Ross Douthat and the Dismissal of the Authoritarian Turn by Jonathan Chait

Ross Douthat and the Dismissal of the Authoritarian Turn

 &c by Jonathan Chait

Ross Douthat has spent the Trump era dismissing the argument from numerous liberals (especially me) that the Republican Party is sliding dangerously into authoritarianism. As his position has grown more challenging, his argument has mutated repeatedly and now has finally crossed a threshold into, or at least flirting with, outright support for authoritarian rule.

To understand the evolution of his stance, it is worth tracing the argument as it has evolved over time. Rebutting David Frum’s warning that Trump was undermining democracy, Douthat wrote in 2018, “I am not convinced by his overarching theme of looming crisis, his hour-is-late tone and the frequent implication (however hedged and qualified) that Trump might be on his way to establishing a regime to rival the populist authoritarianisms of other unhappy countries.” Trump was nasty, he conceded, but too silly and undisciplined to pose any serious threat.

Two years later, in the spring of 2020, he argued that Trump was not only incapable of seizing illegitimate power but uninterested in doing so. “Great men and bad men alike seek attention as a means of getting power, but our president is interested in power only as a means of getting attention.” Needless to say, his conclusion that Trump had no interest in power was an all-time historical misjudgment.

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

 

On the eve of the 2020 election, Douthat asserted that his theory was about to be tested conclusively. “Three weeks from now, we will reach an end to speculation about what Donald Trump will do if he faces political defeat, whether he will leave power like a normal president or attempt some wild resistance,” he proposed. “Reality will intrude, substantially if not definitively, into the argument over whether the president is a corrupt incompetent who postures as a strongman on Twitter or a threat to the Republic to whom words like ‘authoritarian’ and even ‘autocrat’ can be reasonably applied.”

It turned out Trump did indeed crave power. To Douthat’s credit, when Trump did the precise thing Douthat said he wouldn’t, he confessed that his predictions had missed the mark. In December, 2020, he admitted surprise at “the sheer scale of the belief among conservatives that the election was really stolen, measured not just in polling data but in conversations and arguments, online and in person, with people I would not have expected to embrace it.” Following the insurrection, he conceded, “When I predicted three months ago that there would be no Trump coup, I should have showed more imagination.”

But soon thereafter, he reverted to his old line. The danger had passed, and liberals were overreacting. The Republican Party was placing Trump’s lie that he had won at the center of its agenda. But not to worry. “Meanwhile, at the state level, the Republican-backed bills that purport to fight voter fraud are obviously partially sops to conservative paranoia — but as such, they’re designed to head off cries of fraud, claims of ballots shipped in from China or conjured up in Italy,” he wrote in June 2021. “That sort of heading-off strategy may fail, of course, but for now, exercises like the Arizona audit have mostly divided grass-roots conservatives against one another rather than set up some sort of Tea Party wave that would sweep out all the quisling legislators who failed to #StopTheSteal in 2020.”

A “Tea Party wave that would sweep out all the quisling legislators who failed to #StopTheSteal in 2020” is almost exactly what has transpired. Republicans have lost all will to deny Trump’s lies; the brave few who have dared to contradict them have been almost uniformly drummed out of the party. Big-lie enthusiasts have organized to elect candidates for governor and secretary of state and flooded the election-counting apparatus — which depends on the goodwill of sane, competent volunteers — with crackpots. But never mind.

In an interview in February of this year, Douthat allowed that an election crisis might in fact occur, and it “would be bad, but it’s different from saying, ‘Here are the 17 structural forces that are going to turn the United States into Viktor Orbán’s Hungary,’ which is not — as far as I can see — going to happen.”

So, yeah, maybe there would be an attempt to steal the next election, but it’s not as if, should Republicans manage to win, they were going to run some kind of Orban-esque competitive authoritarianism, right?

Flash forward to the present and — as I describe in a recent feature story — this is precisely the goal of a large and influential group of conservative intellectuals and Republican elected officials including not just Trumpists but also the leading alternative to Trump. I’ve seen conservatives roll their eyes at the term semi-fascist, but I haven’t seen any fundamental challenge to my description of either the belief system or the tactics now taking hold of the right. They are more or less up front about their belief that Republicans should employ methods they would consider oppressive if used against them. The right is largely abandoning the whole notion that American politics and government requires some neutral set of rules and norms.

Douthat’s most recent column doesn’t question my analysis, either. He simply retorts that liberals are doing the same thing. You can read his parade of alleged horribles, some of which are legitimate complaints, others exaggerations, but which, even if accepted in toto as correct, would not come close to equaling the Republican Party’s authoritarianism.

And even if they do, notice how much he is now conceding. “Indeed, much of Trump-era conservatism is convinced that worrying too much about classical-liberal niceties is a sucker’s game,” he argues. “But anyone who imagines that Trumpism took shape in isolation needs to understand how this ‘don’t be a sucker’ attitude has been reaffirmed and strengthened by progressive governance that seems equally unconcerned about neutrality or fairness.” So Douthat allows that a large and probably dominant faction of the conservative movement is authoritarian, but liberals bear much of the blame.

Douthat’s contention is that the conservatives weren’t authoritarian until recently, only becoming so in response to provocations from the left. This is eerily reminiscent of the analysis he once made of Sarah Palin — first denying she was an ignorant demagogue and then, when that denial became impossible to sustain, insisting she only became one, tragically, in response to her enemies.

Only this time, there’s no tragically. He is now proposing, or at least toying with the case, that conservative authoritarianism is justified as a response to the left’s offenses. “To give up the weapons of state power that your opponents are using so freely,” he argues, “feels, inevitably, like unilateral disarmament.” Once Republican authoritarianism ceased to be undeniable in his mind, it also ceased to be unacceptable.

Douthat is a wonderful columnist, and his critiques of liberalism are often deeply incisive. His point that progressives are also capable of illiberal overreach, and that this overreach can contribute to a cycle of radicalism, is well taken. But he has consistently leaned on a series of small-scale observations that are narrowly correct — such as Trump’s apparent lack of seriousness about governing — and drive him to diametrically wrong conclusions about the larger dynamic.

First he brushed off the Republican Party’s authoritarian turn as unlikely. Then it was containable, then inevitable, then, finally, necessary. In the course of four years, Douthat has talked himself, step by step, into defending what he once dismissed as an unrealistic nightmare.

Shadi Hamid — who is, God help us, a fellow at the Brookings Institution — has also consistently scoffed at the idea that the Republican Party poses any kind of threat to democracy. Hamid’s arguments are considerably cruder than Douthat’s. His most recent argument consists of a logical syllogism. If the Republican Party is authoritarian, then the only logical response is to use authoritarian measures against it. And since Democrats are not calling for a legal ban on the Republican Party, it follows that they do not actually believe the Republicans are authoritarian:

 

 

Yes, he is arguing that a situation where one party is committed to democracy and the other is not is conceptually impossible. If the evidence of the Republican Party’s illiberalism is so overwhelming that the best Hamid can do to deny it is to construct a logic game so absurd even a stoned college freshman would laugh at it, we’re in trouble.

One revelation I’ve had about the climate-justice movement is that many of its ideas are not merely unrealistic but directionally wrong. In particular, the movement wishes to enhance the ability of local community activists to block new infrastructure when, in fact, those blockages are a key impediment to the green-energy transition.

I wrote a column about this recently. The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas, who is more deeply versed in the issue, wrote a better version of the same argument. Both argue that a failure to successfully liberalize the permitting process will mean that at least 80 percent of the greenhouse-gas reductions in the Inflation Reduction Act will fail to materialize.

Brad Johnson, a climate strategist and formerly the founding executive director of Climate Hawks Vote and editor of ThinkProgress Green, writes a response in his newsletter for the Intercept. Here is the entire, unabridged text of his response. I am omitting nothing:

RETROGRADE ECOMODERNISTS: The ecomodernist gang, licking its wounds after failing to push through Joe Manchin’s fossil-fuel fast-tracking bill, continues its push to redefine climate action to mean deregulated industrial capitalism, based on the argument that some people are worth more than others. Hmm.

The reliably dangerously wrong Jonathan Chait published the unhinged “The Climate-Justice Movement Is Helping Neither the Climate Nor Justice” in New York, a Vox Media outlet.

And The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Desmas (formerly Vox) cites fracking booster and Koch cog Eli Dourado1 in a wild screed attacking environmental justice (“Not Everyone Should Have a Say”). Surprise, surprise: both Desmas and Dourado were attendees of the 2022 Breakthrough Institute Ecomodernism conference.

I’m guessing Chait and Desmas are not attending this Thursday’s WE ACT for Environmental Justice gala, which will honor Dr. Beverly L. Wright, Jessica Ottney Mahar, and Mychal Johnson.

In summary, his rebuttal consists of the following points:

1) I am “dangerously wrong” and my article is “unhinged.”

2) Demsas, whom he calls “Desmas,” includes among her multiple sources somebody who approves of fracking and once attended a conference with her.

3) Neither Demsas/Desmas nor I are likely attendees at an environmental-justice gala. (Johnson concedes this is merely a guess, but I can confirm it is correct.)

That’s the entire rebuttal. It is not just that Johnson has a bad argument or even that he has bad reasons for his argument. He appears not to understand what a “reason” is.

It would be unfair to the climate-justice movement to suggest Johnson’s reasoning skills are typical of its professional advocate class. Still, the fact that arguments like this can be published professionally tells you something about the quality of thought that prevails in this movement.

Multiple House Republicans have vowed that, if they gain a majority, they will hold the debt ceiling hostage to force the Biden administration to make spending cuts. They attempted the same gambit the last time they won control of the House under a Democratic president. “The November elections will likely give Republicans control of the House of Representatives as a platform from which to oppose the Democratic-controlled White House,” I wrote recently. “And one thing Republicans will do with this power, in all probability, will be to try to provoke a crisis in order to extort Democrats into accepting spending cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.”

The libertarian writer Matt Welch objects. He insists not only that Republicans won’t do this but also, even more bizarrely, that they have never done this:

I do, however, have at least some standing to judge the accuracy of this recent headline from New York Magazine political columnist Jonathan Chait: “Republicans Plan Debt Crisis to Force Cuts to Medicare, Social Security: They do this every time.”

Reader, they do not do this every time.

On November 4, 2014, Republicans won back control of the United States Senate for the first time since 2007, ushering in the only fully oppositional Congress of Barack Obama’s presidency. On November 5, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), said, “Let me make it clear: There will be no government shutdowns and no default on the national debt.”

The main confusion here lies in Welch’s apparent failure to understand that the House and the Senate are different legislative bodies. I will break this down in simple terms. The 2010 elections gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives. This meant Republicans now had the opportunity to block debt-ceiling increases. They attempted to do so. The government managed to avoid a default, but it was a near-run thing. The near default frightened the business community, and when Republicans won control of the Senate in 2014, McConnell came out against debt-ceiling extortion.

Welch is quoting McConnell’s statement to attempt to show that the debt-ceiling hostage negotiations of 2011 never occurred. But they did occur. I did not write that Senate Republicans provoked a debt-ceiling crisis, nor did I predict that Senate Republicans would do so if they won control. I was writing about the House of Representatives.

Of course the problem is that, since raising the debt ceiling requires Congress to pass a bill, this necessitates the ascent of both the House and Senate. The Senate’s aversion to holding the bill hostage is nice, but the House’s professed desire to withhold support is the veto point.

If Welch remains confused, I suggest he study this short explanatory video.

Learn more about RevenueStripe...

MORE FROM JONATHAN CHAIT