Downplaying Fundamental Conflicts of U.S. Politics Puts Democrats At a Disadvantage

For some time, I’ve been making the case that you can’t really understand the current state of American politics without viewing the GOP and MAGA movement as being in a state of de facto insurrection against American democracy. In a terrific essay published at his Weekend Reading website, Michael Podhorzer demonstrates how very instructive this framework is, while zeroing in on a specific issue that’s claimed some of The Hot Screen’s attention in recent weeks: the misleading nature of terming the conflict between the MAGA movement and the rest of American society as some sort of civil war. Crucially, Podhorzer gets how this “civil war” framing not only badly misinterprets reality, but hands a huge advantage to those seeking to replace American democracy with something far closer to autocracy or theocracy:

[W]hen we describe what happened in the 19th century and what we fear coming now as a “Civil War,” we undermine the legitimacy of the American nation. We put the secessionists then—and the MAGA movement now—on an equal footing with the legitimate American government. By doing so, we not only mislabel the threats that Trump and MAGA represent, but also underestimate their dangers.

Podhorzer gets the stakes exactly right — this is no ordinary, democratic political conflict with two sides contending within set and mutually recognized boundaries, but a struggle between those who are loyal to the basic tenets of American democracy and those who are not.  Such principles include majority rule, acceptance of election results even if they go against your side, the separation of church and state, and the rule of law. (In a broader sense, they also include the recognition that citizens should be free to live their lives as they see fit without undue interference by the government). Failing to recognize this underlying conflict essentially legitimates the contention that democracy should be ended, by considering its destruction to be a reasonable goal of democratic politics —both a logical absurdity and a moral abomination. Those who reject the basics of American government are not conducting democratic politics; they are engaging in rebellion. To this point, Podhorzer makes an important distinction between conservative policies and a stance of opposition to democratic government itself:

Those advocating for conservative and even extreme policies should be welcome in a democratic polity. But those acting in ways that reject legitimately constituted authority are neither conservative nor extreme. They are criminal. Thus, if we hope to be a single America, then we must acknowledge that those who claim that the 2020 election was stolen, decry the prosecution of Trump as a crime, call those convicted for their January 6 crimes “political hostages,” and claim that the Rio Grande is Texas’s to defend and not the federal government’s, do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States.

Not only is Podhorzer’s description of our political reality accurate, it is absolutely essential if we are to find our way to forms of politics — including electoral strategies, messaging, and concrete policies — that can successfully beat back and ultimately defeat this authoritarian threat with deep roots in America’s history and its long-standing conflicts over race, gender, religion, and economic power. We are all more or less flying blind if we don’t understand that our politics, very much including the 2024 election, are about whether the majority will rule, or whether a retrograde minority will impose its will on the rest of the country. For the real threat we face is not that red-governed states will secede from the Union, but that the MAGA movement will reclaim the presidency and then impose its sectarian visions and cruelties upon the rest of the country (after all, the federal government is only really objectionable to MAGA partisans when right-wing Republicans don’t control it).

We have already received dreadful previews of what is to come should Trump and his backers regain the presidency: the January 6 insurrection and its aftermath, during which the GOP has essentially affirmed the right to reject election results that don’t go its way; the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent horrors imposed on women in multiple states who have been stripped of their bodily autonomy; leaked plans from the Trump campaign to deport millions of long-term undocumented immigrants in ways designed to legitimize violent repression against Democratic-governed states and cities; and the depraved contentions of Trump himself that the president is completely above the law and may even go so far as to execute political opponents without repercussion.

Foregrounding the reality that the United States faces a rebellion by anti-democratic forces provides a necessary clarity for organizing and acting effectively. There is no way forward that does not draw a hard line between what is acceptable in American politics and what lacks legitimacy. You cannot accommodate anti-democratic, anti-freedom attitudes — you must highlight, confront, and defeat the forces behind them. Looking at our specific moment, acknowledging the truth of the MAGA rebellion allows us to see what a sideshow the discourse over Biden’s age and relative ability to run for re-election is. The contest between Biden and Trump, while vitally important, should properly be seen as the central front in the larger clash between the MAGA movement and the rest of us, and should be described as such by the press, the Democratic Party, and any ordinary citizen who wishes to defend American democracy and freedom.

Indeed, in a separate article titled “Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport,” Podhorzer stresses this general point, asserting that “When we depend on the campaign smarts of the Democratic Party to forestall a MAGA future, we abdicate our duties as democratic citizens to do everything we can to keep it from happening,” and arguing for something like a full mobilization of civil society to sound the alarm about the threat we collectively face. He goes on to write that, “The 2024 election is not a contest between two politicians, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a de facto constitutional referendum.” Mark my words: this description of a “de facto constitutional referendum” is a phrase and an idea that we should, and I believe will, be hearing a lot more of in the coming months, if the pro-democracy forces in this country have their wits about them.

Strikingly, Trump and his allies are not making much of a secret of their authoritarian intentions — Podhorzer notes the various elements coming together to form the looming anti-constitutional threat, including Trump’s apparent willingness to use the Insurrection Act to physically repress opponents and extreme plans to deport immigrants. Meanwhile, other elements are already in plain view, perhaps most strikingly the corrupt Supreme Court’s willingness to re-interpret even long-settled law in ways that advance nakedly partisan GOP interests.

Seen from this perspective, it’s deeply unsettling for the press and public to be gnashing their teeth over Joe Biden’s age as if this were the most important issue before us. Neither Democrats, nor the press, nor the public are required to play by rules that obscure the actual stakes of the upcoming election. As Podhorzer urges, the stakes of the election are so momentous that all Americans who cherish their freedoms have every incentive to come off the sidelines and make their voices count, from now through November.

Fortunately for those interested in preserving our democracy and our rights, the MAGA movement and GOP have increasingly gotten high on their own supply, flaunting their deranged ends and backwards values for all the world to see. Though a tidal wave of repression and chaos awaits us should Trump regain office and enable a right-wing counter-revolution against modern America, the movement’s radicalism should rightly alienate a strong American majority. In some ways, we have watched this radicalization play out in real time over the last few months on the abortion rights front, as the theocratic reasoning that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned has now further led to an Alabama court’s internally logical but objectively insane conclusion that any fertilized egg is actually a complete American citizen. The fact that the GOP’s supposedly pro-life position has brought it into conflict with actual pro-life IVF treatment is a further reminder that this is a party whose obsessions lack justice or reason. The untenable consequences of radical GOP policies are already harming Americans; it is up to the rest of us to publicize these facts and the reality they lay bare, to wield them as non-lethal weaponry to smash the pretense that the modern Republican Party can ever be trusted with the power to rule over us. 

It remains incredible to me that the Democratic Party, particularly its leadership and the Biden administration, largely declines to publicly acknowledge and describe the obvious fault lines of American politics and offer a coherent counter-narrative to the deranged descriptions offered by the right. Donald Trump and the GOP explicitly appeal to the racial and cultural resentments of millions of Americans and offer a coherent (if also paranoid and despicable) worldview as to what has purportedly gone wrong: brown-skinned people are taking your jobs (and probably also voting illegally to really stick it to you); gay people are painting with rainbows that which god ordained should forever remain a manly primer grey; and women are violating their divinely ordained role as servants to men (and plus aren’t having nearly enough babies to keep the white population in a permanent majority).

In other words, the GOP has taken some very real changes across our society that I believe most of us view as progress, twisted them into existential threats to mom, dad, and apple pie, and used this distorted vision to appeal to citizens’ deepest fears around their status, their identity, and even their very survival. In fact, they have stoked these anxieties to essentially make the case to the Republican base that democracy itself is now the enemy, if majority rule means that white people (and particularly white men) no longer have, or at any rate soon will not have, pride of place in American society. As evidence, you need look no further than the widespread acceptance across the GOP that the January 6 insurrection was justified and not really a crime, and more broadly at the various ways in which the GOP has set about dismantling American democracy in favor of minority (white supremacist) rule.

Against this, the Democrats, taking President Biden’s lead, have leaned heavily into a faith that concentrating on economic issues will result in a country that’s wealthier and so, ideally, one less easily manipulated by cultural and racial appeals. While it is true that President Biden — to his credit — has foregrounded the defense of democracy in his re-election appeal, it is equally true that he shies away from describing in sufficient detail why, exactly, the GOP has turned against democracy, as well as how American democracy is the essential condition for the freedoms and open society the majority supports. Such detail, I believe, would require talking about the very same changes in American society that the GOP does — only, of course, in a way that tells a story of progress. In other words, this would require engaging in the same arena of cultural, racial, and religious feelings and fears which dominate GOP strategy, only in a way that sought to defuse conflict and navigate anxieties rather than exacerbate them. Leaving the field open for the GOP to unilaterally define such an enormous swathe of American reality has been an unmitigated failure.

If the Democratic Party won’t do it, then it is in fact up to the rest of us — journalists, religious figures, civic leaders, ordinary citizens — to describe the reality of American conflict and to tell a positive story about how the changes rippling through American society are on balance positive, and that the best way to navigate our conflicts is to bring them out into the open and discuss them, however awkward, difficult, or even seemingly hopeless that process might sometimes seem. The GOP cannot be allowed a monopoly on acknowledging and addressing deep currents and changes within American society — doing so has already resulted in immense damage. 

The Debate About Biden's Age Is Getting Real Old

Special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Joe Biden’s handling of classified materials may have exonerated the president on the merits of the case being investigated, but Hur sparked a fresh round of “Biden is too old” frenzy with his disparagement of Biden’s memory and age. An explosion of articles in mainstream papers like the New York Times and opinion pieces across the spectrum seized on Hur’s remarks, igniting in turn a self-perpetuating round of worries among Democrats and glee among Biden’s opponents.

Voters have expressed significant concerns in multiple polls about Biden’s age, which should surprise no one; he’s our oldest president, and has showed signs of physically slowing down over the course of his administration. Perceptions are certainly also not helped by the fact that Biden has always been a politician who tended to the verbal garble and gaffe, magnified by a stutter that he still contends with, so that what would before have been ascribed to Biden just being Biden is now ascribed to not only physical but mental decline. On the right, it’s an article of faith that Biden is senile and doddering; across the rest of the political spectrum, Biden is absorbing the understandable anger and anxiety of people who hate Trump, not Biden, but fear that Biden will be the unwitting agent of Trump’s return to the presidency. Biden may also be drawing the anger and anxiety of an American public that fetishizes youth, and that gives little quarter to anyone reckless enough to remind them of their own inevitable aging and decline.

But as a messy and caustic debate rages over whether President Biden should decline to run for re-election due to disqualifying physical and mental infirmity, all parties truly interested in a reasonable discussion should think hard about what sparked this latest round of Biden-bashing — NOT a decisive new poll or indisputable act of mental incompetence by the president, but a shard of propaganda launched into the public realm by a partisan Republican special counsel who abused his power by pairing an exculpation of Biden with a baseless character attack in areas he is not fit to judge. In other words, the media and too many Democrats have let themselves get played by something of a GOP psyop, ignoring the fact that Hur’s assessment of Biden’s memory and mental state are the non-professional judgment of a single partisan figure. His bad-faith behavior has been taken up in seemingly blind good faith by far too many, certainly by many who should know better.

Nonetheless, here we are. So what to make of the contention that Biden should step down and let someone else take his place? For my money, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein’s recent audio essay arguing for this course of action is the strongest of this recent lot, a well-meaning attempt to grapple with concerns about Biden’s age and conceive of a way forward; it’s anchored in the unimpeachable position that Donald Trump must be defeated in 2024, and authored by a thoughtful, low-drama thinker who doesn’t have a particular axe to grind vis-a-vis internal Democratic Party politics. The furious backlash to Klein’s piece by those who disagree speaks to the punch it could potentially add to the dump-Biden campaign — but also indicates a solidifying consensus among defenders of the president that Biden is being unfairly maligned and that there is no surefire way for him to be replaced even if that were his own wish.

For a thorough dissection of the problematics of Klein’s piece and the larger Biden replacer movement, I would point readers to the latest podcast of Is This Democracy, hosted by political scientist Liliana Mason and historian Thomas Zimmer, as well as a companion piece by Zimmer at his blog Democracy Americana. Here, I’d like to zoom in on what I find to be the most glaring issues with this effort, starting with Klein’s exemplary piece, and conclude with where I’ve ended up after processing various “dump Biden” arguments over the last few weeks.

Klein’s piece repeats a familiar trope: that even if President Biden is in fact capable of being president — and Klein concedes that he is — what is truly dangerous to his prospects are public perceptions of his age and debility. On its own, though, this seems hardly damning, in that it actually opens the possibility of a course correction: Biden could get out in public more often, even acclimate people to his gaffes, as some have argued, in order to show he’s still got the right stuff. The question of perception is interesting, because it leaves open the possibility that it can be remedied, at least to some extent; conversely, it raises the deeply disturbing possibility that Biden should be discarded not because of actual incapacity, but due to his inability to project competence. Again, though, this seems like something well within the world of fixing by Biden and his team.

At this point, though, Klein presents an intriguing twist: the main problem is not that Biden cannot serve as president, but that he’s not sufficiently capable of running a presidential re-election campaign, due to his advanced age. At first blush, this seems to be a distinction worth digging into. After all, a presidential campaign is a highly public phase for a politician, at times filled with long days, travel, and the need to enthuse one’s supporters. Yet I’m hard-pressed to see this as a critique meaningfully distinct from the basic one that Biden should not be president due to public perceptions of his weakness. For instance, Klein cites two presidential campaign speeches, one recent and the other four years in the past, as evidence that Biden’s energy and self-presentation have diminished markedly. However, contending that Biden is slower and less energetic today is still not the same as saying that he should not run for president, but merely reopens the initial question of public perception regarding his ability to be president; saying he can’t campaign well doesn’t fundamentally change that this is a question of how people perceive Biden.

It’s telling to me that Klein elides a point that weighs heavily in Biden’s favor and that also undercuts the “not able to campaign for president angle”: Joe Biden is already president, with all the relative benefits of the position. Unlike his likely opponent, Joe Biden is currently gainfully employed in the very position he seeks to hold for another term. There’s a reasonable case to be made that part of how an incumbent president campaigns is to continue doing his job as president; at a minimum, his current job responsibilities reduce the amount of time Biden both can and should be rushing around the country campaigning as the election gets into full swing. As the incumbent, Biden might be blamed for things going wrong on his watch, but occupying the presidency also grants its own sense of legitimacy and continuity — the basic advantages of incumbency.

Ignoring Biden’s current position as president also lets us ignore the contrast that will exist between Trump and Biden as the campaign gets underway. Trump will (energetically enough) be saying hateful, anti-American things at rallies to incite his base not simply into voting for him, but to be ready to take violent action should he lose. While I, too, would love a more energetic Biden, his calm and sober conduct in the coming months may well work to his advantage against the increasingly erratic, if admittedly frenetic, displays of Donald Trump. As Simon Rosenberg succinctly puts it, “Trump is campaigning from the courthouse this time, not the White House.” Biden, in stark contrast, is indeed campaigning from the White House.

I’m also not really buying Klein’s suggestion for how Democrats can move beyond Biden: first, have close allies convince him not to run; and second, decide on his replacement at the Democratic convention. Plenty of people have already made hay of both suggestions (Jamelle Bouie has a gentle dissection of how Klein is way too optimistic about how an open Democratic convention would go that’s well worth a read), so I won’t pile on here, except to highlight a couple points that have been underplayed in the critiques. First, it seems to me that a spring and potentially early summer filled with news stories about efforts to get Biden to step down, all while Biden should be expected to be campaigning, would provide a deeply muddled and demoralizing message both to the Democratic base and to those who might otherwise be persuaded to vote Democratic. Putting aside whether such an effort would even be viable, Klein seems to badly downplay the damaging passage of wasted time. Similarly, waiting until August to choose a Democratic candidate would put the Democrats at a deep disadvantage, seeing as Trump would until that point effectively have run unopposed, with all the ability to gain momentum and set the agenda that such a vacancy would enable. 

There’s been a lot of commentary about how very haywire a Democratic convention might go, with multiple candidates vying for the presidency in a crazily compressed time period, but the key point that leaps out at me is that whoever emerged would be deeply plagued by credible claims that he or she lacked democratic legitimacy (a point Bouie rightly makes in the critique I noted above). Though Klein may be technically correct that primary voters are electing delegates pledged to a candidate, and who can be freed to vote for someone else if that candidate drops out, the whole point of the primary reforms that occurred after the debacle of the Democrats’ 1968 convention was to move towards a system where voters had much more say in who the presidential candidate would be.

Simply put, Democratic voters have a very reasonable expectation that their presidential candidate will be the person who receives the most primary votes. To strip away that assumption and that approach, and to return to a system easily characterized as backroom deals and power plays, seems highly risky — and, as has been said by others already, is a really bad look for a party that claims the mantle of democracy. This is not to say that such a convention wouldn’t be balls-to-the-wall exciting for political junkies, the political press, and some segment of the public, but this would come at the price of a candidate who had likely received practically no votes, and at the risk that the compromises necessary would result in both a milquetoast candidate and upwards of a dozen disappointed also-rans. Could it work? Sure. But is the risk of disaster too high? The Hot Screen avers fuck yes.

I sympathize with the spirit behind Klein’s excitement about an open Democratic convention. I think it speaks to a wish for a reset, a way to leapfrog past the complexities of the Democratic coalition that have led to this place where the future of the party, not to say American democracy itself, rests on an octogenarian who’s behind in the polls and fills many Americans with doubts. Klein is entirely correct to point to the up-and-coming younger politicians who could run for president now.

But I have to say that after sitting with this debate for a good long while, and reading through arguments like Klein’s, I’ve come around to feeling like efforts to persuade the Democratic Party to somehow replace Biden are not only counter-productive but deeply perverse. They give primacy to polls about an election that is still many months away, and just as dubiously, downplay or ignore Joe Biden’s significant achievements over the past three years. For me, the following are some of the most noteworthy achievement and acts that point to a president fully engaged with the challenges that the U.S. faces: the passage of meaningful climate legislation; infrastructure spending that will boost the US economy for years; efforts (however undermined by a right-wing Supreme Court) to mitigate the crushing student college debt burden; the decision to back Ukraine against Russia’s invasion (a struggle which I increasingly believe will be seen as one the defining fights of our era); the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan (completing a process begun by his predecessor and putting a well-deserved endcap on two decades of the insanely conceived War on Terror); and a concerted effort to integrate progressive priorities into his agenda in a way that has helped strengthen the Democratic coalition. 

I think it’s also reasonable to remember that since the Republicans gained control of the House in the 2022 midterms, meaningful legislation has become a pipe dream, as GOP representatives are overtly acting at the behest of Donald Trump to ensure that solvable problems fester. Is that really Biden’s fault, or is yet another sign that the nation is under assault by a radicalized GOP that places the goals of returning an authoritarian to power over the most basic notions of the public good? We keep hearing that Biden is not getting credit for his accomplishments, but it seems to me that if Democrats were to run another candidate out of the blue, it would cement the idea that Biden, and the Democrats, have not done much of anything over the last 3 years, which is not only totally wrong but a pretty stupid strategy for the party. It puts me in mind of Al Gore’s doomed 2000 campaign, in which his efforts to distance himself from the Clinton administration of which he was a part undercut his ability to point to his executive experience as a reason to vote for him. In major ways, bumping Biden off the ticket would seem to constitute an undeserved validation of the Republicans’ efforts to derail governance over the last couple years, and to unnecessarily memory-hole the president’s substantial accomplishments. That sounds like a strategy of panic and fear, not confidence and righteousness.

Democrats Ignore the Violence of the Trumpist GOP At Their Peril, and To Their Disadvantage

As Donald Trump has cleared the field of his GOP opponents — Nicki Haley’s odds at this point seem hopeless, save for Trump being convicted and sent to jail for one of his many crimes — and as Joe Biden deals with a hack job attack by a partisan Republican prosecutor, it’s more urgent than ever to properly characterize Trump’s third bid for the presidency. With a campaign overtly dedicated to retribution against his enemies, reliant on the instigation of threat and violence by his most ardent followers, a clear agenda of lawless rule should he re-gain office, and a pre-emptive declaration that he will not accept the election results if they don’t go his way, Donald Trump is mounting an insurrection in the guise of a presidential campaign. And with his frequent callbacks to the justice and rightness of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and his previous broader effort to overturn the 2020 election outcome, we should view Trump’s current quest for power as a de facto continuation of his initial 2020-21 insurrection, only now swaddled in the propriety granted by the acceptance and forgiveness of his heinous actions by both Republican politicos and the MAGA base.

Indeed, complementing Trump’s effort are currents of insurrectionism and sabotage by the Republican Party, whether it’s Representative Elise Stefanik refusing to say whether the GOP-controlled House would certify a 2024 Biden election victory and echoing Trump in her reference to January 6 criminals as “hostages,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott (joined by two dozen other GOP governors) challenging established federal powers over the border in favor of retro, pre-Civil War states’ rights hokum, or the GOP scuttling a border deal with the Democrats in order to advance Donald Trump’s talking points and sow a sense of chaos at the southern border.

To help foreground and discredit this insurrectionary movement, Democrats and other supporters of democracy should go for the rhetorical jugular and remind voters that Trump’s power over the GOP rests in significant part on threats of violence by himself and his followers. Vox recently published a staggering article by Zack Beauchamp illustrating how threats against fellow GOP politicians have been key to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. But of course Trump has also turned to applying such threats to the larger body politic; as Jamelle Bouie observes, “He can use the threat of violence to make officials and ordinary election workers think twice about their decisions,” reflecting an overall effort “to use the fervor of his followers and acolytes to tilt the playing field in his direction.” And violence is what Trump promises to unleash upon America in a second term, with his talk of shooting shoplifters and protestors, rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants, and creating an atmosphere of menace that cows the freedom and aspirations of African-Americans and other racial and sexual minorities.

Democrats also need to draw a line from this current and planned violence to the lawlessness that would be integral to a second Trump term based on retribution, dominance, and plunder. Threats to prosecute political opponents for no reason except their opposition to Trump; the pardons of January 6 insurrectionists; the planned firing of civil servants to be replaced with Trump lackeys — all point in the direction of authoritarianism and dictatorship. 

Both the violence and the planned lawlessness are critical to keep in the forefront not only to mobilize voters to cast their ballots for Democrats, but also in order to drive home that a Trump presidency would simply lack political legitimacy. Democrats need to insist that political power gained by violence and threats should never be accepted by the American majority, just as a person robbed at gunpoint should never accept that the money in the robber’s hand now legally belongs to the robber. Such a legitimacy argument serves two strategic purposes: it lays the groundwork for mass opposition to dictatorship in case Trump were to win the election by eking out another Electoral College victory, and it prepares the ground for the near-inevitable Republican insurrection that will surely arise even if Biden wins big in 2024.

Democrats cannot proceed as if this election will result in either the total downfall of American democracy or the shining, unchallenged triumph of Joe Biden and the vanquishment of Donald Trump. Should the worst come to pass and Trump win, Democrats need to prosecute the fight to save American democracy in a way that maximizes the chances of doing so — hence my insistence that they lay the groundwork for the illegitimacy of a Trump administration on anti-democratic grounds now. Likewise — and I believe and hope this to be the likelier election outcome — Democrats must steel themselves, and the public, for a sustained fight against a much more open GOP insurrection against constitutional government should Joe Biden prevail.  

What's Civil War Good For? Absolutely Nothing, Except to Provide the Right with a Sinister and Misleading Talking Point

At his excellent new politics blog The Cross Section, Paul Waldman takes square aim at an under-examined vein of rhetoric emanating from the political right: the notion that the United States is on the brink of “civil war.” To his great credit, Waldman cuts through the bullshit and provides a salutary and correct interpretation of such talk:

[F]ew bother to clarify that when a conservative says a civil war is on its way, what they mean is not that order will break down and two factions will face off against each other in a battle for control of the government. What they mean is this: If our side doesn’t get what we want, we will start killing people.

That is what “civil war” actually means: heavily armed right-wing Americans committing acts of murder and terrorism across the country. And riht now, Republican elites are doing everything they can to bring that nightmare about.

You really can’t over-emphasize how important it is to lay bare the murderous intent behind the right’s civil war talk (I took my own swing at this topic a while back). “Civil war” is a deliberately obfuscatory phrase, suggesting that both left and right long for violence, when in reality it’s a cover for the right to attempt to impose its will by fascistic, bloody means. This is hardly a semantic point; laying bare the true meaning of such language may yet do serious damage to the political power of the right, while helping rouse the rest of the country out of whatever accommodation and denial they may be in towards the extremist threat facing the U.S.

Many on the right would like nothing more than to dignify their violence with a patina of respectability through “civil war” references, but what they are seeking to cover is a bloodlust and a desire to commit mass murder against innocents. It is very much in the interest of those who seek to determine the balance of political power by the bullet, not the ballot box, to suggest that all sides are itching to fight; this is a way to obscure the right’s minority status in the country, and to reframe democracy not as a battle of numbers but as a battle of blood and will, in which the capacity to inflict violence is conflated with the purported righteousness of one’s cause.

Beyond hiding the one-side violence so attractive to the right, “civil war” phrasing has another baleful aim. The term suggests the clash of two competing centers of power that both claim a contested legitimacy. However, a clear-eyed view of current American politics shows that what the United States actually faces — indeed, has faced over the last few years, since the events around January 6 — is much more accurately characterized as a right-wing insurrection against the legitimate, democratically-elected government of the United States. From Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to the GOP’s mass acceptance of the Big Lie that the election was stolen and its many maneuvers to undermine future elections, the GOP has declared war on American democracy. Uncritical acceptance of civil war talk needlessly grants the right a measure of unmerited legitimacy to such efforts, as well as to more violent schemes; in contrast, speaking of a right-wing insurrection puts this movement in its proper place, designating it as illegitimate and usurping of the democratic order. 

Waldman brings up the current conflict between Texas and the federal government over border security, in which that state has quite clearly overstepped its constitutionally prescribed bounds while invoking secessionist rhetoric about the federal government having broken its “compact” with the states. (As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer reminds us, “The Civil War settled this question; the union is perpetual, the federal government is sovereign, and states do not get to defy federal law simply because they don’t like when their preferred candidates lose the presidency.”) You can see the logic of the civil war talk playing out in the border conflict, as Waldman observes that the GOP and right-wing media are essentially saying that, “The authority of the federal government is inherently illegitimate, and if you don’t like the decisions made by that government, you are justified in resisting it, including by violence if necessary.” But it should be clear and obvious that an assertion that the “authority of the federal government is inherently illegitimate” is insurrectionary in nature, a statement as meritless as Donald Trump’s parallel, evidence-free claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This is not a battle between two equally plausible claimants to power, but between a legitimate one and an illegitimate one.

Whether we use the term “civil war” versus “insurrection” isn’t just a question of semantics: insisting that attempts by right-wing governors and others to challenge established federal power in the name of an extremist power grab are “insurrectionary” seizes the high ground and clarifies reality. Likewise, it’s very much in the interests of Democrats and other defenders of democracy to push back hard against purposely vague ideas promulgated by the right that the United States is on the brink of mass violence. Such threats are almost entirely emanating from one side, whose dreams are less of martial conquest than of terroristic, one-sided violence, as Waldman correctly identifies. These fantasies stem not from the right’s power, but from its fundamental internalization of its loser status as a shrinking minority bloc in a nation that has generally become more liberal on a host of issues, from gender equality and sexual identity to the role of religion in public life. Talk of civil war is an attempt to drag us all down to their own sordid level, to try to persuade the majority that it is powerless and literally outgunned. To the degree we accept talk of civil war, we delegitimize majority rule, democracy, and the majority’s own rightfully-held power.

But as I have written previously, even as we need to take very seriously all threats of violence, I think the greater likelihood is not that the right will embark on mass extermination of liberals and other hated fellow citizens, but that they will use limited violence and specter of broader mayhem to permanently warp American government in its own minoritarian favor:

[A]n over-emphasis on political violence as a threat to American democracy, up to and including speculative talk about civil war, distracts from a broader, far-likelier danger: that violence will be used by Republican politicians as a tool in a quasi-legal push to dismantle American democracy, so that the GOP, with its dwindling share of the electorate, can still have a shot at holding the various branches of the U.S. government [. . .] the more likely future for America is not that we might devolve into civil war, but that the GOP and the right use violence as an adjunct to an illegitimate deformation of American democracy. To talk about violence coming from the right — let alone civil war — without talking about this larger, more consequential Republican movement to subvert our political system obscures the dangerous synergy between the two, and helps the GOP evade accountability for its incriminating behavior in the here and now.

So we need to keep this larger anti-democratic push by the right in mind, and properly characterize it as the slow-motion insurrection that it is — but to the degree that defenders of American democracy can discredit and delegitimize the GOP and its right-wing allies by calling out their dreams of mass slaughter of civilians and instrumentalist attitude towards violence, Democrats and others shouldn’t hesitate to use Republicans’ own deranged fantasies against them.

Justice Deserts

I wanted to highlight this sharp piece by David Kurtz about the agonizing slowness of the American justice system in holding Donald Trump to account for his many, many crimes. Kurtz writes from the perspective of someone who was initially in the camp of trusting the slow grinding wheels of justice to do their work, but who has evolved to “having my hair on fire that the gravity of the moment calls for so much more than the legal system is prepared to offer.” I’ve been on a similar trajectory, so his words hit me with particular punch. 

Here’s the heart of what Kurtz has to say:

[I]t has become obvious that the slowness of the legal system isn’t merely the result of a careful, deliberative adherence to the rule of law and the procedural protections necessary to do proper justice. It is also a product of a wariness in confronting Trump and his legions of supporters, an unreasonable tendency to give him the benefit of the doubt, the judiciary’s own overweening sense that it is above politics, and a fundamental failure to appreciate that a strongman who attempted to seize power unlawfully once is a threat to the very existence of the legal system itself.

When the legal system itself is under threat, it must respond with extraordinary measures that continue to protect the procedural and substantive rights of the individual defendant but girds the system against attack, prioritizes institutional self-preservation, and is self-conscious of its role as a bulwark of democracy [italics added].

I’ve emphasized the second paragraph above because, as important as it is to understand the lamentable reasons for why the U.S. justice system has fumbled its response to Trump, Kurtz’s prescription cuts to the heart of the true challenge and what ideally needs to be done. It is incredible to me that so many in the justice system have not grasped that, as Kurtz puts it, “the legal system itself is under threat,” even as such is obviously the danger posed by a lawless authoritarian like Donald Trump. It should be self-evident that the legal system should protect itself against such incursions, both for its own sake and owing to its role as “a bulwark of democracy,” and yet this has not happened. The question, then, is what might be done to change this dynamic.

One thing that occurs to me is that we can hardly expect the legal system to protect itself alone, in a vacuum, cut off from political support from elected politicians. Democrats have not done nearly enough to provide either cover fire for the legal system or encouragement that it play its proper role, out of a misplaced fear of appearing to politicize it. It could have been different; it could still be different. For instance, when judges and juries legitimately fear threats or violence at the hands of MAGA extremists, the lack of clear and deterrent Democratic-led legislation amping up penalties for such intimidation becomes glaring and unforgivable. Why not drum this up into a political issue? —done right, it might even win them some votes from law and order types!

Conversely, when Democrats necessarily defend the “rule of law,” pointing to our system of justice is a key way of making concrete what might seem overly abstract. And in turn, being able to creatively and powerfully talk about what the rule of law provides the country (equal treatment for all, freedom from arbitrary violence) in turn can provide support for the legal system that makes it possible, in a sort of virtuous circle. It seems to me that defenders of democracy across the board could be doing a far better job of this — particularly as a second Trump term promises a high likelihood of lawlessness by the president and his allies, with all the mass political, physical, and economic insecurity that would entail. 

President Biden's Pro-Democracy Assault on Trump is a Promising Start to 2024 Presidential Campaign

Earlier this month, following a visit to Valley Forge, President Joe Biden effectively kicked off his 2024 re-election campaign with a speech that indicted Donald Trump as an authoritarian menace to the United States, with a particular emphasis on the January 6 insurrection that took place three years ago. In doing so, Biden signaled that the fight to preserve American democracy will be central to his election appeal over the coming months. The president’s speech rightly recognized the overwhelming reality of American political life: that in the time since Donald Trump left office following a failed coup, the question of whether the United States shall remain on the path to greater democracy, or will recede into some manner of authoritarian nightmare, remains an all-too-open question.

Biden’s repeated invocations of the violence of January 6 strike me as especially important — the unprecedented physical attack on the Capitol still resonates among most non-Republican voters, and stands as both symbol and substance of what Trump remains capable of inflicting on the country. I think this passage is an especially strong summation of the import of Trump’s efforts to stay in office:

In trying to rewrite the facts of January sixth, Trump was trying to steal history, the same way he tried to steal the election.

But he, we knew the truth, because we saw it with our own eyes. So it wasn’t like something, a story being told. It was on television repeatedly. We saw it with our own eyes.

Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault.

They were insurrectionists, not patriots.

They weren’t there to uphold the Constitution. They were there to destroy the Constitution.

Denouncing Donald Trump as an insurrectionist has a cold logical quality to it — it’s the most damning thing one can say about him — but also hits the hot button of patriotism among ordinary Americans. And refreshing people’s memories of the violence that day lends weight to the critique Biden offered of a possible second Trump presidency, with the president further noting Trump’s openness about wanting to be a dictator, wish for revenge, and intent to deploy the military against dissenting voices. And Biden’s invocations of democracy as the only legitimate way to govern, in that it allows the American people to choose their own fate — in contrast with Trumpist one-man rule — is necessary and clarifying. Nailing Trump for his treason and authoritarian ambition should rightly be central to the 2024 campaign.

But as before with Biden’s pro-democracy speeches, I find myself worrying that he is speaking too much in generalities, presenting Trump and his MAGA movement as a sort of Dr. Evil on steroids, doing bad things because they are bad people. While I’m persuaded that this line of attack isn’t so far off where Trump is concerned, this is simply not a sufficient description for why so many thousands of GOP politicians, and so many millions of American citizens, remain loyal to him and to the cause of returning him to the White House. The MAGA movement really does embody something specific — an effort to prioritize white supremacism, conservative Christianity, and patriarchy as the primary order of American life, to be imposed by violence and the power of the state. Moreover, the movement as a whole has grasped that its members constitute nothing close to a majority in the U.S., leading to an increasingly wholesale rejection of majority rule in favor of minoritarian power.

This, above all else, helps explain why the Republican Party has coalesced around the position that the events surrounding January 6 did not constitute an insurrection, but at worst an exuberant effort to reverse an election stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Thus, as Josh Marshall remarks, the greater importance of January 6 no longer lies primarily in the past, but in the present:

The ongoing Republican defense of the failed coup means January 6th never really ended. Politically we’re still living in an open-ended January 6th. You can see it every time an elected Republican refuses to admit who won the 2020 election, the refusals to admit that Trump attempted a coup and failed.

The fact that Trump’s coup never ended, but only changed form, is a key fact of American politics, perhaps a close second to the related fact of the GOP’s descent into a white supremacist, Christian nationalist party predisposed to violence and authoritarianism. The transubstantiation of January 6 in the minds of devoted Republicans into an event of righteousness — a Black Mass in which Capitol Police blood has been turned into electoral wine — only increases the pressure on Biden and other Democrats to insist on the perfidy and treason of that day.

But beyond this, it also requires the Democrats to talk about why GOP politicos and base voters have taken such a radical turn. By identifying the motivations and concrete goals of this anti-democratic movement, the Democrats will simultaneously position themselves to identify the substantive elements of what a pro-democracy movement stands for: freedom of religion, racial and gender equality, the right to go about your daily business without fear of political violence. As I’ve written before, it’s not enough for the Democrats to say what they’re against.

Biden should also make clear that democracy is inseparable from the material security and freedom that most Americans view as the fabric of their everyday existence. From being able to walk around without fear of white supremacist gangs sanctioned by Trump, to being able to hold a job without being fired on the basis of your race, gender, or sexual orientation, to having autonomy over your own body, to being able to trust in a government that puts science over religious mysticism, the majority’s right to rule is no abstract thing, but the ultimate guaranty that we live in a world that we want. On this point, I think President Biden is on the right track when he talks about the people being able to choose their own destiny — but he would benefit his case by getting much more concrete and down to earth about what this means on a day-to-day level.

A few days after the speech I’ve been discussing, Biden gave another one at the site of a racist mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in which he directly invoked the specter of white supremacism behind Donald Trump’s campaign. Though some news coverage presented the speech as primarily a pitch to energize African-American voters, it needs to be acknowledged that his references to white supremacism are also a challenge to white voters to pick a side in relation to America’s greatest sin and fracture line. It has sometimes seemed that Democrats have been overly hesitant to call out white supremacism directly, a position that has become untenable with the rise of Trump, who has more or less unabashedly anointed himself the leader of aggrieved white Americans unable to cope with increasing diversity and the prospect of growing racial equality across the country. Biden’s South Carolina speech suggests a recognition that this reluctance needs to change, and was promising in that it delved into the substance of what makes Trump and other Republicans so unfit for office.

Despite the various reservations I have with Biden’s approach to the democracy question, it still seems possible that his current brand of attacks on Trump’s anti-democratic, violent, and election result-denying ways will find increasingly ample targets in the coming months. Donald Trump kicked off his own campaign with praise of the January 6 insurrection, has threatened to unleash violence in response to the various legal charges against him, and has refused to say he would accept defeat at the polls in 2024. In other words, Donald Trump is running as an insurrectionary candidate, who will either subvert American democracy if he wins the Electoral College, or will once again incite his followers to violence should he lose. It is also well worth noting that senior members of the Republican Party have indicated their agreement with these anti-democratic aims — just look at Representative Eliese Stefanik, the chairwoman of the House Republican conference, who refuses to say whether the GOP-controlled House would certify a 2024 Biden election victory, and who echoes Trump’s rhetoric by referring to January 6 insurrectionists behind bars as “hostages.”

From this perspective, Donald Trump’s countervailing efforts to paint Joe Biden as the real threat to democracy are weak tea indeed, undercut by Trump’s own pronouncements and the evidence of our senses. The former president’s decision to double down on insurrection is only going to confirm for people that he engaged in insurrection in the first place, increasing the likelihood that Biden’s line of attack will hit home. Trump is betting everything on his authoritarian, violent-minded movement cowing the U.S. government and the American majority into complaisance and submission. If Biden continues to press his strategy and makes a fuller case for how vital democracy is to the lives of Americans, Trump may find himself walking into a meat grinder of his own making.

No Second Chances for Insurrectionist Presidents

The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Donald Trump is ineligible to appear as a presidential candidate in that state’s GOP presidential primary is a dose of unqualifiedly good news (a parallel assessment by the Maine Secretary of State in more recent days is also heartening, though both rulings are currently on hold as the decisions make their way through the appeals process). The Colorado decision, based on language in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that “disqualifies people who engage in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it,” is the first win by those engaged in a multi-state effort to keep Trump off the ballot for the 2024 election.

Unfortunately, as political scientist Thomas Zimmer writes in a thorough assessment of the ruling and the urgent need to defend American democracy, “the discourse surrounding this decision and its broader implications is a complete mess,” with Zimmer pointing to both right-wing disinformation and centrist muddling of the issues involved. Equally shocking to me, though, is the lack of a unified Democratic response that might amplify a key finding by the Colorado judges: that Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States. Whatever the fate of this decision (the U.S. Supreme Court will sooner or later have its say), this is an obvious cudgel to hammer home the message that Donald Trump engaged in rebellion against the United States, presents an ongoing danger to the republic, and is completely unfit to hold the presidency a second time. This line of attack may fall on deaf ears where hardened GOP partisans are concerned, but it may yet rally more persuadable GOP and centrist voters, as well as energize the Democratic base.

Democrats have an even greater incentive to trumpet this argument in the present moment, given the high probability that the Supreme Court will reverse this decision on some grounds or another, with the likely result that Trump and the GOP will claim that it clears Trump of “false” accusations regarding his acts of insurrection in late 2020 and early 2021. To avoid losing such a potent argument against Trump, Democrats and other defenders of democracy need to make a lot of noise right now regarding this affirming assessment by the Colorado court, with a primary goal of persuading and reminding American voters of Trump’s insurrectionism. Secondarily, in the event of an adverse Supreme Court ruling, this would allow the Democrats to hammer the ruling as  nonsensical and reinforce that only a Democratic victory in 2024 can stop Trump. And in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court actually endorses the view that Trump engaged in insurrection, but nonetheless finds a way to keep him on the ballot, it would still benefit Democrats, and defenders of democracy, to shout from the rooftops now that Donald Trump engaged in war against the U.S. — in this latter case, they could then point to how even the Supreme Court agrees with the argument they’d been making all along! If Democrats truly believe Trump engaged in insurrection in 2020-21, then they need to be consistent, and not recoil from constitutional measures that would protect the U.S. from him.

Unfortunately, most Democratic politicians once again seem largely determined to take a hands-off approach to a legal proceeding concerning Trump, even when the issues involved go right to the heart of how to protect American democracy, and when the Republican Party feels no such compunction about trying to sway public opinion. The underlying reality, which many politicos and commentators seem determined to repress, is that Donald Trump is a historically unique danger to the United States because as president he launched a coup to stay in power after an election loss — an action that in a healthy democracy would be universally considered an unforgivable offense, one that at a minimum would disqualify such a politician in the eyes of voters from holding any future office. Alas, such is not the case in the U.S. today, where millions upon millions are either indifferent, in denial, or in open sympathy with the former president’s once and future intentions to tear down American democracy. 

This inescapable, overriding reality — that Trump tried to overthrow our government by installing himself as president despite an election loss — is the crucial backdrop to understanding the fallacy of the widespread contention that keeping Trump off the ballot in 2024 would somehow be undemocratic. Republicans have embraced this view; mainstream pundits have embraced this view; even some on the left have embraced this view; and unfortunately, too many Democratic elected officials have embraced this view.

A news analysis published by the New York Times serves as a decent bellwether for this flawed perspective, and a ripe target for interrogating its tenets. From the start, we’re presented with supposedly objective assertions that don’t hold up to minimum scrutiny, with the piece noting that the Colorado court ruling highlights a tension between “giving voters in a democracy the right to pick their leaders versus ensuring that no one is above the law [. . .] If the court’s legal reasoning is correct, obeying the rule of law produces an antidemocratic result.”As others have already pointed out, the notion that democracy and the rule of law are somehow opposed doesn’t really make sense; for most of us, democracy as we experience it in the United States is inseparable from the rule of law. The Times piece asks us to believe that the Colorado court has somehow imposed its judgment abstractly, drawing from this mysterious thing called “the law” that is somehow separate from democracy. This assumption is totally incorrect as a general idea, and certainly in this case, where the constitutional language in question was added by American legislators who had been elected by their constituents (granted, at a time when many Americans were denied the franchise). That is, the language exists in the constitution because of democracy, not in opposition to it.

You can see this mistaken reasoning operating at full tilt as the piece continues, as it notes that, “under the principle of democracy, the government’s legitimacy stems from the fact that voters decided whom to put in charge. The prospect of unelected judges denying voters the opportunity to make their own decision about Mr. Trump’s political future has given pause even to some of his critics who fervently hope Americans will reject him at the ballot box.” Here, “unelected judges” works to obscure the fact that the judges here are in fact simply applying what is clear language in the 14th amendment — and even if you disagree in good faith and think there is ambiguity over the term “insurrection,” what the judges did here is what judges do across the spectrum of American law. This is how our government works - matters of constitutional dispute work their way up the judicial system. The “prospect of unelected judges denying voters the opportunity to make their own decision about Mr. Trump’s political future” is hardly an objective description of the situation, but an opinion that, in circular fashion, simply states as supposed fact the opinion of those opposed to the ruling. Similarly, “unelected judges” makes it seem as if judges simply appointed themselves, when in fact judges are generally either appointed by elected officials or directly elected themselves. To say that judge are divorced from our system of democratic elections and accountability is simply not true.

And when we are told that the judgment denies “voter the opportunity to make their own decision about Mr. Trump’s political future,” it ignores the reality that the Constitution already structures and limits our ability to elect our leaders, by providing the rules by which our democracy functions. At the most basic level, the reason we elect a president is because the president is a position identified in the Constitution, along with senators and representatives. And many observers have already reminded us that the Constitution already sets restrictions on who can be president (he or she must be at least 35 years old and born a U.S. citizen), and that the 14th Amendment, Article 3 language is no different a restriction.

The Times goes on to note that, “If the Supreme Court now overturns the Colorado ruling, it will be leaning in the direction of letting voters decide about Mr. Trump; upholding the state court’s ruling would be the opposite.” I think these assertions get to the heart of the matter, for the basic problem is that Donald Trump has already violated the idea that voters decide elections, by launching a coup attempt — an insurrection — to undo the will of the majority of voters (and the Electoral College) in 2020; allowing him to stay on the ballot means enabling him to try yet again to reject the majority’s will, this time potentially successfully. At its core, the 14th amendment provision would prevent Trump from violating voter choice again.

Most decisive to me, though, is a point that has necessarily been absent from the flimflam critiques of the Colorado ruling found in the Times and in the broader scolding discourse. Arguments that allowing Trump to remain on the ballot represents a triumph of democracy rest on the tacit and false assumption that the man who engaged in insurrection once before to retain office will now simply run for office adhering to democratic norms, and would likewise govern in adherence to these norms. Regarding his new run for the presidency, the two most important norms that come to my mind are a willingness to accept the election results and a commitment to non-violent politics. Trump has already failed to meet either basic threshold. As part of his campaign, he has attempted to incite violence against his political enemies through dehumanizing and inflammatory language. Such inciting language must be given particular weight since he already once attempted to overthrow American democracy, in part by employing similar language.

More critically, though, by continuing to reject the 2020 election results, Trump is very clearly signaling that he will likewise reject the 2024 election results should they not go his way. In fact, this preemptive rejection of an adverse 2024 outcome forms a malevolent continuity with his denials around 2020, and should properly be seen as insurrectionary in nature. (And even if Trump were to declare that he will indeed accept the 2024 elections results, even if he loses — well, what reasonable person would assess such a declaration to be in any way believable? As Greg Sargent rightly points out, someone who broke his oath once cannot be trusted to follow his oath of fealty to the constitution again.) The likelihood, verging on near certainty, that Donald Trump would not hesitate to launch a second insurrection to regain office is the reality that the right and much of mainstream opinion would prefer to keep submerged (such efforts could range from recruiting GOP politicos to distort election results to the full-on deployment of violent resistance). And yet it is a reality that defenders of democracy, including Democrats, must acknowledge when considering how to discuss and support efforts to keep Donald Trump off the ballot for 2024. 

Beyond his predictable conduct in the upcoming election, Donald Trump’s stated intention to act in an unconstitutional, dictatorial manner if elected reinforces the applicability of the disqualification clause. It is true that future intent is not mentioned in the 14th amendment, but when you consider that Trump’s lawless presidency would merely take up where his failed coup began, you can grasp even more clearly why he should not be allowed on the ballot again.

Whether or not disqualification survives the Supreme Court gauntlet that awaits it, any reasonable sorting through the issues at play opens up a robust discussion of Trump’s insurrectionism and his fundamental disqualification from ever holding office again, even beyond the Constitution’s prohibitory language. From this perspective, such a dialogue is invaluable, and attempts to shut it down should be viewed as deeply suspect and ultimately rooted in a refusal to confront Trump’s insurrectionism in its malign totality.

To reiterate a point that seems to have gained traction in recent days: What was actually anti-democratic was Donald Trump trying to mount a coup to overturn the 2020 election. Failing to reckon with this fact leads critics of the 14th Amendment language to the logically absurd position that it is as anti-democratic to keep a known insurrectionist off the ballot as it is for that candidate to have committed insurrection in the first place. Many who oppose Trump but also question the 14th Amendment remedy tell us that the truly democratic solution is to beat Donald Trump in the 2024 election. But of course we know that Donald Trump can very well legally win the election by undemocratic means — by getting more votes in the Electoral College than in the popular vote. Indeed, this appears to be his most plausible path to victory, just as it turned out to be in 2016. For deeply recondite reasons, though, we are supposed to believe that the Constitution is to be followed if it allows Trump to win undemocratically, but is not to be followed when it undemocratically bans him for his insurrectionary acts.

The “disqualification is anti-democratic” angle would have us believe that it’s anti-democratic because millions of Americans would not be able to vote for their choice for president — but people making this case must necessarily ignore the other side of the equation: the ability of people who want to choose someone other than Trump to be able to make their choice as well.  As I noted above, the anti-democratic angle requires an assumption that, should Trump lose the election, the other candidate — presumably Joe Biden — would become the president, and democracy will have prevailed in substance as well as procedure. But the notion that Trump would simply concede if the major media call the election for Biden requires ignoring the reality of what happened in 2020 and the obviously authoritarian nature of Trump’s bid for another term in office.

If nothing else, the deliberately obfuscatory public discussion of whether the Constitution says that Trump should be banned from running again reveals the depths of denial regarding the threat of a third Trump candidacy. There can be little doubt that Trump’s campaign, when in full swing, will involve ever more explicit efforts to incite violence, destabilize the U.S. government, and sow doubt about the coming election results — in other words, to perpetuate the insurrection that Trump began in 2020 and which arguably never ended, but only went temporarily underground. Americans, very much including elected officials and those tasked with covering the news, face a stark choice: they can either address this unacceptable reality head on, or pretend either that it is not happening or is a reasonable form of democratic politics. The basic fact of Trump’s insurrectionism needs to be kept front and center as the 2024 campaign progresses; to abandon the discussion of the 14th Amendment’s disqualification provision to those who speak in bad faith or in deep denial of basic facts would be an unforced error on the part of democracy’s defenders.

Confidence Games

I want to circle back to a point I made in my last piece, but may have gotten a bit lost in the larger argument. I urged the Democrats to do much more to energize ordinary citizens to do what they can to counter the growing authoritarian threat from the right, and for Americans to get mad, not rattled, about the gang of MAGA radicals, Christian nationalists, and white supremacists who are coming for our freedoms and our peace. Luckily, over at The Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent offers a fully-articulated piece calling on people to not get overly spooked by the recent talk of a Trump dictatorship (while also acknowledging the reality of the danger we face). The whole post is well worth a read, and I wanted to call out a few particularly valuable points.

First, while I’ve been talking a lot about the need for the Democrats to do more to “rouse and rile” the public, Sargent reminds us that in the past few election cycles, pro-democracy activists have indeed been furiously and effectively organizing; moreover, the anti-MAGA coalition has had demonstrable success in pressing back against Trumpist politics in 2018, 2020, and 2022. These are heartening points — we are hardly starting from a dead stop when contemplating the efforts needed to win in 2024.

Another not-as-straightforwardly-heartening point Sargent makes is that the likeliest route to victory for Trump is not through winning a majority of the electorate, but essentially through the distortions of the Electoral College, remarking that, “In short, if Trump has a path to autocracy in United States, it probably would run through the counter-majoritarian features of our system at least as much as through alleged voter apathy about democracy. Yet all the hand-wringing about the autocratic threat rarely involves discussions of majoritarian reform.” His last point hits a favorite theme of mine — why on earth the Democrats and others aren’t fighting harder, right now, to move pro-democracy reforms to the top of the national agenda (check out this Jamelle Bouie piece about how structural issues of American government strengthen the MAGA minority)?

Finally, he makes the essential observation that not only is it inherently demoralizing to exaggerate Trump’s threat into one of inevitability, but also that projecting such an aura of inevitability is an established fascistic tactic of which Trump’s campaign appears well aware. Sargent tells us that, “The aim is to hypnotize voters into forgetting the power and numbers that they possess, persuading them that politics is a hopelessly sordid and disappointing exercise. But that is not the story of the Trump years.” We need to be wise to Trump’s head games; god knows we have no excuse not to be at this point.

I’ll end with pointing you to similar points made equally well by Brian Beutler at his new-ish Substack site Off Message, where he reminds us of the necessity of keeping our wits about us:

[T]here’s a perverse logic to it; if he’s promising to be “retribution” and liberals respond by quaking in their boots, it’s not unreasonable for passing observers to wonder whether Trump has valid scores to settle.

What I’d emphasize instead is that his designs are profoundly unpatriotic. They are the sadistic fantasies of a petty tyrant who genuinely believes that people who oppose him are vermin and need to be rooted out—also, deeply unpatriotic [. . .] But I think the anti-Trump movement will be likelier to succeed approaching that challenge in a dignified, unflinching way—confident that a large majority of Americans recognize a vindictive, unscrupulous degenerate like Trump should never have been president in the first place, and must never be president again.

Trump May Want to Be a Dictator, But He'd Be the GOP's Dictator

In recent weeks, there’s been an efflorescence of think pieces and news articles addressing the severe dangers should Donald Trump manage to return to the Oval Office. While many observers have long warned of the continuing danger posed by the former president, this batch is coming from more mainstream sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic magazine. This broader awakening is a cause for celebration — not because such warnings are a silver bullet bound to stop Trump, but because they hold the promise that both the voting public and the Democratic Party may be snapped out of any complacency in the face of the greatest constitutional threat since the Civil War. In this, the former president seems unexpectedly willing to help paint himself as a crazy extremist; as one observer noted after Trump tried to take ownership of the “dictator” label leveled at him, “The word ‘dictator’ is not likely to land well with the median swing voter who is disengaged from politics but will not be able to miss this characterization next year—with the accompanying sound bites to prove it.”

Yet there’s an enormous difference between sounding the alarm about Trump’s return to the presidency, and articulating strategies to make sure it doesn’t come to pass — the first without the second carries the risk of raising panic and disarray rather than action, granting agency to Trump while withholding it from the American majority that opposes him. Likewise, it’s important to get the warnings themselves right, and make sure the discussion encompasses not only Donald Trump but the larger reactionary movement of which he’s become the figurehead.

First, though, I want to praise and amplify the many good points that are made in recent articles. One particular strength is the way that various authors have sketched out, in nightmarishly credible detail, the means by which a re-elected Trump could use his administration to disassemble the rule of law without a great deal of trouble. The standout of these recent tocsin essays is Robert Kagan’s editorial in the Washington Post about the U.S.’s path towards Trumpian dictatorship. Kagan provides two invaluable services: he illustrates the powerful factors that make Trump’s victory in a third presidential election entirely plausible, and provides an airtight case as to the authoritarian nature of a second Trump stint in the Oval Office.

Kagan traces the factors running in the former president’s favor, including: his current dominant position in the primaries; the extreme likelihood that the GOP will coalesce around his candidacy; fractures in the Dem coalition and the presence of third-party candidates who might well siphon votes from Joe Biden; Trump’s sheen of credibility as a former president; a powerful right-wing media apparatus; a sour national mood; voter concerns about Biden’s advanced age; and Trump’s pose as an outsider who can cut through the logjams of the American political system. It’s a thorough and gut-punching list.

But Kagan saves his most savage accounting for what he sees as the likely nature of a second Trump presidency: nasty, brutish, and not at all short. With presidential powers pushed beyond their constitutional limits, Trump’s desire for retribution against his enemies would explode, abetted by his ability to defy and corrupt the justice system, replace bureaucrats with right-wing lackeys, and conscript the military into violently suppressing domestic dissent. As for the rest of the citizenry, Kagan takes a dim view of their reaction to a nation where the law might be distorted in such a way:

The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.

An even more exhaustive package of Trump warnings arrived in the form of an entire issue of The Atlantic, in which individual authors detail the inevitable corruption, anti-immigrant extremism, unfettered misogyny, and subversion of the rule of law in a second Trump term. And an overview by David Frum provides a complementary perspective to that of Kagan, with Frum writing that it “would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War [. . .] [T]he government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.” In other words, if Trump’s need for retribution somehow didn’t push him into lawlessness, his need to escape his own criminality, and to continue it unmolested, would drive the country towards dictatorship.

But as one looks at the various angles of a second Trump presidency that the Atlantic writers anticipate, a subtle but crucial distinction can be discerned — the awful things that Trump would do out of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, and the things Trump would do that are. . . actually GOP and right-wing priorities. Indeed, Kagan, Frum, and others make clear that the glue holding Trump’s schemes together would be the expected complicity and complaisance of the Republican Party, which would render congressional opposition a dead letter.

Sure, when we speak of Trump’s corruption, perhaps the desire of other GOP politicians to share in the loot would be a major motivator of their support. Widening the aperture, though, we can grasp that, no matter his personal inclinations towards dictatorship, a second Trump presidency would likely incorporate vast swaths of GOP doctrine and goals with which Trump is simpatico. For example — Trump is a misogynist, and his mere presence would have hugely malign effects for women across the nation. But at least equal to his moral enablement of abusers and misogynists everywhere would be his ability to appoint conservative GOP judges who oppose abortion rights and bureaucrats who oppose all manner of equal rights for women — actions not simply reflecting Trump’s bad character, but the anti-female ideology of the Republican right and of the MAGA base that is driving his candidacy.

This points to a more holistic and ultimately more helpful way of talking about, and warning about, the threat of Donald Trump. The GOP is not just randomly adhered to him through foolishness and cowardice — though many of the party’s politicos are in fact fools and cowards — but because in significant ways he would be doing what the Republican Party actually wants. This includes the implementation of radical anti-immigration measures; moves to impose Christianity as the de facto state religion; a desire to undermine hard-fought rights for women and sexual minorities; and an effort to promote white supremacy by eroding the civil rights and equality of minority Americans.

Likewise, we can see that even the more general threats embodied by Trump are hardly his goals alone. What is Trump’s threat to elections and democracy but a more exaggerated and personalized version of what the GOP has already done in state after state, where it has gerrymandered itself into permanent majorities? Aren’t we talking not just about the end of democracy, but the imposition of one-party rule by the Republican Party? Likewise, it is not entirely accurate to say that Trump would destroy the rule of law, so much as that he’d twist its application to favor not just himself but men, whites, and Christians. And to be clear, it’s not just the Republican Party’s interests Trump would represent, but the whole reactionary base that’s now driving the Trumpist GOP — a base motivated to a great extent by “anxiety that White, Christian preeminence is under threat from outsiders of different ethnic groups and creeds,” as CNN columnist Stephen Collinson neatly puts it.

Apart from the ideal of accuracy, why is it important to acknowledge the way that Trump is no rogue actor, but the embodiment of a reactionary movement that encompasses almost his entire political party and tens of millions of Americans? Isn’t Trump’s malevolent presence on the national stage persuasively bad enough on its own? Why muddy a clear message about an obviously degenerate politician (“he wants to be a dictator”) in favor of one that’s harder to encapsulate (“the United States faces a de facto insurrection by a reactionary crowd of white supremacists and Christian nationalists, led by the uniquely awful Donald Trump”)? Why shouldn’t the Democrats just make Trump, rather than Trump and the radicalized GOP, the focus of their 2024 campaign?

As strong as they are, Kagan’s and Frum’s essays provide some clues as to why skimping on this broader context ultimately hurts the defense of American democracy and the effort to defeat Trump. Notably, they both take for granted the abject surrender and spinelessness of the modern GOP to Trump — a sound assumption — yet neither fully addresses the obvious consonance between Trump’s apparent goals and those of the GOP. In Kagan’s piece, there’s a glaring omission when he talks of Trump targeting his political enemies and effectively cowing the rest of American through example. It seems far more likely that Trump would help unleash a tidal wave of oppression — both legal and violent — against particular hated groups, such as African-Americans, gays, and women.

But I think this level of specificity would run contrary to Kagan’s wish to issue a clarion call about Trump that keeps the focus on Trump and brings in potential allies, particularly on the right, who might be put off by talk of how the former president is a specific threat to non-whites and other groups. The hope that the tide may be turned by conservatives is confirmed in Kagan’s follow-up essay, in which he identifies strategies for stopping Trump — strategies that, in my humble opinion, place an awful lot of faith in members of the GOP breaking with him. As I already said, most GOP politicians don’t back Trump because they fear him — they back him because they agree with him. You can see this reflected in the words uttered by more than one Republican that it would be better to elect Trump than Biden, because they ultimately consider the Democrats a greater threat to the country — which, roughly translated, means that they’d rather have a violent-minded dictator who supports white supremacist and Christian nationalist values than a pro-democracy president whose re-election would mean the continued advance of a more egalitarian America (in terms of race, gender, and sexual identity).

For the American majority that opposes Trump — a heterogeneous group that encompasses America’s diversity of all kinds — the risk in overly concentrating the 2024 Democratic campaign on a vaguer “Trump is a dictator in waiting” line is that it appeals to this majority’s idealism, when the Democrats really also need to appeal even more to their self-interest.  And to appeal to their self-interest, not only do they have to remind people that democracy sustains their rights — they need to make clear how Trump represents a powerful minority of Americans who hate gays, believe women should be forced to deliver the babies of their rapists, think Latinos and African-Americans should be treated as second-class citizens, and are totally fine with banning Muslims and coercing fellow Americans into praying to their Christian god. In other words, they need to be reminded not simply that they should fear Trump, but that they should loathe and oppose the whole rotten movement behind him that seeks to move America back to the 19th century, not further forward into the 21st. The Democratic campaign must seek not only to gain their votes, but to mobilize them as an active movement that opposes, tooth and claw, what amounts to a white nationalist, far-right Christian insurrection against not just American democracy, but against our modern society itself.

The problem is not that the connections between Trump and this vast reactionary project are hidden — they’re very much in plain view. Rather, the problem is one of emphasis, particularly by the Democratic Party. I will put this as bluntly as I can: to the degree the Democratic Party fails to fully identify the threat of this broader reactionary movement — one that seeks to do harm to specific constituents of the Democratic Party — they are failing their voters and failing America.  To the degree the Democratic Party fails to alert the American majority to not just what Trump has in store for them, but what his thousands of political allies and millions of fervid supporters intend — they are failing their voters and failing America. To the degree the Democratic Party refuses to mobilize the American majority due to fears of creating unnecessary conflict in society — conflict that the GOP and the right have self-servingly stoked non-stop for many decades — they are failing their voters and failing America.

Trump’s best chance of election is to mobilize his own supporters with his increasingly fascistic and white power rhetoric, while the majority that opposes him is lulled into complacency by the lie that he doesn’t mean what he says, that he’s just an entertaining guy who speaks off the cuff who maybe deserves a second chance after the anxiety-filled Biden years. This is the danger of overly personalizing the race and making it too much about just Trump. Trump can try to hide his true intentions behind smokescreens of lies, and in fact is already enacting his usual defenses, appropriating the accusations made against him, and either flinging them back at his opponents, or trying to make them into a joke; but it’s a lot harder to hide an entire right-wing movement hellbent on returning America to the days when men were men, women were women, and minorities knew their place. The evidence for this movement can be found everywhere that the GOP has gained full governmental control — from Texas, where draconian anti-abortion laws mean that even women with a desperate medical need for the procedure must flee like criminals to other states that permit it, to Florida, which is targeting gay teachers and students, to the widespread extreme gerrymanders in state after state that deny fair representation to millions upon millions of Democratic-leaning voters.

Decent Americans shouldn’t be scared of Trump; they should be absolutely furious at the retrograde presumption of this whole violent-minded movement of which he is the obscene and discredited face. Likewise, no American casting a vote for Trump in 2024 should be able to claim ignorance of the hatred, violence, social destabilization, and wrecking-ball-to-democracy that they would thus endorse. Unlike in 2016 and 2020, the goals of Democrats must include making crystal clear the full stakes of the election, so that no American can bury their head in the sand.

But Democrats can’t just think about beating Trump in 2024; they need to think about rolling back, delegitimizing, and defeating for good an agglomeration of religious extremists, white supremacists, and anti-gay bigots that keeps on sabotaging American governance and society. It is beyond absurd that the forces of democracy and equality should behave as if they are on the defensive, even as we rightly acknowledge the virulence and extreme danger of the right-wing counterrevolution behind Trump. Every day that the Democrats are not talking about GOP extremism and pressing Trump and his allies to defend their indefensible positions is a day that they are conducting themselves like political losers. As Josh Marshall rightly notes in a recent piece advocating for a politics of Democratic initiative, expressing outrage at what Trump does ultimately accomplishes nothing — what counts is going on offense (his example of Biden’s need to propose a bill codifying abortion rights should he be re-elected is spot on). And I would add that going on offense also involves articulating and moving forward values supported by the American majority that’s opposed to Trump and the radicalized GOP.

In turn, speaking and acting in ways that activate the American majority to outrage and action is essential to winning this political battle — because this fight is not just against Trump, or GOP politicians, but against a whole political-social movement consisting of thousands of daily offenses and aggressions. Americans need to be reminded of how proud they should be about the advances we’ve all made towards greater equality and democracy that allow all a greater opportunity to thrive — and how these advances are threatened not just by Trump, but by a whole army of people who would deny them their basic rights, not to mention their basic humanity. In their workplaces, in their relationships, in their places of worship, Americans need to bear the light of this awareness, and push individually and in solidarity for a more just nation. It is far past time to rouse and rile the American majority to its own defense, and to send an unambiguous message that no rule but democratic rule will ever be accepted as legitimate in the United States.

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.”