The Material Stakes Of The GOP Assault On Democracy Become Obvious
As corporate titans flock to Trump, labor leaders flock to Biden, and GOP leaders sabotage the country, a bigger picture comes into focus
There’s a genteel but long-running debate in liberal politics over the utility of the democracy appeal: Should Democrats place democracy, and Republican efforts to destroy it, at the center of their campaign rhetoric in the abstract? Or would they be wiser to concretize the idea by linking the GOP’s dictatorial turn to the regressive, unpopular things they want to do with stolen power?
Is democracy a high-value like “freedom” that can galvanize voters on its own through sheer civic patriotism, or is it too intangible without a quantum of self-interest? Does the appeal work better when it’s simple? Or should Democrats paint a bigger picture.
If you’ve followed my work here and on Politix, or in the years before I launched Off Message, you may know I tend to think simpler is better. If the danger to democracy needs to be connected to anything at all, it’s Trump’s low character. He’s a crook and a sociopath who will cheat and steal and even end American democracy for fame and fortune and to evade justice. Why complicate something simple and obvious with allusions to the hidden motive of Obamacare repeal or tax cuts for rich people?
Most days I still feel the same way, and I always think the corrupt side of the bargain—cheating, insurrection, political violence—has to be the core component of any appeal. But this week Trump and his allies made the big picture of the GOP’s race to autocracy much easier to grasp.
TURNING ON A DIMON
I wrote recently about the center-right’s reconsolidation behind Donald Trump, and how revisionist praise from influential people like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon could have a dangerous normalizing effect that cascades through the business community, into wealthy suburbs, where Trump has been an object of revulsion.
This is a real thing that’s happening and (viewed in a vacuum at least) a cause for genuine concern. Absent the suburban realignment, Democrats would be toast. But it’s also an extra-tidy manifestation of the Big Picture democracy appeal.
I’d bet a large sum of money that Dimon knows Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. I’d bet almost as much that Dimon knows Trump has promised to establish a dictatorship on “day one”; that he has demanded immunity for any crimes he committed from 2017-2020, and any that he might commit from 2025 onward.
And yet to hasten another round of tax cuts and reduced bank regulation, Dimon will tell the world he thinks Trump is a populist everyman who gets a bad rap. It’s hard to think of a cleaner distillation of the idea that Trump’s assault on democracy is about more than his personal thirst for power. It’s so people like Jamie Dimon can get richer at the expense of the people who will suffer next time unregulated financial capitalism wrecks the country.
The submission of Trump’s intraparty skeptics reveals a similar cynicism, and a similar calculation: To them, democracy is more of a nuisance than it’s worth if it doesn’t yield right-wing outcomes.
It’s hard to say anything definitive about the moral values and ideological priorities of someone as cynical as Mitch McConnell. But as near as I can tell McConnell genuinely despises Trump. Not like how some Republicans will claim to know that Trump is a cretin in off-the-record conversations with reporters, but only to burnish their Beltway reputations. No, on top of the usual insults and the racist mockery of McConnell’s wife, Trump has tried to end McConnell’s career, and cost Republicans control of the Senate in sequential elections. After January 6, McConnell told Jonathan Martin, then of the New York Times, “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself.” Oops.
McConnell also earnestly wants to fund Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. I doubt McConnell has deep ideological views about border security or the ethnic composition of the United States, but I do think he was hoping he could wring unilateral immigration-policy concessions from Democrats, and that doing so would convince Republicans in the House to allow a vote on Ukraine aid.
But now we see he’ll jettison all of that, including his dignity, at Donald Trump’s request. The two of them are of one mind that leaving problems in America to fester will help Trump get elected, which will facilitate more tax cuts and deregulation. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine [Trump],” he told Republicans this week.
Republicans like Dimon and McConnell have ultimately decided to join Trump’s slow-burn insurrection not because they worship Trump on a cult-like level, but because the world confronted them with a choice between things they care about and preserving a free society and they’ve decided to sacrifice the latter. It’s not quite the same coarse narcissism that animates Trump, who wants wealth and power for personal aggrandizement and to stay out of prison. They radicalized against democracy because they’re greedy for other things that they’ve reasoned won’t materialize through democratic processes. And in a way it’s worse. Trump is like a dog who will shit on your living room floor if you don’t give him a treat; Dimon and McConnell are like houseguests who will shit on your living-room floor if the toilets are occupied.
FRUITS OF LABOR
There is a happy counterpoint to all of this.
On Wednesday, the United Auto Workers endorsed Joe Biden, and the union’s president, Shawn Fain, laid Trump bare as a long-time scab. I think Biden would’ve won the union’s endorsement even if Trump weren’t a corrupt election thief, because he earned it. But there’s also something mechanistic about the choice facing most labor unions right now. Just as Jamie Dimon wants regressive tax and regulatory policy, and will set fire to democracy to get them, unions want workers to have a fighting chance against rapacious capitalists, but they’ll be crushed if they don’t fortify democracy first.
That contrast should be clarifying.
If Trump gets buy-in from the corporate blob and maintains narrative control over the ridiculous idea that he’s also a populist tribune for the working class, it’ll be a big problem. But if Trump gets buy-in from Wall Street CEOs, and Biden gets countervailing buy-in from labor unions—that’ll be a big problem for Trump! Almost worse than if he got buy-in from neither half of the labor-management divide.
But it’s important not to lose the democracy angle in all this. Debating the merits of organized labor and tax cuts and deregulation is fine, perhaps even to Biden’s benefit, but suddenly we’ve lost sight of the dirty pool the right-wing half of the debate is playing.
Viewing their words and deeds in isolation, Dimon and McConnell are trying to get Trump elected. If they succeed, Trump will gain legitimate power to undermine unions and gut bank regulations, quite apart from pardoning himself or jailing his political enemies, and Dimon and McConnell will feign innocence. It’s thus important for Trump’s opponents to remind people that the Dimons and McConnells of the world are playing dumb about Trump, his crimes, his willingness to cheat in every election, and the wreckage he’ll make of the rule of law if he wins. They may not be agitating outright for a coup, but they’re laying the groundwork for one consciously.
They know Trump will deny the results again if he loses. That he’ll assemble mobs to steal victory. They know his allies in the House GOP leadership will fan his lies. They know Speaker Mike Johnson—who in 2020 tried to empower Texas to overturn election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—will abuse his office to install Trump if he can. They know House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik won’t commit to certifying Biden’s re-election. They know that if neither candidate wins 270 electoral votes, there will be a contingent election in the House, and Republicans will happily hand the presidency to the popular-vote loser.
They’re fine with all of it, because they want those tax cuts. That’s the bigger picture, but it’s still quite simple: heads they win, tails we lose.
Re your penultimate paragraph, all of those things scare me - but I think we’ll see that playing out.
The thing that keeps me up at night is the hollowing out of non-partisan election infrastructure in the states. If the shit they tried at the state level works this time because they’ve scared away all the people with integrity, we likely won’t know about any shenanigans until it’s too late.
I guess one thing I wonder is: to what extent does union endorsement help Biden with working class voters? I guess it's obvious that having such an endorsement is better than not having it. But given how the labor share of the working class has dropped, despite recent activism; that while it was dropping, the working class outside of unions polarized right; and that 'right to work' and other bamboozlements have argued to working people that unions are the aristocracy and full of leftists: does it move the needle? Or does it aid polarization? I should say that as a Biden supporter I'm really glad and grateful to the unions for making an effort. But I guess I'm just caught up in the gulf between the ideals of the labor movement and the political mobilization of the mass of actual wage laborers.