Zack Beauchamp at Vox has written an excellent primer that both conveys the authoritarian dangers of the federal presence in Portland, and connects them to a larger crisis of American democracy. Beauchamp assumes, as have many others, that the deployments in Portland have been connected to Donald Trump’s “law and order re-election campaign,” but drives home how unprecedented such presidential actions are. Shockingly, he notes that there appear to be no analogues in modern democracies where a militarized national response occurred without the assent of local authorities and, perhaps more importantly, in the absence of actual circumstances that would justify such a response (the single exception is possibly the troubles in Northern Ireland). There has been no mass lawlessness in Portland; yet the Trump administration has pretended that there is.
But Beauchamp quickly pivots to a deeper story here: how the Republican Party, which “claims to be for federalism and states’ rights,” has fallen in line with outright authoritarianism. For, as he writes, “To even think about this kind of deployment in Portland, let alone to see the brutal results and then to announce expansions to other cities, reflects a radical de-democratization of American politics: a sense, on the part of the president and his allies, that the residents of Portland [. . .] are the enemy.”
Beauchamp points to the polarization of American politics, and particularly the increase in “negative partisanship,” which he describes as a “political identity defined not so much around liking one’s own party as hating the other one.” He continues:
But in a democracy, rising negative partisanship is playing with fire. For a democratic system to work, all sides need to accept that their political opponents are fundamentally legitimate — wrong about policy, to be sure, but a faction whose right to wield power after winning elections goes without question. But if political leaders and voters come to hate their opponents so thoroughly, they may eventually come to see them not as rivals but as enemies of the state.
The idea that we are at a point where one national party — the GOP — sees the other — the Democrats — as enemies of the state is key to understanding what has been happening in Portland over the past few weeks. It helps us understand how it is not just Trump, and not just Republican politicians, but the widespread endorsement of the use of violence among rank and file GOP party members, that created conditions for the monstrosity of the Portland occupation to occur. Even small-scale dissent in the president’s party could quickly undermine his authoritarian actions; instead, we are witnessing mass GOP acceptance of his strategy, all the starker for the utter violation of decades of GOP rhetoric about states’ rights and the limits of federal power, as Beauchamp notes.
But this is also where analytical concepts like “partisanship” and “polarization” also, paradoxically, begin to lose their utility, as they are notions that describe features of a democracy, a key aspect of which is the assumption of legitimacy of all participants. Once a party acts as if its opponents are enemies of the state, it is no longer acting as a democratic party, but as an authoritarian one. In such circumstances, to say that extreme partisanship is the issue misses the forest for the trees: if you don’t believe opponents should be able to compete for power democratically, you no longer believe in democracy.
In the United States, there has been a clear line between the Republican Party’s diminishing ability to win free and fair elections, and its increasing opposition to democracy and its incentive to demonize its opponents as illegitimate. And this is where we can, in retrospect, see how terms like “polarization” and “partisanship” also served to obscure the crisis now upon us. For the actual, substantive conflicts that underlay their rise were often conflicts that were always about democracy versus authoritarianism. Most centrally, the clash between white supremacism and equality for all was never an issue in which two legitimate, democratic forces were in conflict. The idea that non-whites should have less political power has always been an anti-democratic political belief; its substantive consequences can be seen in the GOP’s decades-long effort to suppress the voting rights of minority Americans, leading to increasingly strident measures to ensure the power of a diminishing white majority.
Indeed, Beauchamp makes an analogous point, when he writes that, “The extreme federal deployment there isn’t just about demonizing Democrats and antifa; it’s a means for the president to activate the kind of racial grievance politics that propelled him to power in the Republican Party. His mechanism for doing so is by leaning into the side of his political personality that admires foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, both of whom have notably suppressed protests by force.”
In these extreme and dire circumstances, the way forward for defending our democracy is to clearly identify what the stakes are and to be as specific as possible as to what the nature of that conflict is — including the abomination of one party treating its opposition as deserving of physical punishment. As political scientist Lilliana Mason tells Beauchamp, “It’s not just about partisanship — it’s about who gets to be considered a ‘real’ American, with the full rights and privileges that entails. But it also clears the way for Trump’s push toward authoritarian rule. It feels like the brakes are off.” White fears about loss of power are driving authoritarianism; and Trump’s authoritarianism relies on playing on those fears. Opponents of Trump and defenders of democracy must make explicit these drivers of Republican authoritarianism, must lay bare the true conflicts rending American society, with the aim of building a majority that can re-assert the primacy of democratic rule and values in this country. This is not an abstract political exercise, but an all hands on deck moment. From mass protests to Democratic officeholders raising legislative hell, all possible peaceful and legal means must be brought to bear to stop and roll back this authoritarian menace. Knowing and articulating what we’re fighting against, and fighting for, are essential.