If the clown car of the Republican coup to reverse the presidential election results was sputtering badly last week, it has now crashed through the guardrails and is in the process of tumbling to a fiery doom in the ravine below. Judges are consistently rejecting the Trump “elite strike force” legal team’s preposterous filings, such as the demand to throw out the votes of all Pennsylvania voters. A slow dribble of Republican officials continues to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory. Rudy Giuliani, or at least his head, appears to be melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West.
But this is in no way to say that the longer-term danger has passed, or that the damage hasn’t been immense. While the Democrats have consistently won crucial legal battles that have essentially stopped the Trump campaign from throwing out legitimate votes that won the electoral college for Joe Biden, the Trump team has been teaching the GOP a lesson about routes to flipping defeat into victory in a future, much closer election. Similarly, as Dave Roberts writes, “What Trump is establishing right now is a new norm for the conservative movement, whereby "fighting for you" means disrupting the electoral process at every opportunity & rejecting results conservatives don't like. Even if he fails in this attempt, the norm will stand. And Trump’s losing effort is in fact a winning effort when it comes to telling his base that the election was stolen from him, and that by extension Joe Biden’s presidency is illegitimate — a benefit that likely is a key reason Republican elected officials have been nearly united in offering at least tacit support to the president’s failed coup.
In short, the Republican Party is in the process of advancing the concept that elections are inherently illegitimate when the Democrats win, making more explicit than ever the anti-democratic animus that underlies measures like gerrymandering and voter suppression. That their war on voting has now extended to large-scale tacit support for an open attempt by the president to steal an election is the logical conclusion for a party that has long been drifting towards outright opposition to democratic government, and whose embrace of Donald Trump these last four years has set them firmly in the camp of authoritarianism.
But I don’t think anyone can rightly be surprised by this latest turn of the screw. The Republican Party has simply thrown off the last remaining bonds of loyalty to democratic government after years of hacking and sawing away. This moment has been coming for decades. What is genuinely surprising, though, is the Democratic Party’s deer-in-the-headlights response to an opposition party that may as well have hired a skywriting plane to puff out “We hate democracy” above every state in the union — and in particular, its response to America’s first coup attempt. The Democrats obviously has a successful strategy to defeat Trump’s immediate effort to undo this election — essentially by winning in the courts — but they have had essentially no strategy to defeat the broader damage being done by Trump and the GOP telling tens of millions of voters that the Democrats only win by stealing elections, and that Joe Biden should not be considered to be a legitimate president.
Because while there is nothing the Democrats can do to stop the Republican Party from going down this dark road, there is also nothing the Republicans can do to stop the Democrats from using every means at their disposal to to make the case to the American people that the Republican Party has set itself beyond the pale of acceptable politics. Yet, as observers like Jeet Heer and Brian Beutler have noted, the Democratic strategy has been more or less to wait out Trump’s coup attempt, rather than engage in more aggressive efforts, such as the House subpoenaing the General Services Administration appointee who refuses to sign the paperwork to release funds for the Biden transition to begin. In the face of crisis, the Democrats seem largely dedicated to downplaying that the crisis is even occurring. In doing so, they are playing a crucial role in normalizing the utterly abnormal behavior of Trump and the GOP.
Particularly dismaying is that so many millions of us have performed our role in ordinary democratic politics, casting far more than enough votes to drive Trump from office, yet before our eyes Trump and the Republicans are pursuing a new form of politics that goes on after the ballots have been counted, that declares that some have been cast illegally, that elections in fact do not decide our fate — in other words, telling us that they have only contempt for our rights as American citizens. In the process, the GOP is enraging great portions of its base, telling them that the Democrats are a threat to the country, and setting the stage for future efforts to subvert elections by increasingly brazen means.
In the face of this, to see the Democratic Party not seize the rhetorical high ground, or attempt to maximize the damage to the GOP by its open embrace of ongoing election subversion, but instead to simply act as if our ordinary politics — specifically, the outcome of elections — has settled matters for all time, feels less like a demonstration of admirable sangfroid and more like an abdication of what this moment requires. Not seeking to make the GOP pay a price for what feels increasingly like open treason against the government of the United States runs the catastrophic risk of normalizing the anti-democratic evolution of the GOP.
As Ron Brownstein points out, it makes sense for Joe Biden to pull his punches, since he is preaching a message of unity, but congressional Democrats have no such excuse. What for me cinches the case that the Democrats are failing to rise to the moment is the explicit racism that has undergirded the president’s attempts to throw out the election results. In his telling, it is not just Democrats but heavily African-American cities that are the culprits behind the purported theft of the election. And so his election subversion team has repeatedly made the case that Trump would win if you just removed the votes of African-Americans in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta. I honestly don’t know what further ammunition the Democrats are waiting for before they start explicitly referring to the GOP as America’s white supremacist party.
Exhibit A against the Democrats’ business-as-usual approach is that they did what they were supposed to — win a resounding victory against Trump — yet the GOP is not just unchastened, but has in fact escalated its anti-democratic assault by standing by as the president further divides the nation and inflames the GOP base into opposition to democratic (and Democratic) election results. It is as if the Democrats were missing the basic equation that the more they win, the greater the incentive for the GOP to wage war on democracy.
Too many Democrats seem bizarrely reluctant to acknowledge the permanently changed nature of the Republican Party and the necessity of hardball strategies to discredit an openly authoritarian and racist GOP. Alongside this, there is a reluctance to take a stand on first principles without which we cannot truly to be said to have either a democracy or a political union. If the GOP is now at war with democracy itself, as I believe it is, then there is no point in not acknowledging that war, and using the GOP’s anti-democratic position as a central part of an appeal to voters. If the GOP is acting in an unpatriotic way that amounts to treason and sedition, then act like it. After all, these are not just words — they are descriptions of behavior that betrays the country, encompassing our freedom, our security, and our ability to collectively make decisions about our future. As John Stoehr wrote last week at the Editorial Board, “If most Americans start seeing the Republicans through the lens of betrayal, if they start seeing the party as a separatist movement (that’s what it is), even the milquetoastiest of Democrats, like Joe Manchin, will be forced to go to the wall.” Stoehr suggests that Trump is close to making the Republicans choose between party and patriotism, but I think the Democrats could make a decent case that the GOP has already crossed that Rubicon.