The present moment is bleak

This headline from David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo says it all: What It Looks Like When One Side Rejects Democracy. I read what he had to say, and I will admit it hits hard. Unfortunately, what he has to say is reality, and it's far from clear how many of us (me included) truly grasp the weight of the moment. What is clear to me is that something is fundamentally broken when it comes to our politics right now, and we have already lost so much that we once took for granted. Let me share with you what he has to say:

The last few weeks have been a particularly strange stretch in a campaign year that is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced.

The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of the occasion.

It was different in the tumultuous summer of two attempted assassinations against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal from the race, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and the political conventions. That period felt as historic as the decision voters would make in November. But since then, things have settled into a odd limbo, like we’re all waiting out the clock until Election Day, resigned that a sufficient number of our fellow citizens may in fact decide to ditch the American experiment as we know it, imperfect though it’s been, in favor of some kind of gaudy neofascist kleptocracy.

In some respects, once Harris replaced Biden and took the doubts about his age and fitness off the table, the election became a referendum on Trump. And what, really, is there left to say about Trump? Everyone who pays any attention to politics long ago made up their minds. All that’s left to do is the expensive work of trying to make sure those people actually cast their votes while also trying to capture a slice of the hapless folk who after all these years still haven’t made up their minds about Trump. In the meantime, everything else is frozen in place until a decision is made on whether democracy is the way to go.

Compiling Morning Memo each day has been harder in recent weeks than ever before, not because there is no news but because there’s little that seems to capture the present moment in full, which has forced me to think hard about why, instead of building to a crescendo in November, we seem to be slouching toward a potential second coming of Trump.

I don’t have an especially satisfying global answer, but there are some dynamics that contribute to this unpleasant sensation that we’re walking eyes wide open into the abyss.

It is a mark of the poor health of our democracy that democracy itself is on the ballot at all. A choice between democracy or not democracy isn’t a choice but an existential threat that doesn’t sustain or nourish civic life. The social compact has already been broken when we can’t agree that free and fair elections are a universal goal or that we abide by the results of those elections or that the rule of law should apply equally to everyone. We can’t even agree on whether an auto-coup by a sitting president is a good or a bad thing – or a thing at all.

To put a finer point on it: While we should hail the self-sacrifice of Republican Never Trumpers for forgoing their own political ambitions in service of defeating Trump and upholding the rule of law, something is fundamentally broken when it requires a coalition that ranges from AOC to Liz Cheney to elect a pro-democracy candidate. Democracy is designed to mediate the differences among those who believe in democracy, not resolve the conflict over whether to have democracy at all.

These kinds of dynamics – and the presence of Trump and MAGA Republicans – skew public discourse in ways that I’m not sure we fully recognize let alone understand. I could debate with Liz Cheney til the cows come home on the proper role of government, on how to fine tune the balance between liberty and equality, on where the rights of the individual should yield to the common good, and on more mundane topics like health care policy, the energy transition, and foreign affairs. But those are not the debates anyone is having.

For much the past eight years, and especially in the last several months, the long-running debates that form a through line for American democracy have been sidelined by the existential threat posed by Trump and Trumpism. So while there is honor in linking arms with former foes to unite in defense of the very democracy that allows us to argue these finer points with each other, there is much to mourn in what we have already lost: years of some the most pressing issues we face relegated to secondary or tertiary significance; vibrant and essential public debates left to molder while we confront the more immediate threat; time, energy, and resources diverted from supporting the best of who we are to fend off the worst of who we can be.

The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.

Most of political journalism fails to meet the moment because it has chosen to maintain – or is unable to break free of – the illusion that the 2024 campaign is another in the long line of great quadrennial public debates engaged in mostly good faith by two sides seeking to coalesce the will of the people around their preferred vision for the country. It’s nowhere more painfully apparent than watching the TV networks continue to try to competitively exercise their convening authority to stage the presidential campaign in front of their cameras. We’ve catalogued at length the ways that using the same old journalistic constructs normalizes Trump, creates false equivalencies, and generally allows the anti-democratic forces to pantomime as democratic while denigrating, undermining and delegitimizing democratic institutions, including news outlets themselves.

What that has left us with is a curdled public discourse in which the pro-democracy side is mostly yelling at each other about what more can be done to stop Trump; holding up scorecards like figure skating judges on the effectiveness of this or that anti-Trump strategy; assessing the purity of each other’s anti-Trumpism; and railing against democratic institutions like the media for wilting in our hour of greatest need. Not all of those are bad impulses, and to be clear they are not the cause but rather a symptom of our current predicament. It’s what happens when the “other side” rejects democracy as a means of resolving these differences. It’s like having a public debate against an abandoned lectern.

Emphasis mine. It wasn't always like this in the US. We had our problems, but there was some shared commitment to democratic principles and maintaining the institutions that enable democracy to function. Those who wanted to end democracy were not only a minority (and they still are) but also were so marginalized as to have no realistic expectation of overthrowing what the rest of us either held dear or simply assumed would always exist. Those days are long gone. Maybe the "last days of Weimar" is a bit dramatic, but in some ways it's a metaphor that captures the moment. 

I have been advocating for some sort of "grand coalition" or "popular front" approach to this election for a reason. Kamala Harris and her team have been adept at forming a sort of grand coalition that includes a plethora of never Trumpers, national security conservatives who see their party that has lost its way, along with the usual Democratic coalition built up by Obama back in 2008 and to an extent revived during the Biden candidacy of 2020. As much as I enjoyed talk show host Jon Stewart's "fuck you" moment when mentioning Dick Cheney (George W. Bush's former Vice President), the reality is that we need him and others like him and his daughter Liz. And they have made their presence felt. This is a time to put aside differences because so much more is at stake.

I don't know if a grand coalition is a winning strategy, but it is all we have. Take it or leave it. Just remember that leaving it guarantees a fascist future. My hope is probably much my hope in 2020. Back then, I was hoping that Biden would meet the moment and buy us four more years. Thankfully, Biden met the moment and then some. But his moment had passed. Now it is up to Harris and her team to buy us yet another four years. At their best, grand coalitions can freeze out fascist movements and parties in the short and possibly medium term. But they won't hold forever. A lot of it comes from the nature of grand coalitions. We can find solidarity in an immediate moment of crisis, but we have real differences that divide us, and our impulse to discuss and debate those differences causes us to lose focus when we really need to focus on the fact that we're on the back foot against a formidable and well-financed anti-democratic movement. We found that during the previous Trump term in the White House, our institutions held, kinda sorta. That's not saying much. Those safeguards have been further eroded in the interim. It is doubtful that institutions like the courts will provide guardrails against Trump a second time. Our legacy media have failed to meet the moment. Social media platforms are useless. 

And we have to look at recent history to understand that grand coalitions can and do get worn down eventually. The European Union, like us, has a fascist problem. The EU's parliament has stayed surprisingly stable in the aftermath of this year's elections. The center is holding for now. But if you look at individual nations, you have to be deeply concerned. The French snap elections were a master class in how to run a snap election in a matter of weeks and keep Marine Le Pen's former National Front party from sharing power. Unfortunately, that tenuous coalition won't last. I am not sure I would want to be in Austria right now. And there is a fascist specter haunting Germany with national elections coming soon, and state elections - especially in the former East Germany - increasingly dominated by a neo-Nazi party. Hungary, which I visited a decade ago, has tried a grand coalition approach against Orban's ruling party, but so far has failed. I almost wonder if it would be best to accept that the same nation that fought valiantly against the Soviets in 1956 will be once more under the Kremlin's boot. Poland managed to free itself for now from its own wannabe despots last year. How long that lasts is anyone's guess. I think you get the picture. 

I am cautiously optimistic that Harris can win enough electoral votes to be sworn in as President next January. It will be close. She will likely have a divided legislature where one party - the one that turned its back on democracy (GOP) - will sabotage any good-faith effort to keep our government functional in preparation for what would be a Trump family dynasty. If we are lucky enough to buy ourselves another four years, we really need to prepare for what comes next, rather than hope that the fever among the anti-democratic forces breaks. It has not so far, and I seriously doubt the fever will break in the near future. How do we hold a grand coalition together? What do ordinary conservatives do to create a party mechanism that can be viable in short order? Do those of us who are pro-democracy need to form our own militias in the eventuality that the fascists will prevail before the decade's over? Those are not the questions I want to ask. Unfortunately, those are questions that cannot be avoided any longer. 

The last thing I want to wake up to is news that a coalition of our generals had to overthrow a Trump regime in the hopes of forming a second US republic, the contours of which are hard to even fathom. But this is the odd moment that we live in. 

In the meantime, I've been avoiding critiquing the Democratic strategy of forming a grand coalition for this election. Look, we only have bad options, and the goal is to pick the best bad option. This is probably the best of the options available. We have a democratic republic still, if we can stay focused enough to keep it. The sort of authoritarian keptocracy that Trump and his handlers envision is one that can stay in Russia or Venezuela. That nonsense is not welcome here, by a long shot. We're going to have to be loud and produce the sort of landslide victory that forces anti-democratic factions back into the margins where they belong. The alternative is unthinkable, and I seriously doubt many of my fellow Americans could successfully adapt.