We Get the Government We Deserve
It isn’t just the Supreme Court that’s dragging us into dictatorship.
Last week I wrote about the ways in which the archconservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, in agreeing to hear Trump’s ludicrous immunity claim, is abetting his open desire to install a right wing dictatorship in the US. (Though only, he says, for Day One. His words, not mine.)
That effort carried on the very next day, when the Court handed down a second decision keeping Trump on the ballot in Colorado and elsewhere.
But it would be an enormous mistake to believe that SCOTUS, or any governmental institution, is the only problem. It would be a mistake even to say that the problem lies with Trump and the other cretinous architects of that neo-fascist endeavor themselves. A far more worrying problem is the extent to which many many many ordinary Americans fail to appreciate the danger, and—gobsmackingly—seem to think that Donald Trump and his fellow travelers are reasonable, trustworthy politicians who deserve their vote.
Be they deluded Kool Aid-drunk true believers, apathetic low-information voters who aren’t really paying attention, or just wildly misinformed folks who can still be won over, these citizens represent a terrifying demographic on whom the latest Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes may turn, and on whom the forces of fascism are counting.
DO THEY CALL ME GIUSEPPE THE BOAT BUILDER?
I’ve made this point before—ad nauseam, some might say. Only a month ago, I made almost the identical argument in a piece called “Who Needs Voter Suppression?” that carried an illustration of lemmings. This week it’s sheep. Hey, do you think it’s easy to crank out 5000 words a week without some recycling?
But I continue to repeat myself because the problem remains.
We all know that the polls are—bizarrely—grim for Joe Biden. In a sane world, he would be cruising to re-election on the strength of a record that most incumbents would give their eye teeth for….particularly since his opponent is facing 91 criminal indictments, including trying to overthrow a free and fair election (and murder his own vice president along the way, though he’s not even charged for that). Yet a slim majority of Americans—at least for now—seem to think Donald Trump would be a better choice for the job.
[Pause to collect pieces of skull and brain tissue scattered across the room.]
Here’s Nate Cohn in the New York Times:
On paper, Biden ought to be the favorite…..Yet according to the polls, Trump begins the general election campaign in the lead. Over the last four months, he has led nearly every poll in Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, along with the states he carried in 2020 — enough to give him 283 electoral votes and the presidency. This is not what many expected from a Biden-Trump rematch, especially after Democrats were resilient in the midterms and excelled in special elections by campaigning on issues like democracy and abortion.
Last week the New York Times ran a front page headline that read, “Voters Doubt Biden’s Leadership and Favor Trump, Times/Siena Poll Finds.” That sentence alone is headspinning, but let’s explore it a little further.
With eight months left until the November election, Mr. Biden’s 43 percent support lags behind Mr. Trump’s 48 percent in the national survey of registered voters. Only one in four voters thinks the country is moving in the right direction. More than twice as many voters believe Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them as believe his policies have helped them. A majority of voters think the economy is in poor condition.
A full 40 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had helped them personally, compared to only 18 percent who said the same of Mr. Biden’s. Only 12 percent of independent voters….said Mr. Biden’s policies had personally helped them, compared to 43 percent who said his policies had hurt them.
Was this poll taken at a Klan rally? Or in the banquet room at Mar-a-Lago? Or maybe in the Kremlin?
We know that these beliefs fly in the face of empirical reality. But facts don’t matter any more, do they? And it’s no coincidence that the people who promote that post-modernist view—the right wing—do so because the facts don’t favor them. Cui bono, people.
And the bitter, Orwellian injustice of it all gets even worse:
(O)ver and over, the Times/Siena poll revealed how Mr. Trump has cut into more traditional Democratic constituencies while holding his ground among Republican groups. The gender gap, for instance, is no longer benefiting Democrats. Women, who strongly favored Mr. Biden four years ago, are now equally split, while men gave Mr. Trump a nine-point edge. The poll showed Mr. Trump edging out Mr. Biden among Latinos, and Mr. Biden’s share of the Black vote is shrinking, too.
It beggars belief that, after Dobbs, Trump is winning a majority of American women. Latinx support for Trump is also hard to fathom, even accounting for the oft-forgotten strain of Catholic conservatism in that community. Significant numbers of Latinx voters are going over to the guy who made demonization of immigrants, especially brown ones, the whole backbone of his campaign? The one who told us that Mexicans are rapists and criminals, and wanted to wall off the southern border? The one who kidnapped and caged thousands of Latinx children? The one that wants to kick down doors in search of “illegals”—again, predominantly Hispanic people—and build concentration camps to put them in?
Of course, “Hispanics’ are not a monolith. There’s a world of difference between, say, a recent Guatemalan refuge and a rabidly anti-Castro Cuban-American born and raised in Miami. But the latter have long been in the Republican camp. What accounts for the new converts?
I dunno, but I’m reminded of that overplayed Don McLean song where Satan was laughing with delight.
Some of these results may reflect what the researcher David Atkins calls “thermostatics,” which is a fancy way of saying that, while incumbency has its advantages, there is also a hope-springs-eternal/grass-is-always-greener effect that makes voters want to “throw the bums out,” no matter who’s in power. (Triple points for me on the Cliché-o-Meter.) Not to mention a willful, collective amnesia over just how horrible the Trump years were.
In any case, if you ever get the feeling that you’re living in Idiocracy, you’re not alone. Stand by for eight Oscars for Ass.
BACKSTABBERS
Who, in the wake of January 6, thought that a mere three years later we would be on the verge of returning Donald Trump to power? Yes, the GOP and the levers it controls have been instrumental in that American Dolchstoßlegende. But like the grifters say, you can’t con a man who doesn’t want to be conned. And plenty of Americans have been happy to let themselves be suckered.
But let’s back up a little. I say “verge of returning” Trump to power, but that is an overstatement, of course.
A few days ago, this Biden-is-doomed narrative looked like it was calcifying into received wisdom. Then Joe gave a ferocious State of the Union speech that chipped away at the “old and senile” narrative and suddenly convinced a lot of people that he’s not dead yet. (Not that his haters will be swayed. Ross Douthat wasn’t. But Ross’s judgment has been known to be iffy.) It was a reminder that Joe’s been in politics a long time, and he’s pretty good at it—something his enemies somehow consistently forget, over and over.
Afterward, a lot of pundits who’d been defeatist a mere 24 hours before suddenly saw a world in which Trump looked very mortal indeed. In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last’s headline was “Biden Can. Win.” In The Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Senior’s was “Biden Silences the Doubters.”
We shall see. American politics swing back and forth harder than Tom Brady’s retirement plans.
Meanwhile, it’s weird to wake up and think that Tommy Tuberville doesn’t seem like the crazier of Alabama’s two US Senators anymore. The GOP ought to be disqualified just for thinking Senator Chloe Fineman—er, I mean Katie Britt—was the best available spokesperson to give their SOTU response. Yes, I know it’s a thankless, no-win assignment (ask Marco Rubio or Bobby Jindal), but this one was awful even by those low standards. The high school drama club tone, the “American carnage” theme, the dogwhistling choice of a woman speaking from her kitchen—it was truly beyond parody. The historian Heather Cox Richardson noted that Britt “conspicuously wore a necklace with a cross and spoke in a breathy, childlike voice as she wavered between smiles and the suggestion she was on the verge of tears.” The content of her speech was all but unworthy of attention, but one lowlight was her attempt on a variation on the old Reagan line, “Are you better off than you were three years ago?”
Uh, you mean during the pandemic? Actually, um, yes. Yes, I am better off.
As Andy Borowitz quipped, Britt characterized “Biden as out of touch for not knowing the price of gas or groceries. Her nominee only knows how much it costs to silence a porn star.” But far and away the most important thing to note was her howling, outright lie about GOP support for in vitro fertilization when she and her party explicitly support fetal personhood, which would explicitly outlaw IVF, led by the nutjob Christian radical Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of her own home state of Alabama.
“Republican Politician Tells Brazen Lie”—stop the presses.
Katie Britt is said to be a formidable—and therefore scary—right wing politician. Despite this humiliating debut on the national stage, in which she was badly served by her handlers, we may not have seen the last of her.
FOLLY TO BE WISE, GUYS
The alarm over Biden’s prospects is not entirely a bad thing. It can be helpful as a wakeup call, a boon to voter registration and GOTV efforts, and a bulwark against complacency and overconfidence. (Little chance of the latter, strong chance of the former.) It also points to a way to move the proverbial needle, and a great opportunity for the Democratic Party and their man.
As the Times’s Nate Cohn writes, “There might be a kernel of good news for Biden hidden in his extreme weakness among less engaged voters: His campaign can hope they are simply not paying close attention, and might return to Biden’s side once voters tune into the race.”
As we noted last week, criminal conviction(s) are the one thing that even Republicans say would dent their support for Trump. The aforementioned NYT/Siena poll, the one that causes a collective pants-shitting in Blue America, showed that there has been a slight dip in the number of voters who “currently believe Mr. Trump has committed serious federal crimes,” down from 58 percent in December to 53 percent now. One has to believe that that downward trend—the result of relentless right wing propagandizing—will reverse as criminal trials commence and hard evidence against him is presented. Which is precisely why the GOP, including its loyalists on the Supreme Court, is working overtime to delay those trials.
But Trump has other vulnerabilities with voters that, similarly, have not yet been highlighted to them.
Remarkably, polling shows that most Americans—incredibly—are unaware of Trump's fanatic, fascist comments about what he'd do in a second term, and his desire to “terminate” portions of the Constitution and turn the US into a dictatorship. When made aware, their view of him (and willingness to vote for him) drops significantly.
That lack of awareness is astonishing to me, but the possibility here for Democratic strategists is obvious. As Greg Sargent, formerly of the WaPo and now at The New Republic, writes:
That’s maddening for obvious reasons. But it also presents the Biden campaign with an opportunity. If voters are unaware of all these statements, there’s plenty of time to make voters aware of them—and the polling also finds that these statements, when aired to respondents, shift them against Trump.
A survey by the veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin for the group Save My Country polled voters in three swing states—Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and weighted the results according to votes in the Electoral College.
The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol, his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause, his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more.
Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump,” the memo accompanying the poll concluded.
The good news for Biden is that when respondents were presented with these quotes, it prompted a rise in Trump’s negatives. For instance, after hearing them, the percentage who see him as “out for revenge” jumped by five points, the percentage who see him as “dangerous” rose by nine points, and the percentage who see him as a “dictator” climbed by seven points.
Garin also found that when presented with these remarks, “the percentage of those who view Trump unfavorably jumps five points, from 53 percent to 58 percent, and 69 percent say Trump will bring “chaos to the presidency and our country.”
In other words, when voters are presented with evidence straight from Trump’s own mouth, they see an authoritarian second term as very plausible.
Sargent notes that one interpretation of these results is that Team Biden hasn’t successfully made the case for Trump’s unfitness—yet. Maybe they’re keeping their powder dry for the summer and fall. According to this logic, when voters are adequately presented with the truth, particularly about the two central issues in this race—democracy and abortion—where the vast majority of Americans are soundly aligned with the Democratic position and hostile to the Republican one, Biden will win.
More importantly, Sargent notes that these results seem to obliterate the idea that voters just don’t care.
“In fact, all this might in some ways validate one of the Biden camp’s frequent claims—that voters are so checked out that they aren’t seriously aware of the threat a second Trump term poses.” Yes, hardcore Trumpies will never turn on their guy….but that’s not who we’re talking about. We’re talking about the slim but crucial sliver in the squishy middle who will decide the election—a segment Sargent describes as “gettable” for Biden.
“Trump’s negatives are not baked into the cake at all,” Garin told me. Fortunately for the Biden camp, between now and Election Day there are some eight months to fire up the campaign crucible and ensure that they do get baked in—good and hard.
Cohn writes that Biden can “hope that Trump will loom larger in the minds of voters as the election nears.” Beyond mere hope, that is exactly what Democratic messengers intend to promote.
In the end, Biden might well prevail by capitalizing on issues like abortion and democracy. Historically, early polls are not especially predictive of a final outcome. Many voters aren’t yet paying close attention, and there will be every opportunity for the Biden campaign to refocus the electorate on more favorable issues once the general election campaign gets underway.
FILE UNDER DUNNING-KRUEGER
There’s lack of awareness, and then there’s wanton, day-is-night, ass backwardness.
While the punditocracy is obsessed with beating up on Joe Biden—and not just the right but the center and left too—marveling that he is not more popular given his many significant accomplishments and the flaws of his opponent, consider the vast tsunami of political ignorance that engulfs America, and with which he must contend.
The Times’s Cohn related the tale of his colleague Claire Cain Miller who “interviewed a voter who said abortion was the most important issue, but blamed Biden for the loss of abortion rights in America.”
Yes, the Biden campaign may bear some blame for not doing a better job of getting the facts out there, and maybe it will do so in the next eight months. But when we are up against that kind of stupidity, one wonders if our country will soon get the kind of vile, reality-denying autocratic government it deserves. Is it just anecdotal? Yeah, but add up enough anecdotes and you get a statistically significant (or even definitive) critical mass.
Per above, Biden’s inner circle is said to be confident that they can win over that sliver of misinformed and/or insufficiently attentive voters. They’re the pros, so I hope they’re right.
But if part of the blame for this public ignorance of Trump’s statements and misdeeds falls on Team Biden and the DNC for failing to make their case, a lot of it falls on the press. When it comes to the relative flaws of Joe vs. Don, it’s “but her emails” all over again.
While the media obsesses over Biden’s electoral prospects—a process that only further diminishes them—what is Trump up to, besides trying to get Elon Musk or some Middle Eastern potentate or (presumably) Vladimir Putin to give him half billion dollars so he can post bail in his various trials? (Good thing a guy in the red like that isn’t in possession of sensitive US government secrets!)
Whatever it is, the media isn’t covering it in any kind of remotely responsible way. Here’s the esteemed Dan Rather:
Over the weekend, the former president said that he would eliminate federal funding for any school with a vaccine mandate. That includes vaccines against chickenpox, polio, and measles. The audience shouted its approval of this dangerous, if not outright terrifying, promise. Can you imagine the consequences of that? The children who would die? Where’s the coverage and the outrage?
Then Trump confused two Democratic presidents—not for the first time—saying, “Putin has so little respect for Obama ….” Imagine the airtime that remark would get if it came from President Biden?
Rather’s conclusion is that “an informed and determined electorate can stop (Trump) at the ballot box.” No doubt about that. But that requires someone to inform them in the first place.
Greg Sargent again:
President Biden’s brain trust appears confident that he will ultimately prevail over Donald Trump due to the threat Trump poses to our constitutional system. By November, the election’s “focus will become overwhelmingly on democracy,” one top Biden adviser told The New Yorker, adding that “the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”
Some of Biden’s fate lies with turnout, particularly when it comes to “the less engaged, less educated segment of the electorate, including many young, Black and Hispanic voters who traditionally vote for Democratic candidates.” As Cohn notes, in 2020 he defeated Trump in the “pivotal battleground states” only by narrow margins—less than a percentage point. And now “his favorability rating is 14 points lower.”
If some of Biden’s strengths in 2020 have eroded, some of Trump’s vulnerabilities have widened. Per Cohn, Trump is “viewed about as unfavorably as he was four years ago. In fact, his ratings numbers are almost exactly where they stood before the last election” and “a majority of voters say they believe Trump has committed serious federal crimes.” In an election with razor thin margins, that could make the difference for either man.
But writing about the current presidential race in old-fashioned horserace terms is exactly what I don’t want to be doing. We are in an existential crisis for American democracy, with the candidate of one of our two major parties openly campaigning on a promise to institute cult-of-personality-style fascism. Talking about the color of ties and kissing babies at state fairs is not appropriate. It’s a habit the press finds hard to break, so it will fall to partisans outside the Fourth Estate to make that case.
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER
In the Times, Cohn writes: “Trump’s persistent unpopularity sets up an agonizing choice for millions of voters who liked and backed Biden in the last election but now find themselves left to choose between two candidates they dislike; a group sometimes known as ‘double haters’.”
Wow. Are there really people trying to decide who’s worse, Trump or Biden? No matter what you think of Joe Biden, the idea that anyone thinks Trump is a better choice to lead this country is unfathomable to me.
One of Biden’s favorite lines is, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty—compare me to the alternative.” (#DadJoke #GranddadJoke.) That contrast has never been more stark than in the 2024 presidential race. But Americans are also justifiably tired of a choice between the lesser of two evils, even if one “evil” is MASSIVELY more evil than the other evil, which can hardly be described as evil at all.
Let me be clear: I don’t believe there is any legitimate reason to vote for Donald Trump, any more than I believe there’s any legitimate reason to take the side of Vladimir Putin, or Francisco Franco, or that fella from Austria. Not saying he’s in their league, but how bad do you have to be? Trump has far exceeded the minimum standard of unfitness for public office and designation as a menace to society.
I have dear friends who are Trump supporters. (And possibly family? Not sure.) I love them. But I believe they are dead wrong on that count, and history will judge it so.
We are far from the only country to flirt so openly with fascism. Some have not only flirted but gone all the way to consummation, and smoking cigarettes together afterward while avoiding the wet spot. There has always been a proto-authoritarian strain in the American soul, though rarely has it been as ascendant as at the moment. But if it triumphs here, it will be due not only to the Proud Boys and the Josh Hawleys and the Tucker Carlsons, but to the shoulder-shrugging tens of millions who didn’t storm the Capitol, but quietly went along and didn’t stand up to stop the march of American authoritarianism either.
Democrats will run on abortion and democracy, and if that’s not enough to win I don’t know what’s wrong with our country. Maybe it will be. Or maybe the GOP will sucker enough of the American people once again, with the help of the maddening apathy of otherwise progressive-leaning young people, a far left that is living up to its reputation for devouring its own, and the furor of Arab-Americans in Michigan who think Biden is abetting genocide and therefore prefer to throw the race to an opponent who would cause infinitely more harm to the people of Palestine, and won’t stop there.
But if we return Donald Trump to power—for any reason, and as the result of any weird combination of factors, we will get what we deserve.
*******
Photo: Portrait of American voters in their natural habitat
h/t Genie Smith for the Dan Rather article
Thanks to Gina Patacca for her pro bono copy editing!