Will a Growing Pro-Choice Tsunami Turn November Into a Blue Wave?

This past week should go far to settling the question of whether the issue of abortion rights will play a dominant role in the November elections. With the Arizona Supreme Court upholding a draconian 1864 state anti-abortion law (passed at a time when women couldn’t even vote), we’ve seen Donald Trump and other Republicans openly flail about to avoid a growing backlash against restrictions that the GOP itself has long worked to impose. But as Paul Waldman writes in a deeply clarifying essay about how abortion politics and public opinion have evolved since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the GOP has ended up making real the previously more abstract stakes of the abortion rights struggle. He observes that, “[i]n practical political terms, there are only two paths to take on abortion, one toward securing rights and one toward undermining them. The “middle” position means more restrictions that ultimately lead to abortion being outlawed. And we all know it.”

The reason “we all know it,” as he goes on to describe, is because powerful elements of the GOP have used the Dobbs decision to impose extreme limits on abortion, with real-world, devastating impacts on women’s health in multiple states. If before Dobbs the GOP could seek to gain advantage by rousing its base with promises to end abortion even as those in the middle and on the left had trouble believing that this right would ever go away, the aftermath of the Court decision has introduced the reality principle to American’s pro-choice majority.

And as this Washington Post analysis by Aaron Blake notes, Donald Trump’s attempt to find a safe space by averring that states can now do what they want on abortion and that what they do is always right is not exactly a brilliant strategic move. Rather than clearing Trump of responsibility for abortion restrictions, this position essentially links him to whatever bonkers limits that GOP state governments decide to impose. For instance, when Trump was asked if doctors should be punished for abortions, Trump said that it would be up to the states. It is difficult to believe (and this is backed up by polls) that Americans are eager to start jailing physicians around the country, yet Trump’s “states’ rights” logic leads him to take no clear stand on such a damaging question for himself and the GOP. As Blake writes, “It’s one thing to say states should handle policy; it’s another to provide basically no judgment on what is acceptable policy [. . .] The fact is that leaving this to the states — some very red — is likely to lead, and has led, to policies that the national Republican Party would rather not account for.”

I don’t doubt that the Trump campaign and the broader GOP will continue to cast about for an abortion message that they believe will minimize the damage to the party’s election prospects. But not only are they fighting against an actual reality they themselves created (as Waldman makes clear), they are also stuck with a uniquely tarnished party leader where this issue is concerned. Not only is Donald Trump the person most responsible for the destruction of abortion rights — a responsibility which Trump himself has repeatedly and loudly proclaimed — he is also obviously untrustworthy on this topic and thus likely unable to sway pro-choice opinion even if he stumbles upon the ever-elusive right thing to say. Both Jamelle Bouie and Josh Marshall hammer this point home in recent pieces, which when paired with the undeniable fact of abortion restrictions the GOP itself is implementing around the country simply leaves the party very little room to maneuver.

But why should Republicans even expect to have room to maneuver? The GOP accomplished its long-time anti-abortion policy goal of overthrowing Roe v. Wade through a combination of persistence and Supreme Court norm-breaking, and have made it a part of our shared reality, to the great detriment of the causes of freedom, equality, and women’s bodily autonomy. The problem for Republicans is that their success is deeply, seismically unpopular, and in fact is likely to grow still more unpopular as stories of pregnant women suffering and dying due to lack of abortion access become more widespread. The basic truth of the matter is that religious extremists, on and off the Supreme Court, have imposed on millions of Americans a theological vision of life and reproduction, with predictably catastrophic consequences for ordinary Americans. It does not help the Republican cause that major elements within the GOP want to further restrict abortion access, with the ultimate goal of federal legislation that would effectively outlaw the procedure, with all the compounding chaos such “success” would produce. 

I don’t think we should underestimate the amount of damage the GOP’s immoral anti-abortion position may yet inflict on the party — a vulnerability that has been hidden to date by an unhealthy mainstream media focus on horse race presidential polling that tells us very little about how things will shake out in November. Not only has the Republican Party’s success shown itself to in fact be unpopular and repressive, but the GOP is ultimately at the mercy of a man who has no compunctions about lying and dissimulating about the abortion issue. The GOP’s continued attempts to scam its way out of the abortion trap it has set for itself seem just as likely to produce the opposite of the intended effect, leading Americans to turn even more strongly against the evisceration of women’s reproductive rights as the GOP shows that it doesn’t even have the fortitude to stand by its own policy wins. 

In turn, the fact that GOP gains on the anti-abortion front are actually a tremendous liability for the party should remind us that while it is still likely that the November presidential election will be close, it is also within the realm of possibility that the party is vulnerable to a more significant loss at the presidential and other levels. The Biden campaign’s apparent understanding that they must implacably tie Trump to the Dobbs decision and the mayhem that has followed signals that the president understands this vulnerability and is more than willing to exploit it.

But this fight goes beyond political maneuvering and the scoring of points, which is why it’s both so important that Democrats press the pro-choice attack and unsparingly condemn the GOP’s medieval attitudes. The attack on abortion rights reveals a larger GOP animus towards women, a view of them as fundamentally second-class citizens whose control over their own bodies must yield to the judgment of men who know better. In vowing to restore the right to abortion torn away by the evisceration of Roe, the Democrats are also fighting for a fundamental equality among Americans, regardless of gender. Most Americans intuit this point; the Democrats only stand to gain by making it more explicit and denying the GOP the false piety in which the party cloaks its misogynistic anti-abortion crusade.

Will Anti-Abortion "Success" Help Pop the GOP's Long Propaganda Con?

Here at The Hot Screen, we’re always on the lookout for analyses that help Americans understand the underlying dynamics and stakes of our political conflicts — to use one of my favorite metaphors when talking about this topic, we’re basically flying blind if we try to process the daily blasts of news and propaganda without a proper context for understanding it. Over at Flux, Matthew Sheffield has written a timely essay that fits this bill — not only does it provide a succinct overview of long-standing Republican strategies for advancing their unpopular political goals, but it also argues that the party’s apparent success in overturning Roe v. Wade is now threatening these heretofore successful strategies.

Sheffield discusses two basic strategies that the GOP has long relied on to advance its unpopular ideas and defeat the Democrats’ more popular ones — painting the Democrats as “extreme” while lying about the GOP’s own goals to hide the party’s radicalism. Meanwhile, “moderate” Republicans are trotted out to represent the GOP in the media, even as they are in fact far from the radicalized heart of the Republican Party. At the same time, the GOP pushes the few items for which it does plausibly have majority support — such as immigration — while otherwise relying on a conservative judiciary to implement policy goals it can’t pass through majority votes.  This rule-by-judicial-fiat approach has grown into a staggering success as a Supreme Court with a conservative super-majority has embarked on rolling back long-standing precedents that could never have been reversed legislatively. The most notable of these, of course, is the recent Dobbs decision that eliminated a federal right to an abortion.

But this is where the plot thickens and cracks begin to appear in the GOP’s interlocking political strategies — because, as Sheffield reminds us, GOP-controlled state governments around the country have now imposed draconian bans on abortion that fully embody and advertise the GOP’s extremism in a way that can’t really be dissembled away. This state-level campaign against abortion is happening even as the congressional GOP has so far refrained from pressing for new anti-abortion legislation at the federal level. In this way, we can see the GOP’s attempts to obscure its anti-abortion extremism starting to come apart at the seams, with state Republican parties lacking any compunction about letting their anti-abortion freak flags fly. Indeed, this open extremism has already led to a real-world backlash, as multiple red states have passed ballot initiatives protecting abortion rights (there is also good evidence that concern over abortion rights helped the Democrats exceed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections).

And as Sheffield describes, recent events in Arizona acutely demonstrate how previously-successful GOP tactics meant to hide the party’s anti-abortion extremism continue to falter in the post-Dobbs world:

In anticipation of the Dobbs ruling, state Republicans passed a bill in March of 2022 which banned most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy which included language explicitly stating that it did not repeal a much older 1864 law, enshrined in Section 13-3603 of the state code, which banned the procedure in all circumstances except to save the life of a mother.

[. . .] Arizona Republicans were trying to follow the national model in getting unelected judges to impose their most radical viewpoints on the public without having to actually legislate them. On Tuesday, the Republican-dominated state supreme court gave them exactly what they wanted in a ruling that correctly noted that the 2022 law “does not independently authorize abortion,” meaning that the original 1864 provision would be enforceable.

Republican legislators in Arizona used long-standing GOP tactics of employing the courts to insulate themselves from their extremism — but as anyone who’s been following recent news can attest, the strategy has backfired this time, as it simply looks like the Arizona GOP consists of anti-abortion zealots whose extremism has led them to support a crackpot law passed so long ago that women couldn’t even vote yet.

Not insignificantly, the Arizona dust-up also tripped up Donald Trump, as he opined that in the post-Dobbs world, particular abortion restrictions are at the discretion of each individual state. In other words, as many observers have pointed out, abortion restrictions can now be as strict as Republican legislators choose to make them — a situation that Trump is trying to play up as a just and perfect scenario of states’ rights triumphing, but which most American will rightly see as a license for extremism that directly implicates the GOP. Strikingly, gone is the cover of “the courts made the decision and we are just following their wise strict constructionism”: we are now in a world where, in the words of the GOP’s own presidential candidate, state legislators can do whatever they want where abortion is concerned. 

Sheffield notes that Trump is still engaging in the pre-existing GOP tactic of lying about Democratic extremism (Democrats want to abort babies even after they’re born) even as he tries to whitewash whatever extremist legislation GOP-controlled states pass as the essence of democratic justice. It’s worth remarking that this sort of GOP propaganda is likewise faltering in the face of the post-Dobbs reality, where Americans are able to see with their own eyes that it is Republican laws that are causing real-world mayhem, not fictional Democratic laws causing imaginary harm. In such a situation, Republican propaganda can even become self-defeating, as the distance between the party’s claims and obvious reality becomes grotesquely wide. Canny opponents of the Republican agenda should emphasize this gulf, which not only can help reveal actual GOP positions but also the party’s deep contempt for the average voter, who is conceived of more as a mark to be manipulated than a fellow citizen to be persuaded.

In a broader sense, this growing space between GOP lies and American reality is an object lesson in why it would behoove Democrats to describe Republicans’ strategies of dissimulation and slander far more frequently, in order to prime ordinary citizens to find for themselves examples of this GOP strategy in action. Once seen, I believe, its workings can’t be easily unseen. In the realm of abortion rights and women’s equality, for instance, GOP insistence that Democrats are murdering unborn children sounds increasingly absurd in light of the growing number of real-world examples of women whose health has been put at risk due to Republicans’ frenzy of new abortion restrictions. Absent a media apparatus sufficient to counter the massive bullhorn of the right wing, Democrats should at least invest more effort into helping the public understand the workings of GOP propaganda.

As Sheffield concludes, abortion isn’t the only issue where the GOP is wildly out of step with majority opinion, but it’s a crucial one, arguably one of the central political conflicts of our time. Abortion has long been a proxy for fights about gender equality, as well as the role of religion in public life, and so has ramifications far beyond the already vital question of whether a woman is able to exercise autonomy over her own body. Expose the GOP’s lies and propaganda around this issue, and the ensuring clarity may help illuminate many of the Republican Party’s other unpopular initiatives as well.

The Alpha and Omega of the Case Against Trump

Over and over again during the past few years, I’ve tried to describe how Donald Trump’s orchestration of the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol renders him permanently unfit to hold any level of power in this country (and not just me - this has been an unwavering aim of many reporters, writers, and politicians since then). For myself, this has branched into dissections of a growing authoritarianism throughout the Republican Party, the failure of the Democratic Party to adequately confront the GOP’s violent threats, and criticism of the media for underplaying the dangers facing the United States.

I’ll admit that throughout this time, I’ve been plagued by a sense that if I and others could just write clearly and directly enough, it could change the public dialogue and bend the nation markedly away from the dangers of Trumpism. A recent letter from the editor at Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer has reminded me that this is not just a pipe dream — that despite the passage of time and the constant efforts by the GOP and the right to propagandize away Donald Trump’s insurrection, there are still effective ways to talk about that day and why he should never be president again.

Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn wrote his piece in response to reader criticisms of the paper’s coverage of Donald Trump — essentially allegations that the paper is unfairly reporting on Trump and downplaying allegedly worse behavior by President Biden. After making clear that his intent is not to anger or belittle such readers by writing his response, Quinn lays down the line:

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo zeroed in on, Quinn’s appeal to the evidence of our own senses is the burning core of his letter. In doing so, Quinn provides an essential reminder that the reality of Donald Trump’s offense against America is as plain as the hand that each of us holds up before our face. On January 6, we all literally saw an insurrection play out in real time, complete with Donald Trump as the warlord of the marauding white nationalist hordes who refused to withdraw until Trump reluctantly commanded them to do so. Americans don’t even need opinion columnists or politicians to tell them what happened. It was as obvious as a thing can be.

There are dozens of potent arguments for why Donald Trump is unfit for power. But I think Quinn reminds us, as much as anyone possibly can, that there is a stark and overriding simplicity to the choice facing the American people. We all saw Donald Trump try to violently overthrow our government (this is of course in addition to the many illegal and nonviolent efforts he undertook to reverse the election results). You can either accept this, or deny it. But those who deny it are doing so by denying reality, or because they agree with Trump’s attempted coup to install himself in power against the will of America’s voters.

Behind Quinn’s plain statement of the facts is the proposition that most Americans, perhaps even a decisive majority, can be trusted to believe the evidence of their own senses when faced with an undeniable rupture in the nature of our government and society. Propaganda can try to dissuade people, or cloud their perceptions, but it can only do so much against the vivid facts of that day. Trump’s actions are so self-incriminating, so damning, that at some level, no more really needs to be said except to remind people to trust themselves. Fundamentally democratic and deeply moral, it is difficult to improve on Quinn’s appeal.

There are undoubtedly many reasons why Donald Trump has placed intimations of violence at the center of his re-election campaign — so much so that I’ve been arguing he’s not running a re-election campaign so much as a second insurrection — but a central reason he is doing so is because of the non-deniability of his January 6 attempt to overthrow the government. At a basic level, he knows that we know what happened that day — and like fellow thugs across time, his response has been to double down on his previous threats, to essentially tell us that he will happily engage in violence once again in order to try to get his way. Trump doesn’t even bother to pretend that he didn’t engage in violence before; in this way, he further confirms Americans’ understanding of what happened on January 6, while demonstrating that he will unleash more violence if Americans once again reject him.

Learning to Play Offense on Immigration

Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch’s column on the Baltimore bridge collapse is a fantastic snapshot of how this tragedy reveals so much about the contemporary state of American society and politics. He notes how many on the right immediately re-purposed the accident to attack familiar targets like diversity equity inclusion policies, the purported incompetence of any minority group member who happens to hold a position of power, and immigration. If nothing else, such a reaction from the right helps confirm what’s been a central focus of The Hot Screen for years now — the centrality of white supremacist thinking to the contemporary, MAGA-fied GOP. This is a party and a right-wing media machine primed to vomit out the message, over and over and over, that American is under assault by darker-skinned citizens as well as dark-skinned immigrants, and that these groups should be blamed for basically every bad thing that ever happens.

Bunch rightly takes a scalpel to the surfeit of MAGA mud to reveal a contradictory truth settled inside the plain reality of the accident — the 6 immigrant men who tragically died in the accident put a spotlight on the central role that immigrants play in sustaining the larger American economy. And taking a humanizing look at those who were killed provides a potent reminder that the average immigrant to the U.S. is someone who works their ass off, makes sacrifices most native citizens could barely conceive of, and works for the common good in a way that is frankly incomprehensible to the right-wing commentators who can only think to divide and undermine the United States.

Bunch’s coverage helps remind us that the Republican’s anti-immigration stance is largely one long con, using lies about immigrants stealing American jobs and being inherently criminal in order to support a racist vision of American where only white citizens are to be considered fully legitimate. GOP sabotage of the recent bipartisan immigration bill has, as many have pointed out, revealed the party’s fundamental lack of interest in actually solving any issues at the border or with immigration administration more generally, as the party instead prefers to foment a sense of crisis that neatly supports extremist, Great Replacement theory rhetoric that the U.S. is being invaded by Latin hordes seeking to displace white (true) Americans.

Of course, Bunch doesn’t have a patent on telling the truth about immigration. Democrats could tell a similar history as he does if they were so inclined, instead of too often seeing defense of immigration as a liability where their best hope is to fight the GOP to a draw or acceptable loss. It should be clear at this point that the Republicans are not basing their opposition on reality, but on an irrational though motivating story that ultimately needs to be countered by a positive, reality-based narrative about immigration’s benefits to America. 

Republican National Committee Interview Question Makes Insurrectionism a Sinister Job Requirement

A Washington Post headline calls it “an unusual turn,” but the fact that interviewees for jobs at the Republican National Committee are reportedly being asked if they think the 2020 election was stolen may be one of the least surprising facts of this news week. But though it’s unsurprising, it’s no less ominous, as it’s further evidence that Donald Trump is not running a presidential campaign so much as an insurrection disguised as a presidential campaign. By making his lies about purported Democratic treason in 2020 a litmus test for joining the RNC, Trump aims to make insurrectionism central to the party’s formal structure. It should never be considered anything but utterly disqualifying that Donald Trump has placed at the center of his re-election campaign the idea that he did nothing wrong in attempting a coup to stay in office based on the lie that the presidency was stolen from him. The myth of a stolen election is the fantasy on which his stance of innocence rests; by claiming an imaginary crime against America (and against himself), Trump licensed himself to commit any manner of real-world crimes (including violence) to re-gain power. January 6 and its accompanying offenses is the prime example of such criminality, but it would be naive to think that he isn’t prepared to commit even more in order to re-gain the White House and avoid the accountability that is still coming for him.

While asking prospective employees the question about a stolen election is also clearly a way for Trump to try to assure himself that the RNC only hires MAGA loyalists (or that those hired know they must adhere to even the most extreme tenets of the MAGA line), we can’t ever lose sight of the basics here. Those who reject the 2020 election results despite any evidence of fraud are not misinformed or blindly partisan: they are rejecting the results of a democratic election while offering the flimsiest veneer of plausible deniability. 

At this point, unquestioning acceptance of the conceit that millions of Americans truly believe the 2020 election was stolen has become a central way for the media and Democrats to avoid reckoning more directly with the more ominous situation it hides: that millions of Americans have decided they don’t accept election results when they disagree with them. While not openly insurrectionary, as the vast majority of these people don’t reject Joe Biden’s authority as president (for instance, refusing to obey laws that he’s signed), it is nonetheless more than a matter of supposedly believing lies. When an ordinary person chooses to believe something to be false, when that thing has been established to be true by long-established, transparent standards, then that person is simply choosing to reject reality. In this case, of course, the reality being rejected is the idea that the presidential candidate who wins the Electoral College then becomes president. For an ordinary (i.e., non-politician) citizen, this is a lazy person’s insurrectionism, enabling a posture of righteous opposition to democratic rule without its adherents having to reckon with, or act on, the full consequences of their position. But for true insurrectionists like Donald Trump, it is nonetheless an enormous assist, providing mass support for truly heinous actions rooted in lawlessness and a will to power.

How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Explanatory Framework of Deep Political Conflicts

I recently shared my excitement about a formulation by Michael Podhorzer that the “2024 election is not a contest between two politicians, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a de facto constitutional referendum.” Podhorzer was pointing to the decisive choice that faces Americans in November: whether to vote for a president who will maintain and defend American democracy as most of us have experienced it, or to vote for a man dedicated to tearing down constitutional government in the name of both personal aggrandizement and the regressive goals of the right-wing MAGA coalition. Among other things, this framework reminds us that the stakes of this election are far starker than whether or not to reward the incumbent with another term in office, and that it goes far beyond individual personalities to the basic question of what sort of country we wish to be. This is a perspective, I believe, that can grab Americans’ attention and swing votes to the Democrats.

In recent weeks, two other keen observers of American politics have detailed similar views of the 2024 elections. At the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that, “Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.” Bouie describes the Democratic coalition as wanting “what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.” In contrast, he writes of the Republican coalition that, “Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics [. . .] if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the actual goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to rule over others.”

I think Bouie is right about the drive for domination behind the MAGA coalition, but he doesn’t go into detail in this piece about who composes this coalition or what they want, although he crucially suggests a connection between Trump’s plans to subordinate the federal government to his personal whims and this larger movement’s desire to subordinate the American majority to its predilections. But historian Thomas Zimmer provides a great complementary take to Bouie’s, writing that “the election in November is effectively a referendum on whether the experiment of multiracial, pluralistic democracy – however flawed it may still be at this current moment – should be allowed to continue or be aborted entirely.” He elaborates a little later: “Should the democratic experiment be continued and America be pushed towards realizing its promise of egalitarian multiracial pluralism – or should a radicalizing minority of white reactionaries be allowed to impose its vision on the country with the help of a vindictive autocrat in power?” Here and elsewhere, Zimmer is explicit that the threat comes from a movement of white Christian reactionaries who will oppose democracy itself for the sake of maintaining traditional hierarchies of power.

To be crystal clear: Democrats and other opponents of Trump and the MAGA movement should be talking about the fundamental racial, religious, and economic conflicts of American society because they form so much of the underlying reality that has led to Republican radicalization, so that you literally cannot understand American politics without acknowledging these fissures. Among other things, they clarify why the 2024 election is fundamentally a contest between those who want to destroy democracy in favor of right-wing beliefs and those who believe that the majority should be able to steer the country forward based on majority values. But talking about what is real and fundamental also has all sorts of beneficial, practical consequences that we can easily trace. 

For instance, with Biden’s popularity uncomfortably low and many otherwise loyal Democrats worried about the president’s ability to run a sufficiently vigorous re-election campaign, the argument that this election is much bigger than either candidate should benefit the Democrats to the degree that it helps take lingering focus off of Biden’s imperfections, persistent frustrations over inflation, and a vague post-pandemic social malaise. This doesn’t mean that Democrats should stop trying to highlight Trump’s personally authoritarian goals, but it does mean that they should make an effort to connect Trump’s plans to dominate the federal government with the many ways he would use that corrupt power to further the ends of religious extremists, Christian nationalists, and others (a topic I wrote about recently here). The goals of his right-wing supporters under a second Trump administration would surely include measures to attack the freedoms and dignity enjoyed by millions of Americans viewed as outside the social contract, whether they be non-Christian, female, gay, or non-white. Trump’s delusions of power are scary; the entire MAGA movement’s delusions of power on top of Trump’s are scarier still. Americans can certainly process the fact that Trump is both corrupt on his own and the willing enabler of the toxic movement that supports him; making the contest overly about Trump could needlessly exclude vast additional reasons to support the Democrats in the upcoming elections.

I’m struck once again by how much the MAGA movement is aided by awareness of its own unity, its own common goals. This is not something that I’d want the left to emulate in its specifics — after all, this unity is based on white supremacism, Christian chauvinism, and a fascistic belief in Trump as a strongman figure who will bring redemption through violence and retribution. But it would go some way to righting this imbalance if the American majority were to become more fully aware of the conflict that the right sees so clearly. After all, despite the right’s supposed obsession with freedom, what the MAGA movement ultimately seeks is to exercise its own controversial notions of freedom and morality by taking away actual freedom from other Americans. In a dizzying twist, the ability of Americans who compose the country’s majority to live their lives as they see fit is to be opposed, on the grounds that their free choices are actually an infringement on the freedom of the MAGA constituents. When this consequence of America’s fundamental clash of values becomes better understood, and the mentality that leads to MAGA gunning for millions of American simply trying to live their lives becomes more prominent in the national conversation, I think MAGA may start to finally understand that they’re not the only people who value being left alone to go about their business.

I’ve been emphasizing a cultural or values clash between the reactionary MAGA movement and the more modern-minded American majority that plays out in the realm of civil rights, but I want to end by revisiting Jamelle Bouie’s observations about the contrasting economic visions of the GOP and the Democrats. In the piece I quoted above, Bouie notes that a second Trump administration wouldn’t just involve an authoritarian centralization of power, but “would also be about the concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.” This would come about not only through efforts to cut taxes for the rich, but also by attempts to gut programs like Medicaid and even Social Security. Bouie contrasts this with traditional Democratic coalition interest in “government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.”

But rather than being a wholly separate conflict, these opposing economic goals overlap and reinforce the cultural clash we are experiencing. While the Republican obsession with cutting taxes for the rich and doubling down on trickle-down economics reflects that the GOP is in important ways a coalition between the wealthy and social conservatives, we also need to acknowledge that the GOP’s quest to starve the government of resources runs in tandem with its wish for a government deeply limited in its capacity to actually improve Americans’ lives in concrete, material ways. Indeed, one of the reasons I’d argue that the GOP’s turn to authoritarianism has deep precedents in more “traditional” Republicanism is the way the party has long made the case that the government — our own democratically elected government — is actually the enemy of the American people, to be viewed as a hostile bureaucratic entity somehow divorced from majority rule.

Today, GOP opposition to policies that help Americans in their daily existence — whether it’s health care, debt relief for college students, or childcare funding — should be seen not only as symptoms of a “small government” ideology, but as also how Republicans materially undermine Americans’ ability to be free to live their lives as they see fit. On so many fronts, without government support, Americans are left to fend for themselves, or avail themselves of market solutions they can ill afford. And so graduating seniors must choose between self-fulfillment through college degrees and the life-hampering burden of massive debt; budding entrepreneurs hesitate to found new companies lest they lose their health care coverage based on their current employment; and women who wish to work find they can’t afford the childcare that would allow them to pursue their professional dreams. Yet long-standing GOP fears that disfavored groups (non-Christian, non-white) might benefit from government programs helps lead the party to oppose policies that would help all Americans, MAGA supporters as well as dyed-blue Democrats — plus, of course, more spending on ordinary people means fewer tax cuts for the rich. If the wrong people might be more free, then none should be more free.

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.