Through the course of this year, I’ve tried to argue that the single most important fact of American politics is that the right-wing insurrection that burst into view on January 6 never ended, but has continued on multiple fronts to this very day. At its dark heart is the contention by most GOP elected officials, the Republican base, and right-wing media that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump. This purported theft of an election has been used as justification for unprecedented efforts by GOP state lawmakers not only to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning voters, but to manipulate formerly non-partisan activities like the counting of votes.
One basic reason that the term “insurrection” is the proper description for these efforts, rather than, say, just for the violence perpetrated by the thousands of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, is because they are based on the rejection of the verified 2020 election results. This is not simply hardball or dirty politics; there is simply no difference between rejecting election results and rejecting American democracy. The clincher is that this Republican movement that rejects American democracy is simultaneously putting in motion plans to capture power even if it gets less votes, through manipulation of those elections.
There has been a lot of great reporting on the various GOP maneuvers, but this recent piece by Robert Kagan is a standout for its clear summary of the various elements of this anti-democratic movement and the dangers it poses. Kagan also effectively elucidates perhaps the central reason why so many people are having trouble clearly seeing what amounts to the greatest crisis of American democracy since the Civil War (which itself is arguably part of our crisis):
With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.
The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6.
Kagan neatly describes the dissimulation at the heart of our crisis: GOP politicos continue to behave as the “legitimate political” opposition, even as simultaneously condone efforts to undo democracy itself. This doubleness of the GOP approach, so clearly stated, in turn illuminates the parallel crisis we are also experiencing: the failure of the Democratic Party to acknowledge and confront the basic insurrectionary nature of the GOP, and instead to continue engaging with the Republican Party as if its sole identity were that of a GOP practicing “normal, legitimate political competition.”
This blindness has also undermined the Democrats’ ability to effectively respond to the ongoing covid pandemic. The idea that Republican governors and other elected officials would oppose covid mitigation measures out of a desire to harm the Biden presidency and the Democrats’ prospects in 2022 and beyond seemed beyond the pale to most Democrats at the beginning of the year; yet at this late stage it seems unquestionable, given GOP criticism of Biden’s inability to quell the spread of the virus, that many in the GOP view their ability to prolong the pandemic, and its accompanying economic malaise, as key to their hopes of reclaiming the House and Senate in 2022. Indeed, the GOP’s sabotage of efforts to control the coronavirus — such as by opposing masking and vaccination mandates — is arguably another front in their insurrection against American democracy, an effort to hobble Democratic governance so that they are better positioned to press forward an authoritarian playbook amidst the resulting public disillusionment and economic disarray.
I note the GOP’s malpractice around covid because it helps us understand the limits to viewing the GOP’s insurrection as “merely” a matter of the Republican Party attempting to subvert the levers of government to maintain power despite only being supported by a minority of the American electorate. It’s a glaring example of how the GOP plays by an entirely different rule book that reaches beyond opposition to democracy, to encompass even the sacrifice of public health in the pursuit of power — including, increasingly, the disproportionate suffering of Republican-leaning voters and their families, as the pandemic increasingly ravages unvaccinated, red-shaded areas of the country. And it is of a piece with the GOP’s increasing use of violence and intimidation to achieve its political ends, such as in the various efforts at the county level to intimidate both election and public health officials at public hearings — behavior that has now resulted in a request by AG Merrick Garland that the FBI begin addressing the issue.
Because the GOP’s assault on democracy and the common good extends far beyond attempt to subvert the gears of power, the proper response must do so as well. Ironically, because Kagan’s piece is so effective at describing the Trumpist-Republican uprising as an attack on the mechanisms of government, it’s helped me see how this is an insufficient way to view our crisis. After all, even if the Democrats in Congress were somehow able to pass legislation that prevented voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering, this would only blunt the right-wing political onslaught, and perhaps only temporarily, as repeal of these laws would always be a lost election away.
This is not to say that opposing and defeating GOP election subterfuge shouldn’t be the highest priority of Democrats — it certainly should be, and count me among those who are somewhat maddened that the party didn’t seek election reforms just as soon as Biden and the new Congress took office, when the depredations of the Trump years and the ignominy of January 6 were still relatively fresh in the public consciousness. But there is still time for them to do right, and political interest alone should impel Democrats to protect free and fair elections in 2022 and beyond, once they have worked through the rollicking sausage-making party of the Build Back Better and bipartisan infrastructure bills.
But it’s imperative to recognize that the GOP’s election sabotage is the spear-tip of a broader movement — a movement that sees Donald Trump as its figurehead and leader, as Kagan rightly emphasizes, but that also extends far beyond him. The fascistic hero worship may be new, but the essential authoritarianism so central to this movement is vintage GOP, a strain found from the Nixon presidency and its emphasis on law and order, through the modeling of George W. Bush as a wartime president, through its recent Trumpian incarnation and the resurgence of overt law and order rhetoric and substance. Deeply intertwined with the authoritarianism is a deep misogyny that was previously glimpsed in right-wing opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and more recent GOP indifference to providing childcare that might allow mothers to provide for their families without risking exhaustion and penury. There is also an enormous strain of Christianist belief, that sees the United States as an exclusively Christian nation, and yearns to blur the separation of church and state to privilege the beliefs of this particular religion.
But at its glowing toxic core, burning away many of the conflicts of its adherents (such as class and religious denomination), is a fundamental commitment to white supremacy, a tribal vision of the United States in which the only real Americans are white Americans, and in which non-whites are seen alternately as resources to be exploited, criminals to be demonized, or competitors to be neutralized. As the American population grows more diverse, white Americans feel their status increasingly threatened (indeed, polls show that most white Americans believe they are no longer a majority in the country, even though demographers predict that shift is still decades away).
Recognizing the white supremacist, authoritarian movement that is powering the specific anti-democratic actions rightly calls into question the sufficiency not only of the Democratic response that aims to fix and strengthen our election procedures, but of the tacit Biden administration response that the key way to win future elections is by ensuring broad prosperity among working class and middle-class Americans. These two Democratic strategies aim to empower and engage the Democratic majority that already exists in this country (7 of the last 8 elections having seen the Democratic president win the popular vote); the second in particular also aims to persuade some percentage of Republican voters to reward the Democrats for bringing them financial security. Overall, this strategy is the stuff of regular politics, indistinguishable from what would be ideal were the party not facing an authoritarian nemesis.
Yet the very reasonableness and rationality of this approach, its basic conservatism, do not adequately respond to the challenge of an energized, reactionary GOP movement, in which a huge chunk of the electorate believes that its status and livelihoods are endangered so long as Democrats, and Democratic voters, hold power. This approach by Democrats does not fully recognize the conscious solidarity that so many Republicans have with each other, and the degree to which the vision of common prosperity promised by the Democrats might be seen as a threat to their relative status. How can millions of Trump voters consider the Democrats to be good for them if, even though they themselves might prosper in absolute terms, brown and black Americans appear to be catching up to them in relative terms of wealth and power? To much of the Trump base, what most Democratic politicians and voters would consider an ideal vision of America would constitute not just failure, but an increased threat to them, the culmination of their worst fears. Beyond the racial element, Democratic governance that promotes gender equality will surely arouse resistance from the misogynists of the GOP, while a defense of secularism and an ecumenical attitude toward religions will validate Christianist concerns that godless atheism is on the march.
Likewise, a Democratic approach of “normal” politics risks lulling the Democratic base and Democratic-leaning independents into a false sense of, well, normalcy. Behavior like continuing to fetishize bipartisan legislation — such as with the “hard” infrastructure bill whose fate is being decided even as I write this — and otherwise acting as if congressional Republicans were not providing cover for their renegade confederates in state capitols who are busily rolling back voting rights and doing what they can to lock in permanent power — is a grotesquely unwarranted gift to the GOP. In the mistaken name of dialing down the temperature or other such nonsense, the Democrats are telling their own voters that it might be fine to vote for the GOP at some point, or at least that it doesn’t totally matter if they show up to vote for the Democrats. The reality is this: so long as the GOP is embarked on a mission to secure minority rule in America, it will never be fine to cast a vote for this authoritarian party. Any messaging otherwise supports authoritarianism, and even (indirectly) abets the ongoing insurrection, by helping the GOP falsely cloak itself under the guise of republican virtue.
It is not just that the Republicans intend to subvert democracy so that they can hold power even when they aren’t supported by majorities, as bad as that subversion would be. It is that they would then be able to enact laws that would attempt to impose the substance of their movement on the nation, beyond its anti-democratic dimensions — a regressive, hateful vision of misogyny, race hatred, and a twisted religious outlook that has very little to do with the basic teachings of Christianity itself, all united in a push to elevate the Republican base while punishing and diminishing the diverse Democratic majority. This basic fact seems sometimes to be lost in the discussions that emphasize the importance of defending free and fair elections. It is not just that power gained in such a way would be illegitimate; the governance and policies that would follow would embody racist, anti-egalitarian principles that are fundamentally opposed by a majority of Americans.
Given the stakes, Democrats and other defenders of American democracy can’t confine themselves to confronting only Republican legislation: they need to attack head on the foul ideologies of Trumpist authoritarianism — to name them, to make them explicit, and to expose them to the scrutiny of justice, reason, and solidarity. The goal of this attack is to discredit and demolish these ideas in the public sphere, as far as can be effected. In this sense, Democrats need to discard prior notions of political competition. They don’t just need to win elections — they need to win the battle of ideas.
To do this, it’s not enough to define and dismantle Trumpist ideas, as important as that task is. It’s equally pressing that Democrats publicly articulate the positive, egalitarian worldview that underlies much of Biden’s economic and social agenda — the idea that no matter your race, wealth, gender, sexual identity, or physical ability, our government and our society will help lift you up, will help you contribute to your own development, and in turn to contribute to the common good. Far from being a “radical” or “communist” idea, as the GOP will doubtless continue to assert, these values are arguably simply the basic ideas of any healthy community.
As both an example of what I’m suggesting, and as a central issue in and of itself, Democrats need to publicly discuss the changing demographics of American society, in which white Americans constitute a decreasing share of the population. This basic demographic fact has supercharged white identity politics, to the point that observers have noted that Donald Trump was the first president in modern times to more or less explicitly portray himself as the president of white America, as the instrument of their fears and grievances. Suppressing or failing to acknowledge the psychic importance of this change to the collective white psyche will only empower those politicians and media figures who wish to amplify white fears through fearmongering and neo-Nazi “white replacement” craziness. Rather, the Democrats needs to talk about these changes, to facilitate open and honest public discussion, and ultimately to give voice to the enormous potential of these changes: that a more diverse, more egalitarian America will lift all Americans, that diversity will strengthen us, that more democracy will benefit the vast majority of Americans. The grander the vision, the better — after all, the U.S. has the chance to be a shining example to the rest of the world, a multi-ethnic democracy that models a democratic future for nations everywhere. This goal is something to proclaim, to shine like a beacon against the tribalism and cruelty of Trumpism in the U.S. and the welter of fascist and authoritarian movements abroad.
The objective is not just to persuade Americans of a vision that can unite us, but to essentially raise the consciousness of Americans so that they see themselves as part of a vast and historic movement; that they see Americans with whom they otherwise might not feel a connection as fellow citizens in a grand civic enterprise. Even as the GOP activates white tribalism and works to turn Americans against each other, Democrats should ceaselessly work to remind Americans that they are already part of a greater nation than the Republican Party can ever offer — one where America isn’t hobbled by white supremacy or “makers versus takers” rhetoric, but includes everyone who wants to be a part of it.
By clearly articulating — and working toward — a clear vision of a democratic, egalitarian America, the Democratic Party also sets itself up to confront the worst case scenario that we can no longer discount as a remote possibility: that Republican election subversion will result in the GOP gaining control of Congress and the presidency in coming years, and that the party will then employ that control to cement its position in a way that shuts the Democrats and any other opposition out of power permanently. By articulating a clear line in the sand now as to what is and is not legitimate democratic behavior, and of an unbridled vision of American democracy and society, the Democrats will better position themselves to remove the GOP from power through a combination of de-legitimization, mass resistance, and moral suasion. For the good of the country, Democrats need to be playing a long game.