Greg Sargent has a good piece today discussing whether Democrats are properly framing this crisis. He says Stephen Miller is deepening the polarization with these theatrical raids and violence and defiance of law and order for a reason: Americans will be forced to take a stand and most of them will embrace authoritarian rule. I agree that’s what he believes. Whether he’s right about that remains to be seen. Greg asks:
Do Democratic leaders broadly have their own theory about this moment? It’s unclear. But here’s what we can divine right now: Governors J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California do have one. They grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship—if they are presented with this as a clear choice.
He goes on to describe in detail what Trump and Miller are doing to make this happen and surmises that:
Miller appears to want Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Recently, Miller was asked directly if he’s discussed the idea with Trump, and he evaded the question. It’s likely that Miller, a master manipulator lurking furtively behind the despot’s throne, frequently uses the word “insurrection” about Trump’s opponents to lodge it deep in Trump’s brainstem and make invocation of the Act more likely. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger notes, Miller’s goal is to supplant the rule of law with the “rule of Trump,” a personalist form of rule that answers to Trump the man and no one else.
But there’s another aim as well:
He relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. Miller seizes on every attention-grabbing moment he can to amplify the point, even if—and this part is crucial—it looks likely at first to reflect negatively on Trump.
Consider what happened after ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago last week. As Garrett Graff chronicles, media coverage was brutal: It depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets.
Yet MAGA was undaunted. State-sponsored propaganda video depicted the affair as akin to an action movie featuring the thrilling spectacle of defeated-looking migrants in handcuffs. Miller went on Fox News to hail the operation as an enormous triumph.
He describes Pritzker’s muscular response to all this, “depicting it as a lawless action targeting U.S. citizens in order to provoke a response and justify more thuggery later. Pritzker called it “Trump’s invasion,” deliberately using a term Miller uses for immigrants.”
Miller eagerly took the bait
To be clear, the public is squarely with Pritzker: A new CBS survey finds that 58 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard deployments. And G. Elliott Morris’s recent poll finds opposition to National Guards assisting ICE at 51 percent to 37 percent.
But in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions at best. In this understanding of politics—and you should read Brian Beutler and Lee Drutman on this—what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity voters out of their information ruts, and compels them to really take sides.
Pritzker and Newsom are now plainly motivated by an understanding like this one. Pritzker has plunged very deeply into the public argument over Trump’s troops in Chicago. In urgent moral language, he has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous threat to their way of life. Newsom has done the same. After Trump tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland, Newsom warned: “America is on the brink of martial law.”
In short, Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate Blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within. And they are shaping their approach accordingly.
On the other hand, Miller thinks there’s a potentially sadistic-leaning silent majority that can be brought into authoritarianism by “flooding the public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.” In other words he’s counting on the public just accepting his framing of the “crisis” and going along with this disproportionate response.
It’s really an extension of Trump’s innate ability to persuade a large portion of the public that up is down and black is white. Miller certainly does not have that skill and Trump seems somewhat impotent in the last month or so, kind of phoning it is. (I think he’s really focused on winning that Nobel Peace prize — lol.) So Miller is using tried and true Nazi-style propaganda techniques by creating “content” to spread around on social media and other right wing outlets. I’m not sure how much that’s penetrating to that low-info crowd though. The polls aren’t showing it anyway. It seems more that they are feeding their own beast which isn’t good but it isn’t particularly persuasive to anyone else.
However, the Pritzker, Newsom approach is having the effect of at least energizing the other side, which is vitally important. Whether any low-info voters are hearing that stuff either is unknown but at least it’s out there as a counter weight.
I think more and more Democrats are seeing the necessity to stop rhetorically pussy-footing around with this. I hope so anyway.