Status No: Is Getting "Back to Normal" an Option?

We're All Excited But We Don't Know Why

(Author’s Note: The following short essay uses bold text for emphasis. I apologize in advance for the laziness implied by this device, and stipulate that I may pull this piece down later because I have never, as far as I can recall, written anything in which I used bold text for emphasis, that I didn’t eventually regret.)

The new fun thing on the Internet seems to be talking about what Democrats should do next. The consensus is that we need to put together an agenda that mobilizes our base. I don’t disagree. It’s pretty much what I said in my own short piece about next steps for Democrats (cleverly and subversively titled, “Next Steps for Democrats”). But lurking in the background of all my thinking about this is another, more big-picture question:

Can we fix this? What’s a win look like for us, at this point?

Over the years, I’ve semi-seriously suggested a bunch of stuff that everyone agrees is interesting, but crazy. Like, for example, I’ve repeatedly floated the idea that Democrats with the option to work remotely should move to low-population Republican states (Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and maybe Alaska), and organize to turn those states blue. California went for Harris by 3.7 million votes. If even one million high-income remote-working California Democrats disbursed in low-population Republican states, we could own the Senate forever. To which people respond, “Who wants to live in Wyoming?” and that’s fine. I don’t have a remote work option, so Wyoming isn’t an option for me. Who am I to ask of another what I am unwilling or unable to give myself? But… just saying: if you went there with 200,000 people who also like a good cup of coffee and the right to make their own decisions about their bodies, who’s to say you couldn’t build a pretty cool little town? You wouldn’t live in Wyoming, per se. You’d live in Liberty, Wyoming, home of Wyoming’s craft beer and single-malt movement, fair trade coffee roasters, solar panels and wind turbines, and host city for the state’s first-ever Billie Eilish concert, with Taylor Tomlinson opening. You know that thing where some knucklehead on the Internet makes a meme that’s like, “Why can’t the U.S. be more like Iceland?” You and a quarter million of your future friends could build Iceland in Wyoming.

Or here’s another one I’ve suggested a few times: Democrats should introduce, and support, a constitutional amendment allowing any state to secede with a super-majority vote of its population. What does that get us? As I’ve said elsewhere, the dirty little secret about Republicans is that they don’t actually hate public spending. What they hate is taxes. They’ve arranged things so that blue states pay taxes, and red states spend them. Part of what they’re attempting to do right now is to deprive blue states of all political agency, while still having access to their ports, infrastructure and, most importantly, taxes. They’ve hidden this behavior behind decades of rhetoric about social spending, and how domestic social spending is the reason for the deficit. All the while, they funnel trillions of taxpayer dollars to Republican states that generate almost no tax revenues of their own. Voters in those Republican states have fully adopted the rhetoric of Republican politicians, who have convinced them that they’re the ones driving the economy, and Democrats are just along for the ride. A secession amendment would be a massive political judo throw: Republican voters would support the idea, because of the propaganda they’ve already absorbed about how they’d be better off without us; Democrats would create the option to just leave if MAGA goes too far in its plunder of Democratic states.

And sure, that’s crazy talk. I absolutely agree. But I really want to know what the not-crazy goal is right now.

For the past 35 years, we’ve been in this pattern: Republicans spend too much money, cut taxes, drive up the national debt, break things, deregulate things, and screw people over. Democrats come in and spend four to eight years fixing all the broken stuff. So voters never feel the full impact of all the stuff Republicans broke, and Democrats don’t get to spend any time on a more progressive agenda while our people are in office. Then progressives get pissy and stay home in the next election, and the Republicans get back in power so they can break some more stuff.

So what’s the endgame here? Fortyfive and Musk take a rototiller to the federal bureaucracy, the Justice Department, the FBI, the Pentagon — everything — and we’re going to… what? Follow along behind them, sweeping up? Again?

What does that get us, exactly? I’m not saying I don’t want us to do it. I mean, I have questions. But that’s not even the point.

My point is, global climate change is a thing. Russian and Chinese imperialism are real. AI of some form is not only coming, it’s effectively here, and it’s going to blow a giant hole in the middle class. We’ve got microplastics in literally everything, the wild animal population of the world has dropped by 73% in the last 50 years — I mean, hell, you know the list. And our plan is to not move on any of that stuff, because we’re going to be too busy spending the next forever-many-years just trying to keep fascist voters from electing fascist candidates, because the descendants of coal miners in West Virginia (not actual coal miners, mind you) find air that doesn’t give you blacklung culturally offensive and marginalizing?

Republicans stuffed the Garland nomination before Fortyfive was even part of the equation, and they did it against Barack Obama, back when we still supposedly had norms. I’ve mentioned Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s book, How Democracies Die, here before. Their core thesis is that, because no constitution can anticipate every possible problem, the survival of constitutional democracies requires mutual toleration, and institutional forbearance. The Garland nomination abrogated both of those principles. But Mitch McConnell’s tactics in the Garland nomination didn’t just come out of nowhere. They were the result of decades of radicalization of Republican voters, and a populist rebellion in the Republican Party. From about 2000 on, the Republican Party effectively ceased to exist. The Tea Party, which became MAGA, represented a historical break from both the Old Right, and the New Right. We’re calling the current wave the Alt-Right, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that Republicans aren’t a political party anymore. They’re a rebellion. They’re bankrolled by hostile powers. They’re using popular discontent to dismantle the machinery of democratic control of federal power, and create a one-party state. Democrats are trying to beat them by rolling back the changes they make, when we’re in power. But “not-quite-fixing the mess the Republicans made, before Democratic apathy gets us voted out of office” isn’t turning out to be a winning brand. Republicans have already told us, in as many words, that voting won’t be a concern of ours for much longer anyway. Democrats, meanwhile, keep using the word “coup” — then talking about how finding the right news source, or resisting through selective consumerism, is one of the keys to saving the country. I find myself wondering if “coup” means what I think it means.

It all looks, to me, like someone standing in front of an advancing blitzkrieg, and telling everyone to “eat, pray, love” their way through it. I know that sounds overwrought, but I’m honestly not sure why. Yelling fire in a crowded theater isn’t hysterical if the theater’s actually on fire. Am I really the only person (who isn’t running around in a black balaclava with “eat the rich” tattooed on my chest) who smells smoke?

And I know — I know — a lot of people enjoy a good apocalypse scenario, because they’re secretly convinced that, when the world ends, it wipes away all dumb assumptions, petty distinctions, and preconceptions. When those default positions are destroyed, everybody will see how my vision was right all along. “They laughed at my theories in Vienna! They called me mad! The fools. They’ll see — they’ll see who’s mad. Mwahahahaha, etc.” I swear, I’m not that guy. Or at least I don’t think I am. Tankie lefties who start breathing funny and blushing when they talk about other people dying in the name of their revolution drive me nuts. Wars, disruptions, collapses — they’re all a horrific waste of blood and treasure. I’m against that. You want me to vote for any Democrat the next election? Do whatever I can to fight Republicans now? Donate? Volunteer? Stop shopping at Amazon? Cancel my WaPo subscription? Sure. Let’s go. I’ve already done most of it. Didn’t seem to help with shit, but I’m game as hell. I’ll keep trying. I just gotta ask though —

Where’s the endgame? Where’s the sustainable status quo that we’re aiming for here? Spell it out for me, using small words. How are the things we’re doing now going to materially change conditions, to prevent anyone like Musk from gaining access to the federal mainframes, ever again? How will any of it prevent Republicans from running, and electing, another MAGA candidate in 2028. Draw me a picture. Use crayons.

Because, I’ll be honest: the thing that really worries me in all this is that we might not mean anything we’re saying. Like, all this talk about coups, and fascists, and whatever. I believe we’re sincerely upset about it. But I worry that our thus-far-entirely-chickenshit response to all this stems from our own fictions. Like the way Republicans think Democrats are stealing their tax dollars, when really it’s mostly the other way around? I worry that our self-comforting fiction is that we’d never stand for a fascist regime. We wouldn’t stand for a genocide (except when we would) and we wouldn’t stand for slavery (except when we would), concentration camps (except when we would), or race-based mass incarceration and disenfranchisement (except when we would). But maybe fascism isn’t quite the line in the sand that we like to believe it is?Like, pre-war Italian-style fascism? Maybe we, meaning Democrats, could live with that. If you really look at the question with an open mind, I think Bill Clinton was probably closer to Fortyfive than he was to FDR. Not to say Clinton and Fortyfive are the same thing. They aren’t. But they aren’t totally incompatible. Clinton could have governed with a Congress full of MAGAs. He would have been willing to make those compromises. I think more Democrats feel that way than we generally want to admit.

About 25 or 30 years ago, I came up with this idea that I liked to throw around at parties. Basically, I asked, if Hitler hadn’t done the Shoah, or just generally been such a raging anti-Semite, would people — Americans in particular — still think of fascism as a bad thing? I got the idea from something I’d read in this book, Bitter Fruit, The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, by Stephen Schlesinger. The book includes a quotation from the farewell address of Guatemala’s first democratically elected president Juan José Arévalo, delivered in 1951, and it’s worth reading at length:

On the 15th of March 1945, when I ascended to the presidency of the nation, I was possessed by a romantic fire. I was still a believer in the essential nobleness of man, as fervent a believer as the most devout in the sincerity of political doctrines, and inspired by the deep aspiration to help people create their own happiness… I believed then, and I still do, that a nation cannot be free until each and every one of its citizens is free.... To achieve this in Guatemala we had to combat the peculiar economic and social system of the country: of a country in which the culture, politics and economy were in the hands of three hundred families, heirs to the privileges of colonial times, or rented to the foreign factors. . . . The banana magnates, co-nationals of Roosevelt, rebelled against the audacity of a Central American president who gave to his fellow citizens a legal equality with the honorable families of exporters. ... It was then that the schoolteacher, ingenuous and romantic, from the presidency of his country, discovered how perishable, frail and slippery the brilliant international doctrines of democracy and freedom were. It was then, with the deepest despondency and pain . . . that I felt, with consequent indignation, the pressure of that anonymous force that rules, without laws or morals, international relations and the relationships of men....

The war that began in 1939 ended . . . But in the ideological dialogue between the two worlds and two leaders, Roosevelt lost the war. The real victor was Hitler. . . . Little caricatures of Hitler sprang up and multiplied in Europe and here in the Americas. ... It is my personal opinion that the contemporary world is moved by the ideas that served as the foundation on which Hitler rose to power…

I didn’t necessarily agree with Arevalo’s analysis, but I found the premise interesting. Could fascism have won, without anyone noticing? So I started asking people my fascism-without-genocide question. The answers were consistently surprising, but also deeply troubling. Almost nobody I spoke to seemed to have any idea that fascism was defined by anything except genocide. The rare individuals who were even willing to concede the premise almost always responded that a less brutal form of fascism was not that different from what we had at the time, during the Clinton years. Eventually, I set the question aside and went after more immediate, less abstract issues — only to discover, just a year or two ago, that a 1980 book called Friendly Fascism, by Bertram Gross, had already covered the question pretty thoroughly, 15 years before the idea even occurred to me. The book is extremely good, and includes a few fascinatingly accurate predictions about the future of a world ruled by corporations, such as the following passage where Gross essentially anticipates the Internet:

The hypnotizing effect of TV, both mass and elite, can also be augmented by allied developments in modern information processing and dissemination. …[T]he danger is that an additional layer of “cultural ghettoization” might then be superimposed on residential ghettoization. With extensive control “banks” of TV tapes that can be reached by home dialing and with widespread facilities for taping in the home, almost every individual would get a personalized sequence of information injections at any time of the day or night.

Gross’s conclusions basically agreed with Arevalo’s. Fascism was incredibly powerful in the United States, and many other Western democracies. One index case I thought of to highlight this is that, while the U.S. had multiple red scares that divided the nation and destroyed people’s lives, we never had an anti-fascist witch hunt with remotely the same enthusiasm and elite cooperation. Ever. Gross’s book, which was published in June of 1980, predicted many of the policies of the Reagan administration with shocking accuracy, and outlined the ways in which those changes would constitute meaningful travel along the road to a fascist future. The key takeaway of all this isn’t that Fortyfive and the Republicans are fascists; the important point is that they represent the realization of a continuous, decades-long slide to the right. Fortyfive didn’t get elected by 77 million people who just didn’t know any better. He got elected by, like, 1 or 2 million people who just didn’t know any better — and about 75 million fascists.

Here’s the thing I think may be driving a lot of our responses to this: they probably aren’t going to be that bad, for most of us. They probably aren’t going to be Nazis bad. They probably won’t even stay Fortyfive bad. When Fortyfive goes, what we’ll probably end up with is the government Mitch McConnell dreams of. Blue states will be allowed to do most of our blue state stuff, but we’ll be indirectly punished for it, by being cut off from federal block grants, federal disaster aid, stuff like that. LGBT couples can be recognized by state law, but they’ll be penalized in federal tax and family law. Certain other laws will only be enforced in blue states — like how most of the ICE raids so far have been in Democratic stronghold cities. Blue states will pay vastly more in taxes than we’ll get back in federal spending. The courts will prevent us from doing stuff — like having higher air quality standards in California — that make things hard for multinational corporations. The federal government will keep spending more than it takes in, and they’ll keep blaming blue states for it. But, almost certainly, only undocumented immigrants and a few other genuinely defenseless groups will end up in concentration camps. And even there, nobody will be feeding them into gas chambers. The whole package will land us somewhere in the neighborhood of what China is like right now.

All of which is just to say, if you’re waiting for someone to start lining dissidents up against a wall before you stage a nutty, you probably don’t have anything to worry about. If you’d rather live in the political equivalent of mainland China than move to Wyoming, this is almost certainly going to go your way.

Otherwise, I wonder if anything short of gas chambers would convince your average remote-working San Francisco Democrat to move to Wyoming, or support a sucession amendment. I’m becoming increasingly certain that the answer is, “no.” Because if we actually want to stop fascism, qua fascism — any kind of fascism, not just the genocide-y kind — I see three possibilities to explain what we’re doing right now: our current actions are much more likely to succeed than I think they are, and I’m just too stupid to see it; we’re totally blowing this by accident, through just sheer political and organizational incompetence; or we just don’t care as much as we say we do. Acknowledging that condition one would invalidate my answer, right now I’m leaning toward condition three. But I’d be thrilled to be wrong.

So, I ask again: what’s our goal? What’s our endgame? Can we fix this? What are we willing to do in service of that goal? And if we’re willing to do some really crazy shit, when are we going to start? I’m not asking this to shame anyone into action. I’m asking why anyone thinks the stuff we’re doing, and the stuff most people are suggesting we should do, is going to work. Because I don’t see it.

And, you know, ticktock y’all. The AI-powered surveillance state cometh. And global climate change, and and and. There’s a timeline, is all I’m saying.