(Osita Nwanevu is great.)
Osita Nwanevu/November 25, 2020
The Democrats’ Maddening Cowardice Is Carrying Over into the Biden Era
Party leaders have met Trump’s postelection sabotage with stunning
meekness. Will they stop running from fights?
The debate over how to characterize what the country’s been put through
over the past three weeks will carry on for the rest of our lives. And
Donald Trump’s waddle through the stages of grief is sure to last
through January. But his election gambit is functionally over. Results
have been certified in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; the General
Services Administration has formally recognized Joe Biden as
president-elect; and the transition team finally has a shiny, new
dot-gov email address that means more, materially speaking, than any
concession speech.
Even in the conservative press, prominent figures have thrown in the
towel. On Monday night, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham told her viewers that
Biden will be inaugurated in January, “unless the legal situation
changes in a dramatic and unlikely manner.” Earlier that day, Rush
Limbaugh castigated Trump’s legal team for last week’s bizarre press
conference. “You call a gigantic press conference like that—one that
lasts an hour—and you announce massive bombshells, then you better have
some bombshells,” he said. “There better be something at that press
conference other than what we got, such as a hacker who can tell us,
‘Yep, everything these guys have said is true. I’ve looked into it. I’ve
run the software, I’ve hacked this, I’ve hacked that.’ Even put him
behind a screen, if you want to protect his identity.”
The efforts now in conservative media to talk the base back down to
reality are only coming after weeks of rhetoric aimed at shooting
imaginations into high orbit in the first place—rhetoric a number of
prominent Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz and House Minority
Leader Kevin McCarthy, actively indulged in. And while a few Trump
critics have piped up, most other Republicans in Congress have either
tersely endorsed Trump’s complaints or kept mum about them, as Hawaii
Senator Brian Schatz said last week. “Republican Senators are awfully
quiet during this ongoing tinpot dictator act but they still think they
deserve to run the Senate,” he tweeted. “If this were happening in
Central America all of these silent Senators would be proposing sanctions.”
But in truth, Republican senators aren’t the only ones who’ve been
awfully quiet about all that’s been going on. Where have the Democrats
been? Biden has been talking about the transition at every turn; there
have been statements here and there from Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and their respective caucuses
denouncing the administration and demanding to hear from the GSA about
the delayed transition. But this historic and extraordinary effort to
overturn the results of an American presidential election probably
should have been met with a historic and extraordinary response from the
party that won it—Democrats, as a unit, going to the press and the
public every day demanding Trump’s concession and waxing lyrical about
American democracy. Instead, Democratic leaders spent much of the last
few weeks training their fire on progressives and policing activists.
Last week, CNN’s Manu Raju reported that Democratic reticence has been
intentional. “Democrats are trying to avoid turning Trump’s refusal to
accept the election results into a partisan fight, believing Trump will
be in an untenable position if more Republicans join their calls to let
the transition officially begin as the President’s legal case continues
to collapse and states begin certifying the election results,” he wrote.
“Moreover, seeking to enforce subpoenas to administration officials who
play a key role in the transition process could take weeks to play out
if the White House fights them, potentially going beyond January 20,
when Biden will be sworn into office, Democrats say.”
None of this should come as any surprise. Democrats also intentionally
dragged their heels on Trump’s impeachment for as long as they could,
even after the long-awaited and vaunted Mueller investigation produced
evidence of obstruction of justice, on precisely the same grounds: Wait
for Republicans to jump in, and the party will come off looking better
for its patience, for avoiding legal messiness, and for establishing a
bipartisan front. “Impeachment is so divisive to the country,” Pelosi
told The Washington Post in March 2019, “that unless there’s something
so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should
go down that path because it divides the country.” Months later, her
hand was forced by the revelation Trump had tried to coerce Ukraine into
investigating Hunter Biden.
There’s nothing Democrats can do—or avoid doing—to bridge the partisan
divide. Our very situation now is proof of this. Nothing about Biden’s
pitch for unity and bipartisanship has discouraged the right from
believing or pretending to believe that he, and maybe the Venezuelans,
have perpetrated a massive fraud against the American people. But the
dream of comity lives on: Polls have shown that the public and Democrats
especially are still invested in bipartisanship as a political value,
and revulsion for Trump hasn’t quite rubbed off on the Republican Party
as a whole, particularly among the moderate suburbanites who swung so
dramatically for Biden in the election. With Trump gone, these voters
could swing back toward a more ordinary Republican just as
dramatically—a possibility foreshadowed not only by Republicans’
surprisingly good performance down-ballot this year but in the sky-high
popularity of blue-state Republican moderates like Massachusetts’s
Charlie Baker and Maryland’s Larry Hogan. And the erosion in Democratic
support among Hispanic and Black voters will obviously remain cause for
concern. If notable shares of each were willing to back Trump despite
his overt bigotry, how might more subdued conservatives perform in the
years ahead?
The opposition party will end its term out of the White House without
having done much to engender sustained opposition to the GOP. Now that
task will fall to activists on the outside. One drama that’s played out
in the background of the month’s events should be instructive for them.
The legal profession has been roiled since the election by a movement
against the firms Porter Wright and Jones Day, which have been
representing the Trump campaign in its frivolous lawsuits. Lawyers were
subjected to pressure campaigns, law students pledged not to work at
either firm, and the specter was raised of a boycott against Jones Day’s
other major clients, including General Motors. There were even pickets
outside both firms’ offices. And all of this has seemingly yielded
results. Earlier this month, Porter Wright abandoned one of Trump’s
lawsuits, and Jones Day has reportedly decided not to take on any more
election cases.
This was white-collar warfare, but there’s a broad lesson, too.
Organizers who understood the Trump campaign as an institution dependent
on other institutions and firms devised and carried out a strategy to
undermine those relationships; their success has evidently had a
concrete impact on Trump’s shenanigans. There’s no reason why the same
kind of approach can’t be taken against the Republican Party as a whole.
Its party organizations, the sponsors of its events, the firms that
service it—the web of interdependencies in conservative politics is a
web of potential pressure points. If Democrats can’t weaken the GOP
through democratic reforms in Congress, and are unwilling to rally the
public against it, activists should do what they can outside the halls
of power with their own bullhorns and their own ingenuity.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#3908): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3908
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78528270/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
