One rule I’ve tried to follow in sharing my thoughts about American politics is a basic humility — by exposing my reasoning, not just my opinions, I’m happy to let my contradictions, bad assumptions, and hasty conclusions hang out for all to see.
That said, there are a few things I feel confident in proclaiming without too many reservations. One of those is: in politics, it’s generally a foolish thing not to use the biggest tools available to defeat your opponents. And it’s the Democratic Party’s violation of what should be an obvious principle that’s got me rending my hair and returning again and again to certain notions.
By my reckoning, over the last five years, the GOP has engaged in such a mix of anti-democratic politics, white supremacist behavior, and deadly incompetence that a case can and should be made for driving it out of existence, at least in its current incarnation, as one of America’s two major political parties. What remains mind-boggling to me is that the Democratic Party, as a whole, still refuses to conduct its political campaigns and messaging to highlight the catastrophic failures and authoritarian intent of the Republican Party. Here is a non-exhaustive indictment:
Republican legislatures around the country are passing laws to ensure that Democratic-leaning voters are disenfranchised and disempowered, with particular aim taken at minority voters. Even as I write this, Republican politicians and pundits continue to claim with zero evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, using it to justify an interlocking series of voter restrictions, gerrymandering, and subversion of electoral machinery to permanently lock Democrats out of power in state after state, and with a goal of taking federal power in 2022 and 2024 even if rejected by a majority of voters. What should we call this but a party that no longer believes in democracy and majority rule?
GOP politicians continue to deny the severity or even existence of human-caused climate change, in the process crippling not just America’s but all of humanity’s future out of a deadly dedication to the profits of fossil fuel companies and an indifference to the natural world that makes human flourishing possible. What should we call this but a party that no longer believes not just in science but reality itself?
GOP leaders continue to denounce and defy basic medical advice on fighting the covid pandemic, opposing not just vaccine mandates that could end this pandemic, but even the most basic measures like the wearing of masks in public to prevent transmission of a disease that has already killed more than 750,000 in the country. What should we call this but a party that fails to value human life?
Republican strategists aim to make the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools a major issue in future elections, even as CRT is not actually taught in public schools, but serves as a convenient stand-in for white Americans’ fears about losing status and power in a diversifying America. Alongside attempts to nullify the votes of African-American and other minorities at the state level, what should we call this but a party that puts white supremacism into action?
Republican politicians decry the supposed shiftlessness of American workers who ask for a living wage and better prospects, and continue a war on unions and worker power that makes a mockery of the party’s claims to represent blue collar Americans. What should we call this but a party that hates American workers?
Again and again, the common thread is a tendency towards extremism in the name of greed, racism, and power, with a simultaneous effort to hide and deflect perceptions of this extremism. A central task of Democrats should be to expose this extremism and deny the GOP the ability to use it to motivate base voters while also peeling off independents and supercharging Democratic constituencies. I cannot overemphasize that this is not a case of slurring the GOP, or making stuff up. It is about hammering home basic facts about the party.
Let me focus on one front that has become newly salient, in the wake of the Democrats’ disappointing loss in the Virginia governor’s race. Whatever role it did or did not play in Glenn Youngkin’s victory, some Republican strategists believe that the candidate’s attacks on critical race theory were key to his success, and aim to make appeals to “parental rights” a part of their 2022 congressional strategy. Based on the fact of the Democrats’ losses in the state, it also seems that the Democrats are arguably vulnerable on this front.
But even if it turns out that the anti-CRT rhetoric didn’t push the GOP over the top in the Virginia race, I think we need to turn the critique around, and ask: How was it possible that the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, wasn’t able to use the GOP’s cloaked appeals to white supremacism to clean the floor with his opponent? From what I’ve seen, the answer is that the McAuliffe camp did not take the threat seriously enough, or at least not soon enough, and was not willing to make explicit the white supremacism that Youngkin employed to rile up the Republican right-wing base.
With the Virginia race in the rearview mirror, though, we are seeing tentative evidence that whatever balance Youngkin was able to maintain — energizing the Trump base with anti-CRT language while holding on to plausible deniability for more moderate voters that he really, truly was only interested in kids getting a quality education — will be increasingly difficult for other Republican candidates going forward. Because it turns out that lots of Republicans are not nearly as disciplined at Youngkin, and are happy to acknowledge what should be obvious to any but the most naive political observers — that Republicans have been using opposition to “critical race theory” (which, again, is not actually taught in elementary and high schools) as a way to say that they don’t think American schoolchildren shouldn’t be taught that racism is bad — which, in turn, is a roundabout way of saying to voters that they don’t think that racism itself is bad, and that white supremacism should rightly be the political and social order of the nation.
This article from The Washington Post takes the Republican bad faith at face value, suggesting that there’s a slippery slope from anti-CRT rhetoric to outright opposing teaching about racism in schools, but this reverses the logical order — opposing CRT was from the start a way to oppose the teaching of racism, and let’s face it, the importance of civil rights, in schools. What is actually happening now, and as the Post story documents well, is that the metaphorical Klan mask is coming off, and is being replaced by an actual Klan mask, as multiple Republican politicians and school board members are now feeling free to make clear their opposition is not to the academic theory of CRT, but indeed to any teaching of America’s racist past and the way this past has warped the present. And so it was inevitable that novels by the great Tony Morrison would now be in their sights, the supposed aspersions of CRT meant to tar and feather her artistic efforts to explicate the legacy of slavery in such novels as Beloved and The Bluest Eye. Also not surprisingly, the offensive against improper fiction has grown to encompass objections to books that involve LGBTQ themes; some enthusiastic board members in one Virginia county are ready to go to the logical end of this witch hunt, and have proposed burning the offending books to purge the schools and nation of their influence. The extremity of Republican solutions betrays the extremity of Republican beliefs. (Conversely, Democratic leaders who don’t think they can win a fight against book burning probably should not be Democratic leaders.)
The forces which the GOP has encouraged with its fig leaf of anti-CRT talk are too primal, too full of hatred, not to make themselves more fully known, to erupt in geysers of open racism. But many GOP candidates, particularly those for national office, are likely to continue to use the anti-CRT language, even as it’s clear that it’s a stalking horse for banning the teaching of any racial issues in schools. This requires the Democratic Party to explicitly and unceasingly explain to the American people what the GOP means when they talk about CRT, and to enlist in their service the many GOP politicos who are not so disciplined in their messaging as evidence. Democrats should not hesitate to use the bogus anti-CRT offensive as an opening to talk about the white supremacism that energizes and motivates much of the modern Republican Party. What the GOP sees as a major strength, the Democrats must work to turn into a deadly weakness. I would even go a step further — I think it would be the right thing for Democrats to pick fights with Republicans over teaching about civil rights and the legacy of slavery in American schools, on the principle that no complete civic education is possible without teaching these topics.
But as I’ve said before, the flip side to critiquing such Republican attitudes is just as important. Democrats must hammer home a positive vision for an equitable, just America in which all Americans, of all races, are treated as full members of our national community; that learning about our imperfections makes us better able to overcome them; that the use of racial hatred to divide us weakens the entire nation, makes us less than the sum of our parts, and only serves democracy’s enemies.
What strikes me as bizarre is that Democrats might be in any way flummoxed by the GOP’s use of racist strategies to try to win elections, whether in Virginia or in 2022 and beyond. The blueprint Donald Trump provided was that by making white identity politics the central appeal of the Republican Party, the GOP could actually win the presidency through the perversions of the electoral college, even with a minority of voter support. Likewise, he reinforced the GOP’s trend toward gerrymandering and suppressing votes so that the party can win state elections on a permanent basis, and have a good chance of winning congressional power even if it comes up millions of votes short. For any Democrats to think that fighting for racial equality is any way a side issue, or a subject that can be ducked or deferred, amounts to an unforgivable form of magical thinking. There will be no winning the democracy fight without winning the fight against white supremacism. And with the GOP descending into greater and greater extremism on matters of race and its vision for America’s future, the path forward is open for a Democratic Party willing not just to beat the Republican Party, but to discredit the GOP as a national political force.