There’s lots of wisdom to be gained from listening to Bob Dylan, but I rank
We live in a political world
as one of the more valuable insights the Bard of Hibbing has to offer
. How is power distributed? Who gets to claim authority over the lives of others, and on what grounds? How do people perceive, experience, wield or resist that authority? The world is indeed a political place. Name any aspect of life, and there’s politics behind it, if you care to look.
Politics understandably has a pejorative connotation for most—our first associations with it are conflict, division, argument, corruption, and the like. But I would argue that in democratic-republican societies—like ours in theory, where citizenship is fully honored and the public holds final authority—the understanding that everything is political is actually empowering, and should be embraced.
And so I’m instinctively skeptical whenever someone asserts a phrase like let’s keep politics out of this. Even that is a political statement; it implies I like things the way they are, please do not challenge.
To be fair, I think often when people express this idea what they usually mean is let’s keep partisanship out of things, which is sometimes correct. But I don’t think that’s what Donald Trump meant when he accused Joe Biden of “playing politics” by calling for a three-month national mask mandate. If we’ve learned anything in the pandemic, it’s just how pervasive politics are in our lives, and how harmful denying that reality can be. Wearing a mask during a pandemic is political—it communicates that science guides your choices, that you care for the welfare of others. That’s a political orientation, and a good one.
Donald Trump’s ascension to the apex of the Republican Party—made possible only by the complicity and meek submission of the Party’s leaders and general members—has severely tested the nation and its institutions
. Whether American democracy will withstand this test—as Washington and Lincoln and others foretold, a test that has come from within—remains an open question. Since 2016, there have been successes—the Mueller investigation (despite some valid criticisms), the House’s impeachment, the 2018 midterms—but those successes have been ultimately undercut by Senate Republicans. Ultimately, the final answer will be decided by this November’s election, already occurring in precarious circumstances. Indeed, one can argue that the nation’s fate being delegated to voters—and more worryingly, the electoral college—is the biggest evidence of the overall failure of our governing institutions during the age of Trump.
His open sabotage of the United States Postal Service presents perhaps the decisive tipping point of the times. The situation is paradoxical: on the one hand, this is the exact type of authoritarian maneuver that can fell a democracy; on the other, because Trump always says the quiet part out loud, because the Postal Service is a cherished national institution, and because this is playing out in full public view, it may be an epic blunder that ignites an already angry public and ultimately delivers Joe Biden a decisive, unquestionable victory. (I imagine Trump’s team alerted him of this, given how yesterday he began reversing course).
I keep returning to the inescapable fact that there is no substantive argument being made for Trump’s reelection beyond racial animus and the other usual resentments; the campaign is more focused on suppressing votes than persuading voters.
In my last update I listed actions voters can take to thwart Trump’s attempt to sow confusion and chaos over the election
. There’s a growing body of literature on citizens’ responsibilities in the coming months that I will continue to share. Here’s a good summation from an Iowa state senator:
I want to draw particular attention to #4 under What You Can Do. If the worst case scenarios play out—the election is not decided on November 3rd, or 4th, or 5th… the mail fails, the courts get involved—then we will be called to put aside all other concerns, be citizens first, and take to the streets until the democratic process is fully honored.
If you’ve been following the news from Europe, the people of Belarus are currently showing us how it is done, with continual demonstrations, strikes, and creative protests.
The state of play in Belarus offers some parallels to our own situation, and perhaps a preview of where we could be if things go poorly. Belarus has suffered under the brutal authoritarian rule of Alexander Lukashenko for 26 years. Lukashenko is an archetypal Eastern European strongman of the post-Soviet era: a former Communist party officer, he has successfully repressed democratic aspirations, primarily by subverting elections, often with the assistance of fellow anti-open society autocrat Vladimir Putin.
Putin and Lukashenko are indeed of the same type. As Tony Judt writes in Postwar (2005), with the old order destroyed, many former Communist authoritarians—KGB men, party hacks, army officers— found new life in post-Soviet nationalist movements. “Nationalism and Communism had more in common with one another than either had with democracy,” Judt writes. “Soviet Communism and traditional nationalists had a common foe—capitalism, or ‘the West.’”
Familiarly, Judt goes on to describe how these nationalists were able to exploit feelings of “resentment with nostalgia” by constantly referencing “heritage”, expressing grievance for a stolen past, and speaking of foreign policy in terms of “a wish to recover some international respect.”
The current American president, of course, is an ardent admirer of this brand of politics, and resembles more closely the Eastern European Autocrat than the American President. Indeed, this has always been the underlying issue with Trump’s ties to Russia, which where further illuminated this week. The ties are real and nefarious, but to me the truly alarming aspect of is Trump’s affinity for and practice of Putin’s model of autocratic-oligarchy. This goes back to my thesis that Trump is instinctively and intuitively anti-democratic, an idea articulated by Bernie Sanders in his excellent convention speech. Sanders rose to the moment as the first speaker at the convention to plainly and accurately describe the stakes in a broader historical context. (This and Barack Obama’s John Lewis eulogy are the two essential speeches of 2020).
The filibuster has been in the news recently, with Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama coming out in support of its abolition during the campaign
. On the same subject, I highly recommend this episode of the Lawfare podcast with guests Molly Reynolds and Adam Jentleson. Jentleson, Harry Reid’s former chief of staff, has a book coming out in January about the brokenness of the Senate and the necessity of abolishing the filibuster to save the institution; he’s one of the better Twitter follows for political insight.
Parliamentary procedure is an intentionally confusing topic, and Jentleson and Reynolds do a nice job breaking it down. They cover in detail these key points about the filibuster:
1. It was not a part of the Founders’ plan.
2. It became a tool of nullification for the slave states.
3. It later was used to thwart civil rights legislation in the 1940s and 50s.
4. Senate parliamentary rules no longer require Mr. Smith Goes To Washington-style marathons to filibuster (whatever our romantic notions of filibustering may be, it’s vastly overstated).
5. It effectively thwarted President Obama’s agenda when Democrats had a 56-42 majority.
The big takeaway: the filibuster has been overwhelmingly used as an anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic tool, one that has stifled rather than honored the preferences and will of American voters.
Lastly, this week’s installment in the ongoing series
Will The Republican Party Moderate?
Stock is trending down. (Btw—how do you get banned from Venmo?)
If you read one thing this week
:
Abdul El-Sayed writes up the case for Biden as LBJ.
What I’m listening to:
I am really enjoying the three seasons of The Detroit History Podcast. This a very well produced, easily digestible podcast, and it does a compelling job of interrogating and recontextualizing familiar stories and figures from Detroit.
One example: I was of course familiar with Coleman Young, Detroit’s mayor from 1974 - 1994, but mostly as a vaguely reviled figure, pointed to by white suburbanites as the embodiment of Detroit’s chronic mismanagement. But an episode of this podcast highlights an affair from Young’s early career of which I was completely ignorant: his remarkable testimony and defiance of Joe McCarthy’s HUAC. Listening to clips of the exchanges and barbs traded by Young and the committee feels incredibly potent and current. Young——then just 33 years old, a former Tuskegee Airman with no political standing to speak of—challenges the very notion of “unAmerican” by calling out representatives from the South for Jim Crow suppression and terrorism of Black voters; he also corrects a Southern rep’s dubious mispronunciation of “negro.” It’s pretty thrilling stuff, and certainly offers perspective on Young and why he was an irreproachable figure to many in the city.
Bookmarked Tweet of the Week
:
Quiet part out loud.