Over the last couple of days, we’ve been talking about the indictment of Donald Trump. I want to offer a few closing thoughts — for now, anyways. How much does this matter? A great, great deal. To understand why, really, though, consider the context, which goes like this. America’s in a pitched battle — still — for the survival of its democracy.
In an irony that would’ve made Marx proud, America’s fanatics have learned to seize control of the means of democracy itself. They’re taking control of the basic workings of democracy from the bottom up. Fanatics contest school board seats, shouting death threats at teachers. In Wisconsin, a figure who was involved in putting forth fake slates of electors is now…in a heated race for sitting on the state Supreme Court. In Florida, of course, the laboratory of American extremism, Ron DeSantis has become an expert in decentralizing power, and handing it to fanatics, who are then able to ban books, words.
What was once a battle for American democracy from the top down has become one from the bottom up. State after Red State is turning dystopian, at light speed — banning everything from womens’ rights to LGTBQ rights. Parents and kids are scared. Teachers and classes are criminalized. There seems to be no end or bottom to this race. Vigilante paramilitaries. Tip lines. Shadow institutions, reminiscent of Gestapos and SS’s. And this contest is about taking inalienable rights — which belong to everyone — away.
This is an evolution in collapse. How did it happen? Because the top-down approach failed. Trump ascended to power, and then did his absolute worst — to the point that those of us who warned what was coming feared. As the Jan 6th Commission went on to reveal, there really as a “sophisticated plan” to “overthrow democracy,” right down to overturning the election, declaring it “null and void,” instituting martial law, and holding another one, under military surveillance. The stuff of dystopian fiction — and yet it came within a hairs’ breadth of reality.
And yet while many Americans hope that all that — the failure of a coup, after years of top-down attempts to corrode and overthrow democracy — would be enough to win this battle for it, it wasn’t. The fanatics haven’t given up. If anything, they’ve doubled down, in increasingly absurd ways. If I’d told you a decade ago that a figure who sent fake slates of electors to Congress was in shouting distance of winning a seat on a state Supreme Court — thus giving him the power to fully do it next time — you might have laughed at me. But this is where America is.
Not enough Americans fully grasp this. It is now in a pitched battle for the survival of its democracy. That battle has moved on into a second phase, in a textbook fashion. Having failed at the top-down approach — soft coup, hard coup — fanatics have learned that they can kick democracy’s foundations out from below, make it crumble from the bottom up. And so they’re doing just that, in increasingly organized, systematic, unified ways.
It’s hardly a coincidence that Red State after Red State is pursuing just the same anti-democratic agenda. And no, just because a majority of people “agree” to something doesn’t make it democratic — especially not when that thing is taking inalienable rights away, which is the beating heart of this project of democracy. This is a pilot program for what they’d like to do to the country, should a fanatic win the Presidency again. Because of course the ace up their sleeve is a Supreme Court which, already having taken womens’ rights away, will rubber stamp any form of theocracy, fascism, or authoritarianism, more likely than not.
The evolution of the battle for American democracy — it needs to be understood very, very clearly by every American still interested in having a modern society. And right now, its not — not enough, yet. Because when that point is grasped, the question then arises: how do you win this battle?
The troubling fact — and we know this from watching such phases of democratic destabilization elsewhere — is that this is a much harder battle to win. Saving democracy from the top down is what happened — to a degree — in America after Jan 6th. At the last, Jan 6th failed, due to almost miraculous combination of circumstances — a handful of brave officers, a sudden feeling of revulsion, a sense that things had gone too far. But how do you save a democracy when it’s under attack from the bottom up? It’s much, much harder to do.
Precisely because when a democracy’s under attack from the bottom up, well, everything seems “democratic.” Hey, didn’t Florida elect Ron DeSantis? And if all those school boards full of fanatics want to ban books, well, isn’t that democratic, too? And so what if a state wants to take rights away from women, the LGBTQ, minorities, kids, everyone else — if a majority agrees, that’s democratic, too! Wrong. None of that is democratic, and this is precisely the moment that a democracy must have teeth.
A democracy must have teeth. To protect itself. From not just top down, but also, worse, bottom up attacks. But the trick is this. Bottom up attacks are never just that. They’re led, inspired, guided, incited. And it’s in that way that bringing a movement’s leaders — one devoted to destabilizing a democracy politically — matters intensely.
The ways that we protect a democracy from bottom up attacks are these. We make sure that we fearlessly investigate and prosecute even the movements’ leaders. Even its very top figurehead — the one who has built his image and his bond with the flock by flaunting the fact that he can get away with anything, and thus creating a mythos of invulnerability.
When we do that — when democracy does that — then the signal is also sent: if we are willing to investigate and prosecute your most powerful figure, then, well, maybe you should think twice. That begins to break the back and momentum of the movement which is attacking democracy from the bottom up, because of course, all of those aspiring demagogues are less powerful than the figurehead.
Let’s go back to the figure running for state Supreme Court, who helped put together a plan to send fake electors to Congress. We take it for granted today in America that such a figure can run for a powerful office, but this is a major failure of democracy itself. No accountability has been had here. If you or I — on the democratic side, even if we’re not card carrying “Democrats” — did that? LOL, we’d have been in trouble long ago. With Lord knows whom, state offices, the FBI, the Department of Justice. But the other side is able to get away with it — to the point that figures involved in the last coup are running for highly powerful offices now, from which they can subvert and pervert the next election. Such a figure shouldn’t be able to run for high level office. It’s flatly absurd to think that someone who participated in a coup should have a seat on a Supreme Court.
So democracy must have teeth. The investigations and prosecutions must start at the top, and trickle down to the bottom. That is how we prevent democracy being attacked and dismantled from the bottom up. That way, a clear message is sent. We will defend democracy, with all our might, and throw the book at you, wherever we find evidence of abuse of power. Have you been involved with, LOL, the last coup attempt? Sorry, you’re out of the running — now, you’re in the crosshairs of this investigation, that prosecution. Are you involved with ongoing attempts to subvert and pervert democracy? Sorry, you’re out, too — we’re going to use the powers of democracy, while they exist, to punish you.
None of that is remotely “political prosecution.” If you were involved with a coup, you were trying to overthrow democracy, and democracy has every right to hold you to account. If you’re out there contesting an office so that you can take people’s rights away, democratic accountability has every right to know why, what your motives are, what kind of backing you have, and who is also attached to such a goal. If you’re out there stamping on inalienable rights, democracy’s antennae should indeed be raised, and it should eminently ask why someone would want to do such a thing. Whether or not its constitutional, to begin with, and then to ask whether or not such goals are being attempted legally — because of course, history tells us that they’re often usually not.
Let’s delve into that point for a second. You see, despite the fact that our media equivocates, attacking and defending democracy are not the same thing. If I am enacting democracy, I’m just walking down the street peacefully. There’s a couple holding hands, passing me by — it doesn’t matter who or what they are — and I wave hello. We smile and go on with our day. But if I’m attacking democracy, that is inherently unpeaceful. Maybe I don’t smile at that couple. Maybe I spit at them. Insult them. Mock them, deride them. You see my point.
Attacking democracy is inherently many things. It inherently involves, for example, Big Lies. It is a fact, long established, not just scientifically, but socially, that, yes, why, people really are equal in their personhood. To attack democracy is to tell the Big Lie — inherently — that some people are more people than others, that some are superhumans, and some are subhumans. There is no getting away from this fact — go ahead, turn it over in your head as many ways as you like. Either we’re all equal — democratic value — or we’re not, and some are supreme over others.
What else is attacking democracy, inherently? Well, it’s violent. You see, another fundamental value of democracy — think of my example above — is peace. But when you want to take people’s rights away? You have do it violently, and more to the point, it lets violence happen, too. Let’s take another example, America’s endless gun massacres. They’re protrayed, in America’s foolish discourse, as rights for gun owners, but in fact what is happening here is that others are losing their rights — their rights to live, exist, breathe, not have their bodies torn open by bullets. Taking rights away enables, reinforces, enacts violence.
So attacking democracy is a lot of things, inherently — and none of them are good. I mean that in the classical sense: good, as in, what is best for all of us, by way of what is best for each of us. It may be good for you, in some narrow sense of power and money and a cheap thrill, to make me sit at the back of the bus, to take womens’ rights away — but it’s a grave loss for society, for the future, to history. Democracy itself is not the neutral system we are supposed to imagine it is: it is there to elevate the good, let us all enact it, and defend us all against harm.
Defend us all against harm. Real harm. Not the imagined harm that the far right now specializes in. Who’s really hurt, the kids that get killed in a gun massacre — or the gun nut whose obsession might have to be curtailed a little bit? Who’s really hurt, the kids that can’t read banned books, the society that loses integrity, history, memory, truth — or the parents who say that not banning those books hurts their feelings?
You know the Hippocratic oath? First, do no harm. My lovely wife took it when she became a doctor, in an amphitheatre full of colleagues. What a wonderful, moving moment — much more so than I expected. An ancient ritual, the passing of a torch. A democratic value. Democracy is like that. In it’s simplest interpretation, first of all, it is there to defend us all against harm. Not imagined harms, claims made in bad faith by fanatics — hey, your daughter or wife having a right hurts me!! — but real harms.
So what’s a real harm? Well, that’s where the justice system comes in. It’s precisely the job of investigators and prosecutors to charge that. Juries to try it. Judges to punish it. And on one level, it’s obvious what real harms aren’t. How can me having the right to sit anywhere on the bus — just like you — harm anyone? How can my wife or daughter having a right harm you? How can two people walking down the street holding hands hurt you? You can claim it does, but of course, that’s an absurd claim usually made in bad faith. Real harms are those which genuinely damage the possibilities, choices, and most of all, the basic freedoms we enjoy in a democracy.
Now let’s go back to bottom up attacks. What are bottom up attacks? They’re attempts to inflict those real harms on a local level, usually, or upon some part of a social group, to take rights away in this state, or for these people in this city, town, region — unlike attacks from the top down, which, in true authoritarian fashion, might apply to everyone across a land, or a whole social group. But those smaller attacks, joined up, can do even more damage, paradoxically, than top down attacks, because now there is a whole fabric of institutionalized hate to try and unweave.
Now you should see a little better how to defend a democracy from bottom up attacks. The figurehead inspiring these attacks — even if they’re adept at denying responsibility — must be challenged and taken down. Their mythos of invulnerability must be damaged and tarnished, so the myth stops spreading that you can attack democracy and get away with it. And then that justice must trickle down, from top to bottom, so that every form of inflicting real harm on people, even at smaller levels, is something that’s vigorously defended against.
Attacking democracy, remember, goes hand in hand with lies, violence, corruption — it’s not as if history doesn’t tell us that over and over again. Look for a crime, when malign figures are attacking democracy, and more often than not, you’ll find one. How is it that backing a coup, for example, doesn’t disqualify you from running from high office? If that isn’t conspiracy and sedition, what is?
All that precisely where and why democracy must have teeth. And it’s in this sense that Trump’s indictment matters. Merrick Garland’s been — to put it kindly — dragging his feet along the world’s longest boardwalk. The Jan 6th Commission is ancient history, and even though it handed him a case on a silver platter, he’s still…anyone know? Nervously eating endless breadsticks at the Olive Garden? Playing the world’s longest hand of bridge?
Perhaps this will be the crack in the dam. Maybe this means that American democracy is finally waking up, and beginning to defend itself. So far, it’s done a particularly, notably, strikingly poor job of that — which is why there are figures who were involved in the last coup, running for high office, laying the groundwork for the next dozen. Democracy must have teeth, my friends, if it is to survive. It can’t play nice with bad guys, which is what it’s been doing, too much, so far. It must do what it’s meant to do. First, no harm, and then justice, to those who do.
