In a recent issue of his newsletter, Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler calls out what might initially seem like merely a curious misstatement by President Biden a few weeks ago, as he was giving a speech that touched on the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Speaking of Donald Trump’s role that day, Biden remarked that:
The Capitol police, the DC metropolitan police, other law enforcement agencies were attacked and assaulted before our very eyes, speared, sprayed, stomped on, brutalized and lives were lost. And for three hours, the defeated former president of the United States watched it all happen as he sat in the comfort of the private dining room next to the Oval Office. While he was doing that, brave law enforcement officer subject to the medieval hell for three hours, dripping in blood, surrounded by carnage.
Face to face with a crazed mob that believed the lies of a defeated president. The police were heroes that day. Donald Trump lacked the courage to act. The brave women and men in blue all across this nation should never forget that. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro cop. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro democracy. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro American. [Italics added]
Amid this strong condemnation of the events of January 6, the assertion that “Trump lacked the courage to act” sticks out like a sore thumb; it is, in fact, a complete reversal of what happened on that day. The January 6 hearings have established that the former president “proved that he directed the attack, fueled it as it was ongoing, and let it play out until it was clear it had failed.” Beutler writes:
That is a big and important distinction! [. . .] The truth is far worse and necessitates a totally different response. Trump wasn’t frozen. He wasn’t indifferent. He was gratified! The proper way to alert voters about what happened isn’t to attack Trump as a coward or even to try to divide the GOP into pro-cop and pro-insurrection factions. It’s to state the truth plainly: Donald Trump organized the largest violent assault on police in U.S. history and Republicans have unified around covering it up.
Chalking the prolonged violence up to Trump panicking absolves his abettors, with a version of events that they’ll still reject because they actually support the insurrection. The place to drive the wedge isn’t between the GOP and Trump, it’s between the lot of them and the national anti-1/6 supermajority.
Now, I don’t actually think (and I don’t think that Beutler thinks) that Joe Biden is somehow not aware of the January 6 committee findings. In particular, it strains credulity to think he’s not cognizant of Trump’s role in inciting and encouraging the mob that stormed the Capitol, or that Trump saw it as an instrument for disrupting finalization of the 2020 election results. And so, as Beutler suggests, painting Donald Trump as a coward is best seen a political stratagem, to encourage other Republican politicians to not be cowards like Donald Trump — instead, to be brave, and to stand up in defense of democracy. But as Beutler points out, the basic problem is that much of the GOP “actually support the insurrection,” and that it would be better to divide the insurrectionary GOP from the large majority of Americans who actually support democracy.
So I agree that Biden’s odd phrasing isn’t insignificant at all; rather, it helps illuminate the degree to which Democratic leaders remain in denial about the lack of meaningful difference between Trump’s insurrection of January 6 and the Republican Party’s decision to continue that insurrection by embracing the Big Lie of a stolen election and moving forward with a multi-front plan to subvert future votes. Most GOP politicians have already made a choice to undermine future elections, via voter suppression, disinformation, sabotage of nonpartisan election oversight roles, and threats of violence. The problem is not that Joe Biden let Trump or the GOP off the hook amid an otherwise strong condemnation of the January 6 insurrection; it’s that his comments reflect a broader Democratic leadership failure to come to terms with the threat posed by the current Republican Party and the reactionary social movement that is helping fuel the GOP's radicalization.
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Donald Trump’s presidency made many millions of conservatives fully aware of the idea that it might be possible to actually make their preferences the law of the land, even against the will of the majority, if they would only be collectively bold enough to attack and destroy the democracy that stands in their way. Before Trump, the collective right-wing imagination was still somewhat limited in its ambition, seeing its objectives more in the vein of slowly gnawing away at the major structures of democracy, by means such as gerrymandering and voter suppression. But by staging a violent attempted coup, accompanied by a mass disinformation campaign to convince millions of Republican voters that a sinister Democratic plot had robbed them all of victory, Trump vastly widened the range of tools it is conceivable and acceptable to use, and made the possibility of final victory not a gradual goal but an imminent thing, shimmering on the near-horizon, there for the taking for those strong enough to do so. In particular, by introducing mass political violence as a tool of anti-democratic politics, Trump showed how close it could bring an authoritarian movement to victory; for did he not come agonizingly near to disrupting the election certification and moving the country into a state of constitutional crisis that he could have well used to his advantage?
But not only did Trump lay the groundwork for future violence, the violence itself helped clear space for a whole range of other anti-democratic strategies, from the mass GOP embrace of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, to the widespread tactic of replacing honest election officials with partisan hacks willing to throw future votes to the GOP, to pushing gerrymandering to new extremes in order to secure state GOP governments from voter backlash and accountability.
As Dana Milbank argues in a recent opinion piece, the GOP’s embrace of authoritarianism has been decades in the making, so that Donald Trump should rightly be seen as the logical culmination of pre-existing currents in American society and politics. But while Milbank traces the roots of our current crisis to the advent of Newt Gingrich and his scorched earth politics, the rage of conservative Christians, blue-collar white Americans, and other elements of the conservative movement currently burning up our politics trace back even further, to what they see as the abomination of the civil rights, women’s liberation, and gay rights movements and the increasing secularization of American society — with all of these resentments simultaneously amplified by an economy whose inequalities, their politicians and right-wing media have long told them, were caused not by the bottomless greed of business executives and the inequities of American capitalism, but by these very same minority groups whose growing power they already loathed.
This is the daunting reality that the Democratic Party leadership appears unwilling to face — the existence of a mass (yet minoritarian) movement that is now essentially at war with American democracy and society. And so the idea that American democracy might be saved by turning enough Republicans against Donald Trump catastrophically miscalculates the degree to which not only the GOP, but the larger social and business interests propelling it, are the true threat to the rest of us; that Donald Trump was the inheritor of the worst aspects of the GOP, and now that he has been cast out of office, the GOP has eagerly picked up the tools he engineered and the hatreds he amplified, twisting them into new, fascistic weaponry against our government and society.
As political scientist Thomas Zimmer writes in a recent column for The Guardian, the conflict between this reactionary movement and the American majority simply can’t be resolved by the usual workings of democracy:
There’s no appeasing those who are behind the reactionary crusade, no bargain or truce to be had. The refusal to compromise with the vision of multiracial pluralism, with anyone who deviates from their idea of the natural and/or divinely ordained order, is at the heart of their political project. They are not looking for a consolation prize, partial victories, or an exit ramp. They will keep going – until and unless they are stopped.
The current situation necessarily marks a turning point. It is a veritable crisis because it will have to be resolved, one way or the other. America will either overcome this reactionary counter-mobilization and make the leap to multiracial, pluralistic democracy – or the country will regress, and let democracy perish before it’s ever been fully achieved in this land.
Now, let me pause and note that it’s overall a very good thing that pro-democracy, pro-modernity Democratic politicians generally lack the extremism and absolutism of their Republican counterparts — this, after all, is part of being democratically-inclined. You can admit errors, change your mind based on evidence, and lose today with the idea that you might win tomorrow. But on the question of whether the United States remains a democracy, or whether it gets pulled into a sort of Christian, white supremacist authoritarianism, there are no shades of grey, only black and white. Either the majority rules, or it does not.
There are dozens, even hundreds, of distinct ways that we can and must roll back this authoritarian movement, but they must all begin with the recognition that such a movement exists in the first place. Remarks like those in Biden’s recent speech at worst suggest that even the president of the United States doesn’t grasp the challenge before us, and so can’t be counted on to fight the necessary fight. At best, such a watering down of the threat posed by the GOP suggests an unwillingness to talk straight with the American majority and to instead promote unrealistic and indeed damaging notions of the sort of common purpose achievable with a political opposition that doesn’t share the same basic premises for American democracy and society. It is language that demobilizes rather than mobilizes the American majority. A continued emphasis on finding compromise with politicians who don’t want our votes to count, who favor the lives of imaginary babies over actual women, who see non-white Americans as less than human and gay Americans as worthy of contempt, and who view violence as a legitimate means for gaining and holding power, will only lead to further chaos and disaster. We need Democratic leaders to clarify the stakes, not to obscure them; to mobilize the pro-democracy American majority, not feed it pablum about a redeemable GOP.
As Zimmer notes, the authoritarian movement propelling the radicalized GOP will keep going until it’s stopped. I think this gets to the heart of the Democratic leadership’s misjudgment of our current political era. Democrats are still of the mindset that they are competing with the Republican Party under a stable democratic framework; that the GOP is an equally legitimate partner in governance, and that its ascension to power would be followed at some point by future Democratic victories. Unfortunately, the GOP can no longer be counted on to give up power once it holds it. Beyond Donald Trump’s depraved coup attempt and the retroactive endorsement it has gained from so many Republican politicians, one need look no further than states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Texas, where gerrymandering has resulted in impregnable Republican majorities no matter the will of the voters; such unassailable power has in turn fed increasing radicalization among GOP politicians, as they no longer fear being cast out of office by angry citizens. In other words, in great swathes of the country, Democratic voters are already seeing their rights stripped away, and their states transformed into “laboratories of autocracy,” to borrow David Pepper’s memorable phrasing, with nothing near an adequate response by Democrats in Washington to protect democracy at the state level. Such will be the future for the entire country if this movement isn’t stopped. In the face of such an overwhelming challenge, Democrats need to transform their mindset, from the goal of competing with the Republican Party, to discrediting and destroying it in its current incarnation.