— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) July 30, 2024
He is a seriously talented politician and I know I’d love to see him out there on the campaign trail with Harris. He’s obviously smart enough to be president. (I mean, look at what the GOP has been putting on offer…) Is it time?
The Transportation secretary is blitzing the airwaves with his Midwest-nice takedowns of Donald Trump and JD Vance. Members of Congress are talking him up. Buttigieg’s digital alumni network is circulating clips of appearances and touting his complementary skills to Kamala Harris. He did a canvassing kickoff for Harris in Traverse City, Michigan, on Saturday morning. And an ally in his home state of Indiana — saying they were acting independently of Buttigieg— has compiled a dossier evaluating Harris’ options and concluding: “Simply put, the vibes are high right now.”
The Pete for Veep trial balloon is approaching mid-flight. His allies view it as a clear signal that Buttigieg wants the job.
“He’s open to it,” a person familiar with his thinking said.
But Harris confidants and allies remain skeptical about his chances, according to interviews with a half-dozen of them, all granted anonymity to speak freely. They anticipate she’ll be ruthlessly pragmatic about her selection, viewing other contenders from outside the Beltway as better positioned to deliver key states and constituencies.
Of Buttigieg, one said, “I just don’t see it.”
And even those around Buttigieg readily concede they view him as a longshot. He and Harris are both products of the Biden administration — not exactly screaming change — and Buttigieg carries some of the same baggage as Harris from their time in the administration. He has been at the center of travel disruptions in his job as transportation secretary, including mass delays at airports, even as he has ushered in protections for airline passengers and leveled historic fines against carriers. And then there is the matter of diversity, with some Democrats fearful a ticket with a woman and a gay man may be unpalatable to some swing voters — too much change, too fast.
He’s so good at it that it’s tempting to think he can overcome all those objections. And maybe he can. But even if they decide to pull one of the other great contenders off the bench, he’s got a great future. And he certainly seems to be popular.
Trump has been telling everyone who will listen that he doesn’t need a get out the vote program because he will personally get his people out. He told the RNC and his campaign that they need to concentrate on stopping the “cheating” (by which he means Democrats voting.) The strategy is to suppress the vote wherever possible and contest the vote no matter how close the election is if he loses. There is no Democratic margin of victory that he will declare legitimate. (After all, even when he won in 2016 he said that he actually won the popular vote which he lost by 2 million votes.)
Rolling Stone took a look at how some of the red dominated swing states have set up a system to deny the election results if Trump doesn’t win and it’s sobering:
WHEN ELECTION NIGHT comes in November, it will be up to thousands of local election officials to certify election results in their counties. Among those election officials are scores of Donald Trump supporters who believe his lies and conspiracies about stolen elections — and will be in prime position to act on those beliefs to try to aid his campaign in November.
In the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Rolling Stone and American Doom identified at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results. At least 22 of these county election officials have refused or delayed certification in recent years.
Certification of election results is what legal experts consider a “ministerial task,” and one required by state and local law. But as Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have taken hold, Republicans nationwide have decided that certification provides them an opportunity to hear fraud allegations — and refuse to officially count their local votes. Republicans have refused to certify election results at least 25 times since Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, says Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
The article goes on to lay out the details. This is a huge threat and with the Supreme Court having shown its cards in the immunity case I don’t think we can necessarily count on the judiciary to be fair this time.
The Democrats have to win. And then they have to be prepared to defend the win. Elias is not sure they totally understand the danger.
Journalist Gil Duran has been following this new movement of tech billionaires who are heavily influencing right wing politics in America. They are way more out there than I realized. I just went down the rabbit hole to read these articles and frankly I’m a bit unnerved. You might want to pour yourself a strong drink before you do it:
I’ve spent this year writing for the @newrepublic about how a group of Silicon Valley billionaires has gone WEIRD. Now their weirdness is mating up with Trump’s MAGA weirdness in the 2024 election.
Here’s a few things to understand about these guys.
#1: They despise democracy. These Trump-loving billionaires believe democracy is bad. They want to create their own corporate dictatorships called Network States. They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world.
#2. They want control over existing governments. In addition to building weirdo colonies, they’re also trying to capture existing governments. In San Francisco, a group of these tech zillionaires is trying to win control of City Hall …(and now the USA!)
3. They want to punish Democrats in weird ways. One of their main influencers has suggested that tech bros should form a “gray tribe,” purge Democrats from San Francisco and build statues to remind people of how bad Democrats supposedly are…
4. JD Vance is ONE OF THEM. Vance was literally put on Trump’s ticket by the same group of people – Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen – who are behind all of the weirdness I’ve been writing about.
5. Most newspaper analyses suggest that these tech authoritarians guys just want lower taxes and friendly regulations, but that’s only part of the story. They have developed their own weird sci-fi influenced tech authoritarian IDEOLOGY.
It overlaps with MAGA in multiple ways.
6. MAGA/Tech overlaps: – Collapse. They believe in an impending societal collapse. – Messiah complex. They believe they alone can save humanity. They “alone can fix it.” – Supremacy. They share a believe in the supremacy of rich white (mostly straight) males over everyone else.
7. MAGA/Tech overlaps cont’d: – Anti-Empathy. They abhor empathy/care. – Anti-Public. They detest the idea of the public and seek to privatize most functions of government. – Anti-Worker. They believe employers are superior to employees.
8. This is not an exhaustive list. But you can see here how many of the tech authoritarian goals align with MAGA. Antipathy toward taxes and regulations may be the root of their alliance, but there are many branches. But there are key ways in which tech diverges from MAGA…
9. For example, tech authoritarians see technology as being above God (if they even believe God exists). As tech founders and investors, they see themselves as the top of the hierarchy — the masters of the universe. These beliefs have resulted in some strange sub-cults…
10. The Network State is one sub-cult — the idea of replacing existing countries with tech-run countries. Transhumanism is another — a belief in merging with machines to obtain eternal life. That’s gonna sound pretty weird to fundamentalist Christians. . . Lots of tech cults!
The tech billionaires behind Trump already have money. Now they want power — to create their own countries, to change what it means to human, to control the fate of the world. Their interest is mainly *ideological,* not economic. Anyone saying otherwise has not done the reading.
This story by @davetroy goes deep into the weird collection of ideas called TESCREAL. Many of these tech guys backing Trump have been working on this project for a long, long time.
Not all tech is bad! But a lot of people in Silicon Valley have been aware of this weirdness for a long time and have stayed quiet … or agree with parts of it. With Thiel/Musk/Vance putting it on the Trump ticket, it’s time to tune in. Because folks — it’s gonna get weirder.
On the heels of a CNN analysis that showed Vance was the least-liked non-incumbent vice-presidential nominee in at least 44 years, the network also revealed that the GOP lawmaker has a double-digit unfavorable rating with voters across the Midwest.
According to CNN, Vance had a 28% favorable rating and a 44% unfavorable rating — or a minus 16-point favorability rating — among voters surveyed in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin in July.
For Republicans banking on Vance to help boost the party across the Midwest, his standing is far below where he’ll need to be in order to win over swing voters in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin.
CNN data reporter Harry Enten during an appearance last week also pointed to data showing that Vance had a minus 5-point favorability rating after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“The people who know him best, the region that knows him best, they like him even less than America likes him,” he told the network’s Erin Burnett.
I don’t think anyone knows Vance, least of all himself. He’s a shape-shifting weirdo who is unusually unlikable. Trump made a mistake. Whether he knows it or not, is another story. After all, he believes he is a god who is incapable of making a mistake — or losing. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t.
Good luck with that Donnie… The problem isn’t Fox. It’s you and your people, all of whom sound like batshit loons.
Sen. John Kennedy on Kamala Harris: "Margaret Thatcher didn't giggle … many Americans think the vice president is a little bit of a ding dong." (Neil Cavuto is not a fan of this commentary.) pic.twitter.com/HDcFPIFUp5
Ingraham gives multiple opportunities for Trump to clarify his ‘no need to vote in four years’ remark and to make clear it doesn’t mean there won’t be another election.
Notably, the verbose Trump refuses to do so. Twice.
The Trump campaign issued a very weird statement yesterday disavowing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025— again. As the campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita point out, they’ve been trying to get them to shut up for over a year:
President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way, Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.
The Trumpian threat at the end was a nice flourish but they do mean it. The professional campaign’s frustration with the group has been obvious ever since the Democrats jumped on the 900 page manifesto and made it into another Trump branded product. No matter how hard they tried they couldn’t get people to stop talking about it.
Trump has personally tried to distance himself from it calling “appalling” and “extreme” at different times and claiming he didn’t know anything about it,even though his own VP nominee JD Vance has extensive ties to the organization and has even written the foreword to Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book Dawn’s Early Light, Taking Back Washington to Save America. And as has been thoroughly documented, most of the people associated with it are Trump alumni, such as his former HHS Secretary Ben Carson, Trade adviser Peter Navarro, White House Adviser Johnny McEntee and former Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought. In fact, one report showed that 31 of 38 authors and editors of the 900 page tome had been on Trump’s team at one time or still are. This is not surprising since Trump and his MAGA movement have devoured what was once the conservative movement of which The Heritage Foundation was a founding institution. Conservatives are MAGA now or they are no longer relevant.
Wiles’ and LaCivita’s statement was issued on the news that Paul Dans, the person who was in charge of producing the “Mandate For Leadership” governance guide announced that he was leaving the project in August which was immediately interpreted to mean that the Trump people had engineered the ouster and had successfully gotten the Heritage Foundation to back away from it. But is that really the case?
The 900 page Mandate for Leadership is already written. In fact, it was largely finished over a year ago when we first started talking about it. It’s all over the internet. The producers of the document are MAGA movement operatives and it is a MAGA document whether Trump wants to claim it or not. Certainly, the Harris campaign is not going to let him off the hook:
Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real – in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.
Trump is running around pandering to every constituency and donor group, promising anything and everything in order to get reelected. And most of what he’s promising is in Project 2025 except for the third rail issue of abortion which he fatuously insists he’s “solved” by having it go back to the states, claiming that’s what everyone on all sides always wanted. That is, of course, absurd. But pretty much everything else from policies on law enforcement, trade, deregulation. education, executive power, civil rights and immigration are all listed on his own Agenda 47 website with very little to distinguish them from the Project 2025 except for the level of detail. In other words, they see Project 2025 as a branding problem not a substance problem and the media needs to be much more careful to explain that.
The Mandate for Leadership guide is only part of Project 2025. The other component is the vast personnel database that a new Trump administration will use to staff the federal government once they implement “Schedule F”, an executive order that strips federal civil service protections from workers allowing them to fire thousands of federal workers and replace them with Trump loyalists. There is no doubt that this is a Trump initiative since they first wrote Schedule F during his administration. This database is as much a part of Project 2025 as the manifesto.
Project 2025 has become inconvenient for the Trump campaign but it has produced nearly all the policy it was ever going to & owns the central personnel database in the conservative movement. Trump doesn’t yet have a functioning transition team & will likely need its resources. https://t.co/v3FvDLo3O6
Trump has every intention of implementing its vision. It’s his vision too. And not only would it be terrifying and dangerous, it would also be dangerously incompetent. That wouldn’t be the first time. As I noted back in 2016, when it became news that since Trump had no experience at government he was relying on the Heritage Foundation during its transition, it has a very poor record when it came to staffing government. As the Washington Post reported over 20 years ago, they were instrumental in one of the most disastrous policies of the Bush administration:
They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country’s $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.
Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars.
[…]
For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their résumés at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.
This epic debacle was documented in the book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran which revealed that the Bush administration had decided they wanted ideological litmus tests for the people who were going to build the new Iraq government from the ground up. Among the criteria were questions like were they “pro-life” and did they believe in unfettered gun rights, none of which had the slightest relevance to the jobs at hand. You may recall that this starry-eyed experiment in nation building was an embarrassing failure.
It appears that if Trump wins in November they’re going to try it again, only this time they’re experimenting on their fellow Americans. And they still have clearly learned nothing from all their previous humiliating failures.
Maybe Donald Trump is just confused and lost track of his own previous positions on these things, but we're detecting a less flattering pattern. pic.twitter.com/8sFkVaAOSl
In this piece yesterday, I mentioned Trump’s meeting at the Bitcoin convention and his newfound love for crypto. As you can see from the above clip by Rachel Maddow, he’s just pretty much selling out all policies to the highest bidder these days. Here are a few other policies he’s put on the auction block:
Here are just a few of the policies he is selling to donors.
$1bn from oil companies
At a lavish dinner at Mar-a-Lago in April, the former president gathered with around two dozen executives from the biggest oil companies in the country. His campaign was facing a sizeable cash shortfall against his opponent, President Joe Biden, and he was desperate to make up the difference.
As the executives complained about how the Biden administration’s environmental regulations were hurting their business, Trump made a starkly transactional pitch: raise $1bn to send me back to the White House. If he won, he said he would immediately reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies. The $1bn would be a “deal” for the companies, he added, because of the money they would save from deregulation.
The account of the meeting, first reported by the Washington Post, came from several people who attended. Among them were 20 executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry. It was reportedly organized by oil billionaire Harold Hamm. Specifically, Trump vowed to undo a Biden administration freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports “on the first day” of entering office, one attendee told the Post.
[…]
TikTok flip-flop
As president, Trump spearheaded efforts to ban TikTok. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” the then-president declared to reporters aboard Air Force One in July 2020. Indeed, he signed an executive order in his last year in office that would have effectively prohibited the video app, which is majority-owned by a Chinese company. But just this month he joined TikTok himself. And more recently he has spoken out against efforts from both the Biden administration and his own party to regulate it.
On March 7, a House committee advanced a bill that would ban the app if it didn’t divest, even as TikTok users flooded congressional lines with thousands of calls urging lawmakers to back off. That same day, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “if you get rid of TikTok, (then) Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last election, doing better,” wrote Trump, echoing a baseless conspiracy theory that social media platforms rigged elections against him. “They are a true Enemy of the People!” What prompted this dramatic change?
Some clues may be derived from the fact that his words came swiftly after a very public rapprochement with Republican mega-donor Jeff Yass. Yass has a $20bn stake in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and is the largest donor in this election campaign cycle. At the request of Yass, Trump spoke at a conference of the influential right-wing Club for Growth, which the former president previously blasted as “Club for No Growth”.
[…]
West Bank-rolling
Perhaps the most brazen quid pro quo of Trump’s first term came with a giant donation from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party’s biggest funder over the past decade.According to New York Times writer Maggie Haberman in her book ‘Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,’ Adelson made a $20m donation to a political action committee to pressure then-president Trump to adopt the highly controversial decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. For his second term, Trump may be poised to sell another controversial policy to the Adelson family.
Sheldon died in 2021, but his wife Miriam has continued his cause and may even surpass Yass to become Trump’s biggest patron in this election cycle. A New York Magazine profile of Miriam, published last month, suggested that Trump’s support for the Israeli annexation of the West Bank was top of her wish list for a second term.
[…]
“I’ve been the best president in history to Israel by a factor of ten because of all the things I do. The embassy, Jerusalem being the capital. Then you have Golan Heights … Nobody even thought that was going to be possible. I did that,” he said.Ten days after the publication of the New York Magazine profile, Politico reported that Adelson would fund a massive political action committee for Trump’s re-election.
Trickle-up tax cuts
During his presidency, Trump implemented sweeping tax cuts for the top 1 per cent of earners and cut the maximum corporation tax rate from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. His cuts were “one factor helping the fortunes of US billionaires grow by a collective $1 trillion during the pandemic, from March 18 to December 7, 2020,” according to the non-partisan group, Americans for Tax Fairness.
The group said that an analysis of donations to Trump found that he was “enabled with a total of almost a quarter billion dollars in campaign contributions from 134 of America’s billionaires during his short, violent political career”. Trump is looking to replicate that windfall by promising even more tax cuts for the wealthy, should he win a second term. Several billionaire donors backed off following the riot on January 6, 2021 — they are now finding their way back to Trump, largely thanks to that promise.
Speaking at a donor event at the luxury Pierre Hotel in New York last month, Trump warned the wealthy attendees that taxes would go up unless he wins in November because Biden has vowed to let his tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history,” he said. “So whatever you guys can do, I appreciate it.”
The comments are part of a pattern of offers to wealthy donors from Trump. Donate to me, he says, and I’ll make you richer. Speaking at Mar-a-Lago in December last year, Trump drew laughs as he described the audience as “rich as hell” before declaring: “We’re gonna give you tax cuts!”
And as Maddow mentions in her piece, he’s suddenly done a reversal on electric cars, no doubt because Elon Musk has promised to write checks for 45 million dollars every month until the election.
He is a convicted criminal after all and has been found liable for almost half a billion dollars worth of fraud in Manhattan, not to mention his bogus charity and “university” so none of this should be surprising. What is still shocking is that tens of millions of Americans are fine with it.
If you’ve watched Democrats flounder for years to find messaging that actually catches on, that actually smacks down Republicans’ vapid posturing over family and patriotism, you’re not alone. Remember Rep. Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) stillborn effort to sell how you can make it in America if we “make it in America”? I winced.
Well, with a new generation comes more facile minds, quicker wits, and sharper tongues.
Consider if you will, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his response to Sen. J.D. Vance’s suggestion that Americans without children have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”
Buttigieg responds, “When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids back then. But I will tell you, especially when there was a rocket attack going on, my commitment to this country felt pretty, pretty physical.”
And the crowd goes wild.
Republicans’ economic populism is just posturing, Buttigieg argues. It’s more body language than policy. It’s an act.
.@PeteButtigieg: "If your party has been systematically against unions, against a higher minimum wage, against paid family leave, against overtime, then just because you found Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock and put them on a stage doesn't make you a friend of the working man." pic.twitter.com/bMb74nDSn3
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) July 30, 2024
The New Republic considers GOP whines about being branded “weird“:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday shut down Vivek Ramaswamy’s attempt to fire back at the Kamala Harris campaign’s criticisms of Republicans as “weird.”
It started when Ramaswamy posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday night about how “this whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile.”
Don’t mess with AOC. She’s not from the Hoyer wing of the Democratic Party.
Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy.
Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal.
Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy.
It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird. And people need to know. https://t.co/vgDeM9e7pU
“It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird,” AOC answers Vivek Ramaswamy’s attempt to counterpunch.
It appears that the criticisms of Vance and Trump are starting to get to Republicans, which signals that they’re working. For the past week, Vance has been heavily mocked, as his campaign speeches fell flat and a false internet rumor circulated about him conducting a sex act with a couch. Old remarks where he compared Democrats to “childless cat ladies” resurfaced and drew criticism from celebrities as well as lawmakers.
It doesn’t help deflect the “weird” label when the GOP’s presidential candidate doesn’t just cover his baldness with a combover but sculpts his hair into an architectural wonder. He then trowels on bronzer to conceal his pastiness before going online to fish for compliments from dictators. And when your party’s celebrities look like Batman villains.
Third, the gear that wear to show that they’re totally normal and their opinions are serious.
— Veterans For Responsible Leadership (@VetsForRL) July 29, 2024
Anat Shenker-Osorio self-promotes the fact that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s recently celebrated messaging cleverness has a history. Democrats sold a brighter future in Minnesota that Walz’s policies made real.
For those just newly catching onto Walz, admittedly not objective here, but strongly encourage taking a listen to our podcast episode on the emergence of his extraordinarily effective messaging. https://t.co/rtdmlALeeB
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) July 29, 2024
Signals abound that the political ground has shifted to the Democrats. The Kamala Harris Zooms, for example. The latest last night, “White Dudes for Harris,” raised $4 million in three hours. Jeff Bridges, “the Dude,” dropped by along with 180,000 others. “Harris leads Trump 44% to 42% in US presidential race,” blares a Reuters headline from Thursday. I cited some local signs on Monday. Republicans are experiencing a “weird” problem they’re having trouble shaking.
A few images of Trump world being totally normal and not at all weird. 🧵
— Veterans For Responsible Leadership (@VetsForRL) July 29, 2024
Trump, The Man Who Never Laughs, is making fun of Harris for having a sense of humor. Eugene Robinson notes, “Think about it: We’ve heard Trump snarl and mock, we’ve seen him smile, but can anyone remember him laughing out loud? I can’t. Kind of weird, no?”
Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, demonstrates yet again that Trump’s boast that he picks only the best people is as good as the 34-felonies former president’s promise to produce a replacement health care plan in “two weeks.” That is, if it doesn’t conflict with his next “Infrastructure Week.”
“Donald Trump hired 44 cabinet members; 75 percent of them want nothing to do with the guy,” Jon Stewart reminded “The Daily Show” viewers Monday night. The man who once boasted he couldn’t be bought is openly selling policies to the highest bidders. When the going gets tough, the weird get weirder.
It’s a new day, historian Heather Cox Richardson observes:
Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.
I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.
That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.
But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.
At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime.
In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.
The change was just as quick in the 1850s. In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement.
And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution.
The same pattern was true in the 1920s, when it seemed as if business interests and government were so deeply entwined that it was only a question of time until the United States went down the same dark path to fascism that so many other nations did in that era. In 1927, after the execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, poet John Dos Passos wrote: “they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations….”
And yet, just five years later, voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised Americans a New Deal and ushered in a country that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.
Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.
And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy.
But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive.
And then something fans them into flame.
President Joe Biden’s passing-the-torch moment, compelled or self-inspired, has relit the flame that felt all but snuffed out by creeping authoritarianism just weeks ago. But Trump is no Smokey Bear. He failed to properly drown democracy’s embers. The Dobbs decision overturning Roe “made it clear that a small minority intended to destroy democracy and replace it with a dictatorship based in Christian nationalism.” Bad move. It fanned the embers.
But Biden did not pass the torch to Harris, Richardson suggests. He passed it to us.
It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope.
It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.
Perhaps as Benjamin Franklin said of the chair in which George Washington sat during debates over the Constitution, the sun carved into it is rising, not setting.
