For more than a month now, President Trump has not only rejected the outcome of the 2020 election, but has actively sought to overthrow the results. These active measures have included both a broader disinformation campaign to persuade Americans that the election was stolen from him, founded on completely fabricated lies about millions of illegal votes, and pressure on election officials, state legislators, and judges to throw out or reverse election results. Though we can quibble about the correct terminology for what is happening (is it a coup? An autogolpe?), there is no avoiding the fact that president is working to subvert the U.S. government and constitution, acting like a tinhorn dictator in a banana republic. If he had his way, that banana republic would be us.
Trump’s behavior was totally predictable, signaled far ahead of time without any pretense that he was anything but a dictator in waiting. As some have noted, even in 2016, he refused to say whether he’d abide by the election results if they went against him. And after he won then, he still claimed the election had been rigged, and that he’d actually won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. Going into 2020, he repeatedly asserted that the election would be rigged and that mail-in voting was corrupt, and, again, that he would not agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost. His open opposition to democracy was in fact a profoundly motivating reason to throw this hideous man out of office.
But the very event that seems to have put a nail in the coffin of Trump’s treasonous efforts — the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a suit by the Texas attorney general to essentially throw out the election results in four states that went for Biden — also drives home that an even greater danger to the country lies in the Republican Party. Some 126 House Republicans and 18 GOP attorneys general supported this bonkers lawsuit, which was an unambiguous effort to replace the will of the voters with the will of Republican judges and state legislatures. Such widespread backing of the lawsuit was the culmination of elected Republicans’ complicity in Trump’s treasonous attempt to stay in office, from a general denial that Biden won the election to a refusal to call out the president’s lies about the results. As The New York Times puts it, such support means “that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side.”
The idea that the results of elections are not to be determined by receiving the most votes, but instead by the will of the party that holds enough levers of power to impose its victory no matter the results, is not American democracy, but anti-democratic authoritarianism. And a party that embraces this idea, and works to deny voters the representation to which they’re entitled, is engaging in treason, not democratic politics. Such is the point the GOP has reached. There is every reason to think that challenging each and every election loss will be GOP policy going forward, as will be making up fantasy narratives of how Republicans were robbed by illegal votes cast by immigrants, African-Americans, and other alleged undesirables.
As we’ve said before, this full turn has been a long time coming, embodied previously in strategies like Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression to assure that likely Democratic voters do not have a fair say in selecting their representatives. In a way, Trump’s awfulness offered them a final choice: to proceed to the logical conclusion of this anti-democratic path, or to repent. By supporting his many offenses against the constitution while in office, including and up to his open subversion of the 2020 election, the party has clearly made its choice.
Given this dark transformation of the Republican Party into the U.S.’s authoritarian party, the overriding question of our politics is how to defeat this menace and strengthen American democracy. This is obviously a complicated and difficult question, as it involves not just overtly political questions, but getting at the roots of economic and social crises that have led a major American political party to increasingly embrace an authoritarian, white supremacist agenda. But as with many challenges in life, the first step is acknowledging the extent of the problem. And nowhere is the need for such acknowledgment more important than within the Democratic Party.
By the admission of its own elected officials, the Democrats as a whole have not been engaged full-scale with Trump and the GOP’s post-election attempts to subvert the election results. For sure, they have met just about every Republican court challenge successfully, which is no small thing, as it’s been key to holding off Trump’s deranged coup attempt. But there has clearly been a strategy of avoiding giving any extra oxygen to the president’s objectively outlandish claims, and to run out the clock to the official certification of Biden’s victory today. While this strategy has been successful insofar as Biden’s electoral college victory looks assured at this point, it has done little to counter the fact that GOP politicians have had a clear field to infect Republican voters with the belief that it is the Democrats who are actually the ones who have committed treason.
As Greg Sargent writes, “It appears that untold numbers of elected Republicans are trying to inspire in GOP voters a state of what you might call permanent warfare against our democratic institutions and the opposition’s voters alike.” Polls show the success of this effort; according to a Fox News poll from last week, 68% of Republican voters “believe the election was stolen from President Trump,” while some 77% of his voters believe he won the election. It is crisis enough for GOP politicians to lie about the election results; that crisis becomes even deeper when millions upon millions of Republican voters believe those lies. The partisan disparity is stupendous: even as the GOP whips up its base into a frenzy against the Democrats and democracy itself, based on fictional treachery, the Democrats calmly proceed as if they have won the election — but at the cost of making the crucial case to their supporters and other persuadable voters that it is the GOP’s current behavior, not theirs, that presents the true attack on American government.
There is also the basic fact that Joe Biden will soon be assuming the presidency, to deal immediately with a health and economic crisis perhaps unparalleled in American history. The message of unity and togetherness that this moment calls for is at odds with the need for a partisan indictment of the Republicans’ authoritarian spiral. Yet it is an indication of the bottomless descent of GOP elected officials that they exhibit no interest in such solidarity. The Republican-led Senate still balks at appropriate levels of financial relief at this late date, while many in the GOP parrot Donald Trump’s murderous lie that the coronavirus is not a big deal and that we have long turned the corner. More to the point, they almost to a person refuse to either recognize Biden’s victory or to condemn Donald Trump’s illicit efforts to deny him the presidency.
The Democrats’ cool, calm, and collected approach may be the best they can do in a bad situation, but at bottom it offers an olive branch to the Republicans that they don’t deserve, and that will very likely be knocked away the moment Joe Biden takes office. I have seen multiple people argue that the Republicans will very likely continue with the attitude that Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected president, including and up to a refusal by a Republican-led Senate (in the event the Democrats fail to win the two Georgia seats to be decided by run-off elections in early January) to approve any of Biden’s cabinet choices or other Senate-approved positions. The time is soon coming when they will need to arrive at a strategy designed to defeat the authoritarian GOP — and it will need to go far beyond practicing politics as usual.
Among other things, this means not simply competing with the GOP in the “normal” realm of economic, social, environmental, and defense policy, but by making support of democracy itself a central element of all discussions of politics and policy. In the most direct sense, this means that out the gate of a Biden presidency, the Democrats’ highest priority must be to pass legislation ensuring that every American can vote, free from the depredations of Republican legislatures and judges keen to make voting into the privilege of Republican-leaning voters, rather than a basic right not to be denied to a single citizen. Josh Marshall has written about this recently, and it’s all the more pressing as Republicans clearly intend to leverage their fictional “stolen election” narrative into renewed efforts across the country to suppress voter rights. In this clash between two incompatible political views — voting as inherently suspect and subject to as many restrictions as you need to maximize your side’s appearance of victory, versus assuring that every person who wants to vote can do so and have their voted count — there can be no avoiding the fight at hand, and no point in not seizing the initiative when justice and democracy are so clearly on the side of Democrats.
Closely aligned with this “pro-democracy agenda,” as some have termed it, is the need for Democrats to articulate clearly and plainly the anti-democratic turn of the GOP, both in terms of the last few decades and culminating with their embrace of open authoritarianism under Donald Trump. This is a fraught and complicated path when bipartisan cooperation is still the holy grail of many Democratic politicians and million of Americans, and when efforts must be made to cultivate non-insane GOPers like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins. Yet continuing to behave as if the GOP as a whole were committed to the same baseline assumptions of our shared life — such as free and fair elections, one-person, one-vote, and majority rule — means conferring a sheen of legitimacy to the GOP it no longer merits. Doing anything to legitimize a GOP that no longer supports free and fair elections is all the crazier when you realize that the GOP has already adopted a stance that elections of Democrats, and the votes of Democratic voters, are not legitimate.
To describe what the GOP has become, Democrats also need to start openly describing the GOP as a white supremacist party. What else to call a political organization that seeks to retain not just outsize influence but outright dominance for predominantly white, rural voters at the expense of the multiracial American majority? What else to call a party that explicitly targets black and brown voters as part of its vote suppression and gerrymandering schemes? What else to call a party whose leader encourages white nationalist militias to commit violence against their fellow Americans?
But beyond these broad approaches, the Democrats can work to diffuse GOP authoritarianism by making sure that government actually improves people’s lives in concrete ways. I heard political writer Ann Applebaum make this point in a recent interview, and Adam Serwer argues for it in an essay published shortly after the election:
If Biden is to restore faith that democracy can serve all people and not just the powerful, he must show that government is capable of meeting the challenges ordinary Americans face. It will not be enough to resurrect an economy in which the average American is a bill or two away from bankruptcy, and the engine of economic growth is consumption by the wealthy. That means keeping families in their homes, preventing state governments from going bankrupt, and safeguarding businesses crushed by the pandemic, but it also means ensuring that the benefits of a recovery are available to all Americans and not simply the wealthy and upper-middle classes.
Paired with a positive agenda for making the economy work for ordinary people is a parallel need to paint the GOP as the party that coddles the rich, promotes crony capitalism, and embodies corruption and incompetence. There is no better example of the latter than the coronavirus pandemic that is currently killing a 9/11’s worth of our fellow Americans every single day; every day, the deaths that a psychopathic Osama bin Laden inflicted on our country is inflicted again due to the incompetence and negligence of our own American-born psychopath in the White House and his Republican enablers. I realize that the need to assign blame is at cross purposes with a Biden-election desire to promote unity, but it is incredible to me that the Democrats would let pass a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make the case of the GOP’s sycophancy and ineptness in the face of this virus. It is not just Trump or federal GOP politicians who deserve blame; state leaders like governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Brian Kemp of Georgia should live in infamy for their staggering indifference to mass suffering and death.
But alongside an unforgiving and relentless strategy to democratize America and roll back GOP authoritarianism, Democrats need to be careful to draw a bright distinction between the Republican Party’s betrayal of American values and those ordinary Americans who sometimes or always vote for the GOP. Unlike the Republican Party, Democrats must not divide Americans between those who are true citizens and those who are not. In fact, ironically enough, it is the Republican embrace of real (white) citizens and denigration of everyone else that better than anything makes the case for rejecting such tribalism. In the Greg Sargent piece I noted above, he writes that,
Philosopher John Dewey wrote that democracy is sustained by “faith” in the fundamental worth of other human beings, faith that is demonstrated in all sorts of routine ways. This faith is rooted in a “generous belief” in the “possibilities” of others, in their “capacity” for “intelligent judgment and action.”
What we’re seeing now in this ongoing support for election subversion is at bottom a form of very profound contempt for those possibilities — a very profound contempt for other human beings; for fellow Americans.
This contempt that Sargent describes is a big part of the reason I’m optimistic that a large majority of Americans will sooner or later rally against the authors of our authoritarian crisis, and in favor of greater democracy across our politics and economy. While talk of democracy and voting rights can sometimes feel abstract, I think even the least-politically aware Americans know when they’re being treated with contempt; being treated as if they have no role to play in their own country; being treated as if they cannot be trusted with making decisions about their own and the country’s future. The anti-democratic nature of the GOP will ultimately betray the interests of many Republican voters — as indeed it has already, in the death and misery due to the pandemic — since a party that feels insulated from judgment at the ballot box has little incentive to serve any but the interests of politicians and the powerful. In this dangerous time, Democrats need to respond forcefully and unambiguously to a GOP that now openly flouts the constitution and the premise of mutual respect that underlies democracy. There can be no compromise with authoritarians.