Mitch McConnell Thinks How Democracies Die Is a How-to Manual

&c. by Jonathan Chait

 

 

 

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

 

The central theme of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s book, How Democracies Die, is that the fate of a teetering republic often rests in the hands of a would-be autocrat’s allies. Those pivotal actors have to decide whether to ally themselves with a demagogue, and potentially advance their political goals while subverting democracy, or join the opposition, and forfeit their chance to achieve policy wins in order to save democracy. Those choices, they found, determine whether a democracy survives a challenge.

This is exactly the choice Republicans will face if Donald Trump wins the nomination again. Trump has made it perfectly clear he does not respect democratic norms. Mitch McConnell has called Trump “practically and morally responsible” for a violent coup attempt “orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”

Jonathan Swan asked McConnell why he has promised to support Trump anyway if he is the nominee. McConnell acted as though he has no choice. “I think I have an obligation to support the nominee of my party,” he said. “I don’t pick the Republican nominee for president.”

 

Presented with the crucial choice that can determine the fate of the republic, McConnell acts as if there is no choice at all. This is a common response from Republicans — some of whom have broken with Trump, but most of whom have acted as if openly opposing their party’s nominee is unthinkable. They have treated partisan loyalty as an invisible cage bounding their actions, when they are perfectly free to leave at any time.

Swan’s achievement in this interview is to make it plain that the choice exists and to force McConnell to state it. It’s as if he read How Democracies Die as a how-to guide for killing a democracy.

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A handful of erstwhile leftists migrated from the far left to the far right during the Trump era. Among the most famous is Matt Taibbi, once known for slashing populist screeds attacking both parties for their subservience to the wealthy, who is now mainly a reactionary.

I see his evolution as consisting of two steps. The first and most important is to largely ignore the policy content of the partisan differences in the United States. This takes many forms — Democratic administrations enforce labor laws, while Republican ones generally don’t — but the parties are split most cleanly over redistribution through tax and transfers.

Taibbi is one of the leftists who has always elided this important question by positioning himself to the left of both parties. Neither party is socialist, so it was possible to attack both on left-wing grounds in a way that obscured the differences at issue. It was a natural evolution to move his focus away from economic questions altogether.

After shifting his focus to cultural conflicts, the next step was to close ranks with his newfound allies by ignoring the dangers from the right. Here is Taibbi’s own account of why his free-speech polemics direct all their animus against the left:

 

I can hardly be accused of ignoring the threat to free speech from the left. I also agree that non-state action can pose an important danger to norms of free speech even if it doesn’t take the form of law.

But to ignore the enormous and barely disguised campaign from the right against liberal values is mind-boggling. To take just one example, the Trump administration was engaged in a pressure campaign to compel professional athletes to comply with patriotic rituals. Trump boasted that he intimidated the NFL’s owners into blackballing Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during the national anthem.

The right’s illiberalism is often used as an excuse to ignore the left’s illiberalism. Taibbi is doing the opposite, using the left to ignore the dangers of the right. His rationale for ignoring these abuses of power — “at least they’re laws” — is the reductio ad absurdum. “At least” they’re laws? Does he not recognize that the law can be used to protect the powerful? What kind of populism is this?

Kyrsten Sinema has become the darling of K Street. Sinema has broken with her party on a host of issues but especially on ones that hit the donor class in the pocketbook. She sits well to the right of every Democrat in Congress including Joe Manchin, who has pleaded with her to reconsider her staunch opposition to raising taxes on the wealthy. Sinema’s popularity with the plutocrats has made her a hit on the donor circuit, where she is regularly fêted.

It was not a shock to see another column praising Sinema in The Wall Street Journal “Opinion” page. But it was somewhat surprising, or at least unusually galling, to see the terms in which Journal columnist James Freeman formed that praise today:

Will Democrats discover in time to save their congressional majorities that catering almost exclusively to the preferences of wealthy wokesters is not the path to political victory? Another day brings another warning that the party is driving away blue-collar workers. Meanwhile the best hope for educating Democrats may lie with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.), who is once again resisting her party’s partisan and ideological impulses.

Is there any Democrat in America who more faithfully represents “wealthy wokesters” than Sinema? Virtually all her conservative positions have taken place on economic policy, not social policy. She has made a spectacle of her opposition to a higher minimum wage and corporate taxation while staying faithful to the social-liberal agenda.

It is telling that while Sinema has thrilled the donor class, even her most fervent supporters lack the courage of their convictions. Sinema could make a case for this brand of libertarianism — libertinism and low taxes on the rich — but instead her allies are presenting her, comically, as an enemy of the very class she is serving.

There were two major national political stories last week — the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the fallout from Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law — and both were dominated by Republicans depicting their opponents as pedophiles. Observing the coverage of these events, Ron DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw, asserted that the media had obviously coordinated its coverage at the behest of the Democratic National Committee:

 

Pushaw is absolutely correct. Any time you see writers at different publications describing the same event, your immediate suspicion should be that they are secretly conspiring.

The same day the coordinated wave of stories about Republican pedophilia accusations went out, I noticed another example of obvious coordination. The liberal media unrolled simultaneous claims that the University of Kansas had defeated the University of North Carolina to win the men’s basketball championship. All these stories were pushing the same narrative: Carolina had taken a halftime lead, but Kansas came back to win in the second half. Eerily, they all used the same score, 72-69. The entire corporate media was repeating this story, from the New York Times to CNN.

I can think of literally no other explanation.