Don't Build A Bigger Tent By Giving Corruption A Pass

Policy disagreements are fine but there need to be some bright lines.

(Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Student Borrower Protection Center)

Senate Democrats are embroiled in a fight over crypto regulation. At issue is whether a pro-crypto faction should provide the decisive votes to pass the GENIUS Act, which, among other things, would allow President Trump to continue to use his own cryptocurrency as a conduit for corruption.

Some pro-crypto Dems will make the case for cryptocurrency on the merits, but they also have political motives: They want to get on the right side of the crypto lobby (or at least not invite its ire) and increase the party’s weak appeal to young male voters along the way. The other faction, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is highly skeptical of cryptocurrency in general, and would like it subject to much stricter regulation, but the immediate objective, and larger source of sway over pro-crypto Dems, has a political component, too: Oppose any new crypto regime that allows presidents to use so-called stablecoins as bribery funnels.

Cards on the table, I want Warren to win this fight. To some very small extent, that’s because I’m a crypto skeptic—even of stablecoins, which are at least pegged to the value of real assets—and I trust financial-regulatory experts like Warren to see around corners and reduce the risk of abuses and crises before they spiral out of control. But mostly it’s because I want Democrats to seize every sensible opportunity to draw attention to, and make Republicans pay a price for, abetting Trump’s corruption.

Democrats understand the value and urgency of anticorruption politics when there are no special interests on Trump’s side.

Chuck Schumer announced this week that he’d serially filibuster all Justice Department nominees until Attorney General Pam Bondi answers questions about the $400 million airplane Trump intends to accept from Qatar. That’s a good first step, and a template for further action. If Trump says the Defense Department will take possession of the bribery plane, and spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to sweep it for surveillance equipment and reassemble it, then Democrats should extend their holds to Pentagon nominees. Introduce legislation to defund the entire boondoggle.

The crypto bill provides a similar opportunity to make Republicans reveal their priorities. Do they want to deliver the crypto industry a lax regulatory regime, or do they want to help Trump get away with high crimes?

It’s nice to think Democrats across the spectrum, from the most anti-crypto to the most pro, would see the higher values of rule of law, anti-corruption, and making Trump eat shit as guide stars. Speaking as one, they could tell the crypto world that the only thing standing between them and their money is Trump and his greed. And for a brief moment, they did. They filibustered the GENIUS Act on first pass, raising Trump’s self-enrichment as a core objection.

But I don’t think Warren will ultimately win this fight, and I don’t think she thinks she will. Instead, Republicans will go to extraordinary lengths to enable Trump’s corruption, several Democrats will decide that’s a price they’ll tolerate to clear the crypto bill, and the GENIUS Act will pass.

And to me, quite apart from Trump’s crypto scam specifically, or crypto generally, this raises some pretty profound questions about what different people mean when they say Democrats need to build a bigger tent, and how they go about enticing people to join.

TALES FROM THE CRYPTO

The best political case I’ve heard for standing down on crypto pertains to Democrats’ recent difficulties with young male voters. During the Biden presidency, the argument goes, SEC Chair Gary Gensler took aggressive enforcement action against crypto, and it basically cost Democrats the election. Too many young men had put too much dumb money into these questionable assets, and the industry became too big to fail, as a political matter. They were just going to vote for whoever promised to make their “investments” pay off.

And so, the logic goes that caving to crypto lobbyists is actually just caving to reality. If Democrats remain crypto scolds for high-minded reasons, they can brag about their moral purity from the wilderness forever, while Republicans destroy everything else they care about.

I’m not sure I buy this, but stipulating that it’s true, it definitely doesn’t follow that the optimal political approach is to make sweaty bedfellows with crypto magnates.

For one thing, it doesn’t take a genius to imagine this alliance blowing back. At one point or another, short-term thinking along these lines convinced subsets of Democrats to support both the Iraq war and Wall Street deregulation, and both of those turned out to be bad bets.

For another thing, crypto isn’t actually popular.

For a third thing, crying uncle over crypto, as if the proposition were binary, reflects a simplistic and reactive approach to political adversity, wherein the best move is always to cave. Democrats helped Republicans pass the Laken Riley bill on the same thinking, without giving due consideration to how the law would work in practice or hamstring their party in the future. That decision did not neutralize the immigration issue, but it will become the source of immense grief for the next Democratic president.

They should not try to neutralize the crypto issue in the same way.

Caving in this case won’t just create bad policy. It will sacrifice a rare opportunity for Democrats, from the minority, to check or increase the salience of Trump’s corruption. And it will drive Democrats into partnership with genuinely unworthy, low-character people, as we see when someone like Ruben Gallego cozies up to Marc Andreesen.

Democrats could instead appeal to young male crypto investors not with caveat emptor-style scolding, but by extending an olive branch to those who aren’t bought fully into the crypto scofflaw subculture. Not every crypto holder is a civic degenerate, or cool with Trump selling out America. It’s worth trying to make them see that Trump is the main obstacle to crypto regulation—that he won’t do any favors for crypto unless he’s allowed to use it to sell policy to the highest bidders.

By contrast, it’s not worth wasting time or credibility trying to win over David Sacks and the Winklevoss twins.

TENT, POLLS

I can already hear the retort: Why are you shrinking the tent?!

“My general view of how to win elections is you have to get a lot of votes, and that means we’re going to have to have alliances with people that we may not agree with 100 percent of the time,” Gallego recently told a town hall attendee in Pennsylvania. “Marc Andreessen runs the largest venture capital firm in Arizona.… What happened last election is that we got so pure and we kept so pure that we started kicking you out of the tent. It ends up there aren’t enough people in the tent to win elections.”

My best response is: Marc Andreesen’s just a guy, and an extremely eccentric one at that! If mountains of reporting and experience are to be believed, Andreesen has become a full-blown, thin-skinned, megalomaniacal crank who hates liberals, hates democracy, and wouldn’t enter a Democratic tent under any plausible circumstances.

I’d also say that many of the people who respond to skepticism of moral and ethical compromise by alluding to the need to grow the tent are trying to duck the actual moral and ethical questions, along with more practical questions of how big the tent needs to be, whom we should want inside of it, and in what positions of influence. Should it be open to a big subset of actual crypto holders? Sure. Should it be open to a small subset of tech reactionaries with grim, fascistic views of the future? I think Dems are probably better off welcoming their hatred than rolling out the red carpet for them, but there’s definitely no need to offer them positions of prestige.

Some of these avatars of the tech right might one day be humbled. They might lose an election or court catastrophe and try to tiptoe back into the mainstream. That is their prerogative. But there’s a difference between a world where Silicon Valley reactionaries get burned by MAGA and resume voting for Democrats, and one where Democrats entice them back by letting them set policy. The size of the tent is a matter of counting heads; the tougher question is who gets to be on stage.

The world of crypto evangelists overlaps heavily with a cadre of race realists, who also deserve no pride of place in Democratic politics. Let them vote for Democrats if they’re put off by Trump’s idiocy, but they do not belong in the inner intellectual and strategic sanctums of any liberal party.

The way I think about growing the tent is to define MAGA clearly, and create a welcoming environment for anyone who opposes it on antifascist or pro-democracy grounds.

The Democratic Party isn’t going to win over many climate-change deniers, and shouldn’t try, but it should be the natural home for all people who understand that climate change is real, even when they differ over the proper balance between mitigation and adaptation. That debate is for us—conspiracy theories and lies and environmental sabotage are for the GOP.

The Democratic Party isn’t going to win over single-issue anti-abortion zealots, but it should be the natural home for everyone who doesn’t think pregnant women should lose all autonomy. Freedom is for us, menstrual surveillance is for the GOP.

The Democratic Party isn’t going to win over genuine transphobes, or cynics who bait transphobes to build power. But it should be the natural home for everyone else. In the tent, we can disagree about edge cases, where trans rights and other rights come into conflict, but genital checks and bathroom stalking and bullying people—that’s all for the GOP.

Same criminal justice reformers and pro-policing public-safety advocates. They can align against thugs who genuflect to police until the moment police stand in the way of a coup d’etat. Who pardoned the Capitol rioters, including the ones who bludgeoned police officers? Wasn’t Democrats.

There are many ways to hold progressives and centrists and heterodox oddballs and lapsed neocons and NeverTrump Republicans together within a single tent. But if they allow freaks and grifters and MAGA spoilers to sneak their noses in underneath, all hell will eventually break loose.