stymy the ability of a democratic majority to rule in the way it wants. On the other hand, should a second Trump presidency occur, democracy would very likely experience an extinction-level event that would make the purging of voter rolls in Florida look like a mere trifle by comparison.

The first is an agonizing and unjust suppression of democratic mechanisms that in turn sabotages a whole host of majority preferences in favor of minority views; the other encompasses but also far outreaches that first danger, involving the very likely threat of grotesque injustice (including the jailing and even murder of political opponents), other gross humans rights abuses against citizens and non-citizens alike (concentration camps for undocumented immigrants, summary execution for shoplifters), and the wholesale deployment of violence to maintain political power. With the extreme threat posed by Trump, in other words, the loss of democracy inevitably means the loss of freedom, of physical safety, and of material well-being (as the suspension of the rule of law would likely result in rapidly accelerated economic inequality as the richest among us engaged in ever more unrestrained, predatory behavior). It is this larger concept of democracy — one that encompasses freedom, security, and the basic assumptions of quotidian existence in the U.S. — that Democrats and others need to foreground when they talk about the enormous threats we face. (And if you don’t want to take my word for the very real possibilities and dangers of a de facto Trump dictatorship, I strongly urge you to read this recent Robert Kagan essay on this very topic and see if it doesn’t leave you chilled to the bone.)

The danger posed by Trump and his allies (including, we need to add, many GOP elected officials who, for purposes of analytical simplicity I’ve (generously, temporarily, and grudgingly) hived off until now into a somewhat less malevolent camp) should rightly be an impetus to Democrats and others to talk about how our current democracy undergirds the fabric of our daily lives and expectations — a discussion distinct from specific measures to protect it, and from the vague democracy talk that Bacon criticizes. Such a stark threat requires a frank and honest discussion of the freedoms, rights, and opportunities that even our imperfect democracy affords most of us — a panoply of daily facts that we all take for granted, and that would be obliterated if Trump returned to power and enacted his dreams of a de facto dictatorship (likely abetted by a complaisant Republican congress, as Brian Beutler recently noted).

This would be a necessarily expansive discussion that takes democracy as a keystone and a starting point, but would also entail talking about the freedom, the solidarity, the security, and the ideals of equality that a democratic government enables. With our democracy gone, little else that is accepted as baseline for our society would remain in any stable or meaningful sense. With Donald Trump’s team already contemplating invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with any demonstrations against his election, it’s not going too far to extrapolate that his would be an administration comfortable with directing its loyalists in the military and local police forces to dispense frontier justice to identified enemies, and to intimidate other Americans to keep in line. Lest you think I overstate the president’s violent lunacy, think again to his January 6 incitement of militants, right-wing extremists, and Christian nationalists to physically attack the U.S. Capitol and send America’s legislators fleeing for their lives. Anyone who believe this is a man who would hesitate to have his enemies killed is too naive to contribute meaningfully to discussions of current American politics.

But even if you might temporarily convince yourself into thinking that Trump’s self-restraint would keep him from unleashing violence on those he considers “vermin,” then you might stop to consider what the suspension, or even deep erosion, of the rule of law might mean for our collective existence. Nothing and no one could be relied on — not the deed that says you own your house, not the statute that says your employer can’t fire you because of your religion, not the understanding that a newspaper can publish the news without government agents showing up to shut down its printing press (or internet server), not the premise that you can walk down the street without fear of being attacked by Trump-inspired and -pardoned white nationalist street thugs.

The very real possibility of the United States being plunged into an authoritarian nightmare by Trump and the GOP can be best illuminated by a direct, honest accounting by elected officials, members of the media, and others of how it would destroy the fabric of American life — our freedoms, our basic expectations of safety and security — that most of us take for granted. As part of doing so, Democrats and others must make an unabashed, affirmative case that attempts by a president or a party to nullify majority power and throw American society into chaos are an unforgivable threat naturally opposed by every reasonable citizen.

From this perspective, sweeping declarations of the primacy of democracy very much have their place — so long as they are joined with clear reminders that democracy is inseparable from the free society and security that most of us take for granted. Attention to the existential threat of GOP authoritarianism, and a public discussion of the free society that democracy makes possible, can in turn catalyze support for the concrete pro-democracy actions that will help protect us from this danger (rolling back gerrymandering, reforming the Senate, etc). Equally, such a discussion might galvanize a less tangible but equally important change: a collective solidarity against these unprecedented threats to our society posed by an extremist minority.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying Democrats should abandon the policy-level fight against the GOP, whether it be in the realm of economics, social justice, or the environment, in favor of talking all democracy, all the time. Neither am I saying that the Democrats should give a pass to GOP sabotage of democracy that doesn’t amount to full-on imposition of an authoritarian regime. However, talking about the big picture — the conjunction of democracy and freedom, of democracy and both physical and material security — in the context of the extreme threat posed by Donald Trump and the GOP provides a powerful narrative for rallying opposition to Republican erosion of the majority’s ability to wield power. Doing so might also provide a fresh perspective on policies that bear not just on democracy but on the nature of the free and secure society that most of us want (for instance, how restrictions on abortion eviscerate women’s freedom and equality, as well as undermine their security by leading to needless death and misery, and how this erosion of freedom is a direct consequence of a general degradation of democracy).

If Donald Trump is stupid and malign enough to openly signal his deranged dictatorial plans for a second term in office, then Democrats and others should be smart enough to use such unprecedented political evil to savage and otherwise demolish both him and the political party that provides Trump such a welcoming home. Engaging in a substantial public discussion about the nature of democracy and the world it makes possible is essential to delegitimizing the Republican Party in the eyes of the American majority — a delegitimization necessary not just for Democrats and democracy supporters to win in 2024, but to continue rolling back this authoritarian tide over the coming years.

As Trump secures the GOP presidential nomination and continues into general election mode, it is likely that the distinctions between the threat he poses versus the threat posed by the broader Republican Party will become all but meaningless. The GOP will doubtless close ranks around him, and in the name of party unity will either explicitly endorse, or tacitly endorse by their silence, his horrifying plans to remake American government and society in his own hateful image — even as the reward for his dominance is a host of policies pleasing to the far right and white Christian nationlists. As a defense against further authoritarian radicalization of the GOP, a Democratic narrative that links democracy together with mass belief in a free society may yet serve as a wedge — or even a sword — with which to take apart an emerging Republican consensus that is diametrically opposed to long-standing basics of American life and patriotism.

To Fight GOP Authoritarianism, Democrats Must Prioritize Pro-Democracy Reformation

In a recent piece, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin argues that President Joe Biden’s appeal to voters as a defender of democracy is necessary but insufficient. Alongside this positive message, she counsels, he should also tell the American people “that MAGA Republicans bring violence, disorder, chaos and gridlock.” This one-two punch approach feels spot on to me, but beneath this basic approach are layers of practical and philosophical questions that are worth mulling over.

Regarding the pro-democracy argument, Rubin makes the provocative but essential point that a lot of people simply don’t know what democracy really means, or how it benefits them. To run with this a bit — I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people understand intellectually that we live in a democracy, but feel that they don’t have much say in how decisions are made, or that democracy actually delivers for either themselves or for the American majority. Perhaps they blame this on politicians who have a bias towards serving their big donors, or out of disagreement with the idea that what government does is actually what most people support.

This raises the troubling possibility that when Joe Biden defends democracy either too abstractly or in a way that fulsomely embraces a political system that many millions see as corrupt or unresponsive, he undercuts what, superficially speaking, should be an uncontroversial point for most people and a rallying cry for the majority. Biden’s defense of our status quo democracy is all the more striking when we can see all around us the manifold ways in which American democracy isn’t very democratic at all, from the over-representation of smaller, rural states in the Senate (so that the roughly 39 million citizens of California are represented by the same number of senators as the 575,000 citizens of Wyoming) to states like Wisconsin and North Carolina where a bare majority of GOP voters have allowed Republican politicians to re-write state laws to place the party in near-permanent power and influence. The premier example of the U.S. not operating as a democracy is the fact that the electoral college delivered the presidency to Donald Trump in 2016, despite his loss to Hilary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes nationwide (and it nearly did the same for Trump in 2020, despite Joe Biden receiving in excess of 7 million more votes).

Admitting the ways in which U.S. democracy falls short isn’t the same as saying that democracy is bad, but is actually how democracy in general should operate — always self-interrogating and self-correcting. As much as Biden should be praised for laying down baseline principles in his series of pro-democracy speeches, what’s been missing from his talk and from his legislative priorities is the prioritization of ideas and laws that would truly strengthen U.S. democracy, both against its domestic enemies and in a way that bolsters its responsiveness and accountability to the American people.

This can’t possibly be for lack of available ideas. In the first two years of the Biden administration, congressional Democrats drafted bills that would have implemented concrete pro-democracy improvements like severely restricting gerrymandering and ensuring Americans’ ability to vote and have those votes counted. While it is true that a lack of Democratic unity and GOP opposition stymied this legislation, what is also true is that there was never any reason for Joe Biden to fall quiet on these substantive improvements to our elections and our government. And beyond ideas that Democrats have already considered implementing via legislation, political scientists and others around the country have a bounty of suggestions and solutions (as just one example, check out this piece by Danielle Allen and the amazing series of related columns she has penned recently).

The lack of prioritization of pro-democracy measures that would bring more responsiveness and accountability to American government makes even less sense when we widen the aperture and take in the authoritarian spectacle of the Trump-dominated GOP — a party that is actively seeking to restrict voting rights, and which to large degree supports a presidential candidate who attempted a coup against the United States and is actively considering plans to essentially implement a violent dictatorship should he return to power. Whatever else you might say about it, the GOP is chock full of creative ideas aimed at making U.S. democracy, and the lives of ordinary Americans, far worse. The ideas are certainly not good, but there is a dark energy in their promulgation that is not equally matched by the pro-democracy legislative priorities of either the Biden administration or the Democratic Party.

This imbalance only grows more striking and inexplicable the more you contemplate it. One defense of the Democrats is that they don’t have the ability to pass any democracy-strengthening measures at the national level, so that any energy put into this would be a waste of time. Yet, given the GOP’s increasingly authoritarian direction, the decision not to even talk about ideas like banning gerrymanders, or reforming the Supreme Court so that it more accurately reflects the consent of the majority, has abandoned the field to the forces of authoritarianism at precisely the worst possible time. As the GOP continues to rip away its mask of moderation with the selection of a far-right Christian nationalist Speaker of the House, and conducts a kibuki presidential primary in which the inevitable winner has pledged a term in office based on retribution, violence, and the evisceration of American democracy, Democrats need to be talking a lot more about democratic strengthening and renewal.  

This is where we can see that Republican authoritarianism might yet exist in a paradoxically healthy synergy with concerted efforts to improve American democracy. At its core, the far-right movement represented by the GOP’s accelerating extremism represents an enraged American minority bent on maintaining traditional (but increasingly discredited) hierarchies of power, as keen observers like political scientists Thomas Zimmer and Lilliana Mason have described. They don’t have the backing of an American majority, and so have every incentive to achieve power for a radical minority — a dream of power that is arguably only possible because of the many undemocratic features of American government.

But these very forces of reaction should in turn provoke a counter-reaction from the democratic majority that’s in the process of having its power robbed and its values undermined — a counter-reaction not in the sense of something that will just naturally occur as part of the orderly unfurling of history, but that derives from millions of Americans registering the challenge before us and realizing that more democracy, not less, is the best way forward.

The embrace of a pro-democracy agenda is tightly bound to a vision of a more egalitarian and just America. Just as the MAGA movement opposes and subverts democracy because it’s an impediment to implementing a set of retrograde values, the anti-MAGA American majority believes in a range of values that are far more progressive and egalitarian, held as they are by a much more diverse assemblage of citizens than the overwhelmingly white and Christian Republican base. It is the difference between a party that believes the government should force children to say Christian prayers in school, and a party that believes that every American should be able to choose and practice their own religion (or no religion at all).

A concerted push to advocate for a democratized American political system would supercharge a sense of possibility, accountability, and agency that would form a decisive contrast with the darker side of the MAGA agenda that Rubin mentions in her column — the fact “that MAGA Republicans bring violence, disorder, chaos and gridlock.” The deployment of fear to motivate people to the polls can be a cynical and destructive tactic, such as when the fear is based on hatred of vulnerable groups like African-Americans or gays. But when based in actual threats of violence posed by an opponent, as is the case when naming the threat posed by MAGA candidates, it is an essential step in alerting the public to political reality. And when coupled with a positive alternative — a pro-democracy agenda — it might prove decisive in mobilizing Americans to the side of freedom and democracy.

Polling Sadness Met Non-Sad Reality in Off-Year Elections

Earlier this week, I urged Democrats and others opposed to the authoritarian GOP to generally take to heart the results of a New York Times poll showing President Joe Biden currently trailing likely GOP nominee Donald Trump in five out of six swing states. Even if we are very far out from November 2024, they still contained a warning about a race that Joe Biden should be running away with. 

I stand by what I wrote, but I want to continue the conversation in light of some strong criticisms I’ve read of what we can infer from current horse race polling, as well as in the context of the off-year election results around the country on Tuesday night. To the first point — there’s a lot of great insight and wisdom in Michael Podherzer’s “Mad Poll Disease Redux” article. Podherzer engages a multi-pronged attack against not only the recent Times poll I wrote about, but about horse race polling more generally. There’s one basic, somewhat condensed point that really grabbed me — that such polling, and the media’s presentation of it as more settled and determinative than it truly is, runs the risk of making people think that the next election is set in stone, and that their own actions and votes won’t make a difference. As Podherzer sums it up, “And as long as we have more confidence in the media’s ability to see the outcome than in our own ability to affect it, we surrender before the battle for our freedoms begins.”

I think Podherzer’s point is especially important to bear in mind following a very good election night for Democrats this week. Governor Beshear re-elected in red Kentucky; an abortion rights amendment to the Ohio constitution passed by a solid majority; and the Virginia legislature taken back by the Democrats, befouling the image of GOP Gov. Glen Youngkin as some sort of MAGA-with-a-friendly-face middle-aged wunderkind. Collective wisdom suggests that the outrage over the Dobbs decision overturning the right to an abortion continues to energize Democratic-leaning voters, and that the GOP’s divisive attempts to turn Americans against each other are far from a magic bullet for the Republican Party (witness the Kentucky gubernatorial candidate’s attempts to undermine Beshear because the latter has stuck up for transgender youth).

All of this, of course, has provoked various major media voices to affirm that while last night may be good news for Democrats, it’s not good news for Joe Biden, since doesn’t all this Democratic success - largely predicted by polling, at least in places where polling was done - simply paint Biden as a huge but very real outlier/loser among Democratic politicians? This piece from the New York Times’s Nate Cohn may as well stand in for others already written and still to come. For me, coming so soon after reading Podherzer’s polling critique, it threw into focus the degree to which we all need to think skeptically and critically not only about poll results, but about how they’re presented in the news.

Cohn makes a basic point I alluded to above - that it does not necessarily follow from Tuesday’s results that Biden’s chances are better than the polls show, since a) the same type of polls that show Biden’s lackluster chances also showed the likelihood of strong Democratic performance this week and b) it is entirely plausible that voters might like Democrats generally but not Biden in particular. These points are true, I think, but the whole is presented as an objective analytical perspective that in actuality is only one part of a larger political reality. You could say that Cohn is simply doing his job — but this observation should remind us that others also have a job to do — in particular, the individual reader and the Democratic Party.

For instance, just as cold logic could lead us to conclude that Biden is uniquely screwed, equally cold logic raises the possibility that Biden might revive his chances if he chose to more closely identify himself with the cause of abortion rights. Likewise, as others have observed, there may well be a world of difference between a poll that measures Biden when his likely rival does not currently share the public spotlight, and Biden’s prospects when the media begins reporting on a deranged Trump out on the campaign trail. That is to say, there are both things that Biden might do, and things that will change in the coverage of the 2024 race, that could have a significant impact on whether Biden prevails in 2024.

Cohn makes some insightful points about the nature of an off-year election electorate, and how a presidential election year may well see an influx of less regular, pro-GOP voters. Again, though, the way that one processes this information politically hardly ends with accepting it as a settled truth impervious to human will or effort. Among other things, it is a huge open question whether such lower-frequency GOP voters will still turn out in such numbers — for instance, if Trump ends up being convicted on some of the many, many indictments he currently faces, or if the Trump camp continues to indicate that its plans for a new administration include whopping doses of military dictatorship. 

The more Cohn digs into the contending forces leading into the 2024 election, the more you realize how much is truly unsettled. He write that, “The great question for the next year is whether these less engaged, less ideological, disaffected, young and nonwhite voters who don’t like Mr. Biden will return to his side once the campaign gets underway. The optimistic case for Mr. Biden centers on their disengagement: Perhaps he’ll win them back once the campaign reminds them of the stakes.” But then he goes on to note that “these voters aren’t just disengaged, they’re also nonideological and disaffected. The issues that animate more regular voters, like abortion, might not be assured to win over these voters,” and concludes that, “Mr. Biden’s path to re-election hinges on whether he can persuade these disaffected, less ideological voters to return to his side and then to turn out in his favor. Nothing about Tuesday’s results suggest this will be any easier.” This may be true as far as it goes; but it’s also entirely possible that other vital issues — such as the survival of American democracy — will be front and center alongside issues like abortion in the 2024, and will appeal to such “less ideological voters.” Again, Democrats still have time to find appeals that might yet resonate with those who aren’t responsive to traditional or mainstream party appeals.

Talking Early Onset Presidential Election Polling Blues`

It’s hard not to be dismayed by the New York Times poll out this weekend showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in five of six swing states. Though we should caveat these numbers with the fact that we’re a full year out from the election, it’s also important that we not look away from the danger they suggest faces the nation. Just on the surface, the fact that so many Americans see Trump as an acceptable choice is a painful and shocking indictment of American politics, media, and society. After the failures and cruelties of his time in office — including the unnecessary deaths of thousands due to his incompetence in addressing the covid pandemic and his attempted coup to remain in office — it is hard not to feel that something has gone terribly wrong for so many Americans to be collectively proclaiming, “Please, sir, may I have another?” My award for the single-most dismaying data point goes to the finding that “Mr. Biden also maintained the trust of voters by an even slimmer margin of three points over Mr. Trump on the more amorphous handling of “democracy.”” What on god’s green earth? Trump tried to END democracy via the first coup attempt in our nation’s history, and he’s running neck and neck on the “democracy” question? Oy to the freaking vay.

In his campaign for the presidency, Biden positioned himself as someone who would restore normalcy to American after the depredations and stresses of the Trump years. Over the past three years, he has embraced this role of moderating presence, talking up bipartisanship with a feral GOP while pulling his punches on so-called “cultural issues” like the ongoing GOP campaign of incitement against trans Americans and the demonization of teaching African-American history. Parallel to claiming for himself the calm center of American politics, the Biden administration has talked up the strength of the American economy and the benefits it’s been bringing to millions of Americans.

Yet both of the fundamental identities on which Biden has anchored his presidency have been rocked by realities that are to greater or lesser extents beyond his control. On the economic front, much polling has shown broad public dissatisfaction and fear about the state of the economy, despite the stellar low unemployment figures and declining inflation rates. Without diving into the possible explanations for this pessimism (though the highest inflation in a generation, overly pessimistic reporting, and continuing inequality and insecurity in the American economy are my favorite suspects), we have to acknowledge that it presents a huge threat to a president who has not been shy about talking about Bidenomics and the overall good health of the economy. The resulting perception that not only is the economy bad, but that Biden can’t seem to make it better even as he keeps talking about how good it is, would logically seem to further drag down Biden’s economic polling numbers — a perception of incompetent leadership and supposed economic disarray bound up in one dismal package.

In a parallel way, the instabilities of domestic and foreign politics have, not surprisingly, proved beyond Biden’s ability to calm (more understandably in the case of the latter). In a predictable way, his claims to moderation and normalcy have been undermined by the ongoing radicalization of the GOP, which has treated the president’s calls for bipartisanship with contempt and whose overall posture has arguably shifted into an ongoing, slow-motion insurrection against American democracy. Even the GOP’s self-inflicted wounds in the speaker election saga may have proved costly to Biden with some voters, as the news out of Washington for weeks seemed filled with dysfunction if not outright chaos that made all of the federal government appear to be the probem.

I don’t think Biden’s decisions to sell himself as a force for stability on the political scene, or as a deliverer of prosperity on the economic scene, have been inherently outlandish. Both emphases appear rooted in Biden’s authentic identity as a classically middle-of-the-road politician with a bent for meat-and-potato middle-class politics. But in terms of the American economy, he has to some degree misjudged a sense of insecurity and instability among the public, even putting aside overly harsh coverage of the economy and the still quite real possibility that sentiments will improve as inflation continues to cool (though all bets are off should the U.S. economy seriously slow down or enter a recession in the coming couple of quarters).

And as regards America’s political conflicts, his miscalculation is related to a broader Democratic error in believing that the MAGA uprising is a force that will burn itself out, rather than a movement rooted in serious fissures in American society and politics that will require active and relentless opposition. I would greatly prefer that over the past 3 years, the Democrats had pursued a confrontational, scorched-earth strategy aimed at highlighting GOP lawlessness, racism, and increasing embrace of political violence, and that sought accountability for the crimes and outrages of the Trump years over a preference to let bygones be bygones in a fruitless quest to return to the pre-MAGA normal. And for Biden specifically, I would have loved to see him speak more honestly to the American people about the inescapable fact that we are living through a time of confrontation and danger, rather than being a mere state of mind away from returning to some golden pre-Trump era. On the economy,  it also would have been terrific if the Democrats had spent a bit more political capital on working to remedy the persistent sense of precarity that haunts so many Americans, and talked more about major structural changes — whether to the safety net or to a tax system that has increasingly let the richest Americans not pay their fair share — that would give citizens a glimpse at a substantively more secure future.

At any rate, a year out from the election, nothing is irreversible or foreordained. Trump is no shoo-in for the presidency, and Joe Biden has time enough to build up momentum going into next year’s contest. This will inescapably involve drawing a contrast with Donald Trump and the authoritarian GOP — a contrast that the Republicans will very likely accentuate through their own dark political turn. Among other things, I judge that Trump himself will be unable to resist fomenting open violence and chaos as the election approaches — a challenge to the conduct of a free and fair election, but also a decisive opportunity for Biden to demonstrate that he has what it takes to claim a second term. And as others have noted in response to the Times poll, an increased focus on Trump’s flaws rather than Biden occupying the national stage alone should work out in Biden’s favor. The more Biden can position himself as the unflinching defender of the unfathomable chaos of a second Trump term, supported by the clear evidence of a deranged Trump on the campaign trail, the better his chances at rallying a decisive majority behind him.  I noted above that Biden has made himself vulnerable by promising to be a stabilizing force even as U.S. politics continue to rock from GOP extremism — but Biden’s vow will start looking a lot more attractive to voters when a general election campaign focuses more attention on how very wild and chaotic the GOP and Trump truly are. As even the Times article notes, “Mr. Trump will be more in the spotlight in 2024, including his criminal trials, a growing presence that could remind voters why they were repelled by him in the first place.”

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.