At the risk of turning The Hot Screen into a Jamelle Bouie fan club - if you’re not reading this New York Times columnist on a regular basis, you’re seriously depriving yourself of one of the sharpest political analysts of these upside-down times. In Monday’s piece, he makes a point — and gives it resonant historical context — that has been haunting the edges of my consciousness for months now: in confronting Trump, his opponents would be wise to maintain the initiative against him. This is much more than some Art of War-type banality, as it invokes not only Trump’s unprecedented ability to shape media coverage of him and his administration, but also that unspoken thing that holds back some of his opponents without the notion ever being fully articulated: overestimation of the president’s strength.
The president and the GOP intend to use all the powers at their disposal to continue pushing forward policies supported by a minority of the public, such as draconian immigration crackdowns, a gutting of regulatory protections of workers and the environment, and now, apparently, war with Iran. They also intend to use these powers to delegitimize and even criminalize the Democratic Party, whether through increased voter suppression measures, tacit encouragement of foreign involvement in the 2020 elections to spread disinformation and distrust, and criminal investigations of Democratic politicians (if you think this is going to stop with the Democratic presidential candidates, you are surely dreaming). Democratic opposition on the first front has been fierce, but has been limited by the party only holding the House. On the second, the Democratic Party has been less organized in its resistance.
Trump and the Republicans also maintain a certain initiative by acting in ways that are outside the bounds of what has historically been acceptable behavior, both morally (I am thinking here of the cruelty toward undocumented immigrants, such as family separations and children held in inhuman conditions) and in terms of American democracy (the president pressuring a foreign power, Ukraine, to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son): activities to which our political system might be said to lack adequate responses, since they’re both outside the framework of known politics and essentially defy both the rule of law and common adherence to humane norms on which our politics depend.
If I’m sounding unexpectedly sympathetic to the opposition’s plight, I suppose that is how I’m feeling right now. When one party is trying to break our democracy, there is no ready playbook for how to fight back. But in moving toward a response, a couple points are becoming clearer. The first is that the Democrats are only hamstringing themselves if they fail to see this moment for what it is: an existential fight to the finish with a GOP that has gradually transformed into an authoritarian, anti-democratic party. Part of the reason I say this is because this is how the GOP itself already sees the situation. This is a party that for literally decades has seeded the judiciary with a cadre of Federalist Society attorneys and their ilk, who importantly for our fraught moment seem to worship the centralization of all power in the hands of the president (unless he’s a Democrat, in which case the president is always grossly abusing his powers of office); that for years has fought to change the rules of voting in states across the country so that Democrats can no longer win power by winning the majority of votes, and must work harder than ever to even win a majority of votes in the face of voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics; and has happily existed in a symbiotic relationship with Fox News, a partisan broadcaster devoted to spreading fear, hate, and racism to its all-too-credulous viewers.
From this perspective, the debate (such as it is) over the wisdom of impeachment is both totally appropriate and also wildly missing the point. Impeachment is a specific tool, to bring the power of the legislature to bear on a lawless executive, but in its apparent inadequacy to our present circumstances, it can also be seen as the founders’ tip of the hat to the idea that democracy will come under threat, sooner or later, from perennial human urges to unfettered power. In the face of a concerted, decades-long effort to roll back American democracy, impeachment of the president seems a puny tool; potentially resonant under the right circumstances, with symbolic heft, but inadequate to win the larger fight against an anti-democratic movement that goes far beyond the current president.
So recognizing the stakes is requisite to formulating a response. But after that point, the Democrats and other opponents of this right-wing movement face difficult, even paradoxical questions: How do you employ the law in a struggle against those who no longer adhere fully to the rule of law? How do you fight against an opponent who fundamentally believes you have no legitimate claim to hold power? These are enormous questions with no ready answers, but to ignore them and not at least attempt to answer them is to court disaster and defeat.
One point, though, is clear: democracy is far less likely to prevail if its defenders fail to call out and name the anti-democratic aims of its opponents. This includes describing for the broader public how seemingly disparate pieces of legislation and executive policy together add up to a broad roll-back of American democracy. And this point is why shivers went down my spine when Joe Biden declared last week that President Trump is an anomaly compared to the rest of the Republican Party. While there are strong arguments to be made that it’s good politics to reassure Americans that there is a great middle ground where the country can find consensus and move forward, it is a far different matter to provide the GOP with bipartisan cover for its slide to the authoritarian right. This crisis is not just about Trump, and it is something of a comforting fairy tale to keep saying that he’s a unique problem we’re facing. This president would be nothing without the way he’s fused his governance with a pre-existing set of Republican policies and attitudes.
Which brings us back to the points made by Jamelle Bouie that I started off with: taking back the initiative and refusing to overestimate the president’s hand. From collaboration with the Russians to refusal to hand over the president’s tax returns, Trump and the GOP are on the wrong side of the law and of public opinion in a hundred different ways. Democrats should be making the case every day that the president’s lawlessness and the GOP’s complicity undermine the rule of law, but also are interfering with the ability to move forward with laws and policies that actually help Americans. The president has nothing to offer but more of the same: more hatred, more scapegoating, more destruction of our democracy. Make the GOP own their authoritarianism, their defiance of majority rule. Never, under any circumstances, act as if their behavior is acceptable.