Recently, The Hot Screen has become fairly obsessed with a fundamental fault line in our politics: even as the GOP base and elected officials urge each other on to greater and greater opposition to American democracy, in a clear cycle of radicalization, Democratic leaders continue to respond sluggishly to this crisis, and have so far appeared either unwilling or unable to energize the Democratic base to provide a countervailing force against a rising tide of Republican authoritarianism. Even if Democrats manage to pass some version of voting protections, which I am not at all counting out, and which could help turn back the tide of gerrymandering and voting restrictions passed by GOP state governments since the start of the year, this would still leave unaddressed the question of how to ensure Democrats and independents surge to the polls in 2022 and beyond.
At Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz has a concise but striking post on a new CNN poll that documents what Kurtz refers to as the “urgency gap” between rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans on the matter of America’s democracy crisis. When asked whether democracy is under attack, some 75% of Republican voters said yes, while only 46% of Democrats responded in the affirmative. Assessing these and other results of the poll, Kurtz writes:
We often talk about the enthusiasm gap in electoral politics, but we now face an urgency gap. Republicans under Trump have not only succeeded in selling the lie that Democrats are out to destroy democracy, they’ve got Republicans more stoked about it than Democrats are about the verified, believe-your-own-eyes threat to democracy that reached its current pinnacle with a GOP-led violent attack on the Capitol to subvert an election.
[. . .] [T]hat polling question is a strong signal that rank-and-file Democrats are taking their cues from the slow-footed, ambivalent, conflicted response of elected Democrats – not the other way around (though it probably functions as a self-reinforcing feedback loop).
This is such a great, pithy encapsulation of the perverse phenomenon I’ve been trying to document over the past several months, in which the GOP is just much more enthused about overthrowing democracy than Democrats are about defending it. Kurtz is dead-on that this polling supports the contention that Democratic officials are failing to communicate the stakes to their constituents. Why this might be the case, and how to resolve this “urgency gap” (itself a useful shorthand for describing this issue), are interrelated issues that desperately need to be addressed if we are to effectively defend democracy in this country.
First, to be fair, I think the Biden administration, and by extension its allies in Congress, are in something of a bind in responding to Republican radicalism. Biden built his candidacy on restoring both normalcy and partisan comity to America after the horrors of the Trump years. While this hardly stopped him from savaging the former president during the campaign, or from criticizing the GOP, it did set out a framework for how Joe Biden would proceed to govern. Unlike his predecessor, the new president would not be stirring the pot of American politics on a daily basis, would not be not amping up his political rhetoric and fomenting cultural war conflict. The new president would also look to the GOP as an equal, legitimate partner in government, both as part of his mission to turn down the political temperature, and out of the reality of a closely-divided House and even more closely-divided Senate.
In theory, Biden’s strategy made sense, not just for the good of the country, but for the good of the Democrats. A politics that is less emotional, less angry, would open up space for Democrats’ traditional strategy of appealing to voters’ rational, material interests: by stopping the coronavirus and reviving the economy, Democrats would bring tangible benefits to the great majority of Americans set back or threatened by the covid-Trump economy. And the massive government spending contemplated under the Build Back Better act could reasonably be anticipated to act as both symbol and substance of a new sort of politics, in which a powerful government role in promoting broad-based prosperity and equality could energize not only Democratic-leaning voters, but begin to peel away GOP voters who benefitted from the legislations’ manifold programs. It’s also important to note that the emphasis on climate change-related spending could also reasonably be expected to reap political dividends from the increasing numbers of voters who prioritize the fight against global warming.
Given all this, why should it matter if there’s an urgency gap between Democratic and Republican voters on the question of whether our democracy itself is badly in need of being defended? If the Democrats can win without their voters being as riled up about defending democracy as GOP voters are about upending it, what’s the problem?
The approach of attracting votes by benefitting voters’ material circumstances gives short shrift to some glaring realities. First, in state after state, Republicans have worked assiduously since last year’s elections to ensure that the nightmare of majority rule is not repeated. From extreme gerrymanders based on the 2020 census results, to voter suppression aimed at primarily Democratic constituencies, to efforts to subvert the mechanisms of elections and the counting of votes, the GOP is rewriting the rules of democracy in favor of locking in permanent Republican power, impervious to the will of the voters. As writers like Brian Beutler and others have been hammering, it really doesn’t matter if most voters want to reward Democrats for the economic good they’ve done if the GOP ensures that their votes don’t count. You can’t benefit from the support of the majority if the opposition party subverts majority rule. Just as it’s self-defeating for the Democrats not to prioritize protection of elections, it's also self-defeating for them to discourage, or at least not to activate, a sense of urgency among Democratic rank and file that could pressure hesitant Democrats to support voting rights legislation, as well as incentivize grassroots involvement that could counteract GOP efforts to subvert election machinery at the state and local levels.
Second, Democratic over-emphasis on American politics as a limited contest between GOP and Democratic visions for providing Americans with material benefits badly undersells the stakes of elections in 2022 and beyond. The GOP and its base are driven not simply by a false sense that Democratic-leaning voters and Democrats are taking away their job prospects and wealth (e.g., the Democrats are “socialists” trying to redistribute wealth from the “makers” to the “takers”), but more broadly by a white grievance politics that increasingly sees all possible measures as being on the table to stop the growing cultural and political power of non-white Americans, and to restore the social and economic preeminence of white Americans. Throw in the deeply-rooted misogyny of the GOP and the avowed belief in America as a Christian nation, and top it off with the GOP’s barbaric opposition to science and reason, and it’s easy to see that America’s deepest conflicts are rooted in conflicting systems of values and morality, not in what party can best bring home the bacon.
I would contend that GOP voters see these full stakes more clearly than Democratic voters, and that they’re reflected in the CNN poll results cited above; after all, it’s not simply that Republicans believe the lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election, but that they increasingly believe it’s actually unacceptable that Democrats might have won, since Democratic governance — governance by a party that supports the equal political rights of non-white Americans — is illegitimate on its face. In this way, the fight over “American democracy” is as much a struggle over which Americans can be considered actual members of this democracy, as it is over whether or not non-white Americans can effectively exercise their right to vote.
So how to close the urgency gap, given the underlying stakes of our political conflict? I generally think that Democrats are mistaken in not more explicitly discussing the demographic shifts that are supercharging the white supremacism and white insecurity that have always been present in American society. This has left the field wide open for the GOP alone to define these changes in a way that appears maximally threatening to white voters — to portray them as unambiguously threatening to the social status and economic security of white Americans. Counterintuitively, even as Democrats have largely chosen not to overtly discuss the demographic changes sweeping America — perhaps out of fear of alienating some of their own white voters or adding credence to GOP voters’ fear and anxiety — they have arguably abetted Republican efforts to exploit these fears.
Ironically, the counter-narrative is not difficult to articulate, and has the benefit of being grounded in reality: that America is strengthened by its diversity; that an economy in which everyone is able to contribute will create national wealth that will lift all boats; and that a politics in which all may participate on an equal footing represents a moral vision in keeping with the best traditions of this country.
It feels absolutely bonkers to me that, in the midst of a titanic struggle over the direction and nature of American democracy — indeed, a struggle over whether we’re to be a democracy at all — the Democratic Party would shy away from trying to define the roots and reality of this struggle, particularly when their opponents have no qualms about doing so. And after the insanity of the Trump years, when we got a preview of the authoritarianism, unbridled white supremacism, incompetence, and violence that will surely ensue should the current GOP ever regain full national power, this reluctance moves from the category of incomprehensible to borderline incompetence.
This is why recent signs that the Biden administration and Democrats may be seizing on the Republicans’ sabotage of the covid fight as a path to energizing the Democratic Party’s base leave me with a mixture of hope and ambivalence. As Greg Sargent argues, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s resounding defeat of the Republican recall effort was based not only on foregrounding Democrats’ tough measures against the coronavirus, but also because “Newsom and Democrats [. . .] aggressively prosecuted the case against conservative and Republican radicalization when it comes to resisting public health measures.” Sargent continues: “A big question here is whether the derangement of Republicans around covid could be a kind of substitute energizer for Democratic voters at a time when Trump — who supercharged turnout among those types of voters in the 2018 and 2020 elections — is not on the ballot.”
In other words, making an issue of GOP covid sabotage can be seen as a way to make the case against the GOP’s broader incompetence and authoritarian tendencies, in a way that many Americans could not only easily understand, but that also riles them up emotionally and so boosts the likelihood they will vote Democratic in 2022. My hesitation is not that I don’t think this is an effective argument — it’s no exaggeration to argue that the Republicans have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans on their hands due to their lies and propaganda around covid — but that it potentially gets the Democrats off the hook from articulating an even broader indictment against the GOP, and an even broader vision for Democratic governance. Persuading voters that the GOP will inflict mass death through disease on the country should they return to power could well be a powerful motivator in 2022; but will it counter the reality that GOP voters themselves are energized by the very tribalism represented by the GOP’s unabashed covid policies, in which literally dying to own the libs is now part of the party’s playbook?
But the apparent effectiveness (in California at least) of emphasizing GOP radicalism via the specific issue of the covid fight does suggest to me that the Democrats may be well served by making the broader case against GOP authoritarianism, white supremacism, and anti-science tribalism through concrete, readily-grasped real world examples beyond the important but limited matter of pandemic malpractice. It’s probably too much to ask that Joe Biden lead seminars on how exactly white supremacism has poisoned the souls of millions of Republican voters; but I don’t think it’s too much for him and other Democrats to say explicitly that a country in which millions of Americans aren’t able to work up to their potential makes the whole country poorer, that the GOP’s anti-science attitudes that undermine the global warming fight are deeply linked to the party’s belief in the inferiority of non-whites, and that the party’s obsession with banning abortion is profoundly linked to white supremacist ideas of white women not producing enough babies to outnumber the brown hordes. Challenging the GOP’s zero-sum racist thinking — if black or brown people have more power, white people are threatened—can’t be left unchallenged, or be handled merely by indirect approaches.