I have two pieces I'd like to designate as required reading for this week. Each illuminates major pieces of the current puzzle of American politics, though there is some important overlap. The first is by Rebecca Solnit, who knocks it out of the park with each fresh essay. In Tyranny of the Minority, she provides a concise yet detailed overview of a central fact that needs to inform all progressive politics: the fact that the Republican Party has for decades, and increasingly into the present, firmly grounded its electoral strategy in an opposition to American democracy. Here's a sample of her coolly savage indictment:
"Republicans’ furious and nasty war against full participation has taken many forms: gerrymandering, limiting early voting, reducing the number of polling places, restricting third-party voter registration, and otherwise disenfranchising significant portions of the electorate. Subtler yet no less effective have been their efforts to attack democracy at the root. They have advanced policies to weaken the electorate economically, to undermine a free and fair news media, and to withhold the education and informed discussion that would equip citizens for active engagement. In 1987, for example, Republican appointees eliminated the rule that required radio and TV stations to air a range of political views. The move helped make possible the rise of right-wing talk radio and of Fox News, which for twenty years has effectively served the Republican Party as a powerful propaganda arm."
Solnit provides vital historical context for how we got to this Time of Trump, and illustrates the degree to which Trump, rather than being an anomaly, is the culmination of beliefs that have long motivated the Republican Party. The crux of it is, as Solnit puts it, "Today’s Republicans are democracy’s enemy, and it is theirs." This is one of the defining facts of our time, born out by decades of evidence and now by the depredations of the current White House occupant. This is also the Achilles' heel of the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally: their road map for retaining power is fundamentally in conflict with the most basic premises of our country. The progressive movement needs to push Democrats to put democratic principles at the center of their politics, in ways that are both idealistic and pragmatic. Everyone can relate to the idea of fair competition, a level playing field, letting the best person win; these principles are violated with every new gerrymandering of a Congressional district, with every new voting restriction that targets minority voters. The central anti-democratic premise of the Republican Party needs to be discussed, illustrated, and repeated 'til the cows come home. The evidence is there for all to see; and as we will discuss in more detail soon, it is the throbbing heart of the Trump-Bannon-Sessions triumvirate. It is a hideous state of affairs that one of the two major American political parties has turned itself into a de facto white supremacist anti-democratic party, but the opportunity this presents is enormous; the Republican Party has essentially let the mask drop, and now is the time to fully confront and defeat this pachyderm grown monstrous and near-unrecognizable.
Tom Englehardt's latest dispatch, The Art of the Trumpaclysm, likewise stresses the continuities of Trumpism with what has come before. In this second must-read piece, Englehardt writes:
"Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of history. He’s unimaginable without it. This, in turn, means that the radical nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how radical the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics, and governance. In that sense, to generalize (if you’ll excuse the pun), his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the America we’ve been living in for some years now, even if we’d prefer to pretend otherwise."
He homes in on two major changes since 2001: the rise of the generals, and the rise of the billionaires, both of which cadres are represented in his administration to an extreme degree. To my mind, the widespread lack of public discussion about the connections between the rise of Trump and the politics of terror has been staggering, amounting almost to a blind spot in the national conversation. Englehardt hardily breaks trail on this underreported context — and even the most recent events back him up, as the administration's proposal to add yet more obscene amounts of money to the Pentagon budget gives us more visibility into the militaristic right-wing nationalism that is Trumpism's vision for America.
Both these pieces contain more than their share of harsh truths about the dire situation our country finds itself in; but in doing so, they help to guide the shape of our resistance and the path forward.