Sometime in December of 2020, as Trump accelerated his efforts to overturn the election, I got to thinking maybe it was time to skip town. I made the following notes:
Trends to explore for Time to Go: 1. Half the country has shown they can get behind an authoritarian leader, their political representatives have demonstrated their complicity. 2. More of us are armed and seemingly willing to militia-ize than ever before, to take matters into our own hands, also to identify as parapolice or paramilitary orgs in our own right, and perhaps just as importantly to suspect the other side of the same: what is real is subsidiary to what people can be made to believe is real by a sufficiently unscrupulous leader. 3. The courts have been stacked by a party that has advanced legislative inaction and executive primacy for a couple decades now. How likely are they to stand in the way of the strong man? 4. How likely is the military to intervene to regulate a strongman who has the support of an entire political party and half the populace?
The McConnell years have culminated in a Republican Party that is extremely well established in the courts and states and US Senate, and that has no real reason for existing other than exacerbating culture and climate issues that are only going to become more polarizing with time. They have nowhere to go but deeper into the fracture.
It’s no good anymore claiming that the GOP can’t control their crazies or have been hijacked by their fringe: there is no daylight between the fringe and a functional majority of GOP officials; if leadership is not unanimous in their aesthetic they are unanimous in their submission to that “fringe”.
That it hasn’t happened here is just as valid an argument for why it might as for why it wouldn’t.
The “it” I alluded to in the final paragraph, and which fear of illuminated the proposed piece in its entirety, was of course an authoritarian or fascist takeover of the U.S.
I never got around to writing “Time to Go” in part because the capitol riot of January 6th pre-empted it.
Everybody saw that day what making America great again really looked like to its most fervent believers. It looked like the subjugation of Congress and the election to their own will. It looked like rape carried out in broad daylight. Whatever pittance I had thought to add to the discourse was overwhelmed that afternoon.
This is a tired metaphor but for good reason: waking up last Wednesday was like coming out of a dream. The Biden years must have been a mirage, a sleepy oasis interrupting for too brief a moment an impassable desert. “The Biden Hiatus.” I’m thinking now of that moment in Titanic when, for a few seconds, the broken ship balances vertiginously and there is a fleeting peace before the final descent inexorably begins.
It’s hard not to feel foolish writing about fascist takeovers. This is the province of bong-redolent dorm rooms, of the AM radio spectrum of right wing media polluters. But the people most wrongfooted by events are the ones who lack the imagination to conceive of them, and it’s no use anymore pretending that our institutions are not thoroughly compromised by the bong-redolent, by the specters of the AM band. In fact we’re saturated.
Today, aligned with the “We’re fucked” faction you have the “Keep Calm, Carry On” and “Everything’s Going to be OK” factions. I can see the sense in the “Keep Calm” part—you don’t want people trampling each other on the way out of the burning theater. Since the “Carry On” part connotes an imperative less biological than political, since it’s a rallying cry for the stiff upper lip set, I mean, not just a directive to refrain from suicide, there’s room for debate regarding execution. I understand that Londoners under siege from V2 rockets had nowhere to go, but I could do my carrying on elsewhere. “Everything’s going to be OK” is unimpeachable as far as parental responses go; a bromide administered to the helpless. You can’t avoid what’s coming so you might as well submit to it. But that isn’t how a sane person responds to the fire in the theater, and submitting in degrees to pressures exerted by the unprincipled and corrupt is how countries go Nazi to begin with.
I don’t think it’s going to be OK. I think it already isn’t.
The longest-tenured justice on the Supreme Court is Clarence Thomas, who took his seat in October of 1991. Since then, nine presidential elections have been held. In that time, Republican presidents have made 5 of 8 appointments. The incoming Trump administration is likely to appoint Thomas’s successor and may appoint Alito’s. Barring the unforeseen, his second term Supreme Court action likely ends there.
Suppose Thomas retires and is succeeded by a young pro-life MAGA-minded acolyte. That will mean that the entire Supreme Court will have turned over from 1992 to 2028, a period in which Democratic administrations outnumbered Republican 5 to 4, over which time the winning margin (including last Tuesday’s results) went 86% for Democrats, in which, overall, 52% of the 1 billion-plus presidential votes cast went to Democrats, all combining to result in Republicans having filled exactly two-thirds of the court.
If Alito retires during Trump’s presidency, make that 7 of 9. After Alito, the eldest Justice is Sotomayor. She’ll be 71 next June. It isn’t inconceivable that, at the end of the day, a 48% share of the overall popular vote will have resulted in a 93% Supreme Court-fill rate for Republicans.
This is the gerrymandering of the Judiciary. Just as Republican party activists have for years been able to “insulate” their power from “the will of the voters” in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina (states whose Republican parties convert the slimmest of vote majorities, and sometimes even minorities, into massive and disproportionate delegations), we have seen Congressional Republicans, through a combination of luck and robbery, insulate the highest court in the land from the people’s will.
These are the guys who sit in judgment of the Congress we ostensibly elect to solve problems by making laws. These are the five rich lawyers who have the final say on gerrymandering itself, the five rich lawyers that decided unlimited monetary donations don’t corrupt our elections, the six that toppled Roe, the five that put W. in office, the five that insisted “well-regulated militia” doesn’t mean anything, the six who voided the power of individual cities to regulate firearms according to their own values, the five that have been eviscerating the Voting Rights Act for the last 10 years.
Trump, twice impeached, at the moment still bearing 54 indictments, a felon—until he pardons himself—34 times over, Trump the lawless, the radiantly corrupt, around whom the wheels of justice were already mostly spinning in the mud, will enter office with broad immunity—this a first for an incoming president, a total novelty in our nation’s history—because a half dozen rich lawyers gave it to him in June. Not only will it not ding his support when he does inevitably gun someone down on Fifth Avenue, he won’t even be liable for it.
I’m talking about this because I’ve been thinking about what exists anymore to stand in the way of the worst instincts of the MAGA governing majority. The Court doesn’t have any police power but they could at least ostensibly provide cover for a Joint Chiefs of Staff who didn’t want to do what the President was telling them to do. MAGA will have the entire Congress for at least two years and the Supreme Court is lost. It will be a Republican Party affiliate for probably the next thirty.
Biden might have done something, something slow but important, upon first taking office, had he the nerve, the imagination, the chutzpah. He might have attempted to institute term limits on justices, at least—it isn’t actually unconstitutional (they’re given lifelong tenure but the Holy Pages don’t specify to which court, so they could always be transferred; the idea of term limits are popular even among many of the rich lawyers). But he was never that guy. The Democratic center Biden represents long ago lost any willingness to make enemies. Even though he thinks of himself as an FDR-type president, and his legislative accomplishments (which, nauseatingly, will redound, probably in a huge way, to Trump’s benefit) are truly significant, Biden’s party is a shadow of FDR’s:
We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Halloween, 1936, Madison Square Garden
I don’t really blame them. Democrats are America’s conservatives now. They’re the party of institutional preservation, the party who puts out fires. From such emergencies do not arise candidates of great chutzpah and nerve and imagination. From such emergencies arise “safe” picks. When one party is a fire, the other must become firefighters, and the GOP has been smoldering for decades.
Obama kept waiting for the fever to break, imagining that the forces that again and again humiliated John Boehner and sabotaged “grand bargains” would get over their skis and Americans would stop hiring Republicans to represent them. Reasonable people kept waiting for the “Have you no sense of decency?” moment, in which the cynical and opportunistic cancer festering in the heart of the GOP would exhaust itself. Except cancers don’t work that way. It just ate through the elephant’s hide and became Donald Trump.
As seen, most uncomfortably, in the waning days of this last election, with the Harris campaign’s embrace of the Cheney endorsement, the left’s ideological tent has become paradoxically too big to succeed. The threat now for the future of the party isn’t that the center might not hold, but that it will: a party attempting to balance the worldviews of the Joe Manchins and the AOCs deserves to burst apart at the seams. The people who revere Bernie Sanders shouldn’t be forced to make common cause with those who revere Liz Cheney just because the other half of the people in the room can’t be arsed to care about maintaining the republic in one piece. Of course they do, because they’re responsible, but the effect over time is to compromise everyone’s principles, make everyone grouchy, and empower demogoguery.
A coherent left needs a coherent right, and vice versa. In the absence of a coherent right, the left becomes ideologically diffuse. As the right cedes policy ground, increasingly identifying as the party of Not-Them, the left fills the gap, increasingly identifying by default as the party of the status quo—the status quo being the easiest thing to maintain and the closest thing to grasp and uphold in a pinch. The right meanwhile decries “the system” they’ve conveniently abandoned to the stewardship of a left they undermine, hamper and oppose at every opportunity. A system, needless to say, that has been bulldozing money into the coffers of their paymasters for years.
We’re asking too much of Democrats. The right’s 16-year-long temper tantrum has resulted in a GOP that is essentially one furious kid sitting in a room screaming “No!” There’s a paternalistic creep of forgiveness for them, too: They can’t help it, they’re children; it’s up to you other guys to be the adults in the room. You have to put out the fires they set, govern competently in spite of their roadblocks, save the economy from their economics, do something about climate change and civil rights (issues we understand they will not touch but with knives), do everything with teeny-tiny Congressional majorities (owing to gerrymandering/antique electoral infrastructure) and in the teeth of a Supreme Court slavering to reverse you (because of antique electoral infrastructure/bad luck/robbery) all while absorbing more and more of the center-right voters into your constituency.
How I miss the days of the two party system!
Given such expectations, there’s a tendency to blame the loser for losing rather than the winner for winning. If the only options for president are Luke Wilson’s character from Idiocracy (i.e., a sane and lawful mediocrity) and a kleptomaniacal man-child sex criminal who somehow found a way to lose money on casinos in the 90s, Luke Wilson’s character had better win.
I agree that Biden should never have run for a second term. But it’s also probably the case that the incumbent party was doomed this year no matter what, just as they were doomed in every other country in the inflationary West. The only way the Democrats could have won was if enough people decided not to vote for Trump. But they didn’t. He got just a few more votes than he did in ‘20. After everything.
I blame the winners.
It would be only hard to go to work fixing our problems. We used to amend the constitution. We did it fully 27 times through the 20th century. Zip since. Why? Maybe it’s because the minority-empowered party is strong enough to defeat all attempts and would flounder without the constitutional protections that artificially prop them up. Maybe it’s because they would be forced to compete on issues, to win actual majorities, to evolve. Maybe it’s because those who command the immense treasuries behind the GOP have no interest in an evolving party. Maybe they’re doing just fine with the one they’ve got.
This is the real status quo not just endangering the country but actively dividing and grinding it down: not the harrowing prospect of technocratic competence administered by “coastal elites” but the WWI-style stalemate across a line of scrimmage policed by store-bought referees and fought between teams both bankrolled by gluttonous billionaires lighting each others cigars in owners’ suites, rooting only that the game go on forever.
This century has sapped our will to make adjustments to our form of government. Instead, legislative dysfunction (brought about by GOP intransigence bankrolled by the cigar crowd) has caused us to look to the executive as a messiah figure singularly capable of solving our problems. When he inevitably fails, we get mad and immediately hamstring him by throwing out his majorities in the midterms. Maybe we give him another chance after that…but then we get mad again and weaken him again and then we throw his party out of the White House entirely and let the other guy have a shot just ‘cause he’s different.
(Even if he isn’t different. Even if he’s literally the guy who last time wanted the military to shoot protesters in the knees.)
All the while the jolly cigar gang laughs, applauds each other, throws bills at the desperate candidates who (thanks to the Supreme Court) can’t spare any time after fundraising to forge relationships with their peers or craft legislation or even read the proposed legislation the billionaires’ PACs regularly and helpfully deliver, i’s dotted and t’s crossed, for the Congress’s careful consideration.
But I digress. The point is:
He wanted the guys with guns to shoot their neighbors in the legs. How do you think this ends?
The primary lesson I’ve taken from Trump’s re-election is that the red vote wants more than anything permission not to give a shit about its neighbors. That isn’t what a good country looks like. Elected Republicans, who twice had it in their power to void Trump for good as a candidate and opted not to, will do his bidding. He’s been gaining power by trashing norms since the jump. It took a global pandemic to get him out of office the last time. Otherwise, every time he raised the stakes of his brazenness, the red vote rewarded him. 75 million just did it again.
It isn’t safe here.