Earlier this month, Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde introduced legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives, to withhold millions of dollars in road maintenance funds from the District of Columbia unless the mayor of the District removed the Black Lives Matter mural from Black Lives Matter Plaza, and renamed the street Liberty Plaza (pause for irony). The mayor, saying she “has bigger fish to fry,” went ahead and removed the mural. The move is part of a larger nationwide push on the part of the Trump administration and the Republican Congress to force state and local governments to conform to Republican ideological positions, under threat of loss of federal funding. Trump and his spokespeople have threatened to withhold disaster relief funding from California. Trump’s Secretary of Transportation is attempting to interfere in New York City’s congestion pricing. The Trump administration is threatening to withhold $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University unless they punish students and faculty who have protested against the war in Gaza.
The goal of these attacks is to undermine democratic (small “d”) institutions and deepen an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. The ultimate end is to advance autocracy; to establish that the MAGA movement and the Trump administration can act unilaterally, against anyone, to advance any agenda, and get what they want.
But what if, instead of letting that happen, Democrat-run states pulled together to fight the administration on some of these issues? When Trump threatens to withhold disaster funding for California, other Democratic states could organize to cover it. In the case of Washington D.C.’s roads funding, Maryland and Virginia could replace the road maintenance funding Clyde was threatening to cut. It’s mostly Maryland and Virginia residents who commute on those roads anyway. The State of New York could step in to replace the funding Trump is threatening to pull from Columbia University, possibly in return for some kind of governance role at the school, or tuition breaks for NY residents.
Democratic jurisdictions couldn’t formalize most of these arrangement, because interstate compacts require the consent of Congress, and this Congress would never consent to a mutual aid agreement between Democratic states. But Democratic jurisdictions could each, on their own, move to make funds for these sorts of fights available, and just hand the money across borders without a formal agreement.
These would be largely symbolic victories, but they lay the groundwork for a narrative about democratic America fighting back against autocratic America. By formally directing money from state governments, to oppose Trump’s agenda of increasing autocracy and creating fear, voters in Democratic states could begin to take pride in institutional opposition — by which I mean opposition that manifests as something other than protests, and obstructionism for its own sake. It has the advantage of being both highly confrontational, and unambiguously altruistic. And it gives blue states an opportunity to start talking about the balance of payments issue.
The line would be something like:
Unlike every Republican state except Utah, the people of New York already pay more in federal taxes than they receive in federal spending. The Trump administration feels they’re entitled to keep $400 million more of our money because they don’t like the way we exercise our freedom of speech. Therefore, in the spirit of generosity and civic pride with which we fund schools in Alabama, and broadband Internet access in Louisiana, with no reciprocal financial commitment from either of those states, the governor of New York in consultation with the state legislature has allocated $400 million in public funding to make up the shortfall imposed by the Trump administration. This will require some sacrifices. But New York has been sacrificing in the name of freedom since 9/11, and before. We won’t back down now. When you go low, we step up.
Picture the mayor of DC re-consecrating Black Lives Matter Plaza, right in front of the Trump White House, with the governors of Maryland and Virginia standing behind her. That’s worth a thousand angry denunciations on the floor of Congress.
For nine years, Democrats and the left have responded to Trump and MAGA with the rhetoric of the extraordinary — and the tactics of the every-day. MAGA steals a Supreme Court seat, Democrats wait for voters to react. MAGA illegally deports people, Democrats file briefs in court. Trump blackmails Columbia University, and we all watch “helplessly” while Columbia folds under the pressure. And it’s not just our leaders. Democratic voters are ambivalent, confused, betrayed, and ashamed. Everybody keeps talking about how the fever’s going to break and how, when things get bad enough, Republican voters will turn around and abandon MAGA. This belief persists in spite of the fact that Trump has trounced — and I mean destroyed — every mainstream candidate in three straight Republican primaries. This isn’t a trick, it’s not an aberation; it’s what Republicans are now. But when we think about how to respond, we keep thinking about doing so within the normal framework of reluctant politicians and ambivalent voters. We protest because we expect nothing from our leaders. We rant on the Internet because we expect nothing from our news sources. We critique each other for ideological purity instead of action, because we expect nothing from ourselves.
Everyone’s mad at Chuck Schumer for not “resisting.” But if we try to imagine lobbying our elected officials to do something like re-budget and send money to institutions being blackmailed by Trump, and our main objection isn’t that we don’t think it would be worth it, or that it’s not a moral choice, but that it’s politically infeasible — then we might want to consider the possibility that our anger at Schumer is just us, projecting our disappointment in ourselves onto someone else. He was supposed to stop the CR so we’d have “leverage”? Leverage to do what? We can say it would have been leverage to do something like restore Columbia’s budget, or something like a guarantee to send disaster relief to blue states. But we weren’t asking for those things. We didn’t have a program. We still don’t. Without a clearly articulated agenda, priorities, and values, all we’re defending when we push back against MAGA is a status quo system most of us secretly (or not-so-secretly) hate.
How are we going to defend the idea of “freedom” in a country where, when things are working the way they’re supposed to, we have 5 million people in jail? And the solution there isn’t to add “getting 5 million people out of jail” to our agenda. The solution there is to have an agenda that unambiguously, without political double-speak or euphemism, addresses the underlying conditions that put 5 million people in jail in the first place. If we don’t have the guts to make that a thing we try to achieve in years, not decades, then we should leave Chuck Schumer alone. He’s the Senate Minority Leader we deserve.
If we were in a war — an old-fashioned, declared-by-Congress, “over there,” and war bonds type war — and someone said we’d need to shift our budgets around and raise taxes to cover the cost of it, most people would get that. Our history suggests that a lot of people would be not only willing, but excited to help. This could be that. We fight autocracy by making democracy work. We fight isolation by working together. We fight fear by giving people an outlet for bravery, and supporting a state government that’s pushing back against financial blackmail by an authoritarian strongman is just what the doctor ordered.
We have our fascists. Now we need our heroes.