The current House inquiry into the January 6 insurrection will ideally be a turning point for the Democratic Party’s stance towards the GOP, an opportunity to move from an elaborate and self-defeating attitude that declares the Republican Party an equal partner in American democracy, into a no-holds-barred indictment of the contemporary GOP as an authoritarian, white supremacist party that poses a clear threat to American democracy. It was one thing for Democrats to believe, immediately after Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and the Democrats’ capture of the Senate, that these losses would catalyze reform and reflection amid their GOP opposition, and that the GOP would come to its senses and slough off the hate and authoritarian tendencies that culminated in the horrors of the Trump presidency.
But the calculation is entirely different now that we are nine months past the November 2020 elections, and seven months past the January 6 insurrection, when the Republican Party has clearly made its choice. The great majority of its congressional and Senate members continue to pledge fealty to the former president, to the point that it is now a litmus test for such officials to declare the January 6 insurrection no big deal, and to assert that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president — the second falsehood legitimizing the first as a righteous and necessary act. Indeed, the GOP is at a point where, along with its right-wing media allies, it has sought to re-write the insurrection as the fault of Nancy Pelosi, and declare the arrested insurrectionists to be maltreated political prisoners.
As I’ve written before, this continued denial of the violent intent of the January insurrectionists constitutes a tacit acceptance of their violence, a cover-story not only for those who defiled the halls of Congress with their Confederate flags and Trump banners, but for a president who ultimately turned to violence as a last-ditch effort to remain in office. And the GOP’s broad assertion that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election is itself an attack on our democracy no less than the January 6 attack on the Capitol — particularly as it has provided the justification for an ever deeper assault on our government, via the armada of voter suppression efforts undertaken by GOP legislatures across the country that seek to deny Democratic-leaning voters their right to vote and have their votes count.
But the assault on democratic governance goes even deeper than the self-interested promulgation of lies, concrete anti-democratic legislation, and promotion of political violence. In pursuing this scorched earth authoritarian strategy, the GOP is, crucially, radicalizing the GOP base into further opposition to democracy and openness to employ violence to achieve political ends, and to view neighbors who happen to be Democrats not as fellow citizens, but as illegitimate pretenders to American-ness. Through lies and incitement, the GOP is building a mass movement built on violence and anti-democratic legislation, in the service of white supremacism and the interests of their wealthy donors.
Recognizing ongoing Republican efforts to whip up millions of Americans into a frenzy against their fellow citizens and to reject the basics of American democracy (i.e., one person, one vote and majority rule) provides a stark contrast with the Democratic strategy for maintaining power in the 2022 midterms and beyond. The Biden administration seems to have bet its political future, and that of the Democrats in the near-term, in defeating the covid-19 pandemic and ensuring both economic growth and measures to bring more fairness and equality to the American economy. In terms of turning out and persuading voters, the theory appears to be that Americans will be incentivized to reward the party that saved them from covid and resuscitated the economy. The contrast with the GOP’s strategy is perhaps most starkly illustrated in how the Democrats have not prioritized protection of voting rights to the same degree that the GOP has prioritized destroying voting rights. While it is true that the fate of democracy-protecting legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act are in question largely through the opposition of a handful of Democratic senators (and primarily Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema), it is also true that the Biden administration has, at least so far, chosen to prioritize economic legislation over pro-democracy laws.
I hold to a hope that once the infrastructure battles are resolved, the Biden administration will make a full court press on legislation that protects the right to vote. In the absence of such prioritization, and instead with a current emphasis on achieving a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Democratic leadership is doing nothing equivalent to the ongoing GOP effort to energize its base: namely, making an effort to energize the Democratic base in defense of democracy.
This basic political imbalance, more than any other, persuades me that the Democrats are pursuing a dangerous and potentially self-defeating strategy in failing to match the intensity of the GOP’s authoritarian movement with a countervailing pro-democracy movement. Every day, the GOP is essentially asserting that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 election, instantiating this lie by anti-democratic legislation aimed at crippling Democratic electoral efforts in key battleground states. Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be betting that the popularity they gain by fostering economic recovery and ending the pandemic will effectively overcome GOP voter suppression.
What feels increasingly frustrating, if not outright crazy, is that the same GOP authoritarian efforts that are threatening free and fair elections, and are inciting the GOP base to turn out in 2022, are enormous vulnerabilities for the Republican Party — if the Democrats are willing to exploit them. But part of the craziness of the situation is that the Democrats don’t just have an electoral incentive to do what they can to beat their opponents — they have a moral duty to our democracy to highlight the GOP’s anti-democratic animus. And key to taking advantage of this GOP weakness is actually talking about the authoritarian menace that the GOP poses.
Democratic unwillingness to engage more directly with the GOP’s extremist assault is deeply tied up with the party’s uncertainty about how to handle Donald Trump’s continued elephantine presence in the Republican Party. Because the Democrats don’t want to give the former president attention that they fear would inflate his post-presidential status, they seem to have consequently limited their ability to talk about the Trump-centered authoritarian movement that the GOP has now become. Unwilling to say the former president’s name, they’re also unable to name the authoritarian movement that he has done so much to advance.
While I would love to “move past” Donald Trump as much as the next guy, sticking unquestioningly to this wish becomes delusional when we consider that Trump remains at the center of GOP politics, and indeed seems set on running for president again in 2024. In a way that’s oddly complementary to the GOP’s own continued Trump-worship, the Democrats appear to ascribe power to the former president far beyond what he actually possesses. They seem to fear that talking about Trump will make him more powerful, when the reality is that this silence is allowing him and his allies to build out their authoritarian movement away from fuller public scrutiny and attacks from the Democratic Party.
But what if the opposite is actually far more the case — that Donald Trump remains what he always has been, a highly-flawed tribune for a nascent American fascism, a man who so effectively assumed leadership of this authoritarian, white supremacist movement because of his own morally flawed, narcissistic, and depraved character? What if, it turns out, the former president graphically illustrates the dangers, immorality, and nihilism of a movement that continues to gain force within the Republican Party even now, in a way that is easily grasped by million of Americans who believe in democracy and hate white supremacism?
Thinking about the unique vulnerabilities of Donald Trump helps clarify, in turn, the massive vulnerabilities of a Republican Party that has embraced not only him, but that now openly avows a collection of retrograde beliefs that had found a home in the GOP even before his presidency. Even as the Republican Party has taken direct aim both at American democracy and the Democratic Party, the Democrats have so far declined not to respond in kind. But not only does this betray the Democrats’ obligation to defend American democracy, it also badly misreads the extremely vulnerable position that the GOP has placed itself in. In the first place, the GOP has tied itself to a president who not only lost the last election, but, more importantly, is uniquely galvanizing for millions of Democratic voters. (To my relief, I see I’m not alone wondering about the enormous slack that Democrats and the press are cutting the GOP around its Trumpophilia; John Stoehr has been digging into this issue recently, writing that, “The question of whether the Republicans are taking an enormous risk sticking with a losing president has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves,” and discussing how Trump’s insurrection blows apart GOP “law and order” claims that they hope will propel them to victory in 2022 and beyond.)
In terms of energizing their respective bases, the GOP is currently enjoying all of the benefits of Trump (jazzing the base) while suffering none of the downside (provoking a backlash among a Democratic base that despises the former president). But I would humbly submit that at a pragmatic, common-sense level, the Democrats have every interest in reminding their base that their own political success is all that stands between ordinary Americans and the return to office of the worst president of our lifetimes.
But this strategy shouldn’t depend only on greater comfort with reminding Americans of the horrors of the Trump presidency, and of his continued sway over the GOP. Democrats should also get much more comfortable with reminding voters that they are also the party that stands between ordinary Americans and further right-wing attacks against our government; the party that stands between ordinary Americans and future insurrections. This has both the virtue of being true, and of energizing Democratic voters around the actual stakes of the 2022 and 2024 elections. As much as Biden’s team might want to make those elections about our economic recovery, they are in reality as much about whether we continue to be a democratic nation — and waging those elections on such explicit terms should be seen as a net advantage to Democrats. For Democrats to run the risk of not making the stakes of future elections clear, particularly when doing so will only help them, is the very definition of political folly.
This is why I keep coming back to the importance of foregrounding both the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s continued leadership of the GOP — not only are they essential facts for making the case against allowing the GOP to hold power at any level of government, from city dogcatcher to president, but they are easy to understand — emotionally provocative data points that serve to open broader discussions of GOP authoritarianism, including its assault on elections and its encouragement of political violence. For instance, the Democrats would be remiss not to continue valorizing and promoting the Capitol police who defended Congress against a hateful mob of neo-Confederates, white supremacists, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other enemies of the United States. In one fell swoop, these police officers have provided powerful testimony that GOP lies about the January 6 insurrection are the blatherings of a party that supports authoritarian violence, and as John Stoer argues, has no claim to support either law or order. Rather than fear politicizing the events of January 6, the Democrats should fashion the truth of that day into a weapon to discredit and dismantle the GOP in the eyes of all but its most rabid supporters. Whatever inclinations they have towards conflict avoidance and a false bipartisanship need to be put aside in the name of exploiting these points of extreme vulnerability for the GOP.
In important ways, the GOP continues to inflict potentially disastrous harm on itself on a daily basis — if Democrats are willing to take up the appropriate political and rhetorical cudgels. Every day that the GOP continues to deny the right-wing violence of January 6, it is providing cover for that violence, and eroding whatever claims it might still make to be a legitimate American party. Every day, in other words, its vulnerability grows, as do the stakes around whether the Democrats choose to highlight the GOP’s embrace of the January 6 insurrection. For if the Democrats allow the GOP to re-fashion the events of January 6 into a story of how the former president’s defenders tried to stop the Democrats from stealing the election, without countering it with the truth of the president’s coup attempt (which in fact started long before January 6) that energizes a majority of Americans into a continued defense of democracy in 2022 and 2024, then they will have made themselves complicit in their own defeat.
But as important as fighting to promulgate the truth of January 6 is, the Democrats need to connect the armed assault on the Capitol with the GOP’s broader efforts to accomplish insurrection by other means — most importantly, by subverting future elections through a combination of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and administrative changes whose goal is to dilute and deny Democratic votes. This is an aspect of the Democrats’ decision to punt on voting rights legislation that I find particular infuriating; the party would be so much better positioned to make the vital connection between January 6 and the need to stop the GOP anti-voting onslaught if the January 6 hearings were being held alongside hearings on why voting rights legislation is needed. Democrats are doing the GOP undeserved favors by separating out these two issues. The linkage can be illustrated in a variety of ways, but Democrats might summarize it as follows: If the GOP denies you the vote, then next time, without Democrats in power, the insurrectionists will win. If the GOP insists on tying itself to the unforgivable actions of a treasonous former president and his armed minions, then let’s make them pay as dearly as we can, by using it to help defeat this whole sordid authoritarian movement.
It may be that Democratic leadership will shy away from making this case, or fears riling up its base in ways that might feel analogous to the tactics of the GOP. But if elected Democrats won’t do so, rank and file Democrats must to this for themselves. There is no equivalence between a GOP that motivates its base with lies and anti-democratic animus, while seeking to deny the country free and fair elections, and a pro-democracy movement that is activated and enraged in defense of democracy, and that seeks to ensure that everyone can vote, and have their votes counted. One thing is the illness; the other is just what the doctor ordered.