Bill Kristol: Warrior for Light

One of my favorite subplots of what has been an overall awful political season has been the redemption arc of Bill Kristol.

For people of my generation or a bit older, it is genuinely hilarious to watch him sound not just like a NeverTrumper, but as a full-blast Resistance Lib.

At one level this didn't come completely out of nowhere. Back in 2016, I predicted the possibility that the neoconservatives might return to the Democratic fold. For those who know their history, neocons were liberals once (as I said then -- not to mix media properties -- this is much like Saruman describing the orcs: "they were elves, once"). They turned away from the progressive movement based on aversion to what they saw as reflexive anti-westernism and a deep, almost messianic, belief in America's ability to spread democracy and liberal values worldwide. 

The latter commitment in particular took them to some pretty dark places, and a lot of, shall we say, "compromises" occurred along the way. But as we reach a crisis point for democracy here at home, some of them -- Kristol being the most prominent -- reached back deep into themselves and remembered what nominally was motivating them as idealistic youngsters.

It's not, of course, like Kristol has some profound influence on the right these days (or the left, or the center). And it should be obvious that none of this requires one to view Kristol as some sort of heroic figure or forget his past "interventions" (forgive the pun).

But as a narrative arc, I can't help but enjoy watching it. And there's so little joy these days; please don't begrudge me for indulging in this one.

Nothing Else Like It

In one sense, what we're going through in America is highly reminiscent of other countries which have recently gone through authoritarian regresses. Hungary, India, Israel, the Philippines, and Brazil, to name a few, all have seen liberal democratic institutions decay in the face of far-right populist demagogues.

I've found this weirdly comforting -- not because what's happened in those countries hasn't been awful, but because somehow knowing this sort of thing doesn't stand outside history is reassuring. It's not the end of time, it is a thing happening in time.

Yet even this reassurance is, I fear, somewhat misleading. Because while it may be true that Hungary, India, Israel, etc. have gone through this before; and even true that (some of) these countries have or will come out the other side, what we have not ever seen is a global hegemon going through this sort of regression. Without understating the havoc that a recklessly authoritarian India or Israel can wreak on a local or even regional scale, they're unlikely to take down the entire international order with them. An out-of-control America could tank the global economy, could cause anarchic chaos to break out all over the planet, could set off a literal World War III. There's literally been nothing like it.

And domestically, with the possible exception of the Redemption-era South, we haven't in American history seen as rapid an authoritarian rollback of democratic equality and rule of law as what the Trump administration has inaugurated in its first week(!) in office. Every aspect of our constitutional order feels like it under attack, all at once, and nobody really knows how to respond.

This uncertainty, unfortunately, is sometimes paired with a strangely confident certainty that purports to know exactly how to respond -- which is to say, "something not what we're doing now."

At one level, I understand where this frustration is coming from -- "what we're doing now" can't be the right response, because it's not stopping things that need to be stopped. At another level, it really does elide the brute reality that nobody knows exactly what the most effective response is to Trump's blitzkrieg fascism. For example, I saw a report that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) was taking the stance that Democrats should ignore Trump's "flood the zone" tactics and focus, laser-like, on the economic damage he was wreaking. I also saw many panning this tactic as leaving many critical issues unaddressed while missing opportunities to make hay out of massively unpopular oversteps that weren't clearly economic. I certainly see the weight of this critique, but I also understand the other side -- that trying to cover everything will inevitably result in an unfocused, chaotic response that lacks a clear narrative and just reinforces a "Dems in disarray" sensibility. How do I resolve that tension? I'm not sure -- and to be blunt, I think most people are unsure too.

My best proposal is this: the important thing is to keep fighting. The where or when or how is far less important than that it happens at all. This means I do agree wholeheartedly with the stance that Democrats' job is to be the opposition party and not give any free inches to Republican policies. But beyond that, I'm not sure the best use of our energy is engaging in internal sniping regarding who is prioritizing what messaging or narrative point best.

Is that a possible line to hold? I don't know. Is it even the best line to hold? I don't know! We're in new territory here. There's been nothing else like it.

We Failed

We failed.

Part of being in a democratic society is that we have a collective responsibility towards our fellows, and to the greater health of our democracy. "A republic, if you can keep it." And we failed. We encountered the most basic test of democracy imaginable since the Civil War -- how to respond to an outright insurrectionist force in the center of our political life -- and we failed.

The "we" is both broad and narrow -- it includes the American citizenry as a a whole, but also the more particular institutions that had more specified tasks centered around militating against and responding to the rise of fascism in this country. The media. The judiciary. The legal community. Law enforcement.  Some of these institutions I'm a part of, and so I include myself in all levels of the "we" who failed. But I'm not interested in assigning blame, I am just stating fact: We specifically failed, and then we, generally, failed.

There are so many who were failed yesterday, and I am wracked with guilt that we failed them. It's no good to say it is not my fault -- I know it mostly isn't -- but collective responsibility is the burden we share as members of a democratic polity, and that means that this failure lands on me as much as everyone. Part of the politics that won yesterday were that of "I got mine, so fuck you", and at the very least I refuse to indulge in that abandonment of responsibility. We should feel bad about those we've abandoned, left vulnerable, marginalized, and excluded. We did a bad thing.

Not that any of us should have any confidence as to which side of the line we'll find ourselves. The cruelties that are coming may not be distributed evenly, but they also won't track perfectly predictable patterns either. Certainly, I have little optimism that "Jewish professor who works on antisemitism" is going to be a fun social position to occupy for the next four years. Maybe I'll skate by unfazed, or maybe a hate campaign will drive me out of my job. Maybe my kid will enjoy his local preschool, or maybe my kid will get sick from avoidable illness because he wasn't allowed to get a vaccination. Who knows! Anything can happen, to any of us. And if it does, we can be absolutely assured that the Trump administration and the coalition that brought him to power will not care. They will not care if you thought yourself one of them, and they certainly won't care if you thought yourself one of us.

We will soon see (it's no doubt already starting) various stories and narratives explaining why exactly we failed, and who exactly is responsible for the failings. I mostly don't want to partake at this time (90% of them will be variations on "if only we did the things I was already urging us to do!"), but if I were to explain this outcome, it is the story reflected in this post: people were just tired of fighting against fascism, and decided to give in. They hope that if they just align themselves with the authoritarianism, they'll be left alone. They can live a boring, normal life under authoritarian rule. Even among the populations that seem most obviously targeted, there's a tendency to say "he ain't talkin' about me!" Why would he? I'm not a criminal, I'm not a threat, I'm just here living my life. The real risk is poking my head up, so better to keep it down and comply in advance.

That's part of the story, but I do want to echo the point made by others: that at root many, many Americans wanted this. They want the cruelty, they want the viciousness, they want the lawlessness, they want the insurrectionism. It may be (likely is) the product of a sort of naivete -- surely the leopards won't eat my face -- but we should take it seriously: the hurt and pain that is about to rain down on so many Americans (and so many others around the world) is desired. 

This is a self-imposed puzzle the media was never able to resolve: it insisted that we had to understand Trump voters, but then refused to actually understand them because doing so felt impolite, instead concocting a series of "respectable" stories about them ("economic anxiety") so as to avoid reckoning with what they actually want. The complaints of "media bias" against Trump voters is laughable: I'm never more sympathetic to Trumpers than when I'm reading about them in the New York Times, where all their grievances and hostility and hate are laundered through gentle cycles and explained as a rough-edged byproduct of the most understandable human needs and frailties. When that filter is removed and I encounter Trump backers directly, it is immediately obvious that this story of them somehow being coerced into hatred is nonsense. They want detention camps, they want to obliterate public health programs, they want schools to be ideological indoctrination centers, they want to be fed lurid conspiracies about the Jews and the Blacks and the Immigrants and the Communists, they want their charismatic leaders to break the law with impunity and they want their enemies to be harassed and thrown outside the protections of the constitutional order.  There isn't some alchemical process where "economic anxiety" explains and apologizes for this. This is what they want, and we should have enough respect for them and us to describe it honestly.

And it will be resilient -- far more resilient than I think even now we can comprehend.  They will laugh as the leopard eats their neighbor's face, and then some number of them will be stunned, not just that the leopard turns on them, but that the people they were laughing with a moment earlier keep on laughing as it eats their face. There is no actual solidarity here, just an enjoyment of the cruelty and enjoyment of finding oneself on the right side of the cruelty, and there is perverse power in that -- your buddy next to you might get betrayed in an instant and it won't move the needle an inch. They will keep laughing even when their fellows are being hurt, so certainly they will keep laughing straight through our marches and protests and rage. It is so, so hard to dislodge this cancer once it gets its claws into power, and it is so much worse when it obtains power the second time. From Hugo Chavez to Viktor Orban, "the second time is worse."

Because this time, there will be no guardrails. This time, the institutions are already in place to smash the dissidents. This time, losing is not an option. And this time, the Republican Party has already reeducated itself to comply utterly and without hesitation. I doubt Susan Collins will even bother to furrow her brow. There is not a single Republican at any elected office anywhere in America I trust to impose any check or limit on any Trump policy that does not personally affect them -- and I mean that with zero limitations. No matter how extreme, no matter how norm- or rule-breaking, no matter how cataclysmic, the Republican Party is poised to march in jack-booted lockstep. And again, in those rare moments where one single Republican does have a personal stake and a personal connection that prompts them to idiosyncratically step out, they will find themselves utterly and entirely alone. Nobody will join them, just as they will not join the next colleague down the row when that one finds their one issue they wish to speak out on. Every element of the governmental and political apparatus will have one and only one objective: to promote the interests of the authoritarian. That's what we are facing down.

It hurts to fail, when the price of failure is so steep. It hurts to have a vision of a better future, and witness it disintegrate with no clear plan of how to win it back. It hurts to care this deeply about the future of our democracy, and watch everything unravel. It hurts so much, I can almost sympathize with deciding ... not to care -- to keep one's head down, and just acquiesce to what is happening, in the hope of being left alone in contented apathy and ignorance.

But to be a responsible citizen means to resist that impulse. And on this day of catastrophic failure, that is one failure I will not accept from myself.

Giving In to Fascism

"We have to fight the impatience with the pace of change that makes us look nostalgically on the days of the Empire. Yes, there might have been a bit more food available. Yes, power outages might have been fewer. Yes, you might have been insulated from the misery of others--but at what cost? The security you thought you had froze into an icy lump of fear in your gut whenever you saw stormtroopers walking in your direction. With the liberation of Coruscant that fear can melt, but if you forget it once existed and decide things were not so bad under the Emperor, you'll be well on your way to inviting it back."

-- Wedge Antilles, "X-Wing: The Krytos Trap" 

I've been reflecting on why it is that so many Americans are so willing to just accept the return of the thuggish brand of fascist authoritarianism embodied by Donald Trump. Of course, the answer for some is "because they're excited about it!" But a substantial portion of persons who are considering voting for Trump, or are going to sit out voting against him, don't seem enthusiastic about it. They bemoan the "incivility", they look askance on the targeting of minorities, they wish politicians would focus on "solving problems" rather than political stunts. They really, truly, don't seem to like the political world Donald Trump has wrought and promises to further entrench. And yet, they seem resigned to, if not accommodating towards, a man who epitomizes crass bluster, chauvinistic bigotry, and theatrical grandstanding. Why?

I always thought the Wedge Antilles quote above (like everything about Wedge) was helpful (though it actually gives Trumpism too much credit -- we don't have less food, or more power outages, or any thing of the sort, under Biden compared to Trump. Overwhelmingly, life is better on most tangible metrics for most regular Americans under Biden than Trump!). With even a little distance, the terribleness of living under Trump fades -- everyone reading this, by definition, survived it -- while the stresses of the present loom larger. Eventually, it all starts blending together: yeah, things weren't great then, but on the other hand, things aren't great now either. What's the difference? Why stress? This, incidentally, is why I deeply and fervently believe that all "both parties are the same!" caterwauling is inherently a handmaiden of fascism. Arendt's core insight that the origins of totalitarianism lie not in people believing lies, but becoming indifferent towards lying (because after all, don't all politicians lie?), looms large here. The two parties are not the same, and pretending like they are is a huge part of the permission structure that lets people accommodate themselves to the likes of Donald Trump.

Another part of the answer is exhaustion. Trumpism requires responsible citizens to be "on" far more frequently than many are used to, locked in a pitched struggle of the highest stakes. As a polity, we literally fought off an insurrection attempt, and by a narrower margin than any would care to admit -- the inability to impose any tangible consequences on the ringleaders, and the soaring political fortunes of the cheerleaders, bodes exceptionally poorly for the inevitable next attempt. And just a few years after we barely managed to scrape by hanging on to the most basic feature of American democracy -- the winner of the election taking office -- we're faced with having to do that pitched battle all over again? People are tired. They need a break, and Trumpism refuses to give them one. In this context, it is easy -- even, at some level, understandable -- that some would rather just surrender and take their chances. The specter of the loss of democracy feels terrifying, but it's a lot more terrifying if you care about democracy. If you just decide ... not to care anymore -- to resign yourself to the possibility that we'll devolve into a semi-authoritarian quasi-democracy, and preemptively agree that it isn't great but also not the worst thing in the world -- well, isn't that soothing? Isn't that, in its way, a coping mechanism?

One of the mantras of the anti-authoritarian playbook is "don't obey in advance," and while this isn't exactly what's being referred to, it's related. The looming vision of authoritarianism feels so awful, and so terrifying, that we mentally accommodate it in advance -- figure out how we're going to be okay and okay with it. And doing that necessarily and by design eases the path to giving in -- what once may have seemed awful and terrifying, now is merged into the ordinary bumps and travails that afflict all of us in life. It's not that it's good, it's that it's a regular bad, of a kind and category of the bads we're experiencing now, so why subject ourselves to all this extra stress?

And on that note, it has to be said -- and this will be controversial -- that for many of us, life under authoritarianism will go on roughly as normal. This is another point many have harped on: that even under conditions most of us would recognize as dictatorial, people still go to work, have babies, take vacations, hang out with friends, make memories, and so on. Ordinary people live ordinary lives. They may feel that so long as they keep their heads down and don't make waves, they'll be largely left alone -- and more often than not, they'll be right. Even in the most repressive authoritarian states, most people aren't imprisoned, most people aren't executed, most people aren't blacklisted. Most people live a life. The image of the 1984 hellscape does a lot more harm than good.

Now certainly, not everyone fits under the "many" -- there are plenty of people who are most certainly not part of the herrenvolk, who know full well that "keeping their heads down" won't be enough. They are the open and explicit targets of the ascendant authoritarian impulse, and don't have the luxury to play make-believe. For those of us who are not in that category, the question is whether we care enough about our friends and neighbors who are to say "it doesn't matter that I might be able to 'chance it', because democracy is a collective project and they matter to me too."

Yet even for those who do seem to be squarely in the realm of the targets, I would bet that there is more denialism than one might expect. I suspect that many German Jews in the early 1930s, while certainly not thrilled at the rise of Hitler, assumed that "he isn't talking about us." He's looking for the rabble-rousers, the radicals, the resistance. We're just regular people; we're not troubling anyone. And so long as we don't trouble anyone, why would anyone trouble us? Once again, there's that notion that we can just make ourselves "fine" by just deciding that we will be fine. It's a lie -- the security we thought we had turns into an icy lump of fear in our gut the moment that the newly-empowered fascist state turns its eye in our direction -- but pretending it's true lets us temporarily paper over the gnawing anxiety of the present.

So this is part of what we're fighting against -- the notion that it's exhausting and scary and immiserating to fight, and if we just give in and stop resisting we can stop feeling this way, is intoxicating. It'd be so easy to just give up. How do we turn back that tide? I'm not sure. But it needs to happen.

Inventing "Fraud" Isn't Necessary for the GOP's 2024 Robbery Plans

In 2020, Republican politicians made bogus claims of fraud in order to justify attempting to steal an election they lost. But why bother with the "fraud" allegation at all? Why not just attempt the robbery? The answer, presumably, is that claiming fraud -- however spuriously -- was necessary to justify overturning the will of the voters and assigning electoral college voters to a candidate who got fewer votes.

The problem with this strategy was, of course, that the fraud claims were obvious nonsense and every sane observer -- including virtually all judges -- knew it. Insofar as the strategy was based on a flagrant lie, it was vulnerable to rejection once it actually hit the judiciary.

Fast forward a few years, though, and Republicans are coming to a realization: They don't need to claim fraud. They can cut out the middleman entirely and just assert the right to ignore the voters entirely. The claim being developed is a version of the "independent state legislature" doctrine that just asserts that state political officials (themselves often in highly gerrymandered seats that bear no relationship to the popular will) have free reign to decide who gets their state's electoral votes. Their decision need not be in any way constrained by such piddling trivialities like "who the voters of their state actually voted for" -- even in the funhouse mirror sense of "well if you discount the votes that we assert are fraudulent because *mumble mumble brown people*, then the voters actually chose our guy." The new version of the steal is a straight line argument that if the state legislature wants to assign their EVs to Trump, Trump gets them. The people can pound sand.

Unlike the concocted fraud allegations, this is fundamentally a legal assertion -- an extreme, terrifying legal assertion, but a legal assertion all the same. Getting the GOP judiciary to accept it does not depend on forcing judges to deny reality, it just depends on getting the right mix of reactionary nihilists who can issue a chin-stroking pontification about how slave states in 1810 organized their elections with a straight face -- and recent history suggests that a welter of federal court judges will be eager to accommodate them. 

Nonsense fraud claims might gild the lily of this endeavor, but they aren't necessary to the strategy. And for that reason, this strategy for stealing the election is far more likely to succeed than the last one. The 2020 steal attempt was a largely ad hoc, on-the-fly paint splatter thrown together by the least competent attorneys Trump's money could buy in a context where it still was mostly taken for granted that the vote tallies ought determine the winner. In 2024, the GOP establishment will have had time to prepare itself logistically, but also mentally -- it will have come to terms with making the argument that in our allegedly constitutional democracy votes don't have to matter at all (See the Senate! See the electoral college itself! We're a republic, not a democracy!).

Republicans swung as hard as they could in 2020, but they just weren't strong enough to ring the bell. This time around, they'll be trained, toned, and ready. I hope we are too.

The Cycle of Republican Acquiescence To Authoritarianism

If, in 2014, you had told the average Republican they'd endorse what their party was doing from 2016 to 2020, they'd have been appalled. More than appalled -- they'd accuse you of suffering from a sort of derangement syndrome, of viewing the opposing party in such an implausibly demonic light that it rendered you unable to ascribe even a modicum of decency or principle to one's ideological opponents. From nominating a birther for president to the Muslim ban to trying to nullify legally cast ballots, the story of the past four years has been Republicans acceding to racist authoritarianism in cases where -- had it been pitched as a hypothetical prediction -- they'd have sworn up and down "of course we'd never do that!"

What is going on? The answer is straightforward, and it really does trace back to Donald Trump. Once Trump and his campaign endorses one of these illiberal and extreme actions, two things happen for Republicans deciding whether to endorse or oppose them:

1. They're put in a position where opposing the action means standing up to Trump;
2. They're on notice that some significant sector of political elite actors will endorse the decision -- it is no longer the province of the fringe or kooks.

The first factor matters because if there's one thing the last four years have made clear, it's that Republican politicians cannot and will not stand up to Donald Trump. You can find stronger moral backbones in a Bill Cosby Jell-O commercial than in the Republican political class these days. And the second factor matters because it suggests that the action in question may well succeed. It's easy to proudly disavow the thought of stealing an election when you know you won't get away with it. But once it actually becomes a live option, well, then it's a bit more tempting to jump onboard. And even if it doesn't ultimately succeed, the endorsement by a significant segment of mainstream political elites* provides moral cover after the fact -- it becomes the stuff of ordinary partisan dispute rather than an extremist power grab.

And of course, all of this dovetails with the GOP's personal partisan advantage. Put it together, and you have a recipe for Republican acquiescence, one we've seen over and over again for the past four years.

Will we see it once more if Donald Trump tries to steal the election? It's true that just because we've only seen grey ducks so far, that doesn't mean the next duck won't be white. But boy would I not count on the GOP breaking the cycle.

* One of the most frustrating things about how Trumpism has been covered is the refusal of many commentators to identify it as existing as part of elite (in the sense of highly-placed) mainstream (in the sense of carrying considerable public support) politics. When people try to criticize Trumpism, the response often is to act as if his views are "fringe" or "not respectable" or "out there", such that it's a form of nutpicking to even pay attention to them. But they're not fringe! They occupy the Oval Office! They're the dominant force in one of the two major political parties! Trumpism at the moment has far more power in both elite political institutions and mainstream political organizations than does, say, Colin Kaepernick. If you're looking to criticize views that have considerable public influence and purchase, Trumpism should rank far, far higher than whatever example of "performative wokeness" you're currently writing up your forty-fifth column on, and this would be obvious to anyone who remembers that places outside of Brooklyn exist.

Searching for Tikhanovskaya

Belarus just had a presidential election, and incumbent Alexander Lukashenko -- who has held his position since the mid-1990s and is known as "Europe's last dictator" -- was announced the winner with over 80% of the vote.

Nobody (well, nobody but a few especially credulous tankies) believes this figure is accurate, and protests have erupted throughout the country. Meanwhile, Lukashenko's main challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has reportedly gone missing (Tikhanovskaya entered the race after her husband was arrested two days following the announcement of his own presidential run. What a fantastic avenue for feminist advancement!).

What do you think will be the most likely circumstances of Tikhanovskaya's reappearance?

1. She'll emerge from hiding in another European country;
2. Flanked by government "security", she will "voluntarily" announce that she accepts the election results and urge that all Belarussians respect Lukashenko's regime;
3. The government will report the sad news of her suicide -- she "jumped out a window" after only taking 10% of the vote, the poor thing.
4. She'll never reemerge, or in any way be heard from again.

I certainly hope she's okay, and safe, and send my full solidarity with the people of Belarus struggling for freedom and democracy.

UPDATE: And apparently, it's door #1!

Democratically-Elected Dictator Bracket!

It may not be March, but I say it's time for a good old-fashioned tournament! The competition? Democratically-elected authoritarians? Which world leader -- who came to power in a (relatively) open election -- is doing the most to trigger democratic backsliding and creeping authoritarianism in their country?

I'll get to seeding in a second, but first, the rules:

1. Only (relatively) democratically-elected leaders count. So North Korea, China, Belarus, etc., aren't in the pool. There were some judgment calls: Iran's "leader", for example, arguably isn't the "relatively" democratically-elected Rouhani but the completely-unelected Ayatollah; Venezuela's elections really skirt the edge of "relatively". But hey, if these guys were perfect angels, they wouldn't be on the list.
2. This is a "pound-for-pound" tournament, meaning that you should adjust for size. China is simply bigger than Belarus, its leadership has more aggregate opportunity to behave in a thuggish manner. But you should try to weight each leader's authoritarian tendencies proportionally.
3. However, you can take into account the starting points of each country before the current leader came to power -- a leader whose nation was already on shaky democratic footing might get less credit than one who has successfully unraveled what had been a thriving democratic space.

Okay -- the match-ups will be posted as polls on this Twitter thread, but here are the contestants!

1. Vladimir Putin (Russia)

16. Sheikh Hasina (Bangladesh)

2. Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines)

15. Giuseppe Conte (Italy)

3. Hassan Rouhani (Iran)

14. Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico)

4. Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil)

13. Uhuru Kenyatta (Kenya)

5. Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar)

12. Mateusz Morawiecki (Poland)

6. Donald Trump (USA) 

11. Viktor Orban (Hungary)  

7. Nicolas Maduro (Venezuela) 

10. Narendra Modi (India)

8. Recep Erdoğan (Turkey)

9. Bibi Netanyahu (Israel)

Yes, yes, I know -- your favorite wasn't included. Grousing about bubble teams is also a favorite side-game of a tournament.

Anyway, the polls will open shortly, so play away!

Authoritarian Evolution

Following up my post yesterday on how the changing international scene is proving a boon for African liberalization, Daniel Drezner rescues us from crippling optimism by noting how authoritarian regimes have adapted to the new era and found new ways to solidify their grip on power. Route #1: economics. Keep the economy humming, and folks really don't care that they don't get to vote. Route #2: use quasi-Democratic means to ramp up executive power. This appears to be a favorite in South America, where Presidents win office democratically, then host loaded "constitutional conventions" to remake the system to their liking (Drezner cites Bolivia and Ecuador, as well as the narrowly defeated attempt in Venezuela).

It's a good post, and shows that the forces of democracy can't get complacent.