[Images from my neighborhood this afternoon.]
After Senator Corey Booker’s 25-hour indictment of the Trump administration, Ed Kilgore observed:
Booker didn’t concentrate on Trump’s potential Medicaid cuts, illegal deportations, cruelty to public employees, abandonment of Ukraine, violations of civil liberties, reckless tariffs, usurpations of legislative powers, rampant corruption, or thuggish threats to federal judges. He talked about all this and more as a way to dramatize the ongoing assault on both democracy and the well-being of poor and middle-class Americans.
It’s the sheer avalanche of bad policies, bad administration, and bad faith that makes the current situation such an emergency.
At the beginning of last week, Jonathan V. Last shared a recent insight. He explained that he had been “wrong about one big thing in 2024.” He had regarded the Republican Party’s surrender to Trump as due to failings unique to the party and so he did not anticipate the rapid capitulation after the election of institutions in sector after sector. Media, law, business, higher education, tech — institution after institution folded. How quickly they’ve rushed to accept the yoke! All turned out to be weak-kneed when confronting an authoritarian administration.
Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.
This is an extraordinary moment and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.
The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs. This battle is half mass mobilization and half asymmetric warfare. Over the next year those tactics will matter more than traditional political messaging as it has been practiced here in living memory.
No institutions, Last argues, not business, not the courts will protect us. Only people power can achieve this.
The Democratic party won’t stop them, either. If the authoritarians can be stopped then the Democratic party will be the vehicle through which people wield power. But the Democratic party, as an institution, is too weak and desiccated to stage a real fight against Trumpism. It will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.
Today — with the Hands Off! protests — we saw the beginnings of what could be a successful democratic movement. We’ll see. America is at a fork in the road. An authoritarian party controls every branch of our national government and many state governments; small-d democrats are losing ground. Our liberty, the rule of law, and a government that serves working- and middle-class Americans are being lost. The elites making deals with Trump sure aren’t looking out for us. Nor are the Republicans. The Trump train is quite comfortable enough for well-off people who don’t give a fig about our democratic institutions and have no concerns for folks less well-off than themselves.
I agree with Last that while the opposition party will be “the vehicle through which people wield power,” the Democratic Party cannot be counted on to act decisively on its own initiative. Or reliably to act on our behalf.
Last concludes: “The movement must be, at some level, oppositional to the status quo. It cannot only be a defense of democracy and our institutions, it must be a challenge to them.”
This effort can’t help but be an uphill battle. Or rather, a winning campaign will require fighting many uphill battles extending over a number of years. But we don’t have a choice if we wish to preserve American democracy.