The biggest story in American politics for the last several years has been the Republican Party’s increasing turn to authoritarian politics. The GOP’s movement toward outright opposition to democracy had been evident for years, in its campaigns of extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression and efforts to stack the courts with right-wing judges who might insulate GOP priorities from majority will, but the Trump presidency fully catalyzed the shift. To the GOP’s existing tendencies, Trump fused a classic model of the authoritarian strongman leader around whom the party could rally. Donald Trump believed in this vision so much, in fact, that he even attempted a coup in his remaining months in power, culminating in the violence of January 6.
With the majority of GOP leaders and rank and file embracing the Big Lie that Democrats stole the presidency from Trump, the party has prioritized a raft of state-level legislation and rhetoric designed to subvert future elections and cement permanent Republican power. On the gerrymandering front, The New York Times summarizes the situation thus: “In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia, Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.” If voters cannot change their leaders, even if a majority vote for the opposition party, then we cannot say that those voters are living in a democracy. And when you add atop this voter suppression measures aimed specifically at traditionally Democratic constituencies like African-Americans and students, the anti-democratic vise grip becomes even more of a stranglehold.
Alongside this, Republicans who lie that the 2020 election was stolen are now taking over election boards around the country. This chilling Washington Post report captures the dark spirit of their effort, which is pretty clearly aimed at putting in place a body of Trumpist apparatchiks who will throw out future ballots that don’t support their preferred candidates. The previous chair of the Michigan GOP tells the Post that, “This is a great big flashing red warning sign. The officials who fulfilled their legal duty after the last election are now being replaced by people who are pledging to throw a wrench in the gears of the next election. It tells you that they are planning nothing but chaos and that they have a strategy to disrupt the certification of the next election.” The head of a nonpartisan voting group neatly summarizes the situation: “Having election deniers run elections is like having arsonists take over the fire department.”
Parallel to efforts to block majority rule and fair elections, the GOP has begun to incorporate threats of violence and intimidation into its politics. The New York Times reports that:
From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party. Ten months after rioters attacked the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, and after four years of a president who often spoke in violent terms about his adversaries, right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him from power.
GOP leaders signal their comfort with these tactics by their silence, and by refusing to condemn the perpetrators — including Representative Paul Gosar, who just weeks ago tweeted violent images depicting a cartoon version of himself killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening to do the same to President Joe Biden. As the Times notes, the threats have already had concrete effects, with literally hundreds of election workers and health officials leaving county and states posts over the past year. The GOP has no incentive to stop employing and condoning these tactics because they are working — they are inciting the GOP base to greater and greater rage and bloodlust, and driving good people out of public service, to be replaced by partisan hacks who will serve the party’s will in place of the public interest.
Taken together, these GOP efforts aimed at the basic foundations of our democracy arguably constitute a slow-rolling coup that is slowly but surely accelerating. Throw in the GOP’s opposition to common-sense measures to end the pandemic, such as its fight against vaccine mandates, and what comes into view is a party that is essentially war with American democracy and society in the pursuit of power and dominance.
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But alongside the crisis of Republican authoritarianism, we’re experiencing an intertwined, parallel crisis that becomes more inexcusable and infuriating by the day: the general refusal of Democratic Party leaders and elected officials to explicitly confront the GOP’s descent into anti-democratic madness. This Democratic failure encompasses the party’s inability to act legislatively against the GOP assault — such as by passing vitally important voting rights legislation that might undo the GOP’s severe gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts — but is not limited to the lack of substantive action. Just as damningly, the Democrats are failing to describe to the public and to the media the nature of the GOP threat, or to rally decent Americans into fervent opposition against this anti-democratic juggernaut. By falling so very short on both the substantive and rhetorical fronts, they are helping create the very political conditions that allow the GOP’s assault on democracy to thrive. When the Republican Party enacts policies and endorses violent rhetoric without its opposition adequately responding, the Democrats tacitly help to normalize the GOP’s tactics and strategies as fair play in our democratic system, even when those tactics and strategies are aimed at destroying our democracy.
The fact of the matter is that we are already well past the point when promotion of the norms and structures of democracy, and a full-throated fight against democracy’s domestic enemies, should have shot to the top of the Democratic agenda. While protecting democracy was a major theme of the Democrats’ anti-Trump rhetoric during his administration — after all, the appeal to vote for Democrats to stop the depredations of a want-to-be strongman were key to their 2018 and 2020 wins — this strategy has failed to evolve into legislation to back it up, or to evolve to encompass the radicalized GOP in its indictment.
It is somewhat unbelievable that this needs to be said, but also a perfect encapsulation of the Democrats’ mind-boggling torpor: President Trump attempted to stage a coup against the American government, culminating in an assault on the Capitol; in the wake of the coup attempt, not only did the great majority of Republican senators and representatives oppose efforts to impeach and convict the president for his attempted violent overthrow of American democracy, but have since then coalesced into a near-uniform embrace of the contention that Democrats stole the presidency from Trump. And yet, the Democrats have so far failed to make this a central talking point for why Americans should vote for them instead of Republicans. They’ve also failed to prioritize passing laws that might counter not only GOP gerrymandering, but the Republicans’ multi-layered effort to gum up and subvert the conduct of elections themselves, not to mention ensure that those who engage in violent political intimidation are legally sanctioned. Beyond this, where are the new laws that would ensure that the corruption and self-dealing of another president like Donald Trump (or, god forbid, another Trump presidency) could never happen again?
Somewhat ironically, the sense of crisis has only been deepened by recent efforts by the media to sound the alarm, such as in the articles I noted above. In part, this is because the detailed reporting of the Republican anti-democratic efforts portrays more fully than ever a breathtakingly brazen and multi-faceted effort to gain power without majority support. But in turn, such a portrayal only further highlights the Democrats’ relative lack not only of urgency, but of basic strategy and commitment to defeating the GOP onslaught. For me, it’s also driven home the absolute necessity of the Democrats taking the initiative in defense of democracy — because the reporting and other media analysis, as good as some of it is, cannot adequately convey the urgency and arouse the mass indignation that Democratic politicians can and must. It is one thing for the The New York Times to report that several U.S. states are now only democracies in name only; it is another thing entirely for one of the United States’ two major political parties to declare that the GOP is attacking our right to govern ourselves in service of a twisted vision of plutocratic power, white supremacy, and a perverted, militant Christianism.
The various threads of the GOP’s anti-democratic strategy are mutually reinforcing, making it essential that Democratic politicians pull them together to make a case against GOP authoritarianism and for supporting a pro-democracy Democratic Party, rather than relying on the media to do so for them. Voter suppression makes gerrymandering more effective; violent threats mean that not just Democrats but moderate Republicans are intimidated out of public office, or from joining public demonstrations that might show mass opposition to GOP policies and governance.
Again, it is amazing to me that the Democrats would have any hesitation on this point, or that anyone would need to push their leadership to action. The GOP is basically working to ensure that the votes of most Americans essentially don’t count, so that a Republican minority can take power, and is increasingly comfortable with inciting violence to get its way — the very definition, to put it mildly, of an extremely unpopular political position. The GOP is opposed to America, so much so that they can’t really even renounce the coup that the former president attempted! They hate America so much, they’re still trying to make that coup happen by a slow-motion insurrection against U.S. democracy! Do the Democrats really think that defending democracy against its domestic enemies is some sort of controversial or high-risk political stance? And this is just to speak of the situation in purely political terms, which of course is not nearly the case. Not only do Democrats have an overwhelming need to call out and oppose GOP authoritarianism for the sake of the party’s survival and serving its voters, the party has a responsibility, equal if not even more pressing, to defend American democracy for its own sake.
I don’t have a comprehensive theory of why Democrats seem to be choking in this moment, although the most charitable explanations include elements of shock, intimidation, and disbelief at how quickly and thoroughly the GOP has turned into an authoritarian party. Another major reason is that the Democrats, starting from the Biden administration on down, continue to prize the appearance of bipartisanship as a central party goal. As Jeet Heer puts it, “Biden failed to make the link between Trump and the party’s increasing extremism in the 2020 election. Like Hillary Clinton before him, he tried to distinguish between the toxic Trump and a redeemable GOP. But this sop to moderate Republicans effectively prevents Democrats from describing what’s actually happening.”
But the GOP is only growing more radicalized as the months pass, giving the lie to simplistic notions that “the fever will break” or that moderates will rebel and take back the party. Extremism now feeds extremism within the GOP, and the only way it will stop is for another party to stop it. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the Republican strategy is working for them — they are gaining impregnable power and intimidating opponents — without paying any political price. But of course they’re not paying any political price, because the Democrats, again for reasons not entirely clear to me, have chosen not to make an actual assault on American government, up to and including a coup attempt by a Republican president, a central issue in their case for why American should support them and reject Republicans. What will it take to move the Democrats?