The Great Forgetting

The Lost Years

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving break. At times like this, it is essential to remember that “It is not up to you to finish the task, but you are not free to avoid it.”¹

I’ve taken a bit of time since my last post to reset for what is to come. Expect several posts shortly, as they come together.

But today, I want to share a post from four years ago, when Weekend Reading was an off-the-record email. It shows that even before January 6th, we knew enough about Trump’s and MAGA’s criminal conspiracy to nullify the results of the 2020 election to have found it an ongoing and escalating threat to our basic freedoms. (I have not edited it, but have footnoted it to list subsequent Substack Weekend Readings that develop the themes anticipated or to provide greater context.)

I hope you read the post – especially the conclusion, which painfully anticipates what was to follow (again, remember that this was written a month before January 6th):

As inauguration day approaches, as legislative agendas and cabinet appointments become Topic A, a Great Forgetting seems to be spreading. Today we risk confusing a momentary reprieve won at great cost against long odds with something like a new beginning. The tides didn’t breach the levees this time, but without repair, it won’t be long before they do.

Over the next four years, the Biden Administration, Democratic officeholders and seekers, the media, civic and religious leaders, commentators from center-right to left, and self-styled pro-democracy NGOs all but ignored the need for repair. And so, two years later, in a midterm incomprehensibly hailed by Democrats, democracy NGOs, and the media as a “victory for democracy,” an election-denying fascist party gained control of the House of Representatives. (I wrote about this in “You Can't Get to the Super Bowl by Beating the Point Spread Every Week.”)

Then, a year ago, in “America on Trial: If Trump Walks, We Are All Guilty,” I asked whether we would wake up in time:

I’m most struck by the contrast between the moral ambitions and certitude of the Trump years and the defeatism of the last two. In the Trump years, there was a palpable resurgence of moral clarity… But over the last two and a half years, too many sat on the sidelines reverting to a learned helplessness, more interested in hectoring and second guessing those who remained committed. If the Trump years were characterized by the nation’s greatest readiness to acknowledge its faults, the last two and a half were characterized by backlash – not just by those still determined to “make America great again,” but by a peanut gallery of opinionators who insist we discard our most basic moral commitments as political liabilities.

Ultimately, of course, we would not wake up in time, as I warned could be the case a month before the election in “Sleepwalking Our Way to Fascism.”

But now, just seven weeks from January 20th, we seem on the verge of forgetting our own power. Not the power of Democrats, the media, intellectuals, elite NGOs and too-comfortable liberals who almost never fail to fail us. Rather, we are forgetting the power of collective action, the only source of durable human progress and shared prosperity. The question that desperately needs answering is not how Democrats win back the working class, but how the working class wins back the power that made it the foundation for the greatest run of shared prosperity and deepened democracy in the nation’s history. And the only answer to that question has been through stronger unions.

If you haven’t already done so, please follow me on BlueSky. More to come on Musk as well.

(Updates and errata: With the votes that have been counted since the last Weekend Reading (“Is This What Democracy Looks Like?”), I’ve updated the numbers, all of which moved in a direction consistent with the original conclusions. In addition, a reader caught a significant typo; where it said “they actually ‘came to power’ about 16 years ago ‘through democratic elections,’” it should have said 19 years ago. That is also corrected.)

Weekend Reading, December 9, 2020: Belated Happy Safe Harbor Day

Yesterday was Safe Harbor Day. Governors have certified 306 Electors who are now to cast their votes for Biden Monday. While Trump continues to harass the process with lawsuits challenging those certifications, SCOTUS is having none of it, summarily shutting down his Pennsylvania appeal yesterday. He is out of procedural options to overturn the result. While Trump, and the overwhelming majority of Republican elected officials have not acknowledged that Biden is the President-Elect, the fact is that our success in preparation and execution staved off the worst. We should be proud of what we accomplished, but humble about its meaning and the opportunities it creates.

Trump’s Campaign to Defeat the Election

Joe Biden and every presidential candidate before him campaigned to win the election to be able to claim the consent of the governed. Donald Trump was the first presidential candidate to campaign to defeat the election itself to enable himself to govern without consent.

Even before Trump was sworn in four years ago, experts alerted us to the ways in which “democratic backsliding” was succeeding in other countries. As the months of the Trump Administration clicked by we saw Trump taking increasingly aggressive and brazen actions to subvert the election. Itemizing them provides the clarity missing when he is characterized generally as having broken norms or tried to subvert the election. Itemizing insists that we acknowledge how total the effort was. And it makes clear that what Dershowitz argued on the floor of the Senate, has been the guiding principle of the Trump’s tenure: “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” (In no particular order, and nowhere near comprehensive in each category.)

• Ukraine and Foreign Interference. Immediately after the Mueller report, Trump attempted to extort dirt on Hunter Biden from the Ukrainian president. Later, John Bolton reported that Trump solicited dirt on Hunter Biden from the Chinese.

• Vote by Mail. In the wake of COVID, expanding vote by mail was immediately recognized as the sensible solution to the obvious health hazards. Rather than facilitate that, Trump did everything he could to discredit voting by mail, but more importantly to make sure it was as difficult as possible. Although rarely understood publically, the major strategic value of limiting voting by mail was the stress it put on urban election administration, disproportionately deprived of its Election Day workforce by COVID. Picture the lines we saw to vote in places like Philadelphia and Detroit. Now, imagine what might have happened if the millions of voters in those cities who switched to voting by mail this year had not been able to do so.

• The Post Office. Trump replaced the Postmaster General with a campaign crony who initiated practices intended to hobble delivery, especially in major urban areas and blocked adequate funding. And just as he told Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation, he was direct about this, saying, “They want three and a half billion dollars for something that'll turn out to be fraudulent … they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots."

• Funding the Elections. Twice the House passed CARES bills with substantial funding for election administration. Despite a $4 billion need, Trump and McConnell managed to limit federal assistance to an initial $400 million.

• Voter Suppression. As with everything else, Trump said the quiet part out loud: “If we let more people vote, Republicans will never win another election.” He built his campaign around voter suppression, with an unprecedented budget, eventually replacing Pascrale with Bill Stepien, formerly his voter suppression director, and supporting outside groups like True the Vote. The Trump campaign took full advantage of it being the first presidential election after the consent decree limiting GOP suppression activities expired. It followed a strategy famously stated in Weyrich’s “I don’t want everybody to vote” speech.

• Subverting Confidence in the Elections. Trump was never willing to commit to accepting the results of either the 2016 or the 2020 elections, something no president has ever even hinted at. From before he took office, Trump claimed that the election system was rigged and the results were a fraud. He claimed that he won the popular vote in 2016 because millions voted illegally. He established the Kobach Commission to publicize fraud. He told wild and unsubstantiated anecdotes about election fraud that were often “confirmed” by his Attorney General.

• Federal Law Enforcement. Trump concocted an executive order to give himself authority to use his determination that federal buildings were at risk as a pretext for deploying federal law enforcement agents to cities to suppress demonstrations for racial justice. The images of urban violence those agents created became the “proof points” for his contention that electing Democrats was dangerous and that he was the “law and order candidate.” In doing this, he was repeating in the physical world what he continuously did rhetorically: follow racially incendiary remarks meant to consolidate his supporters with ridicule for the inevitable “overreaction.”

• Abuse of Executive Power. Trump treated the executive branch as an extension of his campaign and used it to advance his political interests, from resisting the intelligence community’s efforts to crack down on threats of foreign interference, to firing or displacing career officials who insisted on following the law, to encouraging the Justice Department to investigate Hunter Biden.

• Packing the Courts. The Trump/McConnell campaign to pack the courts culminated in the last minute approval of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Again, Trump was transparent about his motives, saying that her vote was needed to make sure that the Supreme Court decided questions about his own election properly. Before and after the election Trump and his allies have argued that the Supreme Court should overturn the results of the election.

Trump’s extra-legal efforts didn’t stop when the polls closed and the ballots were counted. Among the many things he’s done since then (that we know of) – personally coercing Wayne County canvass board members, summoning Michigan state legislative leaders to the White House to overturn the results, calling the Governor of Georgia and the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House to overturn the results, publically attacking the Georgia Secretary of State for certifying Biden’s win and so much more.

Already Ploughed Ground

In doing all that, Trump continued what other Republicans had been doing for decades with impunity. The ground was already ploughed by Supreme Court cases like Shelby and the wave of disenfranchising laws passed by gerrymandered legislatures in response to Obama’s victory.² The import of the 2010 elections is still not properly appreciated. It wasn’t that Republicans swept those elections in the states, it was that almost all of the Republicans were movement Republicans.³ Ironically, at least in outline, it set off the mirror image of the decade leading up to the New Deal. In the 1920’s, state governments were considered the “laboratories of democracy” generating reforms that would shape the New Deal. History will likely see the 2010’s as the period when state governments were laboratories of autocracy. For example, Scott Walker’s polarizing and authoritarian approach presaged Trump’s. And after Democrats won governor races in the 2016 and 2018 elections, gerrymandered Republican majorities in Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin curtailed their powers in lame duck sessions.

And, in that spirit, Republican legislatures have already announced plans to fix the “problem” of too many people voting (Georgia).

Authoritarian Government

And those were just some of his authoritarian actions taken to subvert the election. Along the way, Trump’s authoritarian governing shredded norms in every area. The Weekly List: This Is How Democracy Ends is a brutal, impossible read, with entries of Trump norm breaking for each of the last 208 weeks. Moreover, his relentless campaign against the media (fake news) and success at establishing his own assertions as truth made America more susceptible to authoritarianism.

An Illegitimate Process Produced a Plausibly Legitimate Outcome

Now, imagine that Biden had gotten 3/10ths of one percent - 44,000 fewer votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, deadlocking the Electoral College at 269-269. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives where each state gets a single vote giving Trump the win, even though Democrats hold the majority of the seats in the House.

And, if all of that happened, if Trump were now preparing for his second term, would his subversion of the election, the voter suppression, the Electoral College and the House vote that produced that outcome despite his having lost by 7 million votes, can we doubt that we would be expected to accept the results as legitimate?⁴ And that many of “our” institutions would demand we act “responsibly?” What would we have said, done?

The “System” Didn’t Hold

So, regardless of whether Biden is sworn in, in no way can we understand the system to have “held.” Neither Trump nor Republicans will be held accountable for their authoritarian/antidemocratic actions in any way. Given Trump and his Senate enablers’ continuous brazen antidemocratic actions the election results demonstrate that none of their supporters valued democracy more than their reelection.

Nor will any elected Republican pay a price for their post-election denial. Yesterday, McConnell, McCarthy and Blunt vetoed a pro forma resolution from the bipartisan Inaugural Committee because it acknowledged that Biden was the president elect. And the Washington Post reported that only 25 Republican representatives were willing to acknowledge Biden as the next President. (Not to put too fine a point on it, those demurring Representatives are by implication saying that the process that made them members of Congress cannot be trusted.) And allies like just pardoned Michael Flynn demand the Constitution be suspended for a do-over election, and Joseph diGenova offered that Krebs “should be taken out and shot.”

It is time that we recognize that we do not live in an eroding democracy whose institutions held; we live in a competitive authoritarian state in which something like a democratic outcome barely occurred. In 2010, Steven Levitsy and Lucan Way wrote Competitive Authoritarianism which examined dozens of post-Cold War “fledgling” democracies to make a very important point that contradicts our intuition that democracies naturally become more democratic. On the contrary, they argued, especially when partisans are well sorted, political systems become “competitive authoritarian” – that is, “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents.”

In the United States, the sorting that competitive authoritarianism requires comes in response to the combination of the breakdown of the white racial political consensus in the 1960’s, an incumbent racial group feeling existential threat, and a constitutional system that affords that group extraordinary advantages in elections, extraordinary power when it governs, and a near absolute veto when it does not hold executive power.

Trump will be evicted from the White House because his villainy was so grotesque, his buffoonery so embarrassing and his incompetence so manifest that pretty much all of corporate America seized the election returns as an opportunity to rid themselves of him. Explain Fox’s coverage in any other way. Or that no one, none of the courts he has packed, none of the state legislatures dominated by gerrymandered Republican majorities and almost none of the state and local Republican election officials have thrown him any kind of lifeline other than denialism rhetoric. Russia has been nowhere to seen. And the election might not have come off without a late infusion of $300 million from philanthropy. As Eric Clapton learned, no one loves you when you’re down and out.

Elections Are a Means, Not the End

If we believe that a democratic election is one in which, at a minimum, every citizen has the same opportunity to vote, that every ballot cast is counted and that the candidate with the most votes is elected, no presidential election has ever met that standard. That is the case de jure and de facto. The Electoral College alone is a de jure violation, and voter ID laws, unequal funding of elections, etc are de facto violations of those conditions. On top of that, this election wasn’t even legal, per the partial inventory of Trump’s violations above. Even the outcome has to be qualified as only “plausibly” democratic given that more people declined to vote than voted for Biden and the manner in which we arrive at the two candidates to choose from – and even that as a practical matter we have just two candidates to choose from.

That this is true might be of little moment if it somehow produced a thriving, flourishing nation. After all, elections are supposed to be a means to that objective, not the objective itself. But, of course, the opposite is true. Just in the 21^st Century our political system has given us forever wars and never responses to accelerating climate catastrophes and inequalities of power, wealth, income and health outcomes. If ever America was seen around the world as a shining city on the hill, it is now seen as a moral hazard and cautionary tale. A moral hazard in its indifference to the consequences of its foreign policies, nuclear stockpile and energy consumption. A cautionary tale in its inability to provide a decent life to so many despite its unprecedented wealth, ensure working conditions that provide dignity, stability, enough time off for loved ones and to be active citizens, or to address enduring racial and social injustices that put the lie to its founding creed.

The Great Forgetting

For many progressives, first with Trump’s election and then with COVID, the lights came on, shining a spotlight on the contradictions between the world we live in and the stories we tell ourselves about that world. Many things that we accepted as natural were exposed for what they actually are. The reckoning with increasingly corrupt commercial and political arrangements as well as disintegrating social bonds felt as if it was coming due. But now, as inauguration day approaches, as legislative agendas and cabinet appointments become Topic A, a Great Forgetting seems to be spreading. Today we risk confusing a momentary reprieve won at great cost against long odds with something like a new beginning. The tides didn’t breach the levees this time, but without repair, it won’t be long before they do.

Weekend Reading is edited by Emily Crockett, with research assistance by Andrea Evans and Thomas Mande.

1. Pirkei Avot

2. Weekend Readings on the hijacking of the Supreme Court and its constitutional coup:

• To the Supreme Court, the 20th Century Was Wrongly Decided

• Politicians in Robes: Part I - The Roberts Majority: Dictators Since Day One

• The John Roberts Election - Politicians in Robes Part II: How the billionaires captured the Court to remake American “democracy” in their own image

• Politicians in Robes: Part III - The “Exceptions” That Prove the Rule

• Breaking the Law: Trump Is the Means, Not the End

• Tipping the Scales: The MAGA Justices Have Already Interfered with the 2024 Elections

3. Weekend Readings on the MAGA takeover of the congressional Republican Party:

• Hiding in Plain Sight: The Sources of MAGA Madness and Congressional Kakistocracy. How White Christian political might made the Republican Party hard right, in 8 charts

• Appendices: The Sources of MAGA Madness and Congressional Kakistocracy. Additional methodology, data, and context.

• There's Nothing Funny About MAGA's Clown Car: MAGA’s blitzkrieg against American freedoms is already well underway – and still gaining strength.

4. Weekend Readings covering Legal but not Legitimate:

• The Electoral College: Legal but not Legitimate: Resisting Learned Helplessness

• The "Civil War" Was an Insurrection, Too: The threat posed by Trump and the MAGA movement, like the Confederate States, is not “conservative” or even “extremist” but criminally anti-democratic