The GOP Plan To Invert January 6
The GOP Plan To Invert January 6
Democracy is still on the ballot, even if Kamala Harris has chosen to campaign in poetry; the rest of her party should be prepared for a different kind of coup attempt.
Early in the Trump era Democrats heeded experts in the modern history of political demagogues, who encouraged them not to harp on every new outrage, and instead be relentlessly normal. The thrust of their advice was to make regular issues the focal point of Democratic politics.
“The most powerful way to oppose him, but it was never really done seriously, was to try and understand what his voters want and try to address the need of his voters,” explained the modern historian Giovanni Orsina. “No jokes, stop shouting, stop crying, stop saying: ‘It is a horror and disaster’; try and seriously understand what his voters want, and the left was never really successful in doing that.”
This was not a retrospective on Donald Trump’s presidency; it was a prescription, inspired by the difficulty Italian liberals had displacing Silvio Berlusconi. The economist Luigi Zingales likewise wrote that the onl opponents who ultimately defeated Berlusconi, “focused on the issues, not on his character.”
There was some dissent around this view, mostly around what “normal” meant in the context of fighting a resisting to the democratic system itself.
One approach—the ones Democrats took for too long, in my view—was to treat “kitchen table” politics as an antidote to Trumpism, as if lower prescription drug prices and 100,000 manufacturing jobs would be a shield against the scheming and corruption and abuses of power that threatened to cheat them out of fair elections.
The other approach—the one I see Kamala Harris taking—is to wage the fight over abstract, higher loyalties, but in ways that enlist the public’s cellular disdain for bitter and oppressive forces.
If you read the text of Harris’s and Walz’s stump speeches, you’ll notice they seldom plead with voters to defend democracy. They largely reserve the word democracy to reaffirm their belief in our system of government, by implicit contrast to Trump and the GOP. Those same speeches are instead peppered with front-footed references to freedom and the future, where they’ll note, among a long list of perks, “freedom means we settle our political differences not through violence but with our votes.” They’ve taken the themes that have animated the rearguard anti-Trump resistance and refracted them through a hopeful, forward-charging, and joyous lens.
Think back on the past month: the Tim Walz-led alienizing of the MAGA movement; Kamala Harris’s mantra “we’re not going back;” her stump speech emphasizing freedom and the future; all the videos of her dancing; the broad left’s embrace of the coconut (earnestly or ironically) as a symbol of resistance. Compare it to, for instance, the seminal appeal of the “No” campaign that drove the dictator Augusto Pinochet from power almost 30 years ago.
See any resemblance?
I don’t write to second guess this approach. It’s working. If it’s not broke, etc. But a voice inside my head is second guessing the support structure around the Harris-Walz campaign, particularly the Biden White House, and congressional Democrats. Trump is not in power; Democrats are not trying to throw him out; Harris and Walz are trying to keep him from winning the election, and seem to be doing about as good a job as anyone could expect.
But whether they run against The Threat To Democracy or for A Future Defined By Freedom, Trump isn’t engaged in an equal-but-opposite campaign to defeat Democrats lawfully. Joyous as Harris and Walz want the Democratic coalition to seem, it remains extremely likely that Trump will try to steal the election if he comes up short after all ballots have been cast. Happiness and joy are great tools for attracting voters, and the larger the margin of victory in the election, the harder it’ll be for Trump and JD Vance and their loyalists to overturn it. But once the votes are in, ebullience loses much of its power.
When all that’s left for Republicans is lawless subversion, and the attempt is underway, accountability and consequences—the less joy-filled subtexts of the anti-Trump movement—will be the only things that can prevent Trump’s second coup attempt from succeeding. Is the rest of the party, caught up in pro-Harris exuberance, laying the groundwork not just to win the election, but to defend the victory? I wish it were a bit more clear.