Nearly as worrisome as President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a wall along the southern border has been some of the Democratic rhetoric in opposition: warnings from politicians like Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Trump is setting a precedent by which a Democratic president could declare gun control or global warming to be a national emergency as well. At one level, these counter-examples are clearly meant to grab the president’s attention, or at least the attention of those Republicans who were already thinking of the downstream implications when their party no longer holds the presidency. Yet Democrats’ framing of any counter-argument as a case of “how’d you like it if we did this, too?” indirectly legitimizes Trump’s actions, as I suspect many or most Republicans believe Democrats would indeed do this if they won control of the government. Rather, the Democratic position should be that they would simply never do this because they believe in democratic governance, full stop.
Observers of authoritarianism have been pointing out that emergency declarations are a sort of gateway drug to dictatorial rule, in which supposedly dangerous circumstances are used to justify a suspension of the rule of law. Remove the excuse of an emergency, and you see that we’re basically talking about a situation in which the executive alone claims to be the whole government.
Assessing the dark place in which Trump’s declaration has left the country, Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall makes a point that might at first seem counter-intuitive: that authoritarianism is often birthed by incompetence and mismanagement. For Marshall, Trump is a prime example of this: he was unable to get funding for his wall, essentially through his own shortcomings as president, and so has turned to undemocratic means to get what he wants.
Marshall goes on to note an observation originally made by Will Saletan at Slate: That “the GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord,” adding:
Trump is unable to govern as a normal President because his policies are unpopular and he’s completely unable – in policy terms or characterologically – to at least attempt to build governing coalitions as almost every President in US history has at least attempted to do. His hold on power depends on keeping his minority faction in a state of maximal aggrievement, activation and confrontation. That’s what this wall battle is, of course, about.
In this sense he has made the US not a failed state but a failed politics. And thus, here we are.
Marshall has made these points before in other contexts, but they seem more resonant and suggestive than ever in our present moment. Partly, it’s because of how explosively and toxically a couple of basic elements come together in the border wall emergency declaration. Trump has not only been driven by his personal incompetence to seek extralegal solutions to building a wall, but the need to build the wall is rooted in satisfying the clamor of a base that blames both personal ills and national challenges on immigrants, rather than in the wall serving a defensible public purpose. The warlordism analogy seems particularly apt here: Trump serves not the nation, but the people who elected him, and he will maintain their favor by whatever means necessary. This is clearly not an emergency situation: at bottom, it’s about the president’s attempt to build a monument to racism and white nationalism.
The Democratic rhetoric I noted above strikes me as particularly inauspicious given Trump’s decision to govern as head of a subset of the American people. In doing so, he shows only contempt for the larger American struggle towards diversity, tolerance, mutual support, and equality. Just toying with the idea that the Democrats might play this game, too, is a dangerous turn for our country. The Democrats should never suggest that the United States is made up of irreconcilable sides, and that Democratic governance would mean their opportunity to move forward Democratic goals by whatever means they can get away with. It is not hard to see such arguments on the Democratic side rooted as being rooted in variants of the incompetence and mismanagement that underly Trump’s authoritarian slide; after all, it has taken a series of catastrophic missteps on their side to surrender both the mantle and reality of the Democrats being the party of working and middle-class Americans, with the built-in majority that status would ensure. The Democrats need to make change the old-fashioned, democratic way: by winning elections, building governing coalitions, and passing laws that carry the legitimacy of constitutional procedure. If building a durable majority means choosing to represent working Americans at the cost of pissing off a handful of irritable billionaires, so be it.
One great danger, in other words, is that Trump’s mode of governing for only a subset of Americans be adopted by the opposition; that it becomes normalized. This, after all, would be in keeping with the anti-democratic spiral described in How Democracies Die, where for the sake of survival both parties must continually embrace increasingly corrosive governing practices lest they lose the struggle for power. In a somewhat paradoxical move, for Democrats to be the defenders of our democratic order, they need to be willing to lose, even as they’re sustained by the faith that enough Americans still believe in democracy that they can build sustainable, significant majorities; majorities that will allow them to push through reforms of both American politics and an economy that’s sucking away wealth to the richest among us, and that may help restore faith in our common enterprise. We also have to reckon with the fact that, though Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves are a combination of personal inclination and political incompetence, he has found a receptive audience in both the Republican party and in a great number of American voters.
So how does anyone make an argument based on what seem like abstract principles, in the face of visceral impulses that one’s own side should win and push through laws that intuitively feel right and reasonable? One thing that has been all too slow to dawn on me is that abstract principles are indeed difficult to defend. In this, the Trumpian approach has a built-in advantage, appealing to people’s most powerful, if toxic, impulses around race and status over their less visceral commitment to their fellow citizens and the nation at large. But is it possible that calling out this understandable yet corrosive impulse can help us understand and better practice a democratic politics that combines the pragmatic and the aspirational, the selfish and the empathetic?