(I’m hoping that President Biden’s speech this morning marks a turning point with respect to this problem. Nonetheless, this problem has been so long-standing, and so deep-seated, that such hopes must be tempered with realism. Even the capture of the Republican Party five years ago by a remarkably and openly monstrous human being did not accomplish adequately the awakening that the Democratic Party — and Liberal America — is called upon to make in order to prevent extraordinary damage to the American civilization to which we are the heirs.)
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It has been said by many lately that:
- The Republicans are engaged in a serious assault on American democracy. And so
- The survival of our democracy necessarily depends on the Democrats. However,
- While the Democrats clearly want to save the nation from these Republicans, they have not been fighting that fight the way that’s required by the nature of their opponents, and the magnitude of what’s at stake.
And that’s all quite true.
This piece will flesh out that picture in the broader context of how the Democratic Party – and Liberal America more generally, of which the Democratic Party is the political instrument – needs to undertake a major transformation that’s not only “political,” but also is rooted in deeper cultural, psychological, and spiritual dimensions.
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The Virtues and Weaknesses of Today’s Liberal America
I can reasonably say that I’ve been a participant in that liberal/Democratic world for more than sixty years. Over those years, I’ve watched that world evolve into something that’s almost a direct opposite of what the Republican world has become. In many ways for better, but also in some with disastrous consequences.
Over the past more-than-a-generation, the two parties have polarized around a whole range of qualities and characteristics:
- The Democrats can be counted on to speak truthfully. The Republicans have become completely wedded to the Lie. (Long before Trump’s Big Lie, W lied us into a war, the Republicans cultivated the racist Birther Lie, McConnell’s Republicans in the Senate lied about their naked power play to steal a Supreme Court seat, etc. etc.)
- The Democrats have continually valued the idea of cooperation, reaching out to the Republicans, valuing the idea of cooperation, referring to the Republicans as their “friends across the aisle.” On the other side of this polarization, the Republicans have demonized the Democrats (“baby-killers,” “hating America,” etc.), shown no interest in working together, and refused to recognize the legitimacy of Democratic power even when the people have elected them.
But most relevant to the present crisis is the polarization with regard to fighting.
During the presidencies of W and Obama – and when I was running for Congress as the Democratic nominee (in VA-06) in 2011-12 – I articulated that part of America’s polarization this way:
“The Republicans make a fight over everything, even when the nation needs the parties to cooperate. And the Democrats refuse to fight over anything, even when the nation needs for them to press the battle against a Republican Party that’s making everything worse.”
This rejection of “fighting” characterizes not just the Democratic Party, but is also a dominant ethos in Liberal American culture generally. (One hears it in daily life among liberals, not only with respect to questions of how to act in the political realm.)
It was not always thus—not at the time of World War II, and not during much of the Cold War.
But gradually Liberal culture came to be one in which reasonableness and goodwill were held not only to be virtues, but to be always the right thing. And fighting – whether literally in America’s wars, or more generally as a way to relate to whatever is going on among people – came to be considered invariably the wrong way to behave.
(This change became visible in the aftermath of the trauma and political conflicts of the Vietnam War, and it has always seemed to me that the division of the nation into “hawks” and “doves” in that era was one important factor in how liberal culture evolved into one that disabled us from fighting successfully against people who were lacking in goodwill, and who have been insatiable – rather than reasonable – in their relationship with power.)
By the time we reached Obama’s Presidency, Liberal America had elevated a leader who – though he might well have been a great and transformational leader in normal times, dealing with a normal opposition party – was completely clueless about how to deal with genuine and obvious enemies. He was feckless against a Republican Party whose clear priority was to rob him of his rightful powers, and destroy his Presidency—a Party that unhesitatingly sacrificed the good of the nation in its ceaseless quest for more power.
(Through his shrinking from the battle the Republicans were forcing on him, i.e. from his enabling the Republicans to benefit from conduct for which they should have been made to pay a political price, President Obama -- that unusually “decent” President -- inadvertently enabled the further devolution of the right to the point that it became possible for a human monster like Trump to become President of the United States.)
But – and this is what’s most telling about our whole Liberal culture – not only was Obama forfeiting a battle that absolutely needed to be fought and won, but the overwhelming majority of the liberal part of the American electorate did not fault him for that forfeiture. Did not even notice it. (Because of course a good man must always be decent and agreeable, and keep reaching out to the other side in an effort to make good things happen—even if every time he reached out his hand the other side would bite it.)
(I know, from having tried throughout Obama’s Presidency to address this problem. It was still during Obama’s first year in office that I published in the Baltimore Sun an Open Letter WHAT THE PRESIDENT LOST - AND HOW TO GET IT BACK – Baltimore Sun trying to summon the President to what seemed clearly to be Job 1, saying:
It is because of your failure to fight back that the Republican Party - behaving more scandalously than any political opposition in memory - has grown stronger, while you have grown weaker…. Your opponents are relentless, single-minded and ruthless in their efforts to weaken and destroy you. This is a continuation of the same struggle [during the already-very-dark years of W’s Presidency] for which Americans chose you to be their champion. It's your job not to ignore the battle but to fight and win it.
And I know, from the responses I got when I tried -- during the remaining seven years of Obama’s presidency -- to rouse the rest of the Democratic world to make the Republicans pay a political price for their disgraceful behavior, rather than allow them to be rewarded with ever more power for their sociopathic conduct.)
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How One Must Fight When Up Against the Spirit of Fascism
What the Democrats must defeat at this dangerous moment in our history is essentially the same Spirit of Fascism that America was compelled to wage war against in World War II. (The same ugly mix of lust for power, cultivation of inter-group hatreds, insistence on conflict, propagandistic manipulation of supporters, dependence on the Big Lie, …)
(I’m not including in this piece another problematic aspect of the culture of Liberal America: a worldview that for years impaired the ability of liberals/Democrats to recognize how profoundly dark and destructive the Republican Party was becoming. It has been a most gradual – and still incomplete – process of awakening. Those interested in this conceptual and perceptual disability in most of Liberal America can explore the matter here: Chapter Two: What I Talk about When I Talk about Evil – A Better Human Story.)
When we ask what kind of leadership we need from the Democrats as we confront this darkness – i.e. the fascist/authoritarian movement the Republican Party has now become, and the “cult of personality” formed around an exceptionally destructive and malignant narcissist – we should look for an answer in the great wartime leadership that FDR and Churchill provided their nations at that earlier confrontation with fascism.
For really, although this political battle is not one being waged with the weapons of violence -- mostly (consider Trump’s Insurrection) -- but it is a war nonetheless.
The Republicans have made it inescapable that the battle between the parties will be a kind of “war”:
- The Republicans’ ongoing assault on the constitutional order signifies that our political competition is no longer regulated by any set of rules. Their pervasive violation of their oath of office – to “protect and defend the Constitution” -- demonstrates that there’s no agreement that the Republicans will adhere to.
- The Republicans have increasingly shown – over the past generation -- that their appetite for power is insatiable, that no matter how dominant they are, they will attempt always to gain greater dominance.
- The Republicans have shown –over the past several decades – that continual attack will be their mode of relating to the Democrats.
Such is the human dilemma that if one side is bent on war, others within their reach are compelled to engage in warfighting or otherwise will lose what’s of value to them.
That’s why what we need from Democratic leadership is a rallying to the battle of the better side of America. What we need to hear from our leaders is a voice expressing the warrior spirit that imbued the wartime speeches of FDR and Winston Churchill.
(Listen to the tone of FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech to Congress, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Attend to the inspiring rhetoric of a whole handful of Churchill’s speeches to the profoundly endangered British people, like his “We shall fight on the beaches…” speech.)
From the leaders of today’s Democratic Party, we are hearing no soaring call to battle. At least to this point.
Our Democratic leaders are resolutely on the side of the good – I love the righteous nobility of Adam Schiff and the pure constant decency of Joe Biden. But they do not speak to the nation in a voice designed to summon their listeners to fight the forces of fascism, that dark spirit in today’s Republican Party.
The job of Democratic leadership right now is not to be so proper and virtuous, and to summon up good evidence and argument, as to persuade the American people to side with them. It is, rather, to kindle the passions of the American people with speech that calls them to battle.
What leaders must ask themselves is “What willmost inspire a determination among the American people to fight and win the battle that fascism has forced upon them?” And then execute your best plan for achieving that.
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I believe deeply in the virtues of reasonableness, decency, and cooperation. I yearn to live in a nation in which those virtues prevail in how power is won and how it is used. But that’s not the nation we live in right now. And in the America of today, that path amounts to weakness, and it leads to disastrous defeat.
(We can infer the insufficiency of that path from what the futures markets are saying, which is: On the present trajectory, in the coming 2022 Midterm Elections, the Republicans will be rewarded for their fascistic conduct with victories that give them control of both Houses of Congress.)
In recent decades, we’ve seen this play out repeatedly. We’ve seen how the Republicans have repeatedly benefited from their destructive conduct because of the failure of the Democrats to press the battle with an intensity and determination to win that the Republicans continually show. We’ve seen
- how the weak way John Kerry campaign dealt with the attacks from the Swiftboaters in the 2004 campaign let the Republicans benefit from that deeply dishonest smear: that instance of weakness allowed a disreputable Republican President to gain re-election by turning the Democratic war hero into an apparent slacker, and enabling the Republican slacker to posture as the military hero;
- how Barack Obama failed to make the Republicans pay a political price for their indefensible policy of across-the-board obstructionism, and did not go all-out to challenge McConnell’s stealing a Supreme Court seat from him in an unprecedented and unconstitutional way;
- and how, right now, Joe Biden is still being Mr. Nice Guy while the Republicans are waging a multi-pronged attack on American democracy in an effort to entrench themselves in power. (And how – at least apparently -- the Attorney General in this Democratic administration is shrinking from prosecuting those most responsible for the attempted coup d’état, though even what all of us publicly witnessed makes a prima facie case that Trump and those around him committed crimes.)
(Admittedly, it might be best for President Biden to continue being Mr. Nice Guy for a little while longer. But if waging war is not yet the best strategy, there must soon come a time -- likely after the battles of Build Back Better and Voting Rights have been fought – when Biden assumes the role of “wartime leader,” in a war in which the stakes are the survival of American democracy.)
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There’s something that goes deep in this liberal/Democratic orientation, i.e. in its combination of virtues and weakness. And things that go deep are not easily changed.
But change it we Democrats must.
Democratic spokespeople, from the President on down, should ask themselves: “How would an FDR or a Churchill (or a Lincoln) speak to the people about this battle, to rally them to the cause?” (Will we yet hear speeches from today’s Democrats that – like their wartime speeches, or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – that future generations will turn to for inspiration?)
Of course, as was said earlier, this is a different kind of “war” – albeit against the same kind of fascistic spirit – then the one to which FDR and Churchill rallied their peoples. In today’s “war,” the battlefield is public opinion, because the battle will be won or lost according to how tens of millions of Americans decide to vote.
And a potentially decisive electoral battle lies not far ahead—potentially decisive for the future of American democracy. Here’s what’s visible:
1) A plausible case can be made that if the Republicans gain control of the House and the Senate in the 2022 Midterm Elections it could be “Game Over” for American democracy.
2) The futures markets are saying that this Republican takeover is highly probable.
3) Therefore: Between now and Election Day next November, Public Opinion Must be Moved.
That’s the challenge that absolutely must be met.
(If we cannot get a majority of Americans to vote against a political party that has been blatantly assaulting our democratic institutions and values, then it may be that our democracy has already been lost.)
And those futures markets are clearly saying that the way or Democratic leaders are speaking now is not doing it. For what they are saying -- expressing the collective opinion of a multitude of people who are paying attention – is that the way things are going, the forces of fascism are about to win an important, and potentially decisive victory.
So clearly, somemajor change is necessary. The Democrats need to do something impactful enough to change the direction of things. By next November.
The stakes could not be greater.
To win this war, the Democrats must rally the American people to defend their birthright as Americans – what our founders bequeathed us -- the precious right to live in the “land of the free,” whose government is not just of but also by and for the people, operating justly by the consent of the governed.
What’s at stake, in other words, is the political covenant that has been the source of the blessings that a great many people have enjoyed since our nation’s founding, that made this society – imperfect as it has been -- nonetheless a beacon to peoples all over the world who had it worse.
It’s a war that needs to be fought with an all-out intensity as if everything we held sacred depends on the outcome.
Because it does.