Let me say straight out, although I’m optimistic, I’m also always worried. And, in matters like this, with a nation embroiled into a conflict over the most fundamental issues of what kind of society we will be, the forces operating are so deep and multi-dimensional — and the role that mere chance can play is significant -- that things can come together or collapse in profoundly unpredictable ways.
But, despite the inevitable uncertainties, I think our victory in the current political battle has become a good deal more likely than our defeat.
(And – having followed this battle full-time since I first saw the extraordinarily dark thing the Republican Party was becoming back in 2004 – I have not always felt that way.)
My belief that “we have the wind at our backs” is based on this reading of the current play of forces in the system:
- the Republican Party is on a path of self-destruction, and they seem to lack the control over themselves to change course.
- A majority of the American people have turned against the crazy and destructive force that’s acting in such dishonest and fascistic ways.
- The forces of American democracy – which, notably, includes the system of justice – has lately roused themselves at last to fight this battle with the guts and grit it takes to beat back something like the destructive spirit that has taken over the Republican Party.
To expand on these:
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The Republican Party seems inextricably tied to Trump – at least through the next elections – and Trump is sinking.
“Tied to Trump” – like the way the Party has rallied around Trump in the wake of this Manhattan indictment.
The polls show that even this – the first and least significant of the likely Trump indictments – is bringing Trump down. Only 25% of Americans now see Trump in a positive light. A majority see the indictment as appropriate, because they understand Trump did wrong.
Even worse is almost certainly coming, as Trump will be indicted for more serious crimes in the weeks or months ahead. But the Republicans have already made their choice to side with Trump against the Rule of Law—a choice they’ll be stuck with even as it only gets more disastrous between now and the 2024 election.
Trump may well get the nomination. But the wind is at our backs for the general election.
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The Republican Party seems unable to act rationally. Its lust for power has been disconnected from any ability to follow the strategies necessary to achieve power.
The 2022 Elections sent the Republicans a clear message that going too far in the crazy MAGA direction was a losing strategy. But the Republicans have shown themselves unable to act on that message.
One vivid illustration of the Republican Party acting like a “force possessed” is how the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has expressed itself. In the immediate aftermath of an election that delivered the GOP a clear message that the majority didn’t like how far toward crazy many Republican nominees had gone, the Republicans in the House put their craziest and most fascistic members – the likes of Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene – in charge.
Many factors contributed to this outcome, but one of them seems to be the weakness of political sanity in the party as a whole: the less crazy could have prevented the Party’s making their ugliest faction into the face of the Party -- by making common cause with the Democrats to block Kevin McCarthy’s selling of his soul to the forces of darkness – but there wasn’t even a rumble in that direction.
(Nor, relatedly, does there seem any chance that some “normal” conservative candidate will win the Republican nomination for President next time out.)
We can look also at the recent conduct of the Tennessee legislature. Besides the very bad look of the whole thing, it really looked like these white racist Republicans were in the grip of something more powerful than any rational calculation. They had nothing to gain. They already had all the power. Yet they were swept along by impulses that — pretty predictably – strengthened their opponents and brought upon themselves national and international opprobrium.
Additional evidence of this irrational (“they can’t help themselves”) dimension can be found in how the Republicans have doubled down on abortion after Dobbs, despite the increasing evidence that they are driving the electorate away.
Once again, in a nation where voters give power and take it away, they seem driven to go ever-further in a direction that the majority of the electorate opposes.
Almost as if possessed.
No more KarlRovian sociopathic calculation for political advantage, but more like people in the grips of a self-destructive spirit that brings to mind the line from Euripides: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
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Foundational to all this is that, with the passage of time, an anti-MAGA and anti-fascist majority has consolidated.
The crazier and more obviously criminal Trump gets, the more fascistic the Republican Party gets, the longer these forces reveal their nature on the American political stage, the more Americans come to their judgment: This is not what we want.
That is what the 2022 Elections showed. That’s what public opinion polling shows on a variety of dimensions of the current political scene. That is what the recent election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court showed—with an 11% margin of defeat for the fascistic Republican candidate in a more-or-less 50-50 state.
The long-standing battle for public opinion over the past twenty years seems to have been a close call. And even now the margin between the sides is far smaller than one would have hoped, considering that the battle is one between Democracy and Fascism, between the Rule of Law and the lawlessness of tyranny. I.e., the advantage to our side should be more overwhelming, given that the choice is at that most fundamental levels, that it is about the most basic of Values by which our nation has defined itself since its founding more than two centuries ago.
But, despite the continuing disappointment at the overall state of consciousness in America, at present it does seem that the electoral wind is at our backs.
Admittedly, the Republicans are also engaged in a multi-pronged effort to destroy the democratic mechanisms by which the American majority can choose whom to empower. And one might say that there is a race going on now to see whether Democracy will be able to drain power away from the crazy and fascistic Republican Party before the Republicans can disable the democratic process — i.e. that process by which the present American majority could consign this Force of Fascism to the recesses of our body politic where it belongs.
But for the foreseeable future – e.g. through the upcoming presidential cycle – it appears that enough of the democratic structure is still in place to win that race.
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Alvin Bragg Exemplifies a Major Transformation on the Side of the Good Guys: A Most Hopeful New Readiness for the Battle.
In 2014, I published a series titled Press the Battle. I’d been writing about the rising force of fascism on the political right for a decade by then.
(A decade-- during two of which years I myself was “pressing the battle” by running --under the slogan, “Truth. For a change” -- against the non-so-honorable incumbent Republican Bob Goodlatte for the VA-06 House seat. What drove me to plunge into the political arena was my deep frustration over the failure of the democratic side – small “d” and capital “D” – to recognize the need to take the battle to the Republicans, to make sure that the Rs would pay a price – and not be politically rewarded – for all the ways they were acting destructively on the public stage.)
At last, the side on which America must depend for the preservation of our democracy has awakened fully to the reality that there’s a battle here that must be fought and won, or our history could truly turn onto a nightmarish path.
At last, we regularly hear the leaders of the Democratic Party calling out the Republicans for their unprecedented sins against our democratic system—from norms to laws to the Constitution itself.
We can look to the recent conduct of Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg as epitomizing this necessary transformation.
I am one of those who misjudged Bragg when two of his prosecutors resigned in early 2022 over Bragg’s apparently dropping the investigation of Trump. He looks quite different now because, though it’s not clear what changed in the case over the course of the past year, not only has Bragg been the first to bring Trump before the bar of justice, but he’s also shown that he’s not going to lie back, as the side of Democracy so often has, and let the lawless forces of the Trump Party get away with their contemptible tactics.
Ari Melber, on MSNBC, has been calling attention to how Bragg has “gone on offense” to make the Trump Party side pay for misbehavior. At the arraignment, Bragg’s team called attention to Trump’s campaign of threats against the system of justice. And now, this week, Bragg is taking Jim Jordan and his political stunt to Court to call out and to check those Trump-Party attempts to abuse their congressional powers for unconstitutional purposes.
Three cheers for Alvin Bragg. And may his readiness “Press the Battle” whenever the opportunity presents itself continue throughout the Democratic forces, going on offense to awaken the American people ever-more-fully to the misdeeds of the Republican Party.
Part of what will keep the wind at our backs will be the Democrats waging their side of the battle with the same passion and intensity that the Republicans have shown for degrading our democracy for the past thirty years.
There is a famous line from William Butler Yeats that I have quoted frequently over the past almost-twenty years: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are filled with a passionate intensity.”
For too long, that mismatch in intensity for the battle between Good and Evil enabled the destructive force that has taken over the Republican Party in our times to gain more and more power.
Thank Whatever that this mismatch — in “conviction” and in “passionate intensity” — is at last disappearing, as the pro-democracy and pro-Rule-of-Law side epitomized by Alvin Bragg show a readiness to take the battle to the powers of darkness, giving us an ever-improving chance to drive those dark powers from the field.
That intensity, that going on offense, is important for keeping the wind at our backs.