Understanding deeper U.S. political conflicts can clarify stakes of presidential race
Behind the Biden v. Trump rematch is a profound disagreement over fundamental freedoms. The MAGA movement gets this; does the rest of the country?
This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.
I recently shared my excitement about a formulation by Michael Podhorzer that the “2024 election is not a contest between two politicians, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a de facto constitutional referendum.” Podhorzer was pointing to the decisive choice that faces Americans in November: whether to vote for a president who will maintain and defend American democracy as most of us have experienced it, or to vote for a man dedicated to tearing down constitutional government in the name of both personal aggrandizement and the regressive goals of the right-wing MAGA coalition. Among other things, this framework reminds us that the stakes of this election are far starker than whether or not to reward the incumbent with another term in office, and that it goes far beyond individual personalities to the basic question of what sort of country we wish to be. This is a perspective, I believe, that can grab Americans’ attention and swing votes to the Democrats.
In recent weeks, two other keen observers of American politics have detailed similar views of the 2024 elections. At the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that, “Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.” Bouie describes the Democratic coalition as wanting “what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.” In contrast, he writes of the Republican coalition that, “Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics [. . .] if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the actual goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to rule over others.”
Bouie is right about the drive for domination behind the MAGA coalition, but he doesn’t go into detail in this particular column about who composes this coalition or what they want, although he crucially suggests a connection between Trump’s plans to subordinate the federal government to his personal whims and this larger movement’s desire to subordinate the American majority to its predilections. But historian Thomas Zimmer provides a great complementary take to Bouie’s, writing that “the election in November is effectively a referendum on whether the experiment of multiracial, pluralistic democracy – however flawed it may still be at this current moment – should be allowed to continue or be aborted entirely.” He elaborates a little later: “Should the democratic experiment be continued and America be pushed towards realizing its promise of egalitarian multiracial pluralism – or should a radicalizing minority of white reactionaries be allowed to impose its vision on the country with the help of a vindictive autocrat in power?” Here and elsewhere, Zimmer is explicit that the threat comes from a movement of white Christian reactionaries who will oppose democracy itself for the sake of maintaining traditional hierarchies of power.
To be crystal clear: Democrats and other opponents of Trump and the MAGA movement should be talking about the fundamental racial, religious, and economic conflicts of American society because they form so much of the underlying reality that has led to Republican radicalization, so that you literally cannot understand American politics without acknowledging these fissures. Among other things, they clarify why the 2024 election is fundamentally a contest between those who want to destroy democracy in favor of right-wing beliefs and those who believe that the majority should be able to steer the country forward based on majority values. But talking about what is real and fundamental also has all sorts of beneficial, practical consequences that we can easily trace.
For instance, with Biden’s popularity uncomfortably low and many otherwise loyal Democrats worried about the president’s ability to run a sufficiently vigorous re-election campaign, the argument that this election is much bigger than either candidate should benefit the Democrats to the degree that it helps take lingering focus off of Biden’s imperfections, persistent frustrations over the economy, and a vague post-pandemic social malaise. This doesn’t mean that Democrats should stop trying to highlight Trump’s authoritarian goals, but it does mean that they should make an effort to connect Trump’s plans to dominate the federal government with the many ways he would use that corrupt power to further the ends of religious extremists, Christian nationalists, and others (a topic I wrote about recently here). The goals of his right-wing supporters under a second Trump administration would surely include measures to attack the freedoms and dignity enjoyed by millions of Americans viewed as outside the social contract, whether they be non-white, non-Christian, female, or gay. Trump’s delusions of power are scary; the entire MAGA movement’s delusions of power on top of Trump’s are scarier still. Americans can certainly process the fact that Trump is both corrupt on his own and the willing enabler of the toxic movement that supports him; making the contest overly about Trump could needlessly exclude vast additional reasons to support the Democrats in the upcoming elections.
I’m struck once again by how much the MAGA movement is aided by awareness of its own unity, its own common goals. This is not something that I’d want the left to emulate in its specifics — after all, this unity is based on white supremacism, Christian chauvinism, and a fascistic belief in Trump as a strongman figure who will bring redemption through violence and retribution. But it would go some way to righting this imbalance if the American majority were to become more fully aware of the conflict that the right sees so clearly. After all, despite the right’s supposed obsession with freedom, what the MAGA movement ultimately seeks is to exercise its own controversial notions of right and wrong by taking away actual freedom from other Americans. In a dizzying twist, the ability of Americans who compose the country’s majority to live their lives as they see fit is to be opposed, on the grounds that their choices are somehow actually an infringement on the freedom of MAGA’s constituents. When this consequence of America’s fundamental clash of values becomes better understood, and the mentality that leads to MAGA gunning for millions of American simply trying to live their lives becomes more prominent in the national conversation, I think MAGA members may start to finally understand that they’re not the only people who value being left alone to go about their business.
I’ve been emphasizing a cultural or values clash between the reactionary MAGA movement and the more modern-minded American majority that plays out in the realm of civil rights, but I want to end by revisiting Jamelle Bouie’s observations about the contrasting economic visions of the GOP and the Democrats. In the piece I quoted above, Bouie notes that a second Trump administration wouldn’t just involve an authoritarian centralization of power, but “would also be about the concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.” This would come about not only through efforts to cut taxes for the rich, but also by attempts to gut programs like Medicaid and even Social Security. Bouie contrasts this with traditional Democratic coalition interest in “government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.”
But rather than being a wholly separate conflict, these opposing economic goals overlap and reinforce the cultural clash we are experiencing. While the Republican obsession with cutting taxes for the rich and doubling down on trickle-down economics reflects that the GOP is in important ways a coalition between the wealthy and social conservatives, we also need to acknowledge that the GOP’s quest to starve the government of resources runs in tandem with its wish for a government deeply limited in its capacity to actually improve Americans’ lives in concrete, material ways. Indeed, one of the reasons I’d argue that the GOP’s turn to authoritarianism has deep precedents in more “traditional” Republicanism is the way the party has long made the case that the government — our own democratically elected government — is actually the enemy of the American people, to be viewed as a hostile bureaucratic entity somehow divorced from majority rule.
Today, GOP opposition to policies that help Americans in their daily existence — whether it’s health care, debt relief for college students, or childcare funding — should be seen not only as symptoms of a “small government” ideology, but as also how Republicans materially undermine Americans’ ability to be free to live their lives as they see fit. On so many fronts, without government support, Americans are left to fend for themselves, or avail themselves of market solutions they can ill afford. And so graduating high schoolers must choose between self-fulfillment through college degrees and the life-hampering burden of massive debt; budding entrepreneurs hesitate to found new companies lest they lose their health care coverage based on their current employment; and parents who wish to work are stuck in a bind when they can’t afford the childcare that would allow them to pursue their professional dreams. Yet long-standing GOP fears that disfavored groups (non-Christian, non-white) might benefit from government programs helps lead the party to oppose policies that would help all Americans, MAGA supporters as well as dyed-blue Democrats — plus, of course, more spending on ordinary people means fewer tax cuts for the rich. If the wrong people might be more free, then none should be.
This is a moving piece. Thank you.