Something I was having trouble articulating a couple weeks ago, after Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race just a year after Joe Biden won that state by 10 points, has been stated plain as day by Brian Beutler:
What troubles me even more than the [Democrats’] governing errors, though, is the fact that Republicans were able to become competitive anywhere in any blue territory in the country so soon after Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans with incompetence and lies, then tried to steal the election leaving dead bodies in the halls of Congress. We can’t expect memories to last forever, but we can expect them to last longer than a year. There is plenty of precedent for the kind of reckoning Republicans deserve, and the fact that the entire GOP isn’t toxic in much more of the country after what we just lived through is prima facie evidence of a political failure.
For a year now, The Hot Screen and many other observers have been pretty rightly obsessed with the Democrats’ lackadaisical response to Donald Trump’s attempted coup and the rapid alignment of the Republican Party with the insurrectionist Big Lie that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 election. A great part of why last Tuesday’s results were so disturbing is that, for the first time, we got a real-world test of the Democrats’ non-confrontational approach — and it was as disastrous as many of us had feared. Thousands of suburban voters who had been shifting to the Democrats during the Trump years stampeded back into the Republican column, while disheartening numbers of Democrats didn’t bother to show up to the polls at all.
There have been numerous excellent discussions of how Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin was able to make racist appeals and energize the GOP base, while also appealing to swing voters by couching those appeals in the plausible deniability of talking about education concerns, in the form of anti-critical race theory rhetoric. But even if you concede that other concerns separate from race, such as education and economic anxiety, were motivating some voters, this only makes the Democratic failure to tar and feather the GOP as a whole more damning: many Virginia voters felt that punishing the Democrats was more important than rewarding a Republican Party whose core organizing principle is that Donald Trump is actually still president of the United States, and that has in fact continued the insurrection of January 6 through other means, such as voting restrictions and suppression aimed at securing the GOP national power even against the will of the majority.
And so analyses of the role of race in the Virginia election also overlook a larger possibility: that many GOP voters went to the polls because they are incensed and angry out of their belief that the 2020 election was stolen. As Beutler writes, “Add it all up and Tuesday starts to make an eerie kind of sense: A Republican base behaving, based on lies, the way you’d want people to act if they thought their way of life and tools for self-governance were being plundered. Meanwhile there’s a live torpedo aimed right at the hull of America’s popular majority, and our representatives refuse to act like it, plausibly costing Democrats a big swing vote.” Because Democrats refuse to motivate their base about the real attack on democracy in a manner commensurate with how Republicans do motivate their base with made-up attacks on democracy, the Democrats have committed a profound unforced error.
You won’t get any argument from me against this essential Beutlerian formulation, and goodness knows I’ve probably quoted and echoed its various iterations across more pieces than even the most patient reader can stand. But since last Tuesday’s election, a related idea has been bugging me: between the ongoing GOP insurrection against American democracy, and the redoubled GOP efforts to stoke white backlash to incite their voters to turn out, I’ve been puzzling over what I’m calling (probably because I’ve watched too many BBC mystery series during our covid years) The Mysterious Case of the Missing Democratic Anger. Simply put, why are more Democratic congresspersons and senators not in a state of perpetual rage and contempt against at a GOP that is actively seeking to overturn American democracy and to maintain power through continuous incitements of white supremacy, and why are they not attempting to communicate and arouse this same outrage among their base? I mean, you sure wouldn’t think so by their continuing broad emphasis on seeking bipartisanship and their general unwillingness to portray the GOP as a party no longer fit for partnership in a democratic nation.
But even if the pose of calm, rational evenhandedness towards the rabid GOP is a pose, a calculated effort to appear to be the grown-ups against the seething emotionalism of the GOP, something still does not compute. Because even if I can understand Democratic politicians not acting angry, what I absolutely cannot fathom is the lack of rhetoric, policies, and overall attitude that would channel an anger that is righteous, democratic, and necessary in this time of extended political crisis.
Let’s focus for a moment on a specific area of confrontation. The phenomenon of white backlash, which we surely witnessed in Virginia over the course of the recent gubernatorial race (with Glenn Youngkin vowing to fight critical race theory in schools), is a predictable reaction to the ejection of white supremacist Donald Trump from the White House — particularly when his party is largely committed to the lie that he didn't actually lose and sees his white nationalism as key to the party’s future. This movement is powered in part by fear, yes, but also by anger, by white Americans’ resentment at losing power in American society to people of color. Critically, I believe that the GOP’s embrace of white nationalism it is premised on the assumption that Democrats will not respond to it, out of a fear that doing so will drive away white voters, such as by creating the impression that Democrats are saying that all white people are racists.
But one reason I’m focusing on the emotion of anger is because I’m wondering if Democrats are reacting too strongly to their own feelings of anger, and that of their voters, and so are not trusting the response to white supremacism that this anger would direct them towards: outright denunciation and opposition. It seems that at a minimum, Democrats are over-thinking the electoral threat of a strategy like that of Youngkin, where racist appeals are couched in plausible deniability (in this case, around the teaching of CRT to public school students, which is a way of shoehorning in the idea that teaching about racism and civil rights in schools is really a plot to make white children and people in general feel guilty about being white, and disempowered at having to recognize the equality of non-white Americans). Rather than panicking about such subterfuge, justifiable outrage would demand that Democrats expose the racist operations of CRT fear-mongering, and embrace a righteous anger against white supremacists trying to poison the minds of American voters and American children alike with bizarre notions such as racism not being a central part of American history. The GOP is basically trying to prevent the sordid history of the Confederacy, the KKK, and Jim Crow from being taught to kids. In the face of this, Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of saying that part of the point of American education is to inculcate a righteous anger against the white supremacism of the past, and that a very good reason to do so is to help them be racially conscious citizens in the present.