Earlier this week, I took a first stab at what I think the Democrats need to do to start rolling back the GOP’s war on democracy. Today, I wanted to dig deeper into how the Democrats can more accurately articulate the nature of this fight, both to themselves and to the American public. As a starting point, I wanted to flag this recent post over at The Editorial Board, where John Stoehr notes recent Democratic rhetoric that suggest growing recognition that the party must explicitly call out the treasonous behavior of the GOP in working to overturn the 2020 election results.
First, late last week, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he said that:
The most serious attempt to overthrow our democracy in the history of this country is underway. Those who are pushing to make President Trump president for a second term no matter the outcome of the election are engaged in a treachery against their nation. You cannot at the same time love America and hate democracy. But as we speak, a whole lot of flag-waving Republicans are nakedly trying to invalidate millions of legal votes, because that is the only way that they can make Donald Trump president again. It is the only way … because he didn’t win.
Stoehr also relays similar remarks by Representative Adam Schiff from last Friday. In reference to the fact that so many Republicans were willing to join a lawsuit to throw out millions of votes for Joe Biden, Schiff remarked that:
The remedy is to make the case to the American people that they are being betrayed. The Republicans said they stood for something. As it turns out, they don’t stand for anything. Helping the country see how close we are coming to losing our democracy and why it’s worth fighting for. I think we all thought democracy was self-effectuating, that we could count on the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice on its own. We have learned we have to fight for it every day.
I don’t think there’s much question that these are fighting words from both Murphy and Schiff; the bigger question is whether they portend the beginning of a broader Democratic strategy of articulating the truth about how very far the GOP has gone in rejecting majority rule and the rule of law in favor of a politics of doing anything to win. This Monday, though, we received some more evidence that Democrats are at least increasingly willing to speak explicitly of the GOP’s authoritarian turn, as Joe Biden’s speech following his official Electoral College victory included explicit and damning remarks about the GOP efforts to overturn the election:
Even more stunning, 17 Republican Attorneys General, and 126 Republican members of the Congress, actually, they actually signed onto a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas. That lawsuit asked the United States Supreme Court to reject the certified vote counts in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This legal maneuver was an effort by elected officials and one group of states to try to get the Supreme Court to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans in other states. And to hand the presidency to a candidate who lost the Electoral College, lost the popular vote, and lost each and every one of the states whose votes they were trying to reverse.
It’s a position so extreme, we’ve never seen it before. And position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution. Thankfully, a unanimous Supreme Court immediately and completely rejected this effort. The Court sent a clear signal to President Trump that they would be no part of an unprecedented assault on our democracy. Every single avenue was made available to President Trump to contest the results. He took full advantage of each and every one of those avenues.
At a minimum, by including these passages, Joe Biden clearly wanted the historical record to include his own recognition that the events of the past five weeks were unprecedented in American history, and that the Republicans merit condemnation. But Biden must also have been aware that the Republicans would not just interpret this as chastisement for prior behavior, but treat it as a provocation and grounds to accuse Biden of poisoning the waters with partisan rhetoric even before he’s sworn in. Knowing this, it’s promising that Biden still forged ahead, and thought the risk was important enough to publicly assert that the Republicans have crossed a line that can’t be ignored in the name of bipartisanship.
Yet, based on what we know of Biden’s political history, together with reports of his efforts to reach out to Republican senators before he takes office, I think it’s safe to say that the president-elect at least holds out some hope that the extremism that has increasingly characterized the GOP will moderate once Trump is out of office (indeed, it’s safe to say this because Biden himself has said so!). And so I don’t expect Biden to leverage his victory remarks into a full-on campaign of labeling the GOP as the party of authoritarianism and anti-democracy in the coming weeks. His initial olive branch to the GOP also makes me skeptical that many other Democrats will offer such critiques at the risk of falling afoul of Biden’s gentler strategy, and also now that Biden’s victory has been secured beyond the reach of Republican sabotage. In this light, the pessimist in me sees Murphy’s and Schiff’s remarks as one-offs, a matter of setting the record straight at this moment in time.
One notable thing about Murphy and Schiff’s remarks is that it’s obvious they didn’t make them lightly. Another is that they don’t simply throw around terms like “treachery” and the idea that the American people “are being betrayed” without making crystal clear what behavior requires such harsh terminology. I think Murphy’s speech quite economically and effectively lays out its case, which might be reduced to, “If a politician works to keep Trump in office even though he lost the election, that politician is engaging in treason.” Not only is the logic sound, the rhetoric fits the level of the offense.
I think it will become increasingly clear in the next few years, as the Republicans double down on their effort to preserve minority rule, and we learn of the full extent of the statutory and political crimes of the Trump administration, that the Democrats pulled their rhetorical punches for far too long against a GOP political leadership that has en masse abandoned our democracy. The one saving grace I see is that you cannot say that the Democrats have cheapened the language of patriotism and treason by overusing it; in this way, they have at least preserved its potential to have some effect.
More than any other political commentator I follow, Stoehr has articulated a case for calling out the GOP on its treasonous actions during the Trump administration, while elaborating on the many ways the GOP has broken faith with American democracy and the basic tenets of patriotism such that it merits such damning rhetoric. Apart from the visceral satisfaction of having someone describe the GOP’s depraved behavior with the appropriate language, I’ve taken Stoehr’s broader point to be that you can’t persuade voters of how badly awry the GOP has gone unless you’re able to describe it accurately. In this case, “treasonous,” “seditious,” or “betrayal” are words that help convey the full import and danger of the Republican Party’s war on democracy that a phrase like “war on democracy”, or even a paragraphs-long elaboration of what this war on democracy entails, cannot do on their own.
But beyond this, the more important thing is not simply to use the appropriate rhetoric, but to act against the offenses that call for such language. If the GOP has behaved in a way that’s treasonous, such as by trying to throw out election results, then the Democrats need not just to describe it accurately, but to pair their rhetoric with meaningful action that puts a stop to future attempts to throw out election results. In this case, such actions include the necessity of pushing through new federal voting reforms that make it near-impossible for states to restrict the voting rights of American citizens; ending the catastrophic Electoral College; and ensuring that the process of counting and certifying votes is further insulated from partisan interference and violent intimidation by would-be insurrectionists.
So another way of understanding the proper use of charged language like “treason” and “betrayal” — language that, not incidentally, has been abused by the right as a rhetorical bludgeon against Democrats for many, many years — is that it’s a key part of setting and maintaining the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable in a democracy. Such boundaries are absolutely necessary for our democracy to survive, and the current fight over what they are, or whether they should even exist, is tightly bound up with the question of when it’s proper to use terms like “treason.”
It’s no coincidence that Democratic willingness to finally use such language is occurring at the same time that the Republicans are engaging in behavior that truly merits it. Yet the clear inertia that the Democrats must overcome in order to use it points to a weakening or ambiguity of such language that itself suggests a long-term crisis of our democracy. After all, “treason” as a word and as a concept is only powerful if enough people agree to what it means, or agree that what it means matters. Certainly in comparison with Republican politicians, Democrats don’t generally employ language that inflames and divides, which is certainly a risk when you’re saying that the Republicans have betrayed their country — an idea that GOP politicians and most GOP voters are sure to reject out of hand. But Democrats are also, I think, wary of using such language when it might not even be meaningful to their own base of voters.
But this brings us to a few points that persuade me that for Democrats, it is well worth taking the risk in escalating their rhetoric against the GOP. First, given the extreme circumstances we have reached, where the GOP has placed voter suppression and now outright rejection of election results at the heart of its electoral strategy, the Democrats have no choice but to make such outlandish and anti-democratic behavior the center of their own case against the GOP. Another way to put this is that the Democrats must make such arguments in order to persuade people that these arguments are correct. In other words, asserting that the GOP is essentially committing treachery against the nation is a way of making people aware that they must make a choice between democracy and authoritarianism (to borrow another insight from Stoehr), and that the Democrats stand for democracy. Using such language alongside accurate, good-faith descriptions of why such language is called for seems to me a necessary piece of re-establishing what is and is not considered acceptable in our democracy — which is another way of saying re-establishing our democracy itself.
One main challenge for Democrats is that the GOP continues to hide behind a veil of plausible deniability, claiming fealty to democracy while opposing it in action. Going on the attack, both rhetorically and substantively, serves to rip away that veil. You can already see this happening. In Georgia, some politicians now want to pass a law that would allow state legislators to choose a presidential candidate even if that candidate didn’t win the majority of votes. There is simply no definition of contemporary American democracy that involves politicians substituting their choice of president for the will of the voters; and yet Republican politicians are now willing to go there! On a grander scale, this is exactly what has happened in the wake of the 2020 election. The Democrats played by the rules of democracy, mobilizing voters to win the election; the GOP, led by Donald Trump, rejected that victory, making their opposition to democracy explicit. As dangerous as this GOP behavior is, there is absolutely no benefit in Democrats not describing it for what it is.
It’s also important to understand that escalated rhetoric about the Republican’s anti-democratic behavior in electoral politics will be most effective when coupled with a similar line of attack against the GOP’s other policies. I want to be clear: the GOP’s war on democracy is damning enough. But its accompanying agenda of tax cuts for the rich, indifference to poverty, denial of global warming, demonization of immigrants, protection of racist policing, and opposition to public healthcare even in the face of a pandemic demonstrate that its opposition to the good of the majority runs far beyond its sabotage of the mechanisms of voting. For instance, Paul Waldman makes the case for applying the same escalated rhetoric we’ve been discussing to the GOP’s economic obstructionism:
[Democrats] need to make clear that Republicans want Biden’s presidency to fail, and to make it happen they’re attacking the American economy. They want to take food off families’ tables, force cutbacks in state and local services, make it harder for businesses to open safely, and create a vicious cycle of austerity from Washington and anemic recovery in the rest of the country, in the hope that Americans will blame Biden for all of it.
Refusing to authorize a new stimulus is an attack on the American economy. Trying to limit that stimulus to far less than what is needed is an attack on the American economy. Threatening blackmail is an attack on the American economy.
Across the board, it’s high time for truth telling, for describing in unvarnished terms the GOP’s descent into authoritarianism and indifference to mass suffering. Whether it’s calling out treason when it happens before our eyes, or describing the Republican Party’s fundamental inability to bring credible responses to the crises and challenges of our time, the Democrats may be pleasantly surprised to learn that simply telling the truth about the GOP can be a revolutionary act.