Downplaying fundamental conflicts of U.S. politics puts Democrats at a disadvantage
Democrats need to get more comfortable with talking about the basic illegitimacy of central GOP goals and tactics
This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.
For some time, I’ve been making the case that you can’t really understand the current state of American politics without viewing the GOP and MAGA movement as being in a state of de facto insurrection against American democracy. In a terrific essay published at his Weekend Reading website, Michael Podhorzer demonstrates how very instructive this framework is, while zeroing in on a specific issue that’s claimed some of my attention recently: the misleading nature of terming the conflict between the MAGA movement and the rest of American society as some sort of civil war. Crucially, Podhorzer gets how this “civil war” framing not only badly misinterprets reality, but hands a huge advantage to those seeking to replace American democracy with something far closer to autocracy or theocracy:
[W]hen we describe what happened in the 19th century and what we fear coming now as a “Civil War,” we undermine the legitimacy of the American nation. We put the secessionists then—and the MAGA movement now—on an equal footing with the legitimate American government. By doing so, we not only mislabel the threats that Trump and MAGA represent, but also underestimate their dangers.
Podhorzer gets the stakes exactly right — this is no ordinary, democratic political conflict with two sides contending within set and mutually recognized boundaries, but a struggle between those who are loyal to the basic tenets of American democracy and those who are not. Such principles include majority rule, acceptance of election results even if they go against your side, the separation of church and state, and the rule of law. (In a broader sense, they also include the recognition that citizens should be free to live their lives as they see fit without undue interference by the government). Failing to recognize this underlying conflict essentially legitimates the contention that democracy should be ended, by considering its destruction to be a reasonable goal of democratic politics —both a logical absurdity and a moral abomination. Those who reject the basics of American government are not conducting democratic politics; they are engaging in rebellion. To this point, Podhorzer makes an important distinction between conservative policies and a stance of opposition to democratic government itself:
Those advocating for conservative and even extreme policies should be welcome in a democratic polity. But those acting in ways that reject legitimately constituted authority are neither conservative nor extreme. They are criminal. Thus, if we hope to be a single America, then we must acknowledge that those who claim that the 2020 election was stolen, decry the prosecution of Trump as a crime, call those convicted for their January 6 crimes “political hostages,” and claim that the Rio Grande is Texas’s to defend and not the federal government’s, do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States.
Not only is Podhorzer’s description of our political reality accurate, it is absolutely essential if we are to find our way to forms of politics — including electoral strategies, messaging, and concrete policies — that can successfully beat back and ultimately defeat this authoritarian threat with deep roots in America’s history and its long-standing conflicts over race, gender, religion, and economic power. We are all more or less flying blind if we don’t understand that our politics, very much including the 2024 election, are about whether the majority will rule, or whether a retrograde minority will impose its will on the rest of the country. For the real threat we face is not that red-governed states will secede from the Union, but that the MAGA movement will reclaim the presidency and then impose its sectarian visions and cruelties upon the rest of the country (after all, the federal government is only really objectionable to MAGA partisans when right-wing Republicans don’t control it).
We have already received dreadful previews of what is to come should Trump and his backers regain the presidency: the January 6 insurrection and its aftermath, during which the GOP has essentially affirmed the right to reject election results that don’t go its way; the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent horrors imposed on women in multiple states who have been stripped of their bodily autonomy; leaked plans from the Trump campaign to deport millions of long-term undocumented immigrants in ways designed to legitimize violent repression against Democratic-governed states and cities; and the depraved contentions of Trump himself that the president is completely above the law and may even go so far as to execute political opponents without repercussion.
Foregrounding the reality that the United States faces a rebellion by anti-democratic forces provides a necessary clarity for organizing and acting effectively. There is no way forward that does not draw a hard line between what is acceptable in American politics and what lacks legitimacy. You cannot accommodate anti-democratic, anti-freedom attitudes — you must highlight, confront, and defeat the forces behind them. Looking at our specific moment, acknowledging the truth of the MAGA rebellion allows us to see what a sideshow the discourse over Biden’s age and relative ability to run for re-election is. The contest between Biden and Trump, while vitally important, should properly be seen as the central front in the larger clash between the MAGA movement and the rest of us, and should be described as such by the press, the Democratic Party, and any ordinary citizen who wishes to defend American democracy and freedom.
Indeed, in a separate article titled “Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport,” Podhorzer stresses this general point, asserting that “When we depend on the campaign smarts of the Democratic Party to forestall a MAGA future, we abdicate our duties as democratic citizens to do everything we can to keep it from happening,” and arguing for something like a full mobilization of civil society to sound the alarm about the threat we collectively face. He goes on to write that, “The 2024 election is not a contest between two politicians, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a de facto constitutional referendum.” Mark my words: this description of a “de facto constitutional referendum” is a phrase and an idea that we should, and I believe will, be hearing a lot more of in the coming months, if the pro-democracy forces in this country have their wits about them.
Strikingly, Trump and his allies are not making much of a secret of their authoritarian intentions — Podhorzer notes the various elements coming together to form the looming anti-constitutional threat, including Trump’s apparent willingness to use the Insurrection Act to physically repress opponents and extreme plans to deport immigrants. Meanwhile, other elements are already in plain view, perhaps most strikingly the corrupt Supreme Court’s willingness to re-interpret even long-settled law in ways that advance nakedly partisan GOP interests.
Seen from this perspective, it’s deeply unsettling for the press and public to be gnashing their teeth over Joe Biden’s age as if this were the most important issue before us. Neither Democrats, nor the press, nor the public are required to play by rules that obscure the actual stakes of the upcoming election. As Podhorzer urges, the stakes of the election are so momentous that all Americans who cherish their freedoms have every incentive to come off the sidelines and make their voices count, from now through November.
Fortunately for those interested in preserving our democracy and our rights, the MAGA movement and GOP have increasingly gotten high on their own supply, flaunting their deranged ends and backwards values for all the world to see. Though a tidal wave of repression and chaos awaits us should Trump regain office and enable a right-wing counter-revolution against modern America, the movement’s radicalism should rightly alienate a strong American majority. In some ways, we have watched this radicalization play out in real time over the last few months on the abortion rights front, as the theocratic reasoning that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned has now further led to an Alabama court’s internally logical but objectively insane conclusion that any fertilized egg is actually a complete American citizen. The fact that the GOP’s supposedly pro-life position has brought it into conflict with actual pro-life IVF treatment is a further reminder that this is a party whose obsessions lack justice or reason. The untenable consequences of radical GOP policies are already harming Americans; it is up to the rest of us to publicize these facts and the reality they lay bare, to wield them as non-lethal weaponry to smash the pretense that the modern Republican Party can ever be trusted with the power to rule over us.
It remains incredible to me that the Democratic Party, particularly its leadership and the Biden administration, largely declines to publicly acknowledge and describe the obvious fault lines of American politics and offer a coherent counter-narrative to the deranged descriptions offered by the right. Donald Trump and the GOP explicitly appeal to the racial and cultural resentments of millions of Americans and offer a coherent (if also paranoid and despicable) worldview as to what has purportedly gone wrong: brown-skinned people are taking your jobs (and probably also voting illegally to really stick it to you); gay people are painting with rainbows that which god ordained should forever remain a manly primer grey; and women are violating their divinely ordained role as servants to men (and plus aren’t having nearly enough babies to keep the white population in a permanent majority).
In other words, the GOP has taken some very real changes across our society that I believe most of us view as progress, twisted them into existential threats to mom, dad, and apple pie, and used this distorted vision to appeal to citizens’ deepest fears around their status, their identity, and even their very survival. In fact, they have stoked these anxieties to essentially make the case to the Republican base that democracy itself is now the enemy, if majority rule means that white people (and particularly white men) no longer have, or at any rate soon will not have, pride of place in American society. As evidence, you need look no further than the widespread acceptance across the GOP that the January 6 insurrection was justified and not really a crime, and more broadly at the various ways in which the GOP has set about dismantling American democracy in favor of minority (white supremacist) rule.
Against this, the Democrats, taking President Biden’s lead, have leaned heavily into a faith that concentrating on economic issues will result in a country that’s wealthier and so, ideally, one less easily manipulated by cultural and racial appeals. While it is true that President Biden — to his credit — has foregrounded the defense of democracy in his re-election appeal, it is equally true that he shies away from describing in sufficient detail why, exactly, the GOP has turned against democracy, as well as how American democracy is the essential condition for the freedoms and open society the majority supports. Such detail, I believe, would require talking about the very same changes in American society that the GOP does — only, of course, in a way that tells a story of progress. In other words, this would require engaging in the same arena of cultural, racial, and religious feelings and fears which dominate GOP strategy, only in a way that sought to defuse conflict and navigate anxieties rather than exacerbate them. Leaving the field open for the GOP to unilaterally define such an enormous swathe of American reality has been an unmitigated failure.
If the Democratic Party won’t do it, then it is in fact up to the rest of us — journalists, religious figures, civic leaders, ordinary citizens — to describe the reality of American conflict and to tell a positive story about how the changes rippling through American society are on balance positive, and that the best way to navigate our conflicts is to bring them out into the open and discuss them, however awkward, difficult, or even seemingly hopeless that process might sometimes seem. The GOP cannot be allowed a monopoly on acknowledging and addressing deep currents and changes within American society — doing so has already resulted in immense damage.