The Next 30 Days Will Decide the Fate of American Democracy
Image Credit: Drew Angerer
The Midterms Are Going to Be American Democracy’s Greatest Test Yet. Will it Survive?
by umair haque
It might be an overstatement to ask: are these the last thirty days of American democracy? But it surely isn’t an overstatement to say: the next thirty days will decide the fate of American democracy. Tick tock. One month — midterm elections.
This set of elections will be perhaps the most consequential America’s ever had. And by now, I think that we all know it. So where, on the eve of this momentous election, do things stand?
Let’s do a quick recap. Instead of backing down, the GOP has now been captured fully by Trumpism. It’s effectively the political arm of the Trumpist movement — a larger sociopolitical movement with a) a neofascist moral quasi-philosophy, in which hated minorities are scapegoated for the woes of the pure and true b) an authoritarian political agenda, in which violence isn’t just acceptable, but applauded and c) a totalitarian vision for society, in which there’s a strict Nietzschean hierarchy of superhumans and subhumans, with rights and privileges defined accordingly.
What do I mean when I say the GOP is now the political wing of the Trumpist movement? That’s a decisive evolution, too — one which took place in the last 12 months or so. And it’s a grim development. What few moderates there were have been unceremoniously dismissed from power or party position, and everyone left, more or less, has pledged loyalty not just to Trump, personally, but even more crucially, repeats the Big Lies ad infinitum — and the Big Lies only get worse. First it was “Mexicans are responsible for our problems! Get them!” Then it was “the election was stolen from us, the pure and true!” And now? It’s “gay people and women are the ones we should hate, and if we can just put them in their place, America will be…
“Great Again!!”
Joe Biden did something very wise when he drew a distinction between MAGA Republicans — and the rest. The problem, of course, is that the GOP only represents the MAGA movement — and when a political party is captured by an extremist movement, that is bad news for a society. It usually happens in poorer countries — and it’s a step beyond an extremist movement founding it’s own fringe political party. To capture a mainstream political and co-opt is the stuff that extremist movements dream of, and in America, it’s now a reality.
This election will test Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest. It rests crucially on Democrats drawing independent voters, those Republicans repelled by where their party has ended up, and on turning out the base like never before, too. How likely is all that to happen?
Polls tell us little — because we are now no longer in the realm of the politics of the normal. The last few years have been full of political shocks, from neofascists winning in Sweden and Italy, to Biden winning a fairly sizable majority, precisely because politics is now governed less by reason, than by animal instinct. Neofascist parties have become experts at triggering people into spasms of rage and hate, thus winning, at the last moment, what I’ve come to call the “secret hate vote” — a sudden, unpredicted mass mobilization for their side. The question is whether center-left movements can win the momentum back. Hence, let’s look beyond the noisy information of polls — to fundamentals.
How are the fundamentals looking — by which I mean things like social attitudes, the economy, Great Truths versus Big Lies, the normalization of hate and violence and brutality championed by the far right? Let’s take those step by step.
Over the last few months, Joe Biden’s developed — to the delight of every sane person — an alter ego known as Dark Brandon. Dark Brandon is a fighter, a guy who tells it like it is, who speaks Great Truths against Big Lies. He calls it fascism — or semi-fascism — and talks openly about democracy under existential threat and reminds people of their duties to defend it. The results? Sane America’s been electrified. Biden’s approval ratings have skyrocketed since Dark Brandon appeared — and more to the point, he’s become a social figure known around the world. People laugh with him — not at him — at the folly and stupidity of the far right. Sane and thoughtful people suddenly have a leader who’s as exasperated, frustrated, and angry as they are.
Dark Brandon, in other words, is a kind of persona. I think of him as an anti-demagogue. And the truth is that anti-demagogues are incredibly necessary during times like these, to spark a sense of excitement in politics again, to channel anger into action — instead of letting it curdle into apathy. His emergence, if late, is the best thing for turnout that could have happened. And in these next crucial days, it’d be wise for Dark Brandon to appear as often as possible — and speak Great Truths against Big Lies every single day. To defend American democracy, an electric current needs to surge through its body, a crash cart bringing it back to life.
So far, there’s a pulse. But the limbs aren’t moving…yet. Action. Dark Brandon’s reminded people it’s their duty to defend democracy — and he should be doing that every day, even more, translating it into the simple fact of voting like your life depends on it, because it does.
Underneath social current — like the rise of anti-demagogues such as Dark Brandon — lie economic fundamentals. And here there’s a mixed picture. The economy’s doing “better,” that’s true. But in America, that’s almost a meaningless phrase — wages have been stagnant for half a century. Hence, most Americans are trapped in a cycle of indebtedness they die in, and their kids inherit. It’s become rare to own anything outright — life is highly leveraged, and leased and loaned back to you.
When pundits say that the economy’s “doing better,” they miss a few very vital points. It’s true that incomes have risen — nominally. But — there are two big buts. One, those gains are nominal gains — relative to inflation, incomes are falling, because prices are skyrocketing. Two, even those gains have been concentrated in two sectors — go ahead and guess: that’s right, retail and hospitality. It’s nice that cashiers and waiters are making more — but you can’t have an economy of them. Gains need to be far more widely dispersed, across sectors from manufacturing (or what’s left of it) to teaching to nursing and beyond to credibly say “the economy’s really doing better.”
All that brings me to another key development — the rise of Bidenomics. For quite a while there, observers like me were waiting — what was Biden’s governing philosophy? Was he even going to have one? It took a while. But Biden emerged with a powerful one. First came the climate bill, then some debt forgiveness, and then came a groundbreaking plan to invest in American manufacturing. America’s got a national economic strategy for the first time in history — among other things, to become a world leader in semiconductors, which is extremely smart, given the fact that the world now faces chronic shortages of them.
So what is Bidenomics? It’s not quite a New Deal. But it is an economic philosophy aimed at regenerating the working and middle class. Through large scale investments — in clean energy, for example, or in semiconductors, where one chip factory can employ tens of thousands of people and power a whole state’s economy. It’s absolutely crucial to understand that this — the economic regeneration of the working and middle class — is how fascism is really brought to heel. Fascism is effectively a way to ration resources in decline — more for us, the pure and true, and none for them, the hated Mexicans, Jews, gay people, whoever the scapegoat du jour is.
Fascism ultimately implodes because it runs out of scapegoats. But that implosion is usually incredibly violent. The key is to defuse it before the bomb goes off — and here, Bidenomics should be getting much more credit. You won’t hear that often from me — and yet it’s true. American commentators — pundits, intellectuals, and so forth — are all too often quite clueless, illiterate and unversed in the historical genesis of implosive movements like fascism. To this day, as a class, they’ll largely deny the American working and middle class ever had any real problems economically — despite voluminously documented stagnation for half a century — and instead basically call them dumb racists. Alas, reality’s not so simple. Everyone and anyone can be a dumb racist, be incited to violence, be driven mad with hate and spite — the question is what takes them to that desperate brink, and the answer is usually sudden, sharp declines into poverty and downward mobility, like happened in America.
So Dark Brandon should be shouting the virtues of Bidenomics from the rooftops. And those on the right side of history should signal boost this accomplishment, too. It’s a Very Big Deal to have even the first steps of a plan to regenerate the working and middle class with investments in things like chip factories and clean energy. Not only is it historic — more to the point, it’s the correct thing to do if you want to stop fascism. Democrats haven’t done a good enough job, in my eyes, in singing the praises of Bidenomics to the nation — when I explain to people that these investment are even happening, like chip factories, people are often unaware, and that’s before we get to the impact they’ll have.
Messaging failure — something the Democrats are infamous for, but this time, the stakes are too high, and if you had a history-changing plan to restore America’s fortunes, well, wouldn’t you talk about it more?
All of that can and should accomplish the three tasks we’ve discussed: flipping independents, exciting repelled former Republicans, and turning out the base. But here too there remain caveats, and chief among them is the purity politics of young people. Young people these days demand a kind of perfection which doesn’t really exist among human beings — say one wrong thing, make one mistake, and it’s a life sentence: you’re cancelled or made infamous forever. At least, they’ll never let you forget it. That’s not wise, and it’s not good. You can’t really build anything, but especially a political coalition, that way. Everyone makes mistakes. Purity politics looks askance at Joe Biden, and asks questions like: why are there so many carve-outs in the climate bill? Why can’t we build a chip factory in every state — just the ones that are the most politically palatable? Why isn’t he forgiving every last dollar of debt?
Even if you agree that all that should be done, to ask all this is really to ask: why can’t we have a perfect world? It’s a juvenile question. We can’t have a perfect world because, well, look around at how painfully stupid most people really are. No such thing is possible. We compromise, and we make progress imperfectly, step by painful step. The far left, and the purity advocates and testers reject this proposition — and they attack their own side relentlessly, over everything from gender issues to ending fossil fuels in one fell swoop — good luck with that, the entire food system depends on them. We make progress one step at a time — and sometimes, very rarely, there are giant leaps.
It’s not their fault. Nobody is teaching young people anymore that the way a wise politics happens is through grand and beautiful ambitions — the end of violence, the end of war, the end of hunger, forever, for everyone — and step by step, as we get closer, we celebrate every forward motion, instead of rejecting and attacking it as not good enough. In all this lies the hint of a kind of infantile narcissism — a longing for the perfect parent — and you can hardly blame young people these days for wanting that, as abandoned as they’ve been, dumped into a river of dystopia without an oar. Still, wiser minds should be teaching them — we dream big, and we celebrate every little step we take. To do it the other way, through contempt and scorn of what we accomplish today, kills all momentum, credibility, faith, and in the end, the possibility of a working politics.
The Democrats don’t speak this language much — that of wise elders — to put them in that position is something of a joke. And this is a big problem: the lack of credibility center left politics have with young people, on whom a democratic future crucially depends. It’d be better to respect their hunger and idealism, and reply to it with Big Ambitions — instead of making them apathetic over and over again by rejecting their dreams and hopes for a better, fairer future.
. . . Time will tell — but if I were the Democrats? I’d make the next thirty days count. And what worries me…well, it’s that they’re not, yet.