Last week, I shared my perception that media coverage of America’s democracy crisis seems to have been improving lately, even as the Democratic Party remains in a state of catatonic denial about the GOP’s accelerating anti-democratic extremism — a split phenomenon that, for me at least, only heightens the sense of a collective nightmare transpiring and a nation unable to wake itself up out of it. The past several days have only brought more mixed blessings on the coverage front, as several tocsin-sounding pieces have been published by a trio of acute chroniclers of our authoritarian precipice.
First, Jamelle Bouie describes the GOP effort to prepare the ground for Donald Trump’s return to power in 2024, linking the campaign to undermine state-level election administration with the push for one-party legislative rule in battleground states that could help the GOP win or subvert the 2022 and 2024 contests. Crucially, Bouie captures how this whole vast effort is being conducted very much in the open — a conspiracy hiding in plain sight, to quote the title of the piece:
Increasingly untethered from any commitment to electoral democracy, large and influential parts of the Republican Party are working to put Trump back in power by any means necessary. Republicans could win without these tactics — they did so in Virginia last month — but there’s no reason to think that the party will pull itself off this road.
Every incentive driving the Republican Party, from Fox News to the former president, points away from sober engagement with the realities of American politics and toward the outrageous, the antisocial and the authoritarian.
None of this is happening behind closed doors. We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.
Of everything I’ve seen lately, for me this piece best captures the unreality of our political situation — one of America’s two political parties openly making war on democracy, its roadmap to illicit power signaled loud and clear for anyone willing to hear it.
But as I also argued last week, the GOP push to seize minority power against the majority will is shadowed by a parallel crisis: that of the Democratic Party and much of the center-left to either acknowledge this slow-motion coup is happening, or to act to counter and defeat it. On matters of the Democrats’ self-defeating tendencies as we move further and further towards an authoritarian hellscape, there’ve been few analysts better than Brian Beutler, and his latest column uses recent indications that Roe v. Wade will soon be gutted or overturned to explore the Democrats’ democracy-defense crisis.
Skeptical that a banning or near-banning of abortion would automatically redound to the Democrats’ electoral benefit, Beutler digs into the contradictions at the heart of the party’s apparent strategy to defend a right that a great many of its voters believe is non-negotiable. As he sees it, even aggressive efforts by the Democrats to defend abortion rights would run up against a Republican opposition whose powers to thwart the Democrats are extremely strong, if not impregnable, because of the way the GOP has already made itself able to withstand majority opinion due to its various anti-democratic maneuvers. The Democrats, on the other hand, are in a best-case scenario left telling their voters to “simply” vote for Democrats in greater numbers than ever in 2022 and beyond, when the Democrats are simultaneously unwilling or unable to pass legislation that would undo voter suppression and gerrymandering that blocks the Democrats from translating these votes into actual congressional seats and power. (An additional enormous downside for Democrats being unable to defend their voters’ interests, despite the best efforts of these very voters, is that it can lead to demoralization among the party’s base, making it even harder for Democrats to win the decisive popular vote margins they would need to possibly overcome Republican subterfuge).
So why won’t the Democratic leadership do what they need to do not just to defend American democracy, but to defend themselves from being relegated to oblivion, like the domestic political equivalent of AFC Richmond? Beutler describes a party that prefers to “[float] above the fray,” an approach that “doesn’t work because it’s incongruent to the realities staring them in the face. It’s how you wind up responding to a coup attempt with an infrastructure bill while the fascists convince more voters that you’re the real threat to democracy.”
But though he doesn’t sound optimistic that this will likely change, Beutler makes a point that had been floating in the back of my own mind recently: “The only nice thing about staring doom in the face is it focuses the mind. Democratic leaders are clearly not prepared to accept what I wrote above as their fate today, but the sooner they do, the sooner they might get their act together, if only to save themselves. As I’ve written before, there’s still the tiniest of openings for them to do what currently seems impossible, and the only reason to think they might is that they must.” I actually believe this is a stronger incentive than Beutler may think, insofar as if politicians are about anything, it is their own political survival. But more than this, I also think that we can’t look at Democratic politicians’ incentives to take action in isolation. It may be delusional, but I do think that grassroots pressure can make a decisive difference here. This is particularly true because on something like abortion, as with many other issues, the otherwise abstract stakes of “defending democracy” are given precise, urgent dimension. If enough of the Democratic base sees that the Democrats will only be able to defend abortion rights if democracy-strengthening legislation gets passed, and what’s stopping that is the filibuster, then I can promise you that you’re going to have a hell of a lot more people calling their senators demanding that the filibuster be reformed (whether that would be enough to catalyze change is admittedly another question — and yes, I realize that a single senator (cough cough, Joe Manchin!) could still derail filibuster reform). Indeed, the ability of actual voters to mobilize and exert pressure on their elected representatives is going to be a key part of any revitalization of American democracy, above and beyond the question of whether Democratic officials choose to do what’s necessary to defend the interests of their constituents.
What gives me a bit of optimism these days is that the majority of the American people and the Democratic Party have literally not yet begun to fight, to coin a phrase. The reality is that the American majority is in the process of having the power of its votes dissipated and nullified by an increasingly fanatical right-wing movement whose hero is a sociopath, and whose vision for women is subservience, for non-white Americans is degradation, and for the planet is exploitation to the point of collective suicide. I believe part of the Democrats’ problem is the failure to articulate a countervailing, egalitarian, life-affirming vision for America — but the good news is that such a vision already exists in large part, and much of the work needed to get us out of this mess revolves around articulating that vision and how Democrats and progressives can instantiate it through policy and good governance.
Conversely, the right may be energized right now, but its anti-democratic animus ultimately comes from a place of fear and weakness, not strength. The historian Thomas Zimmer has a great Twitter thread that touches on this important, and under-discussed, aspect of our present crisis:
The silver lining is that the political order the Right prefers no longer has majority support - which is exactly why conservatives are exploring avenues to erect authoritarian minority rule. That’s the paradox at the heart of the political situation right now: Yes, democracy is in grave danger – but not because it’s weakened recently, but because it’s actually gotten stronger, or to be more precise: closer to the promise of multiracial, pluralistic democracy. The reactionary counter-mobilization from the Right is not coming from a place of strength – conservatives are radicalizing because they feel their backs against the wall, convinced to be confronted with near-overwhelming forces of liberalism, leftism, wokeism.
Zimmer’s reference to “the paradox at the heart of the political situation” really resonates for me, and gets at the frustrations and outrage I keep trying to articulate myself: it’s maddening for Democrats and other defenders of democracy to be playing defense right now, when those who oppose it are essentially lashing out because they know they can no longer win under democracy’ rules. To not make this basic insight central to how the Democratic Party talks about the need to defend democracy, and to promote its many policies that would do so (including the stalled-out voting rights acts and the economically transformative Build Back Better Act) continues to strike me as a completely unnecessary act of self-sabotage, and a shying away from a necessary confrontation with an illegitimate, anti-democratic movement that seeks to pervert the country in its own frightened, delusional image.