You’ve said it. I’ve said it. Everyone you like has said it.
I’m sick of having to save democracy every four years. Ugh.
Can’t we go back to simply having to defeat awful Republicans, knowing that they’d go back to their giant five or six homes and pout, leaving us with some semblance of our fundamental rights as we sifted through the wreckage they left us and then rebuilt everything so they could wreck it again?
Identifying the exact moment when we lost the best of our democracy is a challenge because democracy, like freedom and the future, has never been evenly distributed.
But let’s say we probably lost it when the Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and suffered zero consequences for doing so. Or it could be when Donald Trump took the presidency after getting millions of fewer votes and inherited a decisive Supreme Court appointment held open for him in direct defiance of the Constitution. Democracy was definitely at least on its heels before January 6th, 2021. There’s no doubt that it was already a cooling corpse when John Roberts awarded Donald Trump the sovereign immunity of a king. And many, including the great Anat Shenker-Osorio, argue that democracy has never truly existed in this country. If it had, would it be so easy to defeat?
But democracy can exist here, and it will because the people will eventually decide.
And now, after my recent and sudden spiritual conversion, I can confidently say that I know the two simple steps to save us from the paralyzing existential peril that seems to occur suddenly after every Summer Olympics.
Defeat Donald Trump (and then his theft of the Supreme Court).
I don’t think I need to explain why the GOP’s three-time presidential nominee is a unique threat to democracy. He has created a movement that will continue to savage democracy long after he’s gone. Still, that movement will never threaten our freedoms with the “charisma” and ability to get away with crimes that Donald Trump solely possesses.
The idea that Donald Trump possesses any unique gifts is abhorrent to many of those of us to the left of Liz Cheney. I don’t need to waste my time handing it to him. I’ll just say that no presidential candidate in American history has or will spend more time on television than Donald Trump. It’s his second-best skill, talking to a camera. That didn’t help him in the debate with VP Harris. Still, it is the sole reason he demolished all his Republican opponents and stayed neck-and-neck with all of his Democratic opponents, at least in the electoral college.
His first best skill? Perverting justice.
The most remarkable thing about Donald Trump, who has been a millionaire from tax fraud since the age of eight, is that he wasn’t indicted until his late 70s. And he would never have been indicted if he hadn’t lost the electoral college by 42,844 votes in 2020.
As Marcy Wheeler has been documenting in Ball of Thread, which I help produce, Trump’s unique skill is not just polarizing us as a nation even worse than we were before him but by accelerating the extremism of the right by turning them against anything that resembles the rule of law. The episode above on the Mueller Report shows just how much dirt the special counsel found on Trump and his allies. It also shows how effectively Trump defeated the investigation, thanks mainly to the pardon power and William Barr, the choice of any Republican president trying to use the pardon power to get away with crimes.
And that power for Donald Trump to crime freely is now written into law essentially by the six Republicans on the Supreme Court, only one of whom was appointed by a president who came into office having won the popular vote. This is why defeating Donald Trump is not enough; we must overcome the damage he’s done to the Supreme Court. And as Robin Marty, executive director of the West Alabama Women’s Center, told me, the only way to do this is Supreme Court expansion. That’s the only way to achieve Marty’s vision of abortion bans going the way of Prohibition, with the public unwilling to accept this utterly useless attack on our freedoms for much more than a decade.
Achieving court expansion requires the same paradigm shift or enlightenment that defeating Donald Trump and saving democracy does, which brings us to…Stop saving democracy every four years and start saving it every year.
One of the greatest epiphanies of my life came from seeing this chart posted by the
in their recent Bat Signal, noting that the Democratic ground game is badly underfunded:
A vast and effective counter to the ground game that exists on the right through megachurches, gun clubs, Fox, country music, NASCAR, and the entire culture of rural America is the only hope to overcome this country’s rightward slope.
Zo Tobi at MVP explained to me that this can only happen by empowering the hundreds of amazing local progressive organizations that don’t appear and reappear every two or four years. These incredible groups work year-round on the particular issues that matter to their specific communities. And that positions them to be the best hope for not only turning out sporadic Democratic-leaning voters but also making sure the policies those sporadic Democratic-leaning voters want become law. MVP functions like a mutual fund to connect these organizations to funders so these organizations can focus on what they exist to do—organizing.
Our politics has been fixated on victory’s first two components because they’re fun and easier to document on cable. Yet funding the ground game and getting those of us obsessed with politics and the news fixated only on that effort would radically turn us toward democracy.
As Zo told me, “[I]t's a cognitive shift; it's a shift in consciousness. It's a real pivot in how we see how elections are won and how change happens, because elections are not the end point. They're an inflection point.”
Now, all we have to do is help that shift happen to defeat Donald Trump and then every horrible instinct he represents. That’s why I’m now a monthly donor to MVP, and I hope you join me as we attempt to raise $20,024 to save democracy this time around.
How to stop having to save democracy every four years