An object lesson for Democrats
MAGA conservatives want to go back the 1950s. Project 2025 reactionaries want to go back to the first Gilded Age. Techbros want a kind of techno neofeudalism. After Sunday’s presidential election in Poland of Karol Nawrocki, “a former soccer hooligan and historian” from the far-right, ultranationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS), “Polish patriots just want a return to a democratic normal,” The Globe and Mail reports. So do I.
It is not so easy:
Mr. Nawrocki’s party controlled parliament, the presidency and the courts for eight years starting in 2015, during which Poland’s ranking on international measures of democracy and rule of law plummeted dramatically. The party had seized political control of previously neutral state institutions, and packed the courts and public media with ultrapartisan activists in a textbook example of the process known as “democratic backsliding.”
The U.S. knows what that’s like dating from about the same time.
A liberal-democratic coalition won back parliament in 2023 but failed to regain the presidency. They deferred pursuing much of their reform agenda in hopes of retaking the presidency this week. It was not to be.
“Everything was held back – there was some idea that Poland after 2025 would come back to liberal democratic normalcy,” Karolina Wigura, a Polish sociologist and political analyst, said in an interview on Monday. “But what we had before, it turns out, really was the new Polish normalcy – that is, Poland is divided between two camps, two visions of the future of the country, and we’ll have to deal with it.”
The Polish presidency is a largely ceremonial and symbolic office, but the president does have the power to veto any legislation that does not receive a two-thirds parliamentary majority. And it is now actively supported by the U.S. executive: Mr. Nawrocki received enthusiastic support from Mr. Trump and endorsements from members of his cabinet, and from a circle of European far-right leaders. He has vowed to be more aggressive in resisting the government’s liberal reforms.
So one lesson for U.S. Democrats, and others struggling to return their country to normal, is not to wait until the conditions are perfectly right to act, because they never will be. Mr. Tusk did manage to remove some of the extreme activists from positions in the judiciary, the public service and public media and restore them to neutral professionals, as they had been before 2015, but PiS politicians still characterized those as being “globalist” partisan appointments.
Fearing such responses, critics say Mr. Tusk avoided pushing forward reform legislation – including restoration of abortion rights and sexual equality laws – that he knew would be cancelled or denounced by the PiS presidency. In the view of democrats who favoured a more active approach, this was a missed opportunity to show the public that popular attempts at reform were being trampled by figures from the previous regime.
Democrats are going to have a harder time regaining the presidency here unless they can (somehow) add a couple of more states to the union. Or massively reframe public opinion or something-something with drones.
The GOP-controlled congress is largely a performative one. Showboating is job one (after not riling the toddler in the Oval). Legislation is largely an afterthought. Well, Democrats need to do more of that. Offer more legislation that promotes Democrats’ vision for a better future. Let the GOP quash it. Lose, but lose publically and spectacularly. Make the point. Holding back didn’t work in Poland.
(h/t SR)
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense