It Has To Be About More Than Democracy
With the top half of the campaign hourglass just about spent, it still doesn't feel like a forceful, united coalition against the illiberal tide.
A campaign volunteer door knocker came to our house last night. I answered and the young gentleman greeted me by the name of the man who used to live in our home.
“[Name omitted] hasn’t lived here in ten years. He’s dead.”
“Oh, f***.”
I had no problem having a conversation with him — that is, until he unsubtly f-bombed my doorstep, at which point I kindly advised him that I had children at home and potentially within earshot. Before I could even finish my sentence, he had already scurried away toward the house next door.
Later in the evening, out of dual sparks of anxiety and morbid curiosity, I double-checked Wisconsin’s voter registration database to confirm that the late former resident of our home indeed was not still registered, much less at our address. He was, as appropriate, taken off the voter roll tied to our address.
Such is the woeful state of our politics.
No, this is neither a crowd pop nor a bat flip. Welcome to Seriously., the space where I discuss life’s less-frivolous matters.
Like you, I’m sick of electoral season: the ads and mailers and billboards and the bumper crop of bullcrap dumped on us every four years. My mind has been made up since, well, 2021. I voted for George Bush twice, for John McCain and for Mitt Romney, the last serious Republican atop the presidential ticket. I abstained from the top of the ticket in 2016 and voted for Joe Biden in 2020, the first time I had ever voted Democrat.
(My wife and I went to McCain’s rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin in 2008, and I very briefly met the senator. I won’t forget shaking his hand, noting just how weathered and misshapen it was from years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam.)
I won’t apologize for any of those votes, especially since any of them on their worst days were/are Christ incarnate next to the reprobate misshapen waste of humanity running an American civic cult and having overseen the full mutation of the GOP into banana republicanism.
This really shouldn’t be a competitive race, and I need not tell you that. The man running for president is almost certainly completely compromised by both our adversaries abroad and by either dementia, a stroke or late-stage neurosyphilis. He isn’t much of a Republican (though he is very much a conservative). His policies and platform are virtually non-existent and he openly dreams of wielding the power of an immune executive branch for his own vindictive whims.
I don’t believe this will be a competitive race on election night, and I never have. One side has so alienated itself from reality and so committed itself to its extreme positions that it keeps putting drop ceiling on itself. Anyone who is still affiliated with the GOP at this point is in lockstep with a shrinking, shrieking, increasingly niche movement. Trading electability for purity, as any late-stage cult does. No one can truly have no opinion on the Republican ticket, this is a known quantity and has been for years, and yet we don’t have polling, reporting or major commentary that is willing to admit this.
The New York Times’ Bret Stephens apparently spent the last 10 years in a coma, because he left this sour note of a piece Thursday, appalled that Kamala Harris would agree with the notion that her opponent in this race is a fascist, despite overwhelming evidence and testimony to that very thing. “To use the word now feels both tired and meaningless,” he lamented.
Rip Van Stephens went on:
Second, by adopting the term as her own, Harris descended from truth-telling — that is, just noting what Trump’s own people said about him — to being a name-caller. It’s the wrong look for a candidate casting herself as a uniter and seeking to win over undecided voters, including prior Trump voters. And though the accusation was aimed at Trump alone, there’s an implication that his supporters must, to some degree, be fascists themselves. It will turn off some portion of an undecided electorate that’s tired of moral hectoring from liberal elites.
Third, while Trump can rightly be described as demagogic, meanspirited, authoritarian-minded — even a plain old jerk — most people think of fascist regimes as places where secret police terrorize ordinary citizens, free media doesn’t exist and protest is forbidden.
He goes on with more of this tripe, but you get the point. Here’s the thing about words: they can grow tired and meaningless. I, for one, am tired of ‘circling back’ and ‘putting a pin’ in tasks at work. Generative AI has unlocked all sorts of destruction on rhetoric in the evolving content landscape.
I’m sure more than a few are weary of some pundits referring to others who share differing perspectives as “liberal elites.”
If you’ve ever been around musicians in practice, rehearsal or on performance day, you’ve heard them get their voices or instruments in tune. Once the tones match up and get into the same key, everything sounds right.
This isn’t irresponsibly lobbing pejoratives, like my children calling each other poopyheads. This conclusion, not assumption, comes from a man, one of many firsthand witnesses to a former president’s attitude, words and conduct, and the word John Kelly uses as his conclusion harmonizes with it all.
Bret, Donald Trump is a fascist. Those in his party either agree with him or won’t say otherwise for fear of ostracization, so they are also necessarily fascists. Respective ownership of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have demanded their editorial staffs not publish presidential endorsements because of a potential threat to other business interests. The media — including your employer — has been incredibly and shockingly deferential to Trump for any number of reasons.
Terrorized citizens, a muzzled, compliant media, a candidate who explicitly wants to lock and/or beat up his opposition. Literally everything you’ve said in your third point has happened within the last six months, if not the last six days. Where have you been?
The prevailing rallying cry I’ve seen and heard over the last few months has been to “defend democracy,” a line of thought that is technically correct, but lacks the resonance and vibrance of truth around which people can rise above their partisan leanings and coalesce. ‘Democracy’ has, for example, been used as the cover for leftist and communist movements; it can evoke visions of mob rule a la the French Revolution.
When former vice president Dick Cheney published his statement saying that he would support Kamala Harris, his words were deliberate:
“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.
“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.”
Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, his daughter, said something similar in September, from the AP:
“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this. Because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”
While Harris and Cheney hold meaningful events in swing states, and outlets like The Bulwark host disaffected and alienated Republicans and other centrist refugees, the prevailing campaign messages from the DNC and their allied organizations have largely avoided mentioning a coalition at all, instead leaning on a lot of conventional Democratic and left-leaning political messages about fair share taxation, reproductive rights and defending the working and middle classes. Any messaging has been anecdotal, singular ex-Republicans, all without much talk of being a united front standing athwart illiberalism. Between these and a milquetoast ‘Democracy is neat!’ mantra, it’s no surprise that the energy tends to flag and this thing isn’t a boatrace.
These messages are fine, and I’ve come around on many of these positions, but they’re a waste of money and airtime. This isn’t a normal electoral cycle. Republicans aren’t running a normal campaign. The stakes aren’t typical.
There is one singular issue on the ballot in November, and it’s what the Cheneys and Adam Kinzinger and Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller and JVL and David French and others in the Never Trump camp all seem to understand:
Our campaign is existential, to crush the authoritarian, fascist impulse that has permeated and corrupted one political party and affiliated subcultures within our nation. It’s about upholding the rule of law, the Constitution, finding common ground with former opponents that can be new ground upon which we can forge a better political future. But even that last point is getting ahead of ourselves.
It is ensuring that Trump faces full accountability for his crimes, those alleged and those for which he has been convicted and is pending trial. It is guaranteeing that a more dangerous threat like JD Vance and his technocratic vulture capitalist overlords are squashed before he has a chance to gain more credibility. It is setting the stage for reform of the Supreme Court via Constitutional amendment. It’s not about Democratic policy; it’s not even about democracy, which is too general and vague to mean anything.
We must be clear about what is on the line: preserving the union and the Constitution against threats foreign and domestic. It’s the only message that matters, because if they lose, everything they fight for is lost by default.
There will be another day and another time to address matters of policy. To guarantee that day comes, let’s get November 5 right. And to get that right, let’s get the messaging on point. It’s about democracy, but it’s about so much more.