Addressing Donald Trump’s recent use of the word “vermin” to describe his domestic enemies — a term with hideous echoes of past fascist movements— Brian Beutler considers what it would take for Democrats to make sure the former president paid a proper price for his insane rhetoric and intentions. At the risk of oversimplifying a nuanced take, I’d say that Beutler points to the need for Democrats to hold Trump’s threatening words up for public view, repeatedly, and to help people remember the failures and treacheries of his first term in office. This is all essential advice, but what really snapped things in place for me was Beutler’s comment, after surveying the party’s misplaced faith that positive economic news will push Biden over the top, that what Democrats are missing is “storytelling.”
Beutler is rightly concerned about the Democrats’ failure to tell, and to remind people of, the story of the Trump years, with its endless threats and failures. But this got me thinking about a broader failure in storytelling — the lack of a Democratic narrative about the central challenges the country faces, and what the Democrats and Republicans respectively want to do about them, feels like a huge missing piece amidst the general angst about President Biden’s current polling woes and second-guessing by some Democrats about his upcoming re-election campaign. Democrats present fragments of these stories, but with no coherent whole, and with serious misfires. For instance, we see the preference of many in the party for economic, material explanations of how U.S. politics works, which has led some to point to the overall strength of the U.S. economy as a sign both of Biden’s success and his imminent return to relative popularity. This is not exactly not storytelling — but, as Beutler highlights, it involves the party scrambling from one excuse to the next about why public perceptions aren’t jiving with what they see as the overarching positive economic reality, which is another way of saying that the story the Democrats are telling isn’t actually believed by much of their intended audience. More productively, President Biden and other party officials have done a decent job of highlighting GOP extremism when they bother to do it — but the approach has been piecemeal and inconsistent, not telling a story about the GOP and American democracy so much as speaking from within the framework of an unarticulated larger narrative.
On the fundamental issues of freedom and democracy, the divergence in values between the parties has become chasm-wide and arguably cataclysmic — a situation both signified and embodied by the continued dominance of Donald Trump within the Republican Party and his likely nomination as the party’s presidential candidate for 2024. The GOP has united behind a personage who literally tried to stage a coup and overthrow American democracy, and who is currently campaigning on a platform of retribution, political violence, religious bigotry, and a more or less wholesale destruction of the rule of law. In a perverse but important way, this dead-on threat against democracy and against liberty, let alone the personal safety of tens of millions of Americans, simplifies matters greatly for the Democratic Party as it looks to articulate a story of democracy and freedom. Trump and the radicalized GOP offer a stark vision of what the Democratic Party is very much against; in doing so, it also throws into relief the values that the Party stands for.
A central question for American politics is whether the Democratic Party will take the obvious, and I believe necessary, step of fully articulating the nature of this conflict between democracy and autocracy, between freedom and threat. In terms of a narrative for the party to tell, this is a story rooted very much in the facts and events happening in front of us every day. In a hundred different ways, the GOP has signaled its wish to subvert majority rule and the right of individual Americans to have a say in how they’re governed. From overt voter suppression targeting Democratic-leaning voters, to propagation of the Big Lie that Trump actually won in 2020 and that our electoral system is corrupt, to ongoing efforts to sabotage the federal government so as to undermine Americans’ faith that democratic government can work for them, the GOP’s turn towards authoritarianism is undeniable.
Intertwined with this are the particularly virulent threats articulated by Trump, which form a logical extension and complement to pathologies burning within the Republican Party — ideas like the execution of shoplifters, concentration camps for undocumented immigrants, the abandonment of democratic allies to the predations of dictators like Vladimir Putin, the federal government’s prosecution of anyone Trump deems a political adversary, schemes to replace large swathes of the federal work force with partisan hacks, and plans to put down protests against a future Trump presidency with lethal force via invocation of the Insurrection Act. In other words, Trump’s announced and leaked second term agenda amounts to the intended imposition of an authoritarian regime that would threaten the lives and livelihoods of Americans, and lack the most basic legitimacy when weighed against the values of not just the majority of Americans, but by my estimation a sizable majority.
But to tell this central story of American politics effectively — that is, in a way that is persuasive and attracts voters to the party — Democrats need to do three things besides describe the GOP’s descent into madness. They need to expand the narrative to explain how the GOP got this way, what the Democratic Party stands for in contrast, and what the Democrats would do to serve the national interest and the interest of individual citizens.
Addressing the first would require an honest description of how white supremacism and fears of demographic change leading to a lessened status for whites constitute arguably the single largest motive forces behind the GOP’s radicalization. Likewise, the Democrats would need to acknowledge the role of Christian nationalism, and a related rigid adherence to gender roles and norms, in driving so many in the GOP to abandon democracy in favor of minority rule. In this respect, the Democrats — and the nation — would be well-served by bringing these factors into the clear light of day. It’s insufficient to say that the GOP hates democracy “just because” — the Democrats must lay bare the roots of the GOP’s turn towards authoritarianism for all to see, and to judge.
Against this, the Democrats need to make explicit their identity as a multi-racial, egalitarian party dedicated to protecting the freedoms of all Americans, and prepared to not only defend but improve and expand American democracy to ensure that the majority rules. This would encompass everything from strengthening voting rights and banning gerrymanders to re-affirming that the law is meant to protect all Americans, and not to be warped into a weapon with which to make millions of Americans live in fear. And Democrats can surely tie their advocacy for a government that works for all Americans to fighting for an economy that also works for all Americans, and not one that the Republicans would see corrupted in order to maintain current race- and class-based inequalities of wealth and income.
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Currently, there’s a clear narrative imbalance between the parties. The GOP’s race-based grievance politics is telling a more or less explicit story at this point: America was great until darker-skinned people started getting more populous, or, in the case of immigrants, until darker-skinned people started invading across the Southern border; until gays started coming out of the closet, and staying out; until women started putting on pants, going to work, and making a fuss about wanting bodily autonomy. The GOP also tells a story of economic abandonment of the (white) working class, but is sure to point the blame at racial others (the Chinese for taking our factories, Latinos for taking our jobs) rather than more impersonal global dynamics and the decisions of American companies to abandon their workforces. The GOP does not give two shits about the fact that this story brings the Republican base into harsh, even existential conflict with their fellow Americans, or that it breeds division and anger among GOP voters. Increasingly, the message is that any means are necessary — even undoing democracy itself — in order to retain a government that serves white Christians first and foremost.
In stark contrast, the Democrats seem deathly afraid of identifying the glaring fact that the GOP has effectively become America’s white supremacist and Christian nationalist party — perhaps born out of overblown worries of alienating white and Christian voters by coming across as anti-white and anti-Christian. But the price of this hesitance has been high — the Democratic Party has until now been forced to rely not on an articulated narrative, but one that is rather projected onto them by voters who are savvy or intuitive enough to connect the dots. In their hesitation to proudly proclaim their party the face of a diversifying and egalitarian America — in terms of race, religion, sexual identity, and sexual equality — too many Democratic leaders are slowing the full emergence and cohesion of a coalition that solidly outnumbers the GOP base. Yes, this coalition has come out in force over the past several elections even as the Democratic Party has insisted on talking about health care over Republican insurrection — but what we will face in 2024 will be an order of magnitude harsher, with gales of propaganda and violence conjured by Trump and his supporters to confuse, alienate, and dispirit likely Democratic voters. One vital remedy, if not full-on antidote, to this oncoming wave is to tell a story that creates strong bonds of identity and interest among Democratic-leaning voters.
Unlike the GOP, though, the Democrats can’t put all their eggs in the basket of division and incitement, and tell a story that concludes with the endless division of America, where the Democrats end up with the bigger half. Yes, they should rouse and rile up a majority as part of making their case — but unlike the GOP, they also have a responsibility, as the country’s sole pro-democracy major party, to offer an entry point and path forward for current GOP supporters. Unlike the GOP, they cannot simply declare that those on the right are un-American or deserving of disempowerment.
This might at first blush seems like a perverse or unnecessary constraint — but offering a more universal and inclusive vision of America, where all are welcome to participate and influence our direction, is at the core of a pro-democracy appeal. I don’t want to understate how difficult it will be to thread this needle, but the effort absolutely needs to be made. Democrats must make clear that attempts to gain power and rule in anti-democratic fashion are fundamentally illegitimate, while taking pains to illustrate how much stronger the country is when everyone agrees to play by democratic norms and respect for basic freedoms.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Though it may be difficult for Christian nationalists to grasp, the projects of pretending that America is a Christian nation, and, even more outlandishly, believing that state power can be used to impose Christianity as the national religion, are doomed to failure. This is a faction that has lost touch with how deeply offensive and alienating its religious preoccupations are to most Americans — particularly when even a cursory examination of their beliefs suggests that they have left far behind ties to the actual fundamentals of Christian belief in favor of a grotesquely distorted version that substitutes dominance for equality, prejudice for understanding, and hatred for love. The idea that younger Americans in particular might be attracted to conservative Christianity if it were more forcefully thrust upon them is particularly laughable.
In fact, the far likelier outcome is mass revulsion against Christian extremism, and an eventual backlash that not only ensures that religion is kept to the margins of American government, but that casts doubt on organized religion as a desirable practice in the first place; this may happen sooner or it may happen later, but the notion that you can impose your beliefs on so private and fundamental a subject on fellow Americans through coercion is delusional. Such rationality might not appeal to Christian nationalists — yet the fact of the matter is that a broadly tolerant America will better allow religion to flourish than one that alienates and angers the broader population by pushing sectarian ideas into the faces of the unaffiliated. In other words, the Democrats can make a strong case that they are the party actually interested in defending the nations’s diverse faiths, and understand that politicization of religious belief is the enemy of both democracy and religious faith.
A Democratic narrative of American political conflict would go a long way to mobilizing a pro-democracy American majority and helping make comprehensible the true stakes of the 2024 election and beyond. At a practical level, it would contextualize the cascade of affronts and outrages issuing near-daily from the GOP and Trump. Rather than each attack requiring evaluation as to how Democrats should talk about it and respond, they would be able to use daily events as ongoing evidence for the story they are telling about Republican values and their own. To take the example that we began with — when Donald Trump described his enemies as “vermin,” a pre-existing, comprehensive Democratic narrative of Trumpist and GOP extremism could have quickly identified these comments as further evidence of authoritarianism, pointing out links to past fascist movements as well as previous GOP efforts to dehumanize and foment violence against their political opponents.
Rather than assume a stance primarily of outrage and shock, the Democratic Party would be in a much better position to say, “Here they go again. With every word out his mouth, Donald Trump proves that he’s still the same authoritarian monster who tried to overthrow American democracy on January 6. Donald Trump has once again confirmed he is America’s enemy and that he deserves no place on the American political stage. And through their silence, Republican politicians show that they’re willing accomplices in Trump’s war on America. But as the GOP continues to froth at the mouth with hatred and violence, the Democratic Party is fighting to build our democracy, not tear it down, and to expand our freedoms, not take them away, in the name of a country where all are respected, valued, and free to live their lives as they see fit, under a government that ensures they have the tools and resources not just to survive but to flourish.” Or something like that.