The Blue MAGA Delusion
Until Dems confront reality, things will only get worse.
After an entire nation watched Joe Biden feint and fumble to complete a sentence for an entire presidential debate, the White House press team scrambled to attribute his comatose performance to a cold, listening to his staff too much, not listening to his staff enough, and traveling too much. A similar sentiment has been echoed by Democrat media remoras like Joy Ann Reid or Aaron Rupar or Rachel Maddow, who will post and post about how they’ve dug into the neuroscientific research and can confirm that only an ageist and ableist bigot could look at a pallid slackjawed octogenarian and see a doddering cadaver who struggles to remember what year it is because it is Actually His Stutter that causes him to meander into baffling non-sequiturs like “We beat Medicare!” Days after Biden’s unmitigated dumpster fire, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Some of President Biden’s top donors have latched on to a ‘Star Wars’ analogy aimed at keeping nervous supporters from defecting: President Biden is like Yoda—old and frail yet wise and influential—whereas Donald Trump is like Jabba the Hutt, a gluttonous and powerful gangster.”
It has become a popular progressive media trope to blame the media for Biden’s unpopularity and to insist that outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post act like partisan cheerleaders for the Democratic Party. The media didn’t put Hunter Biden—also a convicted felon with severe conflicts of interest—into the role of chief strategist. The media didn’t make Biden refuse to give a press conference or take a cognitive fitness exam. The media didn’t force the White House media relations team to feed questions to supposedly impartial interviewers. And the media didn’t influence Biden’s failure to remain in touch with Congressional leaders. In the allusive and opaque house style of the Times political reportage, a columnist will kindly suggest that Biden should step down after qualifying that statement with that he is, of course, a good and decent man; meanwhile, the comment section on anything they post will generate an ear-splitting wake of raw noise. Paranoid Democrat loyalists relentlessly type enranged invective and insist that the Paper of Record is on a mission to reelect Donald Trump. The reactions to Biden’s recent interview with George Stephanopoulous were borderline conspiratorial: That ABC was hellbent on embarrassing and attacking Biden, it was a hatchet job, the questions were unduly harsh, the interview was too combative, the lighting was designed to make Biden look sickly and old.
There is an archetype of liberal who sneers at Republicans for being absolute brainwashed marks while they maintain a blank and fulsome smugnorance to the compromised and decimated state of the Democratic Party. An insistent and defiant and proudly unteachable stupidity locks this all into place. This aimless search for something to revere is not terribly useful even during circumstances less harrowing than these, but in circumstances as harrowing as these, it is all so spectacularly useless. There is preposterous gullibility to allow the dispiriting specter of Trump to overshadow any sort of painfully overdue reckoning the Democrats should face during this fatalistic drift.
Lib-brained prisoners of Blue Twitter are free to ignore any obvious weaknesses in their team’s existential fight for freedom and democracy, and instead opt to white-knuckle through the choice between a megalomaniac and suffocating gerontocracy. Casualties of conservative media duly stay extremely upset about some vague idea of liberal elites and the mechanisms of the deep state and a cabal of Satanic pedophiles canceling them precisely because they have never really figured out just what they’re supposed to be upset about. But the notion that Democrats only falter because of the nefarious acts of evil interlocutors is now fully enculturated into the base.
These flabby and inert justifications for Biden’s increasingly unignorable senility are not just an issue of implausible talking points from a desperate White House and a press corps that is well-versed in chugging MSDNC Kool-Aid. It is an intellectual and ideological issue—an inability not just to speak but also to think and act in forceful ways. But some malignant forces are denser than others. Not in terms of the end state they are moving towards, but in the gravitational pull they exert upon everyone and everything in their orbit. A political movement that is suitably self-thwarting or backward or otherwise borked can be not just suppressive but actively distorting. The Vote Blue No Matter Who crowd is still convinced of the inherent goodness of the political process, that governance should be reimagined as a series of clever nudges, subtle piecemeal reforms, and inspirational dada. This delirious, delusional belief that Biden and the Democrats are restoring the soul of America and bringing civility back to politics is rooted in a decadent and supremely dangerous abstraction and a fundamental misunderstanding of our political reality.
There is a fundamental conflict between the constitutional system of government and the partisan politics that has risen to work within it. The founding fathers predicted in the Federalist Papers that the checks and balances would reach critical failure if the government was captured by coherent and disciplined factions. The Republicans are full of six-faced glad-handing wheeler-dealers, Evangelical reprobates, and Dickensian corporate bagmen who are aligned with a manifestly corrupt oafish game show host; all of these norms and checks and systems have short-circuited and failed to prevent Trump from inhabiting a consequence-free zone of totalizing shamelessness. His all-devouring narcissism guarantees he will only ever care about whatever gets and keeps Donald Trump on TV, and in the face of his reflexive cruelty and wild avarice, the rest of the GOP has decided that it isn’t in their political interest to see their leader held to account. This fundamental flaw in the Constitution has been disguised for almost 200 years by the vagaries of geography and the happenstance of history: The era of compromise that Biden and Democrats harken back to as a quaint idyl of civility and Getting Things Done was only possible when the Republican and Democratic parties were a hodgepodge of industry and regional coalitions.
The aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement sparked the exodus of reactionary Southern whites away from the Democrats to the Republicans and established the first era of ideologically coherent parties in America. The first real inkling of this began in 1964 when the Solid South voted for Barry Goldwater; it was furthered by Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, but it didn’t filter down through to Congress until the Republican Revolution of 1994, as Newt Gingrich marshaled a new crop of ideologically galvanized Republicans to wipe out the last vestige of Southern Democrats. Mitch McConnell was the first politician to realize the implications of this dynamic, that there is no benefit to compromising with the other side, there is no rational reason to give the party that controls the presidency a “win” on anything, so he made it impossible for Obama to govern and was rewarded with some of the most devastating midterm landslide victories in American history. If anything, McConnell has proven that the Senate leader with a majority or filibuster-proof minority can act like an intransigent shithead and exercise more control over domestic policy than the president.
Republicans have dispensed with the masks and the euphemistic smarm, and have set themselves to openly taking what they want from Americans that they believe don’t deserve to have anything. The ideology that has assumed Trump’s image—and, in the process, effectively replaced the “respectable” version of it that was once understood as conservative politics—is grounded in a very specific and very deep sense of entitlement and impunity. The GOP is in an inherent conflict with American democracy because they are cosseted by the Electoral College and a system that disproportionately overrepresents rural states. And if population distribution trends continue as is, by 2040, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by 30 Senators. Since protecting the Koch Brothers’s fortune is a tough sell on the campaign trail, they paired an unpopular oligarchic agenda with regressive race-baiting and Christian nationalism to stitch together a viable enough minoritarian coalition. If the gap between popular will and the Republican platform grows wide enough, a party that can consistently secure power despite losing the popular vote will eventually turn against democracy. It began with a decades-long crusade to suppress voting rights and manipulate the electorate through aggressive gerrymandering and poll closures, now they are transforming Trump’s ham-handed flirtations with delegitimizing the very idea of elections into the legal groundwork for a subversive coup.
The grim theatricality of all this—Republicans careening wild-eyed and slavering from one conflict to the next, Democrats trailing on behind with their polite concerns—is grimmer when one pauses to note that all this cheesy meliorism and pathologically passive electoral jiujitsu is a self-justifying rationalization of sorts from a party that has been in tactical retreat for decades. The right has a theory of power that is comprised of the cynical manipulation and weaponization of institutions, a shameless disregard for rules, and an absolute willingness to do whatever is necessary to win. Their change all their rationales in a series of frantic and doddering pivots from one isolated and unsupported claim to the next. For all Trump’s talk about making America great again, the Republican project has transparently always been about keeping this tenuous and untenable moment from tipping into any kind of future; it is about maintaining control, whatever that means and whatever the cost.
Republicans are often described as hypocrites, but they understand they’re in a decades-long project to secure minoritarian power, so their behavior isn’t as hypocritical as it is ruthless. The most notable example of this alleged hypocrisy is when Mitch McConnell refused to confirm Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court for 293 days in Obama’s last year as Chief Executive based on an obviously made-up rule about how a president shouldn’t nominate a justice during an election year; of course, McConnell ditched this principle when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away in 2020 and a GOP-controlled Senate rammed through Amy Comey Barret while a presidential election was in full swing. Flip-flopping on a justice confirmation during a presidential election year is fully consistent with the principle of entrenching power at all costs. Republicans have solidified their hold of the Supreme Court and many federal courts, compartmentalizing their power from the ebbs and flows of democratic accountability, and have guaranteed themselves a veto point against any future progressive agenda for decades.
The Republican Party has, for a few generations, touted not just government but governance as inherently evil, so they have reliably tuned institutions inside out and against themselves whenever in power, and so made their strange faith real. All those decades of the Heritage Foundation crafting policy to facilitate the relentless downward pressure of market forces, to enact ever-steepening austerity until it has atrophied our government into a robust and impotent satire of itself. The right has cultivated an intellectual and professional ecosystem of vetted cadres with an abstracted ideological opposition to the very existence of a common good, and they penetrated government and destroyed it from within. The Federalist Society built an injection molding machine in the basement of the RNC that squirts out cottage cheese into the form of these psychopathic hacks that are plopped onto the Supreme Court to rewrite a century’s worth of laws and precedent.
The relentless corruption and ambient grift that have defined the Trump moment from the start can no longer be plausibly pawned off as a deviation from some noble conservative tradition. It now stands exposed for what the Republican Party has stood for since the Reagan Revolution: Raw smash-and-grab looting and button-mashing repetition. The two most recent Supreme Court rulings—the decision to discard the Chevron deference and the decision to grant the president immunity from criminal prosecution—have opened the door to a neutered federal regulatory body and a dictatorial presidency. This is the apotheosis of a crisis of legitimacy and functionality in the American political system. Trump’s brutal legacy is secured in all the worst ways, and the mere fact of his presidency will make any number of treasured old falsehoods about America impossible to believe in the future.
The critical question here is not whether people should Vote Blue No Matter Who, but how left-of-center voters should reevaluate how they think about power and what they should expect and demand from the Democratic Party. Pretending the American system is robust enough to withstand Trump and a perverted Supreme Court, and that all we need to do is vote and get decorum and civility back to Congress is a form of quixotic West Wing cosplay that should’ve been discredited after the Obama Administration.
Democratic leadership seems, for the most part, to have accepted their opponent’s rancid priors as reality and their job as fundamentally janitorial.1 The sneering, barely coded euphemisms and facile legalisms draped over the GOP’s raw and racialized authoritarianism have never seemed more like a cruel taunt, and the cringing calculation and vacuous equivocating of Democratic politics have never felt more futile on its merits. The future that these years of atrophy and anomie and enmity have augured a civic order that’s violent, chaotic, vicious, and far less interested in things like democracy or the free exchange of ideas in practice than it was in theory.
The more that the Church of the Blue Establishment and the liberal punditocracy preach the manic cant of pragmatism, the less these pencil-necked dorks deserve to be taken seriously. All this vexing and rote gibberish about elevating and exalting process over outcome does not relate to the actual functionality of this system. The kind of reforms that are necessary to avoid environmental catastrophe or address wealth inequality or redress historical inequities are now impossible in the face of a stupendously bad-faith negotiating partner that is only growing more perverse and demented. All this talk about Getting Things Done and the importance of developing meticulous wonk policies is wholly irrelevant to the incentive structure of a Republican Party that is actively resembling Trump’s overwhelming coarseness and avarice, which now plays out as a series of sneerings and muggings.
There is more at stake than an election here, it’s a matter of figuring out whether there’s anything the Democrats want to stand for—actual outcomes and actual values—and how much its leaders are willing to fight for them. Abolishing the filibuster, restoring voting rights, and expanding the Supreme Court should be standard positions of any progressive and the foundational plan of action for the Democratic Party moving forward. There has been an institutional or constitutional unwillingness on the part of Democrats to overhaul a superannuated and sclerotic legislative process; their rationale, which doesn’t quite rise to the level of being a counterargument, is the Pelosi/Schumer-approved method of waiting for voters to punish the GOP at the ballot box after presiding over a monster pig shipwreck. The obvious failure of it all has somehow not led to a change in course. Now the whole country is trapped in Trump’s gilded and claustrophobic life; the days repeat themselves as a prolonged precarious moment, arriving first as tragedy, then as farce, and finally as some confounding simultaneous expression of both.
At this moment, doing too little instead of too much would not be just infuriating in the typical Democratic ways but damning and devastating in essential ones. The crystalized threat presented by a hooting demand for a Trumpist dictatorship and a party that is quite willing to go along with it requires a clear and commensurate response. In the absence of an opposition party willing and able to call it what it is and to match its actions with the tonality of saving democracy rhetoric and the tone of this moment, the nation is more or less left to nauseate at the Democrat’s usual tactics. Where and when the press intervenes, it lets Trump spin this slow-rolling crisis into Another Media Thing, rendering this whole episode as just another argument to have on television. It is ghoulish in the most contemporary of ways that preserving this decaying system is even up for discussion. But it’s important to see the effort to counter the Republican’s fascistic skullduggery as not just a political campaign but an existential one, and not the sort of thing you get to do twice.
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Liberals wonder how MAGA Republicans can rationalize themselves into supporting Trump: They’re convinced trans people and wokeism threaten American democracy, so it’s easy to support any depravity Trump does if they think he’s staving off a greater enemy. This is classic fascist mentality.
While MAGA is a genuinely fascist movement and I prefer Democrat governance to Republican, the specter of Trump allows the Democrats to get away with either further tacking to the right, or not having to promise any fundamental change or campaign on policy. Trump famously said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, but look at what a Democratic-controlled government has allowed to happen to Gaza over the last nine months. Blue Team voters have just brushed this aside. What would the Democrats have to do to cross the line?
This is one of your best pieces.
One of your best pieces Sam. Cynically and brutally honest and accurate take on the state of things. Well done.
Are we not entertained?