An Unconventional Convention Aimed to Rouse a Strong American Majority

Last week’s Democratic National Convention did not give us a vague or gauzy vision of America — it got right to the business of promoting equality, freedom, diversity, solidarity, patriotism, and an open-ended future. By offering up such a vision, the Democrats presented themselves as the party of normalcy, and unapologetically asserted their status as America’s majority party, open to all. The overall effect was to showcase a nation that is vitally alive and ready to move forward.

This was a convention that also took pains to remind viewers that democracy is not a spectator sport. It took a politically astute non-politician drive this point home most spectacularly, as Michelle Obama spoke in no-nonsense, evocative language about what much of the Democratic base has been fearing as well as hoping for. In acknowledging worries that festered as Biden seemed doomed to defeat, she helped her audience process those fears, let them go, and embrace more fully a spirit of hope. In turn, she tempered this hope with a fundamental sense of reality and agency, essentially reminding everyone that our political future is in all of our hands, and that we should be resilient in the face of inevitable down days ahead. 

But it was Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech that most thoroughly tied together the thematic threads laid out over the preceding days. Most strikingly in my opinion, by so explicitly identifying herself as the child of immigrants, she took direct aim at what Donald Trump sees as his greatest electoral bludgeon — the incitement of hatred of immigrants that he is betting is shared by sufficient numbers of Americans to put him in office. Harris was not just saying that he is wrong to do so — she was essentially putting her own example forth as a way to identify how Trump’s stance would have us collectively erase vast swaths of contribution and vitality on the basis of, when all is said and done, a repulsive white supremacism that would see the U.S. deprived of its greatness in exchange for plainly sick ideas of racial hierarchy. In doing so, she asserted ideas of American identity and freedom that are foundational to a liberal vision of America: the concept that we are all equal, that we should be free to follow our dreams, and that being American is not rooted in blood and ancestry, but in adherence to certain ideas and solidarity with the American community.

At the same time, Harris leaned full into her prosecutorial past and persona, but in a way that tied it to commonly held values, middle class roots, feminism, and service of the public interest. In other words, she didn’t just come across as tough, she came across as righteously so, in a way that ordinary Americans would respect and admire. She left us with the idea that this is the sort of person who should be president — all the more so when contrasted with the documented lawlessness, immorality, and fundamentally self-serving nature of her opponent. 

As others have noted, Harris’s speech aimed not only to rally the Democratic base, but to appeal to swing voters and even those who would not typically vote for Democrats. But as Greg Sargent crucially notes, her talk about border security, the January 6 insurrection, and the U.S.’s role as an advocate for democracy in the world made no concessions to Trumpism; indeed, as Sargent puts it, “In numerous ways, Harris portrayed the broad MAGA worldview as something in need of comprehensive repudiation.” For me, her sternest signal of this was the way she held the line on Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, making clear that the attack on the Capitol was simply unforgivable. Given that Donald Trump has placed the rightness of January 6 at the center of his campaign, including his extremely unpopular promise to free the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol building, reinforcing this red line regarding Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office was crucial for Harris, and for the nation.

For a long time, I’ve argued that the Democrats should embrace the reality that they’re not in normal democratic competition with the authoritarian MAGA movement, and need not just to defeat it at the polls but to destroy it as a political force. After all, when you’re always one election loss away from your opponents using their win to overthrow free and fair elections, you really can’t call the situation normal or tenable. This is easier said than done, of course, and I’ve never been able to settle on a fully satisfactory strategy for how this could happen. After all, what does it mean to “destroy” a movement whose power ultimately comes from (awful) ideas?  So I have over time settled on figuring out ways to delegitimize Trump and the GOP in the eyes of the American public. Watching the Democrats assert values like community, freedom, and equality as normal and mainstream, claim the mantle as the defenders of these values, and paint the GOP as abnormally opposed to these values, I think we all witnessed what such a process of delegitimization can look like in action.

Finally, in the wake of the convention, we’re in a phase of American politics when Democrats and pro-democracy voters need to studiously ignore media narratives that try to fit what’s going on with the Democratic Party into a box, such as the eager insistence that Harris’s momentum will soon stall. If you are feeling excitement that you are part of something far larger than yourself, then that is a precious thing that you should hold onto, share, and encourage in others. That feeling is in fact a completely legitimate and necessary part of conducting democratic politics. Likewise, the sense of possibility that many millions are — collectively — feeling is close to the essence of democracy, the idea that in some immeasurable way we can all get to somewhere better if we stick together. A case might be made that part of our ongoing political crisis is in part due to too many people unconsciously adopting a sober-minded, analytical perspective that too closely mirrors the political media, but that really fails to capture what democratic life is about in its entirety.

As Democrats Learn to Trust Feelings Again, Let's Second that Emotion

For the pro-democracy majority, the last month of American politics has been not only dizzying but exhilarating. Months of gut-clenched gloom as President Joe Biden seemed unable to make his case against Trump (both pre- and post-debate) were swept away by Kamala Harris’ quick, joyful emergence as his successor, the emotional volatility among the Democratic base enough to launch a thousand future mass psychology studies.

But as Anand Giridharadas observes in an intriguing new piece, the changes in the Democratic presidential campaign that have inspired waves of optimism among voters aren’t just a result of the candidate switch. Alongside Harris’s ascension, he sees a new style becoming dominant among Democratic campaign strategists and decision-makers, one that has traded a more staid and traditional approach to political communication for an active, multi-pronged engagement with voters. He identifies several key elements, including storytelling, understanding the importance of attracting and maintaining attention, and mobilizing the base as a way of bringing on board moderate voters instead of aiming campaigns squarely at (often unpersuadable, sometimes imaginary) median voters.

But one element above all others strikes me as the single most important: emotion. Giridharadas often seems to be speaking about the importance of appealing to the heart, not just the mind, and emotional engagement is the through-line linking several of the elements he identifies. Storytelling? There’s no decent political storytelling that doesn’t connect emotionally. Working to command people’s attention? Appealing to the emotions will always be key here. Making cultural connection, whether through art or campaign tchotchkes like some as-yet-undefined response to the MAGA baseball hat? Once again, emotional engagement would like a word. Even “reclaiming,” which Giridharadas describes as an effort by Democrats to take back from the Republicans ideas like patriotism and freedom, involves invoking profound emotions as much as profound ideas. 

Full disclosure: I may be somewhat predisposed to focus on the centrality of emotion in the Democratic strategy changes that Giridharadas outlines. Over the past several years, I’ve repeatedly lamented the disparity between the GOP’s willingness to provoke the most extreme and dangerous sorts of emotionality among its base, on the one hand, and the Democrats’ reluctance to fully rouse their base, on the other. This has been most striking in the Democrats’ general eagerness to move on from the Trump years, even as the GOP continued to radicalize against democracy and to promote ever more extreme ideas, such as the notion that impoverished immigrants crossing the southern border actually constitute an invasion. The Democrats’ aversion to riling up their own base by fully alerting voters to the latent violence and authoritarian lunacy issuing from the Republican Party has been deeply frustrating to witness. At worst, it struck me as not only self-defeating but a dereliction of duty, leaving the American majority demoralized and unprepared to face the greatest internal threat to our democracy since the Civil War. To my mind, if the Democrats couldn’t figure out how to inspire voters, they could at least motivate them to the polls by scaring the bejesus out of them with visions of MAGA.

For an aversion to emotional appeals was also on display as Democrats shied not only from articulating a vision of a multiracial, egalitarian society to counter the white supremacist, misogynistic nightmares of the GOP, but also from encouraging Americans to celebrate and draw inspiration from the great progress we have already made in establishing such a society. Such choices were especially striking given what I believe are the powerful and positive feelings of accomplishment, pride, and hope that are, to be blunt, Americans’ due reward for the better society towards which we have collectively tended. Giving ourselves credit where credit is due is key to an attitude of optimism towards the future, and to building a durable pro-democracy majority. 

Reading through Giridharadas’s take on what’s changed in Democratic thinking, I see some preliminary answers as to why it took so long for Democrats to start doing what, to many of us, has been the right and obvious approach all along. He rightly points to the dominance of a mindset that prioritizes dry discussions of policy over grander narrative, an attitude that to me seems rooted in inertia and personal habits of mind among many Democratic pols. Giridharadas also notes that some Democrats actively disdained more emotionally-rooted appeals in reaction to the unbridled emotionality of Trump and the right, as if this fundamental distinction between the two sides needed to be maintained lest the pathologies of the MAGA movement infect the Democrats — as if the only emotions to be roused were the darker spirits of anger and resentment. 

In Democrats’ defense, the way that primal emotions like hate and resentment have come to dominate the GOP means that Democrats have not been entirely crazy to worry about fighting fire with fire. After all, the GOP is Exhibit A for showing what happens when the darkest impulses come to possess an entire political party, as the most extreme attitudes and politicians have driven out any remaining GOP “moderation,” as a faction of right-wing wackos have become kingmakers in the Republican House caucus, and as a degenerate insurrectionist has claimed the GOP presidential nomination for the third time in a row.

But it is equally true that such bleak attitudes and emotions throughout the GOP did not emerge and develop out of nowhere, but rather have been assiduously cultivated by unscrupulous politicians and commentators for literally decades. For example, many members of the Republican base may have harbored worries about demographic change that threatened the status of white Americans, but it has been right-wing politicians and media that have assiduously inflamed such insecurities and prejudice into outright hatred of immigrants and minorities.

But the deliberate perversion of existing, inchoate sentiment into authoritarian passions on the right can also help remind us that acknowledgment and cultivation of mass feeling, when conducted in a healthier, ethical fashion, can also be a powerful pro-democratic force. When you listen to and validate what people are feeling, you are better positioned for their lived, emotional realities to inform your politics (both in terms of policy and rhetoric) — you are more responsive to their needs. For instance, in a time like ours, when much of the population feels worry and anxiety about the direction of the country, strong and moral leadership can help them identify grounds for optimism and solidarity. Giridharadas himself rightly zeroes in on this general concept when he observes that the new thinking in the Democratic Party says that they should “seek to compete with fascists for the emotional life of people, that you must take an organizer’s approach to helping people process a bewildering age and the dislocations of change and the resentments that come with progress and the pain of capitalist predation.”

This gives us a framework for understanding some of what may have been happening with the Democratic base and other Democratic-leaning voters emotionally since Harris took her place as the party’s presumptive nominee. Harris did not simply conjure good feeling out of thin air, no matter how central her personal role has unquestionably been. She did not somehow implant certain sentiments in millions of Americans as if by magic. Rather, she and her campaign have spoken and acted in a way that has cultivated and unleashed feelings that were already latent in the populace. Democrats went from feeling down to feeling up based not simply on her reassuring presence, but because Harris reminded them that there are good reasons to be hopeful about the future.

On top of this, Democratic optimism is very much rooted in an understanding of solidarity and community among millions of Americans — the optimism builds and sustains itself because each individual draws sustenance from knowing that millions of their fellow citizens are likewise energized and hopeful. This self-reinforcing mass energy, based on shared emotions, is what Democrats have been denying themselves and the American people by not more openly appealing to Americans’ hopes and fears in recent years. They have too often treated voters as isolated individuals rather than as members of a vast community that is already largely united behind powerful, forward-looking ideas that are cause for pride and excitement.

To get a bit more specific, let’s look at how the Harris campaign has addressed the anger and fear that many Americans feel about the extremist GOP. Rather than inciting Americans to hate their fellow citizens in the manner of Donald Trump, the Democratic campaign has directed — specifically towards Trump and J.D. Vance — a withering fusillade of contempt and mockery (the whole “weird” discourse features prominently here, which if nothing else is a way to appeal to people’s gut emotions). While they certainly also argue that the GOP ticket poses a threat to American values and freedom (thus engaging in the realm of ideas), their mocking rhetoric encourages emotions like contempt rather than fear or rage towards the GOP. This doesn’t mean that many millions of Americans don’t still (understandably) fear and hate Donald Trump, but the Harris campaign deserves credit for incentivizing Americans to feel and think about what we face in a way that’s both empowering and more socially healthy. Where the Republican instinct is to dehumanize their political “enemies,” the Harris campaign’s approach is to paint their political opponents as all-too-human hot messes who merit laughter and scorn. This acknowledges the deep emotions many feel, while offering paths for expressing them that can lead to solidarity and optimism rather than fueling a spiral of hate.

And for a large-scale demonstration of the centrality of positive emotional appeals to the Harris campaign’s strategy, last week’s Democratic National Convention offered what is likely to be the most concentrate, sustained dose we’ll be seeing. Reporting from the scene, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch amusingly described witnessing a “natural high of ecstasy take hold on the floor” of the convention, as attendees danced, laughed, and otherwise celebrated the political event with happiness and high energy. In turn, this sense of energy and celebration was inescapable for those viewing the DNC at home. Events like Tuesday’s pop song-infused roll call dared to be silly, fun, and wild, creating a remarkable sense of spontaneity despite the careful choreography of the 50-state musical journey. At a primal level, the state of high happy emotion communicated all sorts of positive messages to viewers — that the Democratic Party is confident, that it is optimistic, that it is unafraid of what the GOP might say.

But this raucous atmosphere was much more than a free-floating invitation to Americans to (virtually) join a fun party; it was also a living demonstration that the values and policies of the Democratic Party are reason for celebration and happiness. These political ideas were communicated by the stream of speakers each night of the convention, but I would point in particular to a pair of standout speeches — by Michelle Obama and Vice President Harris herself — as embodying appeals that linked emotional fire to political substance.

Michelle Obama carefully balanced straight talk about commonly-held anxieties about our political conflicts with a message of agency in determining our collective future; in doing so, she acknowledged that our emotional lives are central to successfully navigating this election, at both the individual and mass level. In a complementary fashion, Harris’s speech wove positivity, joy, sobriety, and optimism into an openly emotional campaign roadmap, though carefully grounded in repeated references to her prosecutorial, legislative, and executive experience. It aimed to infuse the listener with patriotic pride, cultural celebration, and a sense of participating in a historic, vital movement into a promising future, even as she enumerated more substantive goals around greater economic opportunity and personal freedom.

Politics, like the human societies in which it’s embedded, is deeply informed by our emotional realities and experiences; ignoring this fact presents its own set of hazards and handicaps. In a democracy, pro-democracy parties should recognize that it’s vitally important to channel feelings that might otherwise run in more destructive directions, and that it’s fine to engage people’s emotions for socially beneficial purposes. Such emotional appeals bespeak a faith that the passions aroused will not end up burning down democracy, but rather are a necessary means to help achieve social solidarity and societal progress. It is an immensely hopeful sign that the Democrats are letting go of an overly cerebral approach to politics, in favor of one that recognizes that political engagement is as much a matter of the heart and psyche as it is of the cooly calculating brain.

As Trump Teeters, History and Recent Events Show He'll Double Down on White Supremacism

Depending on your personal sense of the time/space/political continuum, it’s either way back in the rear view mirror or light years past, but either way I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about Donald Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists at the beginning of August. First, given the passage of time (14 days by old-fashioned terrestrial measurement), we can now categorize it as the first major evidence that Donald Trump has lost his bearings in the presidential race. Specifically, it was both an effort to re-gain control of media attention and, interrelatedly, to knock Harris off her tremendous momentum, and in both efforts he has so far been unsuccessful. Subsequent failures include his deranged press conference last week and his crazed tweet asserting that photos depicting huge crowds cheering Kamala Harris are actually AI-generated fictions. More face-plants are likely to come.

That his initial effort failed is worthy of consideration, and doubly so as it involved Trump going back to the racist well of resentment, fear, and hatred that has always been at the center of his political appeal to certain Americans. If you can stomach it, I strongly encourage you to watch a video of the interview, as words and summaries don’t convey the full crapulence of his appearance. First, and most prominent in coverage of the event, Trump asserted that Harris “turned” black after first claiming to be Indian, helpfully adding later that there is nothing wrong with either race but clearly suggesting that her black identity is a political contrivance. (“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”) There are many levels to Trump’s statements, not because he was being particularly complex or cunning here, but because racist statements always have plenty of ways to intersect with the centuries-long history of white supremacism.

At the most basic level, and I think at the level nearest to his basic intention, Trump wanted to remind white America not that Harris is black (which would be obvious to 99% of voters by now), but more importantly to let them know that he himself is well aware of this fact and wants them to know, as many of them likely already think, that it’s a big, bad deal-breaker. Moreover, he did so in a way that seemed designed to provoke Harris and/or her campaign into a direct response, perhaps something along the lines of saying that “Harris is black and proudly so.” In Trump’s universe, this would be used to further a racist line of attack that would ask how Americans could trust a black person to be president, especially one who so vigorously asserted her blackness. In this way, Trump was wielding white supremacism in a blunt manner no differently than he has for so long — as a way to assert his basic identity as a white man willing to engage in appeals to racism to defeat non-white candidates and the party of non-white people (i.e., the Democrats). He wanted to remind his base, and other possible voters, that he is to be considered the nation’s spokesman for unrepentant white supremacism.

In the same vein, by reminding listeners that Harris is also Indian, he played to the same racist mindset. I don’t think the central intent was to argue she’s untrustworthy because she lied about her identity (although that was obviously a side benefit); rather, he found a way to talk about the basic fact that she’s not just a minority, but doubly so, with Indian as well as African-American ancestry (or even triply so if a listener were confused by the American Indian/Indian American distinction). It was a basic attempt to “other” her, to make her seem alien and strange and definitely not someone with whom white people should feel comfortable (so much exotic blood! So many conflicting loyalties!).

Amplifying the spectacle of American’s white supremacist-in-chief sowing his racist oats was the context of his remarks: the National Association of Black Journalists conference, and the fact that he spoke in response to questions posed by a trio of female African-American reporters. It was in answering their initial question, from ABC’s Rachel Scott, that he uttered his first slanders against Harris, and it’s not insignificant that Scott’s question indeed went straight to the heart of his appeal (or lack thereof) to groups he has targeted. Recounting Trump’s various rhetorical attacks on Blacks, including his birther accusations about Obama and telling four minority congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from,  she asked, “Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”

Trump was clearly angered, replying, “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” characterizing the questioning as “disgraceful,” and asserting this was a “rude introduction. This pattern of indignation and attempts to belittle Scott continued through the rest of the interview, with Trump alternating between critiquing her questions and at times manipulatively bestowing approbation on what he clearly thought was gentler questioning from the two other journalists on stage. He also appeared to blame Scott personally for technical issues at the event, including the interview’s late start (“You’re the one who held me up for 35 minutes”) and issues with the microphones (it was later reported that the delayed beginning actually owed to Trump campaign quibbles with the format of the event). In other words, at the same time that Trump was issuing racist attacks on Harris, he was engaging in a parallel set of racist (and misogynistic) attacks against a black interviewer, as if in Trump’s mind Harris was not fully distinguishable from Scott, nor Scott from Harris. And for receptive racists listening at home, perhaps this was true enough.

In the immediate wake of the interview, it felt as if political coverage teetered on the brink of familiar patterns that have long favored Trump. After all, he did utter outrageous and attention-grabbing assertions that couldn’t be ignored. More than this, Harris would undoubtedly have to respond to them, potentially turning this into a conflict defined on Trump’s terms. But perhaps most decisively to why the story did not play out that way, Harris declined to engage in the manner that Trump likely hoped she would. Rather, at a Houston rally, she remarked that, “It was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect [. . . ] The American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.” 

This refusal to engage on Trump’s terms appears to have been the right choice, as stories about Harris’s identity provoked by his comments quickly peaked and diminished in a matter of days. But just because it was strategically wise for Harris to decline such engagement doesn’t mean that commentators and other Democratic politicians shouldn’t highlight the fact that Trump’s efforts to regain press attention and reverse his steady slide in polls seem to primarily involve reaffirming his white supremacist credentials as a way to attract voters. Likewise, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t remark on the basic fact that not only are such racist appeals disqualifying, they aren’t working as he intended or as they once might have.

Members of the media should also think long and hard about how the questioning at the NABJ conference proved so illuminating as to Trump’s policies and attitudes — a point rightly raised by Jennifer Rubin in a recent column. After all, not only did he engage in white supremacist strategizing, he offered damning responses on other subjects as well. Among other things, he doubled down on his intent to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, suggesting that they were unfairly prosecuted and jailed. He lied about the inflation rate (suggesting it was the worst in 100 years). He threw flailing VP choice J.D. Vance under the bus, remarking that, historically speaking, vice presidents don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races. And in an intriguing rebuttal to his long-time assertion that he will only lose the presidential race if Democrats cheat, he noted that, “If you don’t like me, I’m not going to win” — a rare admission of reality, and remarkable for being one of his few truthful utterances at the event. At a minimum, it feels quite possible that Rachel Scott’s initial, context-laden question broke his cool, making him vulnerable to questioning on other matters as well, including sharp follow-up questions from Scott and her colleagues.

Trump’s racist attacks on Harris have continued since his NABJ appearance, but we need to keep ever in mind that white supremacism was already the single most important element of his campaign for the presidency even before Harris took Biden’s place in the race. His two biggest issues, immigration and crime, are both rooted in the utterly racist idea that degenerate brown-skinned people are literally invading the United States in order to cause mayhem, steal American jobs, and illegitimately cast votes in elections. In this sense, Trump’s racist invocations against Harris are overdetermined, in that there was no way such a racist campaign would ever be able to resist lumping an African-American candidate in with the criminal immigrant threat on which Trump has staked his election chances.

With white supremacism acting as the glue holding together the Republican base and affiliated voters, Democrats would do well to continue to explore ways to describe these attitudes as beyond the pale, subversive of a strong and united America, and revealing of a moral rot at the heart of Republicanism. White supremacism can’t be called out and rolled back in the abstract; rather, the words and deeds of its political practitioners should be accurately described and condemned, and their electoral careers ended by a disapproving majority. While any mass disparagement of the Republican base as intrinsically racist and in need of repentance would be counter-productive and overbroad, it’s still possible to describe the racism of GOP leaders in a way that might wedge open some moral distance from their supporters, while communicating non-negotiable values of equality to the entire public. I think Harris showed one way to do this when she described Trump as performing “the same old show” and referenced “the divisiveness and the disrespect”; this approach captured both Trump’s racism and general unfitness for office without explicitly describing the former. It was a way of acknowledging his racism while avoiding an exchange that might facilitate Trump’s efforts to “other” her.

But politicians and commentators beyond Harris have more leeway to offer specific indictments of Republican white supremacism. While the “weird” discourse sparked by VP pick Tim Walz has mostly been used to highlight GOP misogyny and culture war extremism (banning books, targeting trans youth), watching Trump carry on in tritely racist ways at the NABJ conference made me wonder if a similar strategy might be used against him and others. As much as Trump was engaging in a political strategy that dovetails with his personal hatreds, he also came across as unhinged, outdated, and embarrassing (in addition to being deeply offensive). I don’t think “weird” is the appropriate way to describe a racist, but on the other hand, it feels like an opening exists to characterize Trump’s behavior as something you’d expect to see in a senile older relative raised in a different era — someone whose bizarre racial obsessions place them outside the mainstream of contemporary American life.

As a specific example, Trump’s decision to voice (feigned) confusion about whether Harris is black or Indian falls within a sordid tradition of white Americans claiming the privilege of sorting non-whites into preferred rankings of a racial hierarchy. At the same time, and certainly related to its racism, his commentary has an inherent “ick” factor to it, with Trump ironically tossing himself into another sorting bucket — the one containing dudes who take it upon themselves to stick their noses into other people’s business. With Trump veering nauseatingly into the territory of demanding an intimate accounting of Harris’ very biological being, he places himself adjacent to the uncanny fixations of the misogynist set, with their irrepressible desire to see women solely in terms of their reproductive function and whether or not they are good girls dedicated to replicating the white race. In both cases — Trump’s racial nitpicking and misogynists’ obsession with imaginary babies over adult women — the common thread is a pseudo-scientific assertion of certain nutjob realities (“everyone is one obvious race and must declare what team they are on posthaste!” in the first case, “blastocysts are pre-adult voting citizens whose parents should cast ballots on their behalf” in the second) that are abnormal by the majority’s standards. If outright declarations that Trump’s words reflect white supremacism are too blunt to break through the defenses of many, then finding a way to mock his antiquated racial yardstick might still get through. 

Democratic Enthusiasm for Harris Springs from Renewed Imaginings of Our Future

Over the past weeks, in an unprecedented process that has rocked the presidential race and arrested the attention of the country, Vice President Kamala Harris took the place of Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, launched a vigorous campaign of her own, and selected a vice presidential running mate. The Democratic base appears enthused about its candidate in a way it hasn’t been since the Obamamania of 2008, with Harris far exceeding expectations around the size and direction of jolt she might bring. I’d imagined a more gradual taking of the reins, likely conducted with a tone that mixed in a great dollop of sobriety and sadness over Biden’s departure from the race — not a prescription or the “right way” I thought things would go, just my assumption about such a transition.

Was I ever wrong, and never more gladly so.

Harris hit the ground running with high energy, confidence, good humor, and a no-holds-barred attitude towards her opponent. On this last point, she quickly moved to frame the choice as one between a no-nonsense former district attorney and a recidivist criminal. It was particularly impressive to see her categorize him as such, cutting him down to size and crucially communicating that he was a “type” that she knows all too well. I’d speculate that this ability to put Trump in perspective, to suggest what a small man he really is, has been key to the revival of Democratic base enthusiasm. After all, Democrats had spent much of 2024 watching as President Biden failed to land effective blows against Trump (as measured in Trump’s consistent lead or tie with the president), even as Trump evaded accountability for his crimes and seemed increasingly to be America’s inevitable next president. It was as if Democrats had been collectively sharing a nightmare, unable to evade the disaster that all could see coming in surreal slow-motion, until Harris woke them up and reminded them that Trump is eminently beatable.

The seemingly overnight transmutation of Democratic anxiety into enthusiasm has been helped along greatly by Harris’s positivity and high spirits — the “joy” that VP pick Governor Tim Walz attributed to her in their first joint public appearance. Harris not only showed awakened Democrats there was a way forward, but that this campaign and the renewed hope they’re feeling is cause for celebration, for happiness, even.

With her defiant and contemptuous attitude towards Donald Trump, her willingness to put the extremist Project 2025 agenda front and center in her critiques of his candidacy, and her “We’re not going back" mantra, I would hazard that Harris has consciously made herself into the avatar of a pro-democracy American majority I’ve discussed before. This majority believes in American’s egalitarian ideals, either embraces or has no great objections to the U.S. being a multiethnic nation, and generally agrees with the idea of an activist federal government that acts to improve Americans’ lives. This is a majority that some have called the anti-MAGA majority, which has accurately reflected how its energies have been tied to what it’s against perhaps even more than what it’s in favor of.

But with Harris’s attitude that Trump can be beaten, even as she affirms that her campaign is the underdog, we may be at a point where the pro-democratic majority starts to coalesce more consciously about what it’s for. Indeed, the idea that Democrats are fighting for certain ends, and not just against Donald Trump and right-wing extremism, is something that Harris herself has articulated. Her foregrounding of “freedom” as a core Democratic value echoes the urgings of many political analysts and commentators who have been advocating that the Democrats use such language (and as Ron Brownstein reminds us, this turn in Democratic emphasis can be linked, at least in part, to the fact that the GOP has been busy taking away American freedoms in recent years). Practically speaking, it captures the consequences of MAGA’s anti-democratic threat, so that this threat is made much more tangible, and in the process turns the tables on a GOP that has long claimed the freedom mantle (at least rhetorically). The Harris campaign has defined some specific freedoms — the right to bodily autonomy, the right to be free of gun violence — but its obvious, more general power is the idea that every citizen is free to live their lives as they choose and to themselves define what freedom means. 

Because so many Democrats view a second Trump term as likely disastrous for American democracy and basic freedoms, Harris has also been able to campaign without yet fully articulating a concrete platform for her presidency. There is also a general expectation that her agenda would not be a wild departure from that articulated by President Biden’s campaign, which is a non-unreasonable preliminary assumption to make. Personally, I’m ambivalent about how specific Harris should be about her vision for a second term at this point in the campaign. The overriding necessity right now is to defeat Donald Trump and to delegitimize the authoritarian threat posed by the Republican Party, and Harris is performing the necessary role as defender of American democracy, particularly through the “freedom” talk I’ve noted. Along these lines, there are clearly some areas in which Harris has articulated a sharper vision — the aforementioned abortion rights and gun control measures among them — and which are in line with mainstream Democratic Party opinion. Such positions represent a repudiation of the repressive, chaotic, pro-violence politics of Trump and the GOP, and give substance to a democratic and freedom-embracing vision of the United States. 

But for now, and for at least some time longer, I’d argue that it’s sufficient to acknowledge and celebrate the sense of possibility that this candidacy has opened up — the increasing feeling that America’s future is not firmly set on a dark and unavoidable trajectory. At the most basic level, it’s fundamentally healthy for a society to see its future as open and malleable, rather than foreclosed and ominous.

And I’ll even go a step further and say that Harris’s lack of a firmly delineated vision isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the American majority. Harris has given the public space to think big and positive again; the longer this period lasts, the more it may in turn pressure her into thinking bigger than she otherwise might have. A superb example of this is Anand Giridharadas’s new blog series about big ideas for a Kamala Harris presidency; his first interview, with the brilliant Astra Taylor, provides just one example of how we might think bigger and bolder in this time of transition, as Taylor discusses the transformative potential of debt forgiveness in a way that ties it to Harris’ discussion of freedom. There is something fundamentally democratic about this period; it’s a time when “[p]art of the work of earning our votes should involve listening to Americans about our visions for the country and our place in the world,” as Roxanne Gay puts it in an excellent column talking about this unexpected time of revived re political imagination.

Cultivating mass enthusiasm and individual initiative about a wide-open future is all the more important since certain crucial aspects of our political world have not changed over the past three weeks. The most looming is Donald Trump and the GOP’s continued dedication to re-taking the  White House and controlling Congress via efforts properly described as a slow-motion insurrection. From voter suppression to creating an intimidatory air of menace and barely-contained violence, and committed to returning to power a man who promises to be a dictator on day one, the Republican Party has substantially parted ways with American democracy. Recent reporting on state-level efforts to subvert the vote certification process in Georgia in the event of a Trump loss is just one example of an effort to corrupt American democracy with the aim of placing a GOP strongman in power. The single most powerful blow to GOP insurrectionism would be a blow-out win by the Harris-Walz ticket, but Republican electoral schemes mean that even in the event of a clearly huge Democratic victory, the party could still try to cast doubt on the election results. Those who cast votes for Kamala Harris would need to meet such efforts with a mixture of resolve and contempt, and hold fast to the rightness of their optimism and the non-negotiable worth of their votes. Dreaming big now, and insisting on a campaign and a future Harris presidency that dares to be transformative, can only help us overcome a GOP that would drag us backwards by any means necessary.

Weirdo Vance Gets Dems Wired

Alongside the burst of energy, good humor, and sheer relief from the prospect of impending electoral doom, Kamala Harris’ ascension as the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee has also been accompanied by a weird outbreak across the Democratic Party of. . . the word “weird.” Initially directed primarily at Trump’s VP pick, Senator J.D. Vance, the term has spread like prairie fire, embraced by politicians and partisans to describe the right-wing extremism that has gobbled up the Republican Party.

More specifically, it’s frequently been deployed against the antediluvian attitudes that so many MAGA politicos hold towards women, gays, and trans people, and more generally against what we might term “pretensions of moral superiority uttered while skating on thin or non-existent ice.” As opposed to more traditional political language — such as calling the GOP a misogynistic party dedicated to taking away women’s rights — the “weird” discourse conveys moral judgment while evoking all manner of particular, subjective emotions in the listener. You could say that it hits the listener in the heart as well as the head, provoking basic feelings of discomfort and repulsion based on one’s own particular attitudes. You don’t have to agree that, say, Vance is a “misogynist”; instead, you just have to admit to yourself that, yeah, it sure is odd for someone to say that women without kids shouldn’t have a say in society’s future. This evocativeness also makes it a good way to describe in a visceral way how a politician is outside the mainstream, but without speaking so bluntly; it’s aggressive without overtly seeming so.

Not coincidentally, this linguistic offensive has paralleled Kamala Harris’ more openly confrontational opening stance toward Donald Trump, in which she has cast the former president as a predatory criminal running against a justice-dispensing, no-nonsense former D.A. A huge commonality between these two approaches — one playful, the other more traditional in its language — is an effort to cut the GOP opposition down to size. Labeling it as “weird” for a politician to advocate giving additional votes to parents with children registers a gentle contempt and dismissal, with a tacit understanding that of course voters will know automatically that this is a dumb, divisive idea that only a right-wing freak would propose. In the same way, Harris’ labeling of Trump as a criminal strips him of his presidential prestige. Both approaches are about dominating your opponent, though one is subtler than the other. Moreover, both approaches also rely on a sort of commonsense, “we all really know what the truth of the matter is” attitude towards their opponents, so that dominance flows not just from the speaker’s will and say-so, but also from an appeal to common standards and majority opinion. In this sense, it has a touch of the anti-intellectual about it, relying on personal feelings rather than agreement with some smarty-pants description of what exactly is wrong with the particular right wing politician (Vance is “weird” about women’s privacy versus Vance is a “fascism-curious misogynist with unresolved mother issues”).

Getting the balance right between forthright talk and mockery has long been a challenge in dealing with Donald Trump. He’s a buffoonishly malevolent figure, simultaneously an unrepentant enemy of American democracy (he did, after all, attempt a coup to hold on to power), an entertainer who himself uses (often cruel) humor to bind his followers to him, and an utterer of many, many objectively stupid and offensive ideas. Do you concentrate on calling him an unparalleled threat to democracy, or on pointing out what a crazy m’er f’er he is?

And yet, as those who study authoritarianism tell us, there’s much to be gained from mocking and denying credibility to strongmen and the extremist movements they lead. In the case of Trump and the GOP, I wonder if the underlying equation has shifted over the last few years, as we are no longer talking about the prospect of Trump and the GOP doing awful things (in which case sober warnings of their dangers arguably outweigh a mocking approach that potentially downplays these very dangers). Now we’re living in a world in which their awful works lay bare before us. From the nightmares of the Trump presidency, to the red state war on women, it may be that most of us need to hear a bit less about the true dangers, and a bit more about how the politicians inflicting such harm aren’t just monstrous but absurd weirdos owed not an iota of respect. 

To some extent, proof of the effectiveness of the “weird” line of attack is discernable via the squalling and squirming evident on the right side of the political spectrum — not to mention the good old phenomenon of their doubling down on provocative positions in order to, yes, own the libs. Apparently, the Democrats’ “weird” critiques are to be considered juvenile and themselves evidence of Democratic weirdness. . .

Somewhere in this mix is the “good weird” (hat tip to Congressman John Lewis’ concept of “good trouble”) that so quickly broke out among Democrats following Harris’ replacement of Biden as the party’s de facto presidential candidate. I am thinking in particular of the rush by many with meme-making skills to re-contextualize off-kilter remarks by Harris (at least according to right-wing critics) as in fact fun, playful, and meaningful. And so her remarks about falling out of a coconut tree (comments made by her mother that Harris has relayed to audiences) were transmuted into “good weird,” indicative of rule-breaking, the end of Democratic paralysis, and the advent of perhaps not giving quite so many fucks about bad-faith critiques. Indeed, those who came around to believing that Harris was the Democrats’ logical candidate began to speak of themselves as having been “coconut-pilled.”

I think the outbreak of these two parallel phenomena — the Democrats’ confidence in saying that multiple facets of the MAGA movement are weird and creepy, alongside the Democrats’ embrace of a heretofore alien playful 2024 campaign style —should hearten the party while acting as a flashing warning sign to the GOP. When Democrats see little downside in making open appeals rooted in mass understanding of the Republican Party’s fundamental ridiculousness, and indeed appears to gain public support while doing so, we can see the possibility of the floor giving out beneath the reactionary GOP. Apart from careers in clowning and stand-up comedy, the vast majority of successful endeavors in life require other people to take you seriously. This seems doubly true in the realm of politics.

Ultimately, it feels to me like a mix of rhetorical strategies will be needed to rally the American majority against the reactionary MAGA movement. We need to articulate the true stakes, while also reminding ourselves, and persuadable voters, that the right is filled with absurdity as well as true menace.  This one-two punch, accompanied by a positive vision for the future that transcends the bitter backwardness offered by the GOP, may be weird, and wired, enough to work.

J.D. Vance Is Lamely Trying to Turn Americans Against Each Other

As Americans beyond the borders of Ohio collectively learn more about Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, the results of this mass crash education have not been pretty to behold. Originally emerging into the public sphere almost a decade ago as the author of the autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has apparently spent the ensuing years radicalizing into a particularly nasty dreamer of MAGA-infused nightmares. Over the past week, we’ve been treated to stories about his disdain for the childless cat ladies who apparently run the Democratic Party as well as the federal bureaucracy; his suggestion that only people with children should have a say in the nation’s future (and that their influence should be amplified according to the size of their broods); his ties to the techno-fascist movement brewing out in Silicon Valley; his penning of the intro to a book written by the head of the organization leading the charge for Project 2025; and his friendship with Curtis Yarvin, a fascist who has suggested that the solution for useless poor people is to suspend them in a Matrix-like virtual reality.

For those interested in seeing Donald Trump and the larger MAGA movement defeated in November, Vance has so far proven himself to be a massive self-own on the part of the former president — a far-right VP choice based on a sense that the election was in the bag, and perhaps with an uncharacteristically broader-minded interest in anointing a successor for that distant time when Donald Trump is transported to the great Mar-a-Lago in the sky. So far, Vance seems to have done far more to rally a wide swathe of Americans against his repugnant views than to inspire MAGA-curious voters to jump on the Trump 2024 bandwagon.

I’ve heard observers talk about how Vance’s bald extremism presents all sorts of attack possibilities for Democrats, which is true; but to be more specific, in his articulation of a more cerebral and detailed framework of right-wing nationalism and misogynistic hatred than Trump aims for, Vance has offered valuable openings for a countervailing presentation of progressive and commonsense American ideas. Indeed, in his effort to be both simultaneously logically consistent and maximally provocative, Vance has laid out a hideous, constrained vision that amounts to a MAGA-friendly guide as to who should be considered a “real” American versus who doesn’t make the cut. And so, for example, the idea that only (white) Americans who have babies can be considered true Americans gets run through the thresher of anti-abortion animus towards IVF treatment, with the result that even those white people who have children via IVF are not actually true Americans; neither, apparently, are those who raise non-biological children as step-parents (as in the case of Vice President Kamala Harris) or as adoptive parents (as in the case of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg). Logically consistent? Yes. But also alienating to most Americans? YES.

So why is Vance vociferously advocating for such regressive ideas? In the first place, he may well believe them, though whether this is the case or he’s engaging in a purely cynical play is ultimately unknowable. But at a minimum, he sees them as appealing to the conservative white Americans who constitute the MAGA base. More specifically, the appeal is designed to flatter the opinions and lifestyles of this base. For example, by suggesting that it is one’s patriotic duty to have children and for women to dedicate themselves to raising them, he isn’t just advancing a white nationalist talking point; he also validates the lives of millions of conservative women who are already doing just this. When he tells such parents that they deserve to have more votes because they have more kids, he’s telling them that their choices are amazing and that as a result they should have more political power than nulliparous liberals walking dogs instead of pushing strollers in their barren blue states.

Moreover, it’s not insignificant that Vance has over the years presented his regressive ideas in a way that is maximally divisive. In the first place, he seeks to sideline widely-held societal values, and to rebrand them as deeply conservative ideas. For instance, his suggestion that adults without children should be punished and those with kids rewarded is already U.S. policy, though admittedly less punitively so than he has proposed. As Josh Marshall reminds us, “There are dependent deductions, a refundable child tax credit, even something as obvious as public schools,” with the latter funded even by those without children, and with no broad complaining that this is the case from those without children. That is, there is already a pro-child consensus across U.S. society that provides material and less tangible benefits to parents. However, in advocating for punitive measures against the childless, Vance pretends we don’t already have a pro-child consensus that transcends the claims of either party. Not only does this flatter those conservatives with families, it also mendaciously tries to rile people up against those without children as some sort of freeloaders, when in fact those literally millions upon millions of Americans have gladly been paying taxes to help educate other people’s kids. Lara Bazelon gets it exactly right when she writes that, “This is a fake wedge issue and reveals a deep vein of misogyny. Some women get married, some don’t. Some women have kids, some don’t. The point is we get to decide and Republicans, when it comes to women’s rights, want to take our choices away.”

A strategy to divide Americans with reactionary rhetoric, in a way that flatters believers and denigrates the unworthy, is also visible in Vance’s attempts to provide substance to Trump’s broad declarations of nationalism and America-First-ism.  Writing for The Atlantic, Adam Serwer zeroes in on Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention, in which the Ohio senator asserted that the United States is not just a set of principles, but a “homeland” and a “nation” that encompasses both the living and their ancestors. But an apparently unobjectionable idea (the seemingly banal observation that the U.S. is an actual place with actual people) is immediately conditioned and restricted in Vance’s telling, in which coming from generations of Kentuckians who have lived and died in the same geographical territory constitutes a badge of true citizenship:

Now, in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now, that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

Clearly, Vance’s story-telling is meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia and recognition in receptive listeners — that these traditional, authentic Americans outright deserve not only their citizenship but pride of place in the American nation, through continuity, longevity, and a willingness to defend their territory and their achievements. But as Serwer observes, “if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others”:

In Vance’s definition of what it means for America to be a “nation,” these people who sacrificed their lives to preserve the republic are less American than the soldiers of the slaver army that sought to destroy it. Some of those Union veterans are buried in cemeteries like the one Vance describes, after being forced to bear the kind of nativist bile spewed at the RNC. Vance’s definition of America is less a nation than an entitlement, something inherited, like a royal title or a trust fund. The irony is that Vance’s idea of the nation is as much an abstraction, an imagined community, as the American creed he disdains; it is simply narrow, cramped, and ugly. Unfortunately, people fight and die for those too.

And just as with Vance’s attacks on childless women, his effort to present a conservative worldview that is both propagandistically appealing and logically coherent leads to absurd, untenable conclusions. Is it really obvious, as in Vance’s tale, that a family descended from ancestors who raised arms against the Union is to be considered “more American” than than a woman who emigrated to the United States from Nigeria in the 1980’s? According to Vance’s hierarchy, yes. But this is as nonsensical as proposing that a Mississippian whose great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy should be looked at with disdain in comparison to a person of good Yankee stock whose distant forebears came over on the Mayflower. Once again, Vance is giving voice to archaic concepts that flatter those who meet their qualifications — in this case, white Americans whose families have lived for generations in the same place — that begin to crumble once you start peeling apart their assumptions.

Not only does such genealogical balderdash privilege the status of America’s white population versus more recent arrivals (read: people of color), it runs up against a tacit but bedrock liberal principle that there is in fact no hierarchy of citizenship, and that every American is to be considered equal, regardless of heritage. More abstractly, but just as importantly, this reactionary vision suggests that there is an objective, quantifiable way to judge each person’s relative worth as a citizen — a notion that due to its actually subjective nature is unresolvable and subject to abuse by those wishing to denigrate their fellow citizens, as we can see quite clearly in the case of Vance and his slanderous propositions. The liberal attitude, in contrast, rests on mutual respect towards fellow citizens, alongside an implicit belief that we all belong, and that judgments and hierarchies only bring us all down.

So while Vance’s reactionary schema is insidious and divisive, appealing to base hatreds and insecurities, we should also understand that this is also an opportunity for the rest of us to make explicit those widely-shared ideas of equality, tolerance, and mutual respect that are too often left tacit in American society. We should be able to articulate the consensus that already exists among the American majority regarding families and citizenship; in fact, I’d argue that taking this consensus for granted for too long, and not more overtly praising and celebrating it, has opened the door for reactionaries like Vance to come along with their commonsense-sounding notions that are actually quite backwards and self-serving. The majority believes in the value of families, but not that those families must be defined in an outdated and self-serving way that puts down anyone who doesn’t fit the “right” way of doing things; and the majority believes in our common citizenship and love for country, but not in a way that claims special status for a privileged minority based on un-American claims that they were here first. 

With Biden Stepping Aside, Democrats Can Concentrate on Defeating Republican Authoritarianism

President Biden’s announcement that he will stand down from seeking a second term in office, and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place atop the Democratic ticket, has provided a salutary shock to the American political system. For weeks now, a campaign unraveling over question about his fitness to run and then serve four more years has distracted the Democrats, and the country, from the gravest domestic threat we have faced since the Civil War: the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, this time supported by a fully authoritarian Republican Party. In retrospect, the Democrats have gone through an unavoidable reckoning sparked by Biden’s parlous debate performance a scant three weeks ago. The president’s announcement is providing massive infusions of oxygen to a public discourse that had felt dangerously claustrophobic and self-defeating to anyone who cares about the survival of American democracy.

Concerns about Biden’s age have clearly turned some voters off from supporting him, though it can be difficult to say where such worries end and concerns about his record in office begin, as the electorate has been deeply reluctant to recognize Biden’s role in even objectively strong achievements (the smashing of inflation, the passing of the transformative Inflation Reduction Act, the withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan). But there can’t be any question that had Biden remained in the race, the result would have been a campaign in which attempts to draw attention to the threat posed by Trump and the GOP would have been constantly undermined by concerns about Biden’s age. In a worst-case scenario, the Democrats could have faced a wipe-out from the presidency down through Congress.

Not only would there have been the possibility of significant numbers of a demoralized base staying home, but both Democrats and independents would have had legitimate concerns about the credibility of a party that left unchallenged a president clearly incapable of defeating Trump. The dissonance between the stated urgency of beating the former president and the simultaneous insistence on casting a vote for a man that strong majorities saw as too enfeebled to run would have been toxic for the party’s standing. Even worse for the country, Trump and the GOP would have had a decent chance of hiding the extent of their extremism from the American people; with a nation unprepared for the chaos to come, and the Democrats discredited in the eyes of millions of former supporters, the damage to the country could have been unfathomable.

That full-on nightmare scenario just became far less likely.

But for a Kamala Harris campaign to maximize its chances of victory, it needs to learn from some major errors that Biden and other Democrats have made over the last three and a half years. It’s not just Biden’s age that has dragged him down; it’s also the party-wide failure to hit consistently against Trump and against a GOP that has continued to radicalize even while Biden occupied the White House. In the name of not rocking the boat and restoring “normalcy” to American politics, the Democrats’ deep-seated aversion to conflict has become a huge drag on the party’s prospects. Rather than fearlessly broadcasting the truth about the GOP — that it has transformed into a white supremacist, Christian nationalist, authoritarian party engaged in de facto insurrection against American democracy — the party has too often bought into self-sabotaging rhetoric about “lowering the temperature” and the cult of bipartisanship. 

In contrast, the Republican Party has been playing a far different game this whole time. The GOP has plotted a path to power based on the American public perceiving chaos, danger, and failure all around; based on Americans fearing for their lives and livelihoods beyond rational thought, beyond the evidence of statistics, facts, even lived reality. And so the Republican Party, and its allied media organs, have steadfastly promulgated the idea that the economy is in ruins, communistic elites run an oppressive government bureaucracy, trans youth are spreading like a zombie apocalypse, and violent immigrants constitute an invading army storming across the southern border. Alongside this, the party has engaged in a slow-motion insurrection against democratic governance, eviscerating voting rights for millions, echoing the incendiary rhetoric of the previous president about illegal voting and stolen elections, and preparing the way for Trump’s destructive return to the Oval Office. And paralleling the GOP’s legislative efforts and propagandizing, the Supreme Court’s majority has confirmed itself to be an equally partisan player, eliminating fundamental rights (the most prominent being the smashing of abortion rights) and, most destructively, allowing Donald Trump to evade justice for his crimes in office while laying the groundwork for a lawless second term.

The rhetoric, strategies, and ambitions around the 2024 Trump presidential campaign have validated the theory that the GOP’s politics over the last three and a half years have been insurrectionary in nature. Trump vows to exact retribution against his enemies and to be “a dictator on day one”; to engage in “mass deportation” that will likely cost lives, massively violate civil and human rights, and deliver a body blow to the U.S. economy in one squalid go; and to abandon the alliances that keep Americans safe in favor of an incomprehensible deference to Russia and China. Meanwhile, the blueprint provided by Project 2025 would entail a massive assault on Americans’ freedoms, with the goal of establishing retrograde hierarchies of race, gender, and religion, with profound changes not just to American government but to the nature of our society itself.

With Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential candidate, the party will have a chance to reset its stance towards the authoritarian, racist, and misogynistic GOP. If Trump and the Republican Party are as far gone as their critics allege, the attacks on Harris that are to come will provide plentiful, high-profile evidence of these disqualifying beliefs that unite the party. And if Harris and the Democrats are to blunt the impact of such attacks, and even better, to turn them into liabilities for the GOP, they have a massive incentive to describe early and often what such criticisms tell us about the nature of the GOP, its presidential candidate, and its retrograde vision for America. As Josh Marshall bluntly puts it, “Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism.” For Harris is truly a nightmarish vision in the eyes of the Trump-dominated Republican Party. A woman, a person of color, a child of immigrants, a spouse of a non-Christian: in the value system propounded by Trump, such a person cannot be considered American or even fully human, much less a legitimate presidential candidate. Already, Trump has shown his true colors in his vile response to Biden’s exit from the race; it seems guaranteed he will show an equal lack of restraint in his comments about Harris.

Contrary to what some in the Democratic Party’s leadership think, it is to the benefit of the country and to the party to fully expose the contrast in basic moral visions between the Democratic and Republican parties, even if this inevitably results in an escalation of rhetoric and conflict with the GOP. The Republicans’ ability to win the presidency, as well as other levers of power, is enhanced to the extent that the party can fool Americans into believing that the GOP is not as bad as it seems. But the cold hard facts about the party’s true attitude towards people of color and women, and in favor of white supremacy, cannot be set aside:

• A party that believes African-Americans are the equals of white Americans would not work to deny African-Americans fair representation in statehouses and Congress in order to enhance the political power of white people.

• A party that believes Latinos are the equals of white Americans would not engage in gerrymanders that deny them power in states like Texas, and would not support a president whose slanders against immigrants act as an incitement of abuse and violence to all Latinos in the United States, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.

• A party that believes women are the equals of men would not deny those women control over their own bodies and reproductive choices, or show indifference when some of those women die due to draconian laws based not on science but on religious extremism.

Democrats need to anticipate, contextualize, and refute the obvious racist and misogynistic attacks to come against a Harris candidacy. To do this, they must be unafraid to describe in blunt, unambiguous terms the white supremacist and anti-woman tenets that lie at the core of the GOP. Alongside this, they must unflinchingly describe how such hatreds help drive the party’s anti-democratic stance, unwilling as Trump and his ilk are to assent to equal citizenship to huge swathes of the American populace. Simply playing defense here is not enough; Democrats need to make the case to the American people that the hatreds that bring such energy and meaning to GOP politicians like Trump render them unfit to hold power in an egalitarian, future-oriented America.

I noted above the ways that a Biden candidacy threatened catastrophic losses for the Democrats and for the country. A huge part of the danger was that the Democrats wouldn’t simply lose, but lose in the most damaging way possible — in a way that failed to illuminate the true stakes of this election, and that might alert and energize Americans regarding the profoundly divergent visions before them. With Kamala Harris as the party’s candidate, and with the type of campaign that the Republicans will almost inevitably run against her, Americans are much more likely to experience this contest as the true choice that it is, and to mobilize a majority that can win both this election and the longer-term fight to preserve and expand American democracy.

Only Democratic Escalation of the Fight for Democracy Will Stop the Authoritarian GOP

I’ll take with a grain of salt various assessments that many in the Democratic Party had initially given up on beating Trump in the wake of the assassination attempt against him, and that Democrats should quiet their criticisms of Donald Trump’s authoritarian designs for the country. But even if a variety of damning anonymous quotes weren’t really indicative of a broader collapse of nerve, and with the party rejuvenated now that President Biden has given way to Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s candidate, it’s still worth taking apart facile arguments that Trump’s brush with death has given him superpowers in his quest to become America’s next president — particularly when Trump and the GOP continue to cite Trump’s survival as evidence of his toughness and of divine grace.

One key argument has been that “Trump “was already on track to win and the fact that he is now a victim of political violence rather than the perpetrator,” in words attributed to a Democratic senator’s aide, has been something of a game-changer. But this mentality would grant absolution to a man who himself has steadily encouraged violence against Americans and others since he declared his first presidential run so many years ago, and who among other things incited a violent attack on the US Capitol with the aim of overturning American democracy. In the words of Edward Luce, “No honest accounting of America’s fetid climate can ignore the fact that the former president himself is the country’s most influential exponent of political violence.” For Democrats frozen with worry that Trump has somehow been cleansed of his prior sins, a perspective worth considering is that most Americans may instinctively associate the assassination attempt with the atmosphere of mayhem that Trump himself has done so much to encourage.

Likewise, the idea that the so-called “iconic” images of Trump pumping his fist while his face drips blood have somehow transformed America forever is deeply passive, if not outright bizarre. I don’t think we can assume that American voters’ reaction to such images is going to be, “Wow, that guy looks totally sane and is the sort of person who should be our next president.” I think anyone who already opposes Trump is likelier to be unnerved by the fascistic imagery. Likewise, Trump’s apparent mouthing of the words “Fight! Fight! Fight!” seems about as far from a rational response to almost being killed as one can imagine; reprieved from meeting his maker, Trump’s immediate, gut instinct was to double-down on the violent rhetoric that already alienates so many Americans.

Then there is what the GOP has been omitting in its response: the glaring fact that this was a shooting almost certainly enabled and encouraged by decades of GOP pro-gun rhetoric, which has grown so strident and extreme that it is not unusual for Republican politicians to feature themselves gleefully holding weapons of war in campaign ads and other publicity photos. Setting aside the political dimensions of the shooting, thousands upon thousands of Americans experience what Trump did every year — but not all of them are so lucky as to dodge a bullet or have a government team along to provide counter-sniper fire. Given the Republican voter registration of the shooter, a more critical take might characterize this as an instance of Republican-on-Republican violence made possible by a Republican obsession with semiautomatic weapons and a belief in the necessity of violence to political dominance. 

This leads us to the overriding reason why Democrats can’t let themselves get bullied into pulling back from their attacks on Trump: Trump and the GOP have have steadily encouraged and celebrated political violence for many years now, as a key to gaining power and as a weapon to destroy the peaceful contestation of power without which democracy fails. From right-wing mayhem and murder at the Charlottesville Unite the Right event, to the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump has unapologetically incited and justified violence against perceived political enemies. Now, the GOP is attempting to fold the assassination attempt into Trump’s fascistic appeal, and it is a sign of our broken media ecosystem that this is not being described as far outside the bounds of normal democratic politics. Democrats absolutely need to counter the GOP’s crazy attacks blaming them for inciting the attempt, because they are right to place the blame for political violence squarely on the GOP, and to defend themselves alongside the necessity of peaceful politics. You will look in vain for a Democrat inciting violence the way that multiple GOP elected officials, including Trump, do. On top of this, the Democratic base is wildly against Trump partly because he is trying to mainstream political violence, and they don’t want that to happen to this country. 

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, there can be little doubt that the Trumpist GOP will not only continue with its inciting ways, but will now double down with more threat and menace against its “enemies.” We have seen this already, in statements by Senator (and now also vice presidential candidate) J.D. Vance and Texas Governor Greg Abbott accusing the Democrats of sparking the attempt on Trump’s life. If the GOP plan is to accuse Democrats of inciting violence, there is little doubt that this mentality will lead the Republican Party to increase its aggression and menace toward its political adversaries. As Paul Waldman puts it in a sobering assessment of the latent violence flowing through the GOP and the MAGA faithful, “Just as Trump’s supporters have always used the real or imagined excesses of the left to justify their own squalid behavior, they now fantasize about the depths they believe they have permission to sink.”

In light of the party’s increasing appetite for political violence, attempts at the Republican National Convention to paint Donald Trump as a divinely-ordained figure saved from death by the Almighty himself must be seen as particularly audacious and grotesque. If anyone saved Trump’s life, it was the crowd members who first spotted the would-be assassin, and the police who attempted to approach him; these actions quite possibly distracted the shooter sufficiently that he missed his target. Set alongside such farcically hypocritical attempts to depict Trump as a man of unity and holiness, his inevitable appeals to violence (defending the January 6 attack, threatening “retribution” against his “enemies”) provide an opportunity to further highlight the devolution of the GOP into an anti-democratic, authoritarian menace to American democracy and society.

So Democrats must internalize that they need to fight the GOP slander that attempts to make them the offending, violent party. To do so will require their own countervailing aggression — but of a wholly different kind than the violent-minded, mendacious propaganda coming from the Republican camp. It necessarily needs to be an assertiveness that operates within democratic, non-violent norms, limited to rhetoric and political mobilization, but which effectively exposes, denigrates, and delegitimizes the GOP’s violent push against democracy. They must set aside rote instructions from editorial boards, and self-serving demands from GOP politicians, to tone down the political conflict.

The GOP’s reaction to the assassination attempt is only confirming the darkness at the heart of Republican authoritarianism, with grievance and revenge at the center of its politics. The truth is, Democrats must in fact escalate their conflict with the GOP in the name of democracy and the peaceful resolution of differences. They must speak truthfully about the opposition party’s tragic turn against American democracy and its embrace of a retrograde and repressive agenda (from anti-abortion zealotry, to the targeting of minorities for political disempowerment, to threats to gun down peaceful protestors, to an utter indifference to combatting the effects of global warming that are already brutalizing millions of Americans with heat, fire, and flood). They must speak truthfully about how this turn against democracy springs from a toxic stew of white supremacism, religious fundamentalism, misogyny, plutocratic greed, and a correct perception that a majority of Americans opposes its backwards agenda. And of course they must unapologetically advance legislation now that prevents the slaughter of Americans with weapons of war, whether they be a president or a child, welcoming a fight with a GOP that prefers the rights of guns to exist over the rights of humans to do so.

The things that seem to make Trump and the GOP strong — violent threat; unity based on a narrow-minded, hierarchical vision of America; frantic zealotry; cult-like worship of Donald Trump as a king blessed by God — are also what scare the bejesus out of the American majority. Most of us instinctively recoil from violence, from racism, from lockstep politicians who worship a strongman leader, and Democrats need to hit hard against these dubious GOP strengths. Trump, post-assassination attempt, is the same vile and anti-American figure he was before the shooting. In fact, we can assume him to emerge more extreme, more vengeful, and more violent-minded than before — a stance that will be echoed across the Republican Party. Democrats need to be ready to respond to this, and to make the GOP pay a steep electoral price for its war on democracy.

Supreme Court's Immunity Ruling is an Attempt to Legitimate GOP Insurrectionism

In the years since Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow American democracy in the wake of the November 2020 election, I’ve argued that Republican politics should be viewed through the lens of a party-wide insurrection against U.S. democracy, a movement ignited by the former’s president’s foiled coup attempt. You could say that the GOP began this dark endeavor with gusto. In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the U.S. Capitol building, most GOP House members quickly voted against certifying the election results, despite the fact that this meant validating the rioters’ goal; then, in the following weeks, a majority of Republican congresspeople and senators opposed the impeachment and conviction of Donald Trump for his attempts to undo the election results. Their unconscionable votes proved to be a retroactive endorsement of Trump’s actions, as a large proportion of elected officials, and a majority of the party base, grew over time to embrace the Big Lie of a stolen election as an article of party faith. The GOP also demonstrated its alliance with January 6 perfidy by vociferously opposing investigation of the events surrounding that day, leaving the Democrats to head up what the GOP would try to label as a partisan investigation. 

In the following years, the GOP’s support for Trump’s insurrection has been an essential framework for understanding and properly describing major thrusts of Republican policy and political machinations. At the state level, there have been initiatives to undermine election administration so that future efforts to manipulate the vote might be more successful. Arguably even worse, they encouraged an atmosphere of menace against those administering elections, by tacitly or explicitly supporting right-wing threats against election administrators. Simultaneously, we’ve seen renewed schemes to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. Even as such efforts have continuity with decades-long Republican voter suppression, in the post-January 6 context they can be more precisely seen as efforts to attack American democracy and majority rule. And beyond law-making intended to corrupt American democracy, the GOP has propagated lies about mass voter fraud and illicit elections results, building on the Big Lie of 2020. To my mind, most singularly toxic are Republican lies that not only are Latino immigrants “invading” the United States, but that they’re also voting and are responsible for whatever victories Democrats manage to win. In one sinister package, the GOP manages to embrace the extremist Great Replacement theory, dehumanize innocent migrants while imagining them as a hostile army, and subvert the electoral system.

The single largest piece of evidence that the party’s overriding end is to overthrow America democracy, though, has been the party’s alignment with Donald Trump, the man who. . . tried to overthrow American democracy — and whose clear goal for a second term is to complete his attempted insurrection, which turns out never to have ended but only evolved and mutated through the present. Even a cursory look at what we can discern of Trump’s second term agenda shows plans to take a jackhammer to the rule of law, our free society, and fair election. With plans to stack the Justice Department with die-hard loyalists, a Project 2025 blueprint to impose reactionary repression across America, and avowals to prosecute and jail political opponents, Trump’s planned authoritarianism is sitting in plain view. The GOP’s elected officials, having looked up these plans, have still pledged themselves to support America’s would-be dictator. Perversely, the fact that such a huge chunk of the GOP is complicit or acquiescent obscures that all of this indeed constitutes an insurrection, since it so neatly overlaps with partisan divisions and allows many to characterize the conflict as simply “polarization” or partisan warfare. Yes, it is both of those, too, but in the same deeply misleading way that you might describe World War II as an instance of a highly polarized political environment involving serious partisan warfare. To put it plainly: a movement that seeks to destroy democracy and the rule of law in order to overturn majority rule, and to permanently replace it with a one-party state, should be seen as insurrectionary in nature.

Which brings us to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity issued at the beginning of July. As many were quick to point out, the conservative justices ruled in a way that flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution and American democracy as it has existed for nearly 250 years. Asserting an idea of “absolute immunity” for the president’s “official acts,” the Court proceeded to set up a pyramid scheme of legalese and bad faith by which, in essence, anything the president does is by definition not a crime. In other words, the president is to be considered above the law; an equally accurate and more urgent way of putting this is that the president now has absolute power over the U.S. government, and by extension, over all of us. After all, to cut to the violent chase, if he can now legally assassinate members of the other branches of government if they don’t bend to his will, no true limits can be said to exist on presidential power.

It’s not going too far to say that, in issuing a ruling that transforms the president into a virtual king, the Supreme Court has attempted to nullify the Constitution and American democracy in one blow. Given that the ruling was explicitly issued in support of a man who waged an insurrection against the United States, and who wishes to return to the Oval Office to complete the job, as well as in support of a Republican Party united behind this man, it’s fair to conclude that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has now explicitly joined the GOP’s insurrection. It has done so in the first place by making itself complicit in a previous effort to overthrow our system of government and replace it with something vicious, repressive, and unrepresentative. And looking to the future, it provides the ultimate pseudo-legal cover for illegal presidential acts, while asking us to pretend that the Constitution and the separation of powers still exist and deserve everyone’s deference, when in fact a lawless president enabled by the Court’s ruling would render the Constitution’s actual intent null and void. 

More insidiously, the Court has also joined the GOP insurrection by taking aim at the rule of law itself. As David Kurtz writes in an excellent assessment of the ruling and various attempts to hold Trump to account for his crimes, “The rule of law, as the saying goes, must exist for everyone; otherwise, it exists for no one. By placing the president beyond the rule of law, the Supreme Court has deprived all of us of its protections.” In a similar vein, Jamelle Bouie reminds us that the rule of law is no abstraction, but a basic guaranty of our security, noting, “If the president is a king, then we are subjects whose lives and livelihoods are safe only insofar as we don’t incur the wrath of the executive. And if we find ourselves outside the light of his favor, then we find ourselves, in effect, outside the protection of the law.” This means that literally anyone who ever displeased a second-term President Trump might be thrown in jail, tortured, or killed; simply the threat of such retribution could be used to keep Americans in line, as they rightly feared for their lives lest they show opposition to the president (who, even before the immunity ruling, appeared quite willing to deploy armed U.S. troops against protestors should he gain a second term).

But even if you don’t agree, or simply can’t bring yourself to believe, that these could be the broader consequences of the Court’s ruling, even a narrower reading places the Supreme Court squarely behind Trump and the GOP’s insurrectionary drive. The Court, in issuing an opinion that clears Trump of wrongdoing in attempting to overthrow the government, has swept away the possibility of accountability for his crimes and thus cleared him to become president again.

Moreover, by explicitly clearing him of an attempt to stay in office by both violent and pseudo-legal means, the Court has essentially given its green light to future such efforts. Given the Court’s siding with insurrectionists over the U.S. Constitution, this aspect of the ruling may be its most immediately dangerous. By saying that a president has absolute immunity, and that this immunity covers violent attempts to retain power, the Court has also suggested that Trump and the GOP may use whatever means necessary to gain power in November, including bogus legal arguments by bad-faith actors, but also up to and including violence. After all, so long as the result is Trump gaining the presidency, all will be blessed and made holy through the Court’s anti-constitutional alchemy, past crimes washed away by dint of occupying the presidential throne. So not only has the Court knowingly granted legitimacy to a presidential candidate it well knows will make use of the grotesquely broad power it has granted, it has given a wink and a nudge to that candidate to do what he must to gain power in November.

Beyond that, of course, should Donald Trump succeed, he has been empowered by the Court to essentially rule as a dictator.

And this gets us to why I believe it’s so important that Democrats and other supporters of democracy conceive of the GOP’s collective behavior as constituting an ongoing insurrection. As much of a threat that Donald Trump poses individually, the greater threat stems from the way that the Republican Party has joined its power and identity to the former president. The GOP politics that have emerged — scornful of the rule of law, opposed to democracy, comfortable with the utility of political violence, oriented around authoritarianism and strongman rule — is not democratic politics, but its antithesis. The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling acts as the cement that glues the whole enterprise together — not only empowering lawlessness, but allowing the movement to claim that lawlessness is actually constitutional and democratic, all in a contemptible effort to confer legitimacy on this dangerous insurrection. 

As such, no American is obliged to treat such politics as legitimate; certainly the Democratic Party is not obliged to do so. Instead, defenders of American democracy must loudly and consistently characterize such means and ends as in the first place illegitimate. For me, the single most potent way of condemning them as illegitimate is to describe how they constitute insurrectionism — an ongoing attempt to overturn the U.S. government, and by extension, the free American society our government protects and makes possible, and that most of us see as non-negotiable. 

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling should settle any debate as to whether the push towards autocracy is simply the cause of a single person, Donald Trump. Knowingly and thoroughly, the Supreme Court has placed its institutional heft behind a project to put a Republican strongman at the head of America’s government. This same project has been embraced, or consented to, by a preponderance of GOP state and elected officials. And as has been thoroughly documented, the Supreme Court’s conservative members appear deeply committed to the reactionary vision of American society that also propels much of the GOP base and the politicians it elects — a vision that sees white Christian males at the top of a social and power hierarchy below which all lesser Americans are pitifully ranked. It does not take wild speculation to assume that the justices who voted in favor of this joke of a ruling see Trump’s assumption of unbridled power as key to imposing a cultural as well as political regime with which they identify and sympathize.

Reminding ourselves that the Republican Party has been engaged in insurrection for at least the last three and a half years helps us see the immunity ruling in its proper light. Rather than an attempt to operate within the framework of the Constitution and the rule of law — the bounds of our democracy — the right-wing majority’s opinion holds that both are no longer operative in a meaningful way. To grant such a nonsensical ruling from Republican justices any legitimacy is no different than granting the broader Republican Party legitimacy when it attacks majority rule and when its presidential candidate threatens violent retribution against his personal enemies. The Supreme Court majority’s opinion should be treated with the same contempt and outrage Americans would show towards a ruling that re-instituted slavery, or once again condemned Japanese-Americans to internment camps. The ruling, rather than invalidating American democracy, should rightly be discussed and treated as invalidating the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority in one reckless, self-immolating act. Justices who would render such an opinion have shown themselves to be the Constitution’s hangmen, not its defenders.

Since the immunity ruling, public attention has been captured by the maelstrom around President Biden and whether he will be persuaded or forced to stand down from his presidential campaign due to concerns about his mental and physical capacities. The immunity ruling has made the stakes of Biden’s fate even higher than before. Should Trump return to the White House, only the most naive would think that he wouldn’t engage in a spree of violence and criminality, feeling secure in the Supreme Court’s blessing of untrammeled power rooted in freedom from accountability. One might say that much of the purpose of the U.S. Constitution was to prevent a man like Trump from ever gaining the executive power; thanks to an insurrection by the GOP and its allied Supreme Court, the nation is on the cusp of its own negation — but only if the majority acquiesces to this usurpation.

As I’ve argued before, Trump’s actions even before the immunity ruling rendered him illegitimate as a presidential candidate; such actions included his attempt to violently overthrow the government and his use of violent threat to coerce voters to cast ballots for him this time around. The Supreme Court has now acted in an insurrectionary and illegitimate manner to support his return to office and his exercise of dangerous, indeed outlandish power. The Democratic Party cannot proceed as if the immunity opinion is anything but what it is: a declaration of war on American democracy by a GOP-aligned Court majority. At a bare minimum, the ruling must be used as a weapon to rally a majority for rapid reform of the Court, necessarily including the addition of enough new justices to nullify the power of the Court’s radicals. They must state plainly that the Supreme Court has attempted to render every American, at the end of the day, as no longer possessing the rights of a full citizen, but rather reduced to being the subject of a king-like president that the Court is helping to bring to power.

Democrats must also make clear that this idea of American citizenry is now the Republican Party’s position, and that against this the Democrats stand for a real democracy, true equality, and the rule of law. Equally, Democrats must recognize and broadcast the nature of the larger conflict in which they’re engaged, where a determined minority is acting to overturn American democracy, and act with the requisite boldness. You do not defeat an insurrection by describing its participants as a loyal opposition; you do so by rallying the American majority to recognize and deny the illegitimacy of the insurrection’s tactics, goals, and false claims to be engaging in lawful governance.

One of the most debilitating tropes you hear from some otherwise solid defenders of democracy is that the United States is in danger of ending, of being lost forever should Donald Trump and the GOP gain power. And admittedly, what I’ve written here so far could be read in a similarly apocalyptic vein, and intentionally so: between an unfettered Trump, a complicit Supreme Court, and potentially a congressional majority, the GOP could implement all manner of laws blocking the ability of Democrats to win future elections. And this is on top the possibility of a deranged president wielding violence and repression against his political opposition. But in the face of this threat, we need to bear in mind two basics of life: the future is unknowable, and it can be affected by the actions we take today (for good or for ill).

One reason for optimism is that the Republican Party, from Trump to the Supreme Court, has wildly overplayed its hand. Trump, in adopting the rhetoric of 20th century dictators and mob bosses, is running full tilt against the general movement of the United States towards more democracy, not less; towards more equality, not less; towards more compassion, not less. While it is true that he has managed to radicalize a certain chunk of the population, I still believe that a majority of the population understands that what he’s peddling is poison to the body politic. Likewise, the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority, in issuing opinions that fly in the face of precedent and openly serve partisan ends, has been working hard to delegitimize itself in the eyes of the majority. The fact that multiple justices have engaged in open and contemptuous corruption (accepting millions in gifts, flying treasonous flags at home, lying to Congress during their confirmation processes) adds insult to injury. The Court majority has rendered itself obscene in the eyes of much of the public.

Beyond the fragility of the Republicans’ ideological positions, the sweeping changes to American society that Trump and the GOP would impose on the United States cannot be accomplished without widespread compliance by the American public. As Chris Hayes suggests in a recent segment of his show, assuming mass submission to immoral laws and acts concedes far too much in advance to political forces that are owed no such deference. Would military leaders really order their troops to fire on their fellow Americans? Would doctors across the United States actually respect a national abortion ban that condemned thousands of women to death, and tens of millions of others no control over their persons? Would Americans really stand idly by as millions of immigrants were rounded up and placed in concentration camps?

So this is a final reason, grim but optimistic, why I keep insisting that we view the GOP’s push for irreversible power as an insurrection against the United States. In a worst-case scenario, even if this authoritarian movement manages to gain the presidency, and even Congress, and seeks to entrench GOP rule by subverting the rule of law, such an insurrection cannot ultimately succeed if a majority of people refuse to recognize its legitimacy, and remain committed to American democracy and the rule of law. It cannot succeed if the majority views it for what it is — an illegitimate effort to subvert and overturn American democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law. If the worst comes to pass, we should not expect or accept pro-democracy politicians to simply go along; we should demand politicians who rally the public, defy the authoritarians, and take back the country and its government. And these reasonable expectations hold equally true for every individual American as well. 

Joe Biden Hasn’t Totally Lost His Marbles, But He’s Certainly Lost His Way

What seemed, mere days ago, like escalating and even unstoppable momentum to convince or force President Biden to make way for an alternate Democratic presidential candidate appears to have transformed into a messy, muddled impasse. Critically, Democratic Party leaders, including Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, have endorsed the president’s continued quest for a second term, following conclaves of elected officials on Capitol Hill. These meetings and statements followed unambiguous declarations by Biden himself that he would not be bowing out of the race, including in an interview with George Stephanopoulos last Friday and in a letter to House Democrats.

Biden’s decision to defy the post-debate escalation of worries among Democratic elected officials and the 70% or more of the public who think he’s too old to run again has placed his campaign and the presidential race in uncharted territory. In a best-case scenario, even if the Democratic Party and most of the Democratic base stick with him, it would be naive to think that coverage of his age and every bit of evidence of debility won’t be a major media theme for the next four months. And this, in turn, will inevitably sap his support through direct damage to his popularity, and indirectly by sucking valuable coverage and energy from Donald Trump’s wild unfitness for office.

Likewise, as others have pointed out, Biden has set himself a trap — if he conducts an energetic campaign as advised by those looking for reassurance, it’s inevitable that he’ll provide more demonstrations of disability akin to those that astounded the nation at the debate. One indirect proof of this is that the president has utterly failed to conduct such a round of appearances in the last 10 days, which would have been the clear and obvious way to dispel or assuage doubts. On the other hand, if Biden continues a lackluster pace of scripted events and minimal opportunities for spontaneous speech and thought, he will confirm fears about his limited abilities. If the debate had been the only evidence of health issues, that would be one thing; but in the week and a half since, we’ve had plenty of coverage of prior similar episodes. In continuing to maintain that the debate catastrophe was a one-off, Joe Biden is attempting to defy reality.

So now that we are at this impasse, what might happen? Before we try to answer that, we should take note of how the nature of the discussion over Biden’s fitness for office and continued candidacy have changed in the last couple days. To my mind, the biggest development resulting from Biden’s pushback and the Democratic leadership’s at-least temporary decision not to call on him to step down is that this story is now as much about the Democratic Party as it is about Joe Biden. The first layer is the potential damage to the Democrats’ electoral prospects. Much of the concern among senators and representatives seems to be flowing from their realization that Biden’s weakened candidacy threatens their elections as well. On a mass scale, whether Biden continues as a candidate, and continues to lose public support, means that he could be setting up the Democrats for larger losses beyond just the presidency. 

The other way this is about the Democratic Party is that Biden’s intransigence requires Democrats to make an existential choice: Having failed thus far to convince Biden to step aside, are major elements of the party willing to match their concerns with their actions, and seek to force Biden off the ticket? If they do, they obviously risk losing the fight, in which case they would probably inflict irreparable damage on Biden’s prospects (i.e. their efforts would validate Republican accusations and voter concerns regarding the president). But if they don’t challenge Biden, what will that do to the public’s idea of the Democratic Party? What will citizens think of politicians who knew that their candidate was unfit, but backed him anyway? At a minimum, this seems like a formula for weakening the party over the coming months. But beyond that, if Biden then loses, what will the public conclude about the values of the Democratic Party, when it spent the critical final months of the 2024 election expending vast resources in trying to convince Americans that they shouldn’t believe the evidence of their own senses?

One thing seems clear: without a massive Democratic outcry against Biden’s candidacy at both the party and voter level, he appears set on his present fatal course, having proven impervious to piecemeal complaints. At this point, it feels like any hope for changing Biden’s mind lies less in the realm of politics and more in the realm of psychology. With the president ignoring significant swathes of reality (polls, his own clear deterioration, his catastrophic debate performance) that might actually persuade him to step aside, he has responded to criticism with declarations of his unique ability to defeat Trump and his incomparable handling of the presidency. In contrast to such recent remarks, I was struck by Brian Beutler’s reminder that back in December, Biden told reporters that there were probably 50 Democrats capable of beating Trump. Now he says that he alone can do it. Something has changed in Biden’s thinking, and not in a way that I’d call either good or reassuring. 

At The Atlantic, Franklin Foer suggests a model for understanding Biden’s behavior, writing that, “Since childhood, Biden has suffered recurrent episodes of brutal humiliation, when the world has mocked and dismissed him. On each occasion, Biden has stubbornly set out to prove his worth. Persistence became his coping mechanism, his effective antidote to humiliation. Triumph was always just a matter of summoning sufficient grit.” But now, this otherwise resilient approach to life has created a “psychological prison” for Biden, as he’s in a situation where no matter how hard he tries, he will not be able to overcome the age-related failings of his body and mind. 

But you don’t have to accept Foer’s theorizing to see the persuasiveness of his prescription for handling Biden at this point:

If his aides and fellow politicians want to help him back away from this disaster, they need to understand his temperament. When they have conversations with Biden about his future, they must respect his dignity, and acknowledge his extraordinary achievements. But the truth can’t be painted over. A man who will do whatever it takes to escape humiliation needs to understand that suffering the near-term indignity of stepping down will allow him to avoid the long-term indignity of being remembered as one of history’s great fools.

So far, what we’ve seen of Biden’s reaction to doubts about his capabilities confirms the advantages of such an approach. His reaction to the threat of mass defections was to thrown down the gauntlet and challenge doubters to try to oust him at the Democratic convention, a sure sign that attempts to confront him are feeding into a narrative of his own rightness and need to double down. In the absence of such a challenge, or of a total breakdown in support, it seems that a softer, behind-the-scenes touch holds the greatest possibility — at least at present — for convincing Biden to stand down. Let’s hope that something of this insight is guiding the widespread attitude among House and Senate members to stand pat for now, and that we’re not looking at an irrevocable collective fatalism that will likely drive the Democratic Party into defeat, and the nation into the arms of GOP fascism.

Is President Biden Getting High on His Own Malarkey Supply?

For those worried about President Joe Biden’s ability to beat Donald Trump and serve another term, his interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last Friday raised more concerns than it allayed. Compared to the low bar of his debate performance, Biden came across as more coherent and cogent; even so, he failed to end a few sentences, mishandled questions about the debate itself (offering at least three different reasons he had done so poorly), and took dubious issue with polls that clearly show him behind Donald Trump in key states. And his dismissal of polls showing that many voters view him as too old to run again was particularly striking.

Watching Biden, I felt the sadness other observers have expressed about the interview. It is indeed undignified for the president to have to answer questions about his health and cognitive functions, and yet Stephanopoulos really did have to ask these questions. It was particularly startling for Biden to reject the idea of taking a cognitive test and sharing the results publicly; he averred instead that every day of being president was a neurological test. But in recounting the successes of his presidency, Biden didn’t sound defiant as much as genuinely befuddled, as if he doesn’t entirely understand why people don’t believe past success is a guaranty of future performance. Here, I felt sympathy for him, as I don’t doubt that he is working hard and dealing with high-impact, high-stress situations with global impact on a daily basis.

In light of recent events (the debate, the elapse of a week before we got even a short unscripted appearance), his pronouncement that he’s the person most qualified to be president struck a nerve with me. It felt like a preemptive shiv stuck in any Democratic presidential candidate who succeeds him, ungenerous and grandiose. His declaration that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to drop out of the race was likewise defiantly definitive while managing to strike the chord of grandiosity a second time.

Perhaps most jarring of all was Biden’s response to Stephanopoulos’ question as to how he’d feel if he remained in the race only to lose to Trump in November. “I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about.” With the caveat that Biden did go on to emphasize what a pivotal election this will be, this felt like a response that, whether through verbal flub or honest expression, totally failed to meet the moment. With the very real possibility that a Trump presidency would usher in authoritarian rule, violence, and an unprecedented assault on basic freedoms, the president’s response had a “peace out, good luck to y’all” vibe that I found unsettling.

It is very, very bad that at this point in the campaign, President Biden is in a position where he has to defend his health in place of taking on Donald Trump and the threat of Republican authoritarianism. This interview raised the possibility of a protracted struggle within the Democratic Party over whether to replace or stick with Biden, which ultimately will only realistically be settled by the president choosing to stand down as the Democrats’ candidate. It may not be too soon to start paging the Lord Almighty for some political opining.

Biden Campaign Crisis Continues to Distract Media and Public From Menace of Trump, Supreme Court Radicalism

In the past couple days, and over the last day in particular, we’ve seen an intensification of speculation and coverage over whether President Joe Biden should step down as the Democrats’ presidential candidate. Of particular note was reporting from the New York Times, based on those who have interacted with Biden in recent months, that he has previously displayed episodes of mental disorientation similar to what we all saw on the debate stage last week. Given the seriousness of such observations, and the possibility that some of the anonymous interviewees have an axe to grind, I am taking them somewhat cautiously. However, they are given additional credence by recent episodes of confusion captured on video and described by the Times, such as the president’s difficulty recalling the name of his Homeland Security secretary at a recent event, and a couple different instances of Biden appearing confused at the G-7 meeting in mid-June. Reports that he is only reliably energetic between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. seem equally problematic, if to my mind deeply needing further corroboration.

I’m sympathetic with people who caution that the Times has long had demonstrable bias against Biden, including over questions about his age, but I don’t think this automatically leads to the conclusion that paper, or other outlets, are misreporting here. Questions as to Biden’s capacity were rightly raised by his disastrous debate performance, and are matters of great public interest. To be blunt, his issues on the debate stage were the sort of problems involving memory and cognitive abilities that many of us associate with aging. I think Zachary Carter puts it just right when he writes that, “This was not so much a bad debate as a devastating revelation.” This was not anything like President Barack Obama’s poor first debate showing against Mitt Romney in 2012, in which the president’s problems implicated not his memory or ability to think on his feet, but rather an appearance of disinterest in being there, along with a lackluster advocacy for his own reelection. And indeed, if anyone had had those doubts, they would have been put to rest by his next debate against Romney.

I wrote last time that Joe Biden needs to show the public he has a strategy for allaying their concerns. Yet, in the days since the debate, he has not adopted the obvious rebuttal strategy of putting himself out in public, in unscripted situations, in order to prove that the debate was a one-off. At a minimum, this shows a lack of sharp strategic thinking regarding his present peril; at worst, it provides more (indirect) evidence that he cannot be relied on to make less structured public appearances. Some 67% of Americans in a recent poll said they thought Biden is too old to be president; moreover, “53% of voters say they are more concerned about Biden’s age and physical and mental health, while 42% say they are more concerned about Trump’s criminal charges and threats to democracy.” This latter statistic speaks to the degree to which concerns about Biden based on his age are crowding out concerns about the true threat to America — Donald Trump and the GOP’s plans to remake the U.S. into an autocracy or dictatorship, which have now been supercharged by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling that the president is above the law, free to commit crimes without fear of prosecution.

The question I keep asking myself is a version of the one I’ve seen others expressing — how likely is it that Joe Biden will be able to dispel concerns over his age in the coming days and weeks so that he gains enough trust and space to pursue the necessary case against GOP authoritarianism, versus the likelihood that more information will come out concerning episodes of debility, or that we will witness in real time such episodes ourselves? To be blunt: I don’t see how Biden can win, even against a monster such as Trump, if the public becomes ever more concerned about his ability to do his job, particularly as such concerns will inexorably compete with coverage of Trump’s (even greater) unfitness for office. At some point, beyond all the talk of the dangers and possible chaos of the Democrats replacing Biden with another candidate, I think you need to let some common sense intrude into the discussion: Americans are rightly confused, angry, and disheartened by a choice between a dictator and a man who increasingly looks unable to do his job, including performance of the role of commander in chief. This is most definitely not a crisis that’s been created by malevolent media or back-stabbing allies (though of course all exist and play some part). Rather, people are reacting to reality, which, like it or not, encompasses how Joe Biden appears on TV during a debate as well as his stated prior interest in having such a debate and his campaign’s insistence that his appearance, contrasted with Trump’s predictably odious performance, would help shift the momentum of the race in Biden’s favor. I think Americans are probably puzzled as to why Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t take Biden’s place as the presidential candidate, as would happen if Biden died or were otherwise incapacitated in the course of his presidency (short answer: she can). 

The issue of Biden’s continued candidacy has obvious implications for the Democratic Party’s broader fortunes, but I think Democrats really need to look beyond the possible impact on the party’s ability to hold the House and Senate if they’re saddled with a presidential candidate who reaches a point of clear unelectability. The basic argument in Biden’s defense that people should disregard the evidence of their eyes and ears because people with a vested interest in protecting Biden’s interest (advisers, etc.) tell them he’s great behind closed doors swerves too close to comfort to the realm of Trumpian untruths (every rally is the biggest ever, the U.S. had the best economy ever when he was president, etc.). For me, the Democrats’ role as the sole remaining major party dedicated to protecting American democracy is deeply entwined with a fundamental commitment to the truth over lies and propaganda. Yes, politics — even democratic politics — is always about power, and there will be grey zones and compromises even in the most utopian of political systems. But the risks involved in telling the public that Biden is of sound mind and body when he is in fact not are far greater than wrecking his candidacy — they also threaten the public’s trust in the Democratic Party more generally to be relied on to tell the truth (a party which, in the most cynical telling, could be accused of propping up an octogenarian invalid as its best response to the country’s maximal point of peril since World War II or possibly even the eve of the Civil War). If they find out that Democrats lied to them about Biden’s health, would Americans be less likely to believe Democrats when they tell them that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country? And would the damage be compounded by the Democrats’ willingness to put forward a candidate who doesn’t actually seem fit enough to defend democracy, calling into question their claims that democracy is actually under threat?  I think the answer to these questions is a resounding “Yes.” As others have said, if we’re in a crisis, Democrats need to actually act like it. 

Likewise, Democrats should not underestimate the democratic legitimacy peril that Biden could put them in (and potentially already has, at least to some degree). Yes, Joe Biden won the Democratic primaries; yet against this you have consistent polls showing a strong majority of Americans saying that Biden is too old for the presidency, coupled with the uncomfortable fact that many Democrats voted for him without any great enthusiasm, and, more importantly, based on the understanding that he and his team were telling the truth about his abilities. Yes, we all knew that Biden was older and slower than four years ago — but I’d bet that very few people thought they were voting for someone who would prove unable to defend himself or democracy up on that stage last week. At some point — and some would say we have already reached it — the continued Democratic elite’s support of Biden against popular opinion begins to look not very democratic at all.

The state of play as I write this, around 5:00 on July 3, shows Biden and his campaign pushing back against reports today that he has told some confidants that he comprehends the gravity of his situation, and that, in the words of the New York Times, “understands that he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince voters that he is up to the job after a disastrous debate performance last week.” In response, the Biden campaign has stated that, “Reports suggesting they or the campaign are considering alternative scenarios are patently false.” Moreover, as the Times also reports, “In an emailed fund-raising message on Wednesday, President Biden reiterated to supporters that he’s staying in the race. ‘I’m running. I’m the Democratic Party’s nominee. No one is pushing me out.’” We’ll soon see if these statements are simply cover fire to buy the president time as he ponders his future, or the opening salvos of a campaign by the president to save his. . . campaign.

Post-Debate Biden Campaign Crisis Collides With Illegitimate Right-Wing Supreme Court Crisis

A few days on, I remain convinced that President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week has led to a crisis of his campaign, and by extension, of American democracy. The election of Donald Trump would, by both Trump’s own stated intention and past example, result in an unprecedented assault on the rule of law, basic freedoms, public safety, and national security. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity today guaranties that no guardrails remain to protect the country against his most outlandish plans for a second term. And beyond the disasters that Trump himself would unleash, his election would open the floodgates to all manner of reactionary mayhem by his right-wing allies in the GOP. There can be no question that just over four months from the election, Biden’s debate failures made Trump’s return to power more likely. The Biden campaign and Democrats should be spending every day reminding Americans of the danger of Trump and the authoritarian GOP, and of a positive alternative vision for the country; instead, we are bogged down with rightly worrying about Biden’s capacity to serve a second term. Such worries are a rational response to what we all saw last week. Saying that everyone has bad days does not cut it; a president doesn’t have the luxury to have some off days during which he can’t complete a sentence, express a thought, or adequately confront a dangerous adversary.

Biden’s performance was so upsetting for so many of us because it not only confirmed some of the severest doubts about his health and mental capabilities, it also raised the possibility of more disasters to come during the remainder of the campaign. Even if Biden manages to impress and reassure in upcoming appearances, his debate performance has planted a ticking time bomb of anger, disarray, and hopelessness in the Democratic base and larger public that’s primed to go off should there be a future display of similar ineptitude. A couple months of high-octane Joementum, chock full of town hall meetings, feats of age-appropriate derring-do, and spontaneous eloquence, could be blown to kingdom come by a single repeat of Debate Debacle 2024.

It’s not sufficient for his defenders to say that Biden simply had a bad night, or that a diminished Biden would make a better president than a hyperactive Trump, even if we accept that both are true. The Biden that we saw last week did not appear to be qualified to be president, full stop. Biden owes it to Americans to reassure them as to his ability to serve another four years. You cannot point to his record as proof, because the shortcomings in question have to do with his age and diminished abilities going forward. For his defenders, and for leaders in the Democratic Party, to essentially argue that it would be better to have an incompetent president than Trump is an insult to voters, and a recipe not just for disaster in November, but for public trust in the Democratic Party out into the future. I think that Ezra Klein is on to something when he writes, in response to the debate and its fallout:

[R]ather than act as a check on Biden’s decisions and ambitions, the party has become an enabler of them. An enforcer of them. It is giving the American people an option they do not want and then threatening them with the end of democracy if they do not take it. Democrats like to say that democracy is on the ballot. But it isn’t. Biden is on the ballot. There are plenty of voters who might want to vote for democracy but do not want to vote for Biden.

While I disagree with Klein’s assertion that democracy isn’t on the ballot — though he is literally correct, this election is most certainly symbolically a referendum on whether the U.S. remains a democracy or slides into authoritarian, one-party rule — it is in fact not a tenable position for Democratic Party leaders to dismiss widespread, good-faith concerns that Joe Biden is not fit for another term. As Klein also rightly points out, the Democrats would be fully capable of replacing Biden if a specific health crisis forced him off the ballot. Does it really serve America’s pro-democracy party to ignore concerns that a president might not be able to do his job?

At least in political commentary, how one answers the question of whether Biden should make way for another candidate is largely tracking with individual views of how relatively destructive it would be for the Democrats to choose another candidate. I haven’t see any advocates of resignation say that this would be risk-free, though some, like Klein, argue that a contested convention could end up exciting the public and charging up a renewed Democratic campaign to stop Trump. On the other hand are those who warn of the dangers of such an unprecedented maneuver, pointing to the intraparty conflicts it could unleash, with frequent emphasis on the destabilizing effect if Vice President Kamala Harris were passed over or defeated as the substitute candidate. Some also note the lack of vetting the candidate would receive in comparison to Biden, laying the groundwork for savage Republican attacks on undisclosed or untested weaknesses. I would say that on balance, more of the people whose political instincts I trust the most are currently arguing that a Biden withdrawal carries too high a risk of chaos.

Personally, I remain in the camp of giving Biden another chance, along the lines I described before, at least in this interim period as we wait for polling to capture the extent of the hit Biden’s chances have taken due to his debate performance. I wrote that Biden must lay out a clear, convincing plan to demonstrate he is fit for another term. In a weekend column, E.J. Dionne gets more specific about what such a plan might look like:

He needs to do a series of televised interviews, including many in less than friendly settings. He’ll have to step up his campaign appearances, offering more speeches along the lines of his energetic performance in North Carolina on Friday.

He should make a major commitment to doing all he can to strengthen the campaigns of Democratic House and Senate candidates, the most vulnerable of whom have more reason than anyone to worry about the electoral impact of a weakened Biden. He needs to use last week’s demonstration of the Supreme Court’s radical right-wing activism to underscore the long-term impact of the choices voters will be making this November. If Democrats lose both the Senate and the White House, the damage to the judiciary over a generation will be catastrophic.

Dionne is on the right track here, which as I see it would have two major elements —providing reassurance that Biden is physically and mentally up to the job through public appearances, while simultaneously emphasizing that he understands that the stakes of this race are much bigger than him. My personal preference involves Biden making a particularly direct, honest pitch to younger voters, with particular emphasis on the environment, college debt, and the immorality of GOP white supremacism that directly threatens the social and economic prospects of America’s diverse upcoming generations.

There’s no getting around that this is an ugly, upsetting, and deeply absurd situation. Donald Trump must be stopped, along with the reactionary GOP that seeks to erase decades if not centuries of social progress and basic freedoms. It very much feels like pro-democracy forces are fighting with one hand tied behind their back as so much energy — much of it necessary, at least in the wake of the debate — is channeled into discussions of Biden’s future. The Biden campaign and Democrats, if they choose to retain Biden, must find a way to decisively change the dynamics of this race to focus on Trump’s perfidy, the GOP’s radicalism, the right-wing Supreme Court’s usurpation of power, and the racist, misogynistic forces that bind together the reactionary backlash fueling them all. As today’s Supreme Court ruling should make blindingly clear, the threat to American society and government comes not simply from Trump, but from an authoritarian Republican Party that sees the former president as its instrument of vengeance and control. The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has now cemented its role of not only as a defender of Trump’s coup attempt, but of all future crimes he commits in office, joining congressional Republicans in protecting him from the consequence of his anti-democratic actions. To the greatest extent possible, the election must be presented as a referendum on American democracy, not a referendum on Joe Biden.

As His Presidential Campaign Enters Into Crisis, the Future Is Up to Biden - and to America's Pro-Democracy Majority

Last Thursday night, millions of us experienced a traumatic and collective near-death experience — not of our own lives, but of American democracy. Within the first 10 minutes of the Biden-Trump debate on an Atlanta stage, we witnessed the man who tried to overthrow American government four years ago steamroll over our current president with lies, menace, and an aura of invincibility, while the latter struggled to form a single coherent sentence and appeared to reinforce even the most outlandish accusations that he is too old to be president. And though Biden’s performance improved from his checked-out start, it was deeply disorienting to watch the contrast between Trump’s firehose of lies and fascistic rhetoric, on the one hand, and Biden’s inability to defend American democracy and basic freedoms, much less himself, on the other. 

So many of us remain stunned in the aftermath not simply by Biden’s inability to perform at the rhetorical and intellectual level we should expect from a president, but because we perceive that he is all that stands between us and the volcano of hate, retribution, and destruction with whom he shared the stage. Even as Biden seemed to show that he isn’t up to the job — either in terms of convincing people of his overall fitness for office or of advancing the Democrats’ goals for America against Republicans’ demented vision — we also got a reminder of what a profound threat Trump poses to the country. Trump lied remorselessly about his accomplishments and Biden’s. He was in full sociopathic con man mode, telling America that up is down and black is white: that January 6 was the Democrats’ fault; that Trump actually opposes political violence; that America is being invaded by tens of millions of criminals and mental patients who intend to kill and rape us before taking our jobs; that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is not his fault but is also simply the return of common sense with which everyone but Biden agrees, and that also, Democrats abort babies after they are born.

So when we encounter the mass disorientation of Democrats and other supporters of democracy, it is not because we ever believed Biden to be perfect, but because the threat posed by his opponent is so very great, and because Biden showed — both symbolically but also substantively — that he may well be unable to counter this threat. Time and time again, Biden failed to forcefully or cogently defend basic aspects of American life and freedom from Trump’s lies and slanders. A few particular moments stand out to me:

First, Biden’s utter fumble of his defense of abortion rights, instead slipping into a near-non sequitur about women murdered by migrants, and soon after talking incomprehensibly about trimesters. There was also an unpleasant digression into incest which failed to make explicit that victims of incest could be denied abortions in some states.

Second, his inability to counter Trump’s misdirection about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a straightforward explanation of why the U.S. is backing that besieged country; this was particularly egregious considering the clear opening it held for reminding Americans of Trump’s sycophantic deference to Vladimir Putin, not to mention the fact that Trump was impeached the first time for tying Ukraine’s defense against Russia to its willingness to help Trump kneecap Biden’s first presidential run.

Third, it was appalling that Biden appeared to accept Trump’s lie that the country is being overrun by criminal and/or insane immigrants, and spoke so limply of border security, fumbling the potentially potent point that it was Trump who ultimately directed Republicans not to vote for a bipartisan border bill in order to provide Trump with an issue to run on. It is beyond comprehensible to me that Biden would not have an argument ready to refute such a predictable and slanderous point that is so closely tied to Trump and the GOP’s centering of racial hatred in the party’s appeal to voters. Those who have argued that Democrats have made a grave error in accepting GOP premises around immigration were vindicated, as Biden found no way to upturn the insane premises (brown people are coming to kill us all) and resulting insane solutions (expel 20 million immigrants from the U.S.) proposed by Trump.

Biden is ultimately responsible for his own performance, but you have to wonder about the advisors who were responsible for helping him prep for this debate, and who urged him to participate in it in the first place. Either they did not properly prepare him (including by having someone realistically role-play a vicious and implacable Trump), in which case the team is incompetent, or they did prepare him as much as possible, in which case Biden owns his poor performance all on his own. After all, Trump’s words and actions at the debate were wholly predictable, in line with his prior campaign appearances, and yet Biden seemed to have no plan to deal with his torrent of lies, to undermine Trump’s absurd claims to competence, or to make a case for himself in the face of Trump’s assaults. I hate to repeat a trope that the former president uttered last night, but in this case, it will indeed be a travesty if Biden doesn’t fire anyone for giving him bad advice that contributed to last night’s debacle. 

In the last few days, plenty of Democrats have been hitting the panic button, which for many turns out to be an eject button, wondering how they can jettison Joe Biden from the presidential nomination and get someone more electable in his place. I’ve been skeptical of the dump-Biden arguments up to now, believing that his objectively strong record and commitment to democracy earned him a run at a second term. There was also the not-insignificant fact that no credible alternatives chose to challenge him for the nomination during the primaries, with Biden emerging as the legitimate party choice. And he seemed to do fine and quell a lot of doubts with his strong State of the Union performance back in March.

But if his debate participation was meant to further reassure voters as to his mental and physical abilities while exposing Trump as the degenerate that he is, he failed in the first mission and badly fumbled the second. Instead of the subsequent public discussion being dominated by Trump’s repeated refusal to say that he’d accept the November election results (he hedged his answer in ways that make it clear that only a Trump victory will be acceptable), or by Trump’s lies about abortion rights, or by Trump’s total lack of engagement with questions around climate change, far too much oxygen is being taken up by what is ultimately a self-inflicted (and avoidable) wound on Biden’s part.

So that is where we are, whether we like it or not. But where we go from here is not just up to Joe Biden, but also to the millions of Americans who want to defend our democracy, defeat the fascistic movement behind Donald Trump, and move this country forward. For his part, Joe Biden needs to confront the damage he’s done to our confidence in him, and rapidly implement a credible strategy to regain public trust in his capacity to fight implacably for America’s future. He cannot simply ask the American people to ignore what they saw last week, because what they saw was terrifying and demoralizing, and seemed to validate the widespread concerns about his age held by voters from across the political spectrum. Not only does he need to signal that such a failure will not happen a second time, he will have to deliver on that promise. Even the rosiest possible take on Biden’s health and acuity — that debate night was a one-off, an uncanny convergence of cramming for the debate, a head cold, and the existential burdens of the presidency — must still conclude that his catastrophic performance and choice to participate ended up boosting the prospects of his deranged opponent. And if Joe Biden cannot reassure his prospective voters in the coming weeks, then those voters should feel free to make loud and clear their desire for Biden to step aside, and for the Democrats to choose a successor candidate, however messy and potentially dangerous such an unprecedented maneuver might be.

The country needs a candidate who can clearly illustrate the stakes of this election; it needs to be seen as a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, not as a gamble between a declining senior and an energetic psycho. What happened on debate night was totally unacceptable — again, Biden walked into a trap of his own making. No one forced him to debate Donald Trump, and indeed, many have persuasively made the case that you can’t actually have a debate where one candidate has no commitment to either the truth or basic democratic beliefs like adhering to election results.

At the same time, all the millions of Democrats feeling at sea and disempowered need to face the fact that in-fighting, recriminations, and self-doubt will only make defeat in November more likely. For every conversation about Biden disappointing them, and for every call to their elected representatives urging that Biden step aside, I would ask folks to also remind themselves and others of how hideously Trump behaved on that debate stage. To me, the lack of remorse or accountability over his past catastrophes was by itself disqualifying. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that he is running for president primarily to escape accountability for the many crimes he committed before and during office. In this sense, his quest is utterly self-serving, even as his ascendance to the presidency would empower a reactionary cohort of Christian nationalists, white supremacists, anti-labor zealots, and open misogynists. This race is not simply, or even primarily, about Trump versus Biden, but about whether we continue to have a democratic, free society that defends equality and shared purpose, or an authoritarian one where insurrectionists run free, a deranged president jails political adversaries and guns down protestors, women and minorities are treated as second class citizens, and the world is left to burn as oil executives are allowed to write environmental policy. Whether or not Biden remains on the ballot, we must insist that these be the true terms of the debate.

Corrupt Supreme Court Has Inexorably Placed Itself at Center of 2024 Presidential Campaign

Since last month’s post about Justice Samuel Alito’s apparent addiction to treason-associated flags, there’s been a spate of developments related to both Alito’s personal corruption and the corruption of the right-wing Supreme Court majority more generally. It’s been enough that I want to start by reiterating a point I’ve made before: there are certain political dumpster fires where there is very little cost to Democrats in working to define a public narrative and agenda for action, in part because there is a near-certainty that fresh information will continue to come to light that will only reinforce the case they are trying to make.

The current Supreme Court is clearly vying to be the supreme example of my pet theory. In just the last month, we’ve had additional reporting that casts doubt on the Alitos’ public statements about the circumstances on why the pair of treason flags were flown at family residences (even as the judge has continued to place the blame for the insurrectionary symbols squarely on his wife). Beyond this, an investigative reporter infiltrated a Supreme Court shindig and recorded conversations with both Alitos that aren’t simply unflattering, but in the case of the justice, cast still more doubt on his ability to judge crucial cases without imposing his significant and severe personal prejudice. And apart from the Alitos, inquiries by Senate Democrats have resulted in revelations of even more undisclosed financial gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas, in this instance free flights on millionaire Harlan Crow’s private jet. 

As I’ve written before, the corruption of the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is in the first place inherently bad on various straightforward levels — anti-democratic in ways that align with the authoritarian Republican Party, anti-freedom in ways that reflect an Christian extremist bias, anti-civil rights in ways that reflects a fundamentally white supremacist vision of America, pro-plutocrat in ways that reflect adulation of the millionaire class. Together, these are more than reason enough to place Court reform at the center of the national agenda. As more and more people are recognizing and describing, the Supreme Court has effectively become an unelected GOP legislature, ruling on a host of laws in ways that consistently advance a far-right agenda that doesn’t have the votes to pass at the national level.

But though it is very good news that the Court’s malfeasance is coming to greater public attention, there is one enormous downside that I believe the Democratic leadership is struggling to navigate. The more the Court’s corruption and over-extended power comes to light, the more the public will reasonably ask what the Democrats are doing to correct this imbalance. And as we’ve seen in other areas of conflict with the Republican Party, many senior Democrats are conflict-averse when it comes to fully engaging with the GOP. With the Court, of course, there are understandable (if not fully defensible) reasons for hesitation. At the present time, it does appear impossible to believe that corrupt justices like Alito and Thomas might be impeached and removed from the Court — not with the GOP perfecting displays of “totalitarian unanimity” when it comes to defying the rule of law. But this perceived impossibility seems to be leading the Democrats to not even begin a process that might change public opinion and the country’s political dynamics in ways that might yet yield results, at least in the long term.

Not only is this counter-productive for anyone urging Court reform, it also threatens to implicate the Democrats in the very corruption the claim to oppose. If they do not seem to be trying to undo the corruption, then some might reasonably conclude that they’re actually OK with it. To me, this is a huge reason why action is required, even if that action can’t reasonably be expected to yield immediate results. Indeed, too many Democrats seem to assume that a Court and a GOP that defy common-sense reforms will make them look weak — but it seems equally possible that such defiance might help erode public support for the Court majority and its defenders. 

But though the Democrats risk being tainted by the Supreme Court’s corruption if they fail to move to remedy it, it’s equally clear that Chief Justice John Roberts implicates himself in both Alito’s and Thomas’s corruption every more deeply as the days pass and he refuses to impose meaningful measures that might censure or curb their outlandish behavior. At some point, silence must be read as active complicity in the two men’s insurrectionary and anti-democratic projects. A more aggressive Democratic Party would be hounding Roberts’ failure to lead the Court in an ethical manner, which could in turn increase public pressure for meaningful change.

An underlying issue here is that institutionally-minded Democrats seem to genuinely worry about the Court’s legitimacy and the potential damage to the rule of law should the broader public no longer have faith in the Court’s rulings. This is an understandable concern, as the Court should ideally function as a trusted arbiter of disputes between the various interests and factions of American society. But only a fool would say that this is how the Court currently operates. Instead, it’s become the de facto legislator for imposing minority positions that lack support to ever pass Congress and be signed into law.

This means that when Democrats speak of restoring the legitimacy of the Court, but fail to speak of its legacy of corruption and political extremism that has subverted American democracy and freedom, they inadvertently position themselves as defenders of the Court’s long record of bad decisions. And so this leads Democrats to essentially tell the American majority that they need to effectively eat shit for the indefinite future — to accept as legitimate Court decisions that have been issued by a corrupt Court, in order to preserve public respect for the Court when it someday, somehow begins to issue more reasonable decisions.

But apart from other logical flaws I’ve pointed out, this runs into one gargantuan one: the fact that the Supreme Court is currently acting to subvert the democratic political system that provides the most viable path to checking the Court’s power and ensuring its rulings reflect reasonable interpretations of the law, not right-wing fantasies bent on social control and rule by the nation’s white Christian minority. The Court has attacked the democratic system in ways small and large, from gutting the Voting Rights Act, to signing off on unfettered gerrymandering that lets representatives choose their voters, to eliminating limits on the ability of millionaires and billionaires to buy political favors.

Michael Podhorzer makes this very case over at Weekend Reading, where his latest piece is a tour de force accounting of the various ways the Supreme Court has transformed into an unaccountable Republican power center that accomplishes what minority-status Republicans cannot. Unflinching and exhaustive, his indictment of the Supreme Court’s turn against American democracy in favor of partisan ends is breathtaking. Yet none of the Court’s prior attacks on the democratic system may be as consequential as the Court’s complicity in helping Donald Trump evade accountability for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. As Podhorzer writes, “By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election.” If the Court has over the last 20 years built a ticking time bomb to demolish American democracy and the rights that make our free society possible, its defense of Donald Trump constitutes a lighting of a fuse that may well cause that bomb to explode and blow our democracy to kingdom come.

Podhorzer characterizes the situation wrought by the Court majority around Trump’s immunity case as a “crisis,” as “We will face an irreconcilable showdown between the normal operation of the criminal justice system (which should find Trump in pretrial and trial proceedings for his January 6th crimes over the next five months) and the normal functioning of presidential elections (which should find him campaigning full-time during those months).” But Podhorzer’s piece implicitly argues for an even broader crisis rooted in the Court’s abandonment of democracy and neutrality in favor of open partisan warfare, in which the Court’s effort to protect Trump represent the extreme, logical extension of the MAGA majority’s dark turn.

However, the intersection between the Court’s corruption and Trump’s re-election campaign represents not just a new nadir in the story of the modern Court, but a potential pivot point to restore American democracy by reforming the Court and combatting GOP authoritarianism. Podhorzer’s piece is the most recent exemplar of increasing journalistic attention on how the need to to rein in the right-wing Court majority is fusing with the 2024 election campaign. The groundwork for this convergence was set when the Court handed down the Dobbs decision in mid-2022, which remains a shocking repudiation of a basic right to bodily autonomy that most Americans took for granted, and focused public attention on the Court’s undeniable reactionary bent. But the Court’s recent interventions in the 2024 election shows how very broad the MAGA majority’s impact has become. The Court isn’t just handing down rulings that are erasing decades of social and economic progress — it’s also handing down rulings that kneecap our democratic government and thus render it difficult or impossible to act legislatively to reverse the Court’s rule by judicial fiat.

In putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Trump’s re-election campaign, the Court has left the Democrats no choice but to place questions of the Court’s corruption at the center of the 2024 campaign. As a matter of the Democratic Party’s own survival, it can’t allow to continue unchallenged a Republican power center that floats above even a modicum of democratic accountability. And as a matter of democracy’s survival, the nation can’t tolerate a Court that sides with one party over the other — particularly when its favored party increasingly holds majority rule to be the enemy of cherished reactionary goals. The logical argument for Democrats to make is that tangible reforms of the Court are urgently needed, including term limits and an expansion of the Court to re-balance away from the reactionary majority. Ignoring the Court’s transformation into a bastion of right-wing power would be tantamount to issuing a white flag of surrender.

In recent weeks, we have in fact seen some signs that this political reality is proving undeniable to the Biden campaign. In remarks at a fundraiser, President Biden noted that the next president would likely be able to appoint at least two justices — depending on who holds the presidency, this would result in either a continued MAGA lock on the Supreme Court, or a restored centrist-liberal majority. In this respect, Biden appears to be seeking a middle path, in which he stresses the importance of the Supreme Court to the 2024 election without urging possibly controversial and hard-to-implement structural reforms such as term limits or court expansion. Such signs of prioritizing the Court in his re-election bid are deeply encouraging, both because the Supreme Court is proving an impediment to pro-democracy and progressive reforms in a practical sense, and because the idea of an unelected group of right-wing ideologues setting our society’s course is inherently enraging and galvanizing. The more that Americans learn of the Court’s corruption and subversion of majority rule, the more they will rally to a president and a party that promises a re-balancing of the highest court in the land. Reminding Americans that Donald Trump stands ready to solidify a radical Supreme Court majority that rips away established freedoms while eviscerating our political paths to undoing the damage should be made central to Biden’s re-election bid. In politics, you are always at an advantage when you force your opponent to defend the indefensible; a strategy that highlights an out-of-control MAGA Supreme Court majority beloved of Trump and the GOP will do just that.