Fake-Fighting Fascism

Were Democratic leaders just gaslighting us when they said Trump was a grave threat to democracy? Can we get them some spine transplants, soon?

In mid-August, at the Democratic National Convention, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC that Donald Trump was “a threat to democracy of a kind that we have not seen.” Now, days after the election, she tells The New York Times “We all want the president to succeed,” adding, “We wanted him to succeed in 2016 until they went down a path that we had to disagree with. But again, let’s give this a chance and see where we can find our common ground. We’ll see what is rhetoric and what is real.”

In mid-September, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went on MSNBC and called Trump a “pro-Putin conspiracy-peddling, election-denying extremist” who “lies for a living.” Now he says he is interested in ““working with the incoming administration whenever and wherever possible to find bipartisan common ground to solve problems for the American people.”

In mid-October, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told a rally in Green Bay, Michigan that Trump “is a fascist to his core,” adding, “Let that sink in and don't be a [bit] afraid of saying it, because that's exactly who he is." Now, he says we have to “work harder to find common ground with our neighbors who didn’t vote like we did in this election.”

Before Election Day, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that voting for Trump was “anti-American.” Now she says she told the president-elect in a private phone call after the election that “there are areas where we can work together.” 

Is there something in the water that Democratic leaders all drink? Or does watching bad election returns cause amnesia? Or is it something worse?

If Democratic leaders are confused about President-elect Trump’s nature and intentions, offering gestures of good will and muffling concerns they may have about his horrendous cabinet picks, no wonder so many voters are too. According to a new CBS/YouGov poll, taken between November 19-22, 59% of voters approve of how Trump is handling his presidential transition (that includes 22% of Democrats). 86% of voters think Democrats should “try to work with Donald Trump on issues where they find common ground” – only 14% want him to oppose him on all issues. I don’t think this means a lot of Democrats suddenly like what Trump is up to—it means they are reflecting what they are hearing their own party leaders saying, or not saying.

This is not to say that the public has suddenly developed the same amnesia on display from national Democrats. When asked what they think about the state of democracy and the rule of law in America, 65% say they think it is somewhat or very threatened. That includes 66% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans, so it’s possible many Republicans are still worried about what they see as Democratic “witch-hunts”—a non-problem that will soon anyway disappear.

There’s a fundamental problem with all these gestures toward finding “common ground” with Trump and his Republican party. It means normalizing a president who has said he:

• is immune from legal oversight thanks to the US Supreme Court;

• is allowed to do whatever he wants with presidential records;

• wants “one really violent day” by police to stop theft from retail stores;

• wants to protect police from any prosecutions for actions they may take either in carrying out mass deportations or in his planned “one really violent day” against petty theft;

• believes America’s biggest problem “is the enemy within” who should be handled by the National Guard or the military;

• believes that internal enemy includes politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff;

• believes Democrats with ideas he disagrees with shouldn’t be allowed to run for office;

• ignores ethics rules designed to prevent him from personally profiting from public office;

• wants to punish critical TV networks by revoking their broadcast licenses;

• wants one-day trials and immediate executions for drug deals;

• wants to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to expedite mass deportations;

• praises the use of violence against protestors at his rallies; and

• plans to pardon people detained, convicted and/or sentenced to jail for their roles in the January 6 insurrection.

This is not someone we want to succeed, work together with, or find common ground with. And that’s even more true as it becomes clear that many of his key Cabinet appointees are people chosen because they negate the values of the agencies they will supposedly run. Conciliatory talk toward Trump—who won no “mandate” but just a very narrow victory—will not make him reciprocate.

By the way, this Democratic collapse toward “common ground” with Trump is not new. In 2016, a day after he upset favorite Hillary Clinton, then-House Minority Leader Pelosi issued a similar statement urging that Democrats “find common ground,” specifically offering to work with Trump quickly to pass a robust infrastructure bill. A few days later, she met with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and added “child care” to the issues she hoped for common ground on.

Same as it ever was?

Only a few Democrats saw through Trump’s promised infrastructure plans, like then Rep. Ruben Gallego, who took to the House floor on November 16, 2016, to call it a “privatization scheme, rife with graft and corruption, whose real purpose is to enrich the Trump family and his supporters.” It’s worth re-reading Gallego’s entire floor speech, which reminded listeners that Trump was a sexual predator, a demagogue, a bigot, a liar and a con-artist, and said in no uncertain terms that “we here in Congress must oppose his agenda…[and] his efforts to build up his power.”

Now, Gallego, who did much better than Harris in his state (which has 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats) in his recent bid for the US Senate, especially because of his ability to connect with Latino men, said in his victory speech, “When it’s time to fight, we will fight the administration,” he said. “And if there’s places where we can find common ground, we’ll find common ground.” He’s hoping to do so on “border security.” <sigh>

I vividly remember this time back in late 2016. When my own Congressman Eliot Engel made a similar “finding common ground” statement to local media, even allowing that while he disagreed with Trump’s appointment of white nationalist Stephen Bannon to the position of White House chief strategist, the President-elect had the right to put whomever he wanted into his administration, I knew such Democrats would not show any spine without being pushed. (My new Representative-elect, George Latimer, is apparently saying he wants to work with Trump on tax cuts and infrastructure issues.)

It seems we are in a similar time now.

For starters, why aren’t Democrats loudly protesting Trump’s appointment of Fox Weekend news host Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense? By this point in November 2016, a rump group of Democrats had managed to figure out that Stephen Bannon was a dangerous white nationalist with close ties to anti-semites, neo-Nazis, KKKers , vocally protesting his appointment in an open letter to Trump. Hegseth is getting some heat for accusations of rape, but he’s not just a misogynist, he wants a “holy war” against Americans who disagree with him because “God wills it.” (For more on Hegseth, read Jeff Sharlet’s post on his books.)

I get that everyone wishes we could get to some mythic “common ground” and that such statements are ritualistic. I also get that trying to keep up with the flood of horrible Trump appointments and statements is like trying to drink from a fire hose connected to the wrong end of a sewage treatment plant. But you can’t stop a flood of shit with silence or calls for “common ground” with the people upstream crapping into the river.

Mass Hallucination

According to a Data for Progress poll done in late October, public opinion on mass deportations varies widely depending on how the question is asked.

Ground Game Ground Truth

Author and organizer Astra Taylor has a must-read piece in The Guardian about why Trump’s evident lack of a traditional get-out-the-vote operation didn’t matter. In a nutshell, it’s because the Right has been hard at work for years organizing people year-round. She writes:

When Democrats insist that Trump had no ground game, they ignore the right wing’s investment and presence in spaces that are not purely electoral and that engage people year-round, including groups like Libre, along with the evangelical churches and student groups that increasingly function as social clubs recruiting people to the Maga cause. As Tiffany Dena Loftin details in the new issue of the Black leftist magazine Hammer & Hope, the right wing has spent decades systematically attacking and defunding progressive student unions and networks and building up their conservative counterparts. The Charlie Kirk-founded and Republican billionaire-funded Turning Point USA claims to have “freedom chapters” at more than 3,500 colleges and high schools, which offer young conservatives a sense of belonging and community, leadership development, and pathways to political engagement, of which get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are just one part. The Trump campaign built on this model, providing its base with community and purpose and organizing them, in turn, to mobilize others to turn out and vote…. Mobilizing people to turn out and cast a ballot is not nearly as powerful as organizing people to adopt an identity, commit to a cause, and join a collective effort to push for change.

As a counter-example, Taylor points to Firelands Workers United, a community organization in rural Washington that fights for good jobs, housing, healthcare and fair taxes and emphasizes shared class interests over partisan loyalties. “This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. People out here are frustrated with any politician who sides with the rich over working people,” the group’s co-founder Stina Janssen, told her. She writes:

Firelands members collaborate across very different backgrounds. A Washington-born retired corrections officer and a Latin American immigrant mill worker would canvas together and develop a real relationship. They, in turn, would connect with voters over anger at billionaires and inequality and invite them into a movement, opening space for people’s assumptions and attitudes to change. “There would not have been a chance to build these friendships or for the people born here to learn and hear people’s immigration stories with the same level of curiosity without this close work together,” Janssen said.

Now the group’s non-immigrant members understand what it means for someone to be facing deportation. And immigrant members feel less alone as they understand they are not the only people struggling with healthcare or rent. “Our organizing approach held and affirmed everyone’s suffering and helped people see how their experiences were tied together,” Janssen explained. This “dignity-based solidarity”, as Janssen calls it, isn’t about asking people to check their privilege. It’s rooted in the recognition that we all suffer and deserve better: making ends meet shouldn’t be this hard for me or for you.

Taylor goes on to highlight the work of groups like Way to Win and the Movement Voter Project, which have tried mightily to shift money towards these kinds of programs. “What if, instead of spending millions to keep cable news on life support, you had split that money between strategically building up local organizing and online influencer organizing?” MVP founder Billy Wimsatt asked her. He pointed to Faith in Minnesota, a multi-faith, multi-racial, statewide organization that organizes diverse communities around issues like housing affordability. Faith in Minnesota volunteers had thousands of conversations with voters and helped protect the state house from flipping to Republicans, Taylor notes. “Real organizing wins. Superficial mobilizing loses,” Wimsatt concludes.

—See also this interview of Doran Schrantz of Faith in Minnesota by Hahrie Hahn, explaining how they built a powerful multiracial coalition focused on delivering a shared governing agenda.

Crossroads of Change

Speaking of Hahrie Hahn, I can’t praise enough her new book, Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church, highly enough. It focuses on the Crossroads evangelical mega-church in Cincinnati and a deep organizing project launched inside it by an inter-racial group of church leaders and lay members in the mid-2010s. Hahn got interested in the church in part because in 2016, at the same time that Trump won Ohio by eight points, a ballot initiative that sought to increase local taxes in order to fund universal pre-K education with targeted resources for poor, mostly Black communities, won by 24 points. “Thousands of voters who supported Trump must have also supported [this initiative],” she writes. “I wanted to learn more.”

The book offers an intimate portrait of evangelism (something I personally know very little about) and especially a particular type of mega-church aimed at attracting “seekers” – people who want to say “yes to God” but “no to religion.” And it does a fantastic job of conveying the complexity of a multi-racial but white-dominated church trying to wrestle with the realities of structural racism during a period of rising polarization. As Hahn writes, “Crossroads was a growing megachurch in a divided city in a divided state in a divided nation in 2016. It sought the middle ground, not justice.” So Undivided will not leave you with an unequivocally happy ending.

But what it does do is show the difference between transactional “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) programs that do little if anything to change actual behavior and efforts that aim to build new “social relationships” across divides, where people expect their interactions to continue. Undivided, the name Crossroads’ organizers gave to their six-week immersion program in confronting racism, put church members into small groups that worked together on genuinely challenging their own assumptions. Where it worked, Hahn shows, it created new circles of belonging and friendship that led participants on journeys that caused them to change their priorities, their jobs and their lives. But, she also shows, not every small group that went through the Undivided program clicked.

If you are a non-believing secularist like me, one of the most challenging parts of reading Undivided will be in seeing how much a personal desire to find God (or, in this case, Jesus) was the key that got so many Crossroads members on the path to standing up for justice. That yearning for meaning, for a sense that one’s purpose in life was tied to something bigger like bringing God’s Kingdom to Earth, shows up again and again in the stories Hahn tells as four participants in the Undivided program (two Black, two white, a man and a woman each) confront their own histories and challenges. Having a larger purpose matters.

Thinking Longer Term

Attend: On December 3 at 4:00pm ET, the Boston Review is hosting a free webinar on “What Comes Next” with Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell, political scientists Lee Drutman and Sam Rosenfeld, political strategist Doran Schrantz, legal scholar Tabatha Abu El-Haj, and political counsel Cerin Lindgrensavage. They will be discussing the election, pathologies of the two-party system, voter agency, and possibilities for fusion voting as a solution (at least in part) to what ails us.

End Times

Games to play while we are on strike.

One of the things I am thankful for is all of you, my dear readers. Every week I hear back from enough of you to keep writing this thing. May you have a restful and rejuvenating Thanksgiving holiday, hopefully with family and friends. See you next week!