There Are No Decisive Victories for Democracy to Be Had Yet

Processing an extreme week in U.S. politics

One week ago, on Tuesday, April 4, Donald Trump had to come to the Manhattan Criminal Court to turn himself in, was arrested, appeared before a judge, and pleaded not guilty. Pundits had been looking forward to this day with feverish anticipation, often insinuating we were about to witness an earth-shattering event that would potentially tear the country apart. But what actually happened was rather ordinary and boring, exactly the way it should be. There were no massive protests, no big show from Trump supporters nor the ex-president himself who seemed rather subdued. The criminal justice system, it may have seemed, was finally coming for an unprecedentedly unlawful political figure.

On the same day, Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, giving liberals a majority for the first time in 15 years. So much depended on this election: The future of Wisconsin’s extreme gerrymander, and thereby the questions of whether or not democracy has a future in the state; the right to abortion and bodily autonomy; and potentially even who will be president, as Wisconsin was central in Trump’s scheme to nullify the results of the 2020 election. In a functioning, healthy democratic system, no single state court election should have so much riding on it, but here we are. And once again, just like in the 2022 midterms, a clear majority of voters in a purple state was mobilized for democracy and abortion rights, while Republican fear-mongering over “crime, crime, crime” fell flat.

On Tuesday night, a lot of commentators on the center and in the liberal camp were ready to celebrate April 4 as a triumphant day for American democracy. And both of these events really were significant. But a week later, everything that has happened since should also serve as a reminder that the conflict over whether or not this country should indeed be a democracy that deserves the name is playing out on so many levels, in so many places simultaneously, that we need to hold off on grand proclamations of democracy striking back or turning the tide… No decisive victories have been won in the fight against those who are unwilling to accept America as anything but a country of white Christian patriarchal rule – there are none to be had yet.

Here are some of the things that have happened since Trump was arraigned and the Wisconsin Supreme Court was flipped:

• On Wednesday, April 5, Idaho implemented a law intended to stop people from leaving the state for an abortion. It is the first state to enact such an interstate travel restriction since the Supreme Court abolished the right to abortion in the Dobbs decision last summer. This is evidence – not that any more was needed – that Republicans are not content to outlaw and criminalize abortion just within the states where they are in control. Their vision is a draconian, nation-wide ban, and on the path towards that end goal, they are absolutely willing to drastically curtail basic rights, starting with those of the people in their own states.

• On Thursday, April 6, Tennessee Republicans expelled two Democratic lawmakers from the state assembly. Together with a third colleague, they had shown solidarity with an ongoing demonstration of thousands of citizens, mostly schoolchildren, demanding action to protect Americans from gun violence. It was a breach of decorum and against assembly rules. But expulsion – of the two young Black lawmakers only, not the white woman – was an unprecedented retaliation, perfectly in line with the state’s tradition of white supremacy. It was also emblematic of the attempts by Republicans to suppress the voice of blue metro areas and entrench the power of rural conservatism over more progressive urban centers that is playing out across the country. And it encapsulated the asymmetry of the political conflict in which the GOP does not accept the opposition as a legitimate political opponent. Instead, Republicans see Democrats as a fundamentally illegitimate faction, not deserving of rights or respect – particularly Democrats (and Democratic voters) who are not white Christian men.

• On Friday, April 7, a Trump-appointed U.S. district judge in Texas halted the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortion. The ruling, which would apply nation-wide, is unlikely to stand, the government’s appeal more likely to be successful. But this episode is significant and concerning nevertheless: 23 Republican attorney generals had joined the law suit to ban mifepristone – another initiative to impose an abortion ban even in blue states. The ruling itself has been widely described as legally indefensible: It accepts and reproduces the extreme ideas and positions of the most radical anti-abortion groups, including “fetal personhood.”

• On Saturday, April 8, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he intended to pardon Daniel Perry, a man who, just 24 hours earlier, had been convicted by a jury of murdering a protestor at a Black Lives Matter protest. This attempt to immediately nullify a jury verdict sends a clear message to the Right: It encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to suppress “leftwing” protests by protecting, celebrating, and glorifying those who have engaged in such violent fascistic fantasies – call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma.

• Finally, by Sunday night, April 9, the entire Right had rallied around Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and his billionaire friend / donor Harlan Crow. On Thursday, a ProPublica report had revealed how Thomas had been accepting all sorts of expensive gifts and pleasantries from Crow for years – an astonishing level of corruption, only topped by the arrogant nonchalance with which Thomas seems to have decided this was all totally cool, how dare anyone criticize him or his friends. To make this whole affair a tiny bit more ridiculous, it turns out that Harlan Crow likes to collect and display Nazi memorabilia, along with other artifacts of past dictators. At the very least, as John Ganz pointed out in his newsletter, this “shows an unwholesome fascination with power and domination … there is an unavoidable suggestion of idolatry and vulgar power-worship just under the surface.” And yet, the Republican Party, leading movement conservatives, and the reactionary intellectual sphere have all decided that the only scandal here is “the Left” daring to suggest there might be something problematic about this kind of conduct by one of America’s most powerful people, or about the company he keeps.

This is not a comprehensive list, and it all happened in the five days after Trump’s arraignment and the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. It’s not a great sign for the state of the union that none of these monumental events were able to dominate the news cycle for more than 24 hours because the assault on democracy and basic civil rights is continuing with such brutal speed.

I must admit that I struggled to process and make sense of it all as it was happening. It was one of those weeks that U.S. politics produces far, far too often: If you don’t have the time and resources to keep up, read, follow along all day (which I didn’t), you have little chance to stay on top of even the key developments that could potentially have a tremendous impact on the polity going forward. I can only imagine that even among those who consider themselves politically interested, many people who are not being paid to cover politics either started ignoring what’s going on halfway through the week and settled on simply not knowing the rest – or came away from it all with a misleading and distorted sense of what mattered and what didn’t.

I’d like to offer two general thoughts on how to put things into perspective. First of all, one of the key challenges of our current political moment is to see the news of the past week not as disparate events, but as intimately connected. We are looking at many battlefields, on so many different levels across the country – but it’s all one conflict. It’s really hard to keep track of everything. That’s why it’s crucial to emphasize the underlying reactionary political project, the multi-level reactionary counter-mobilization aiming to entrench traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, the increasingly authoritarian measures to prevent multiracial, pluralistic democracy. That’s the story.

Trump himself is not the story – nor, however, is his fate simply a distraction from what *really* matters. We need to see the ex-president, the cult of personality around him, and his core followership that comprises a significant portion of the conservative base as a specific part of that broader reactionary counter-mobilization, fulfilling a specific role. The multi-pronged attack on the system has a judicial arm (to which the Texas judge who halted the FDA’s approval of mifepristone belongs as much as Clarence Thomas does), a legislative arm (that consists of the Tennessee Republicans who expelled two Black lawmakers from the assembly as well as of the extremist House GOP in Washington), an intellectual arm, and a paramilitary arm, all flanked by a highly effective media/propaganda machine. In this context, what may strike some as mindless, nihilistic, anarchist raging from Trump and his MAGA disciples has a specific role to play: to spread violent chaos and intimidation. The Trumpian drama is inherently political – as part of the bigger story, it matters very much.

My second point concerns the desire among centrists and liberals to find the light at the end of the tunnel, to declare democracy to be unmistakably on the path towards victory. The events of last Tuesday were undoubtedly important. But it makes little sense to diagnose them as decisive turning points in the broader conflict over the future of American democracy if we can’t possibly know how the struggle will unfold from here or even discern where we are in that story.  

The euphoric takes on Tuesday night reminded me of the end-of-the-year assessments from late 2022. As the new year began, a consensus seemed to have emerged among commentators spanning a broad range of the political spectrum, from left-wing outlets like Jacobin to center-right outlets such as the Bulwark, that 2022 was generally a good year for American democracy. Or maybe consensus is too strong a word, as it implies that everyone agreed, which wasn’t the case. But towards the end of 2022, there was a flurry of pieces written by prominent observers and pundits that displayed a striking sense of optimism, albeit mixed with caution, regarding the state of democracy in America and the world. Some argued 2022 was the year that democracy turned the corner, fought back, started winning; some wouldn’t go so far as to flat-out call it a win, but still maintained that democracy had done much, much better than expected; all basically agreed that the country was in a significantly better place than a year earlier. A mixture of relief, optimism, and confidence – and positive expectations for 2023 across the board.

Probably the most hopeful take came from the Center-Right, from Never Trumper-in-chief Bill Kristol. He opened his review of the past year in the Bulwark with a reminder of how “grim” things had looked on New Year’s Day 2022. But then, “things turned around” – or rather, as Kristol argued, “It was people—both extraordinary leaders and ordinary folk—who turned things around in 2022.” Not only had 2022 been better than expected, not only did we, according to Kristol, “enter 2023 in better shape than we could have reasonably hoped a year ago.” Kristol believed the tide had turned against the forces of autocracy. “In 2022,” he told us, “democracy and liberty didn’t just hold the line—they gained some ground.” So much so that he described the year that had just ended as a probable “inflection point”: We were now, that seemed to be Kristol’s key message, on our way to victory.

I don’t bring this up to ridicule these pieces or their authors. There was actual evidence to support these claims. Reading these “The Year That Was” pieces from a few months ago, much like the “This was a great day for democracy” takes on Tuesday night, I am skeptical not so much about each individual argument, but rather about the overall implication that the ship may have been turned around. Such assessments merely offer a snapshot of a very specific moment in time, rather than a solid analysis of the big picture. In December, they were evidence of a widespread post-midterms sense of relief and an expectation (more than a reality) of accountability after the January 6 Committee had just referred Trump to the Department of Justice for prosecution. But the problem is that all the threats to democracy are still there. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, for instance, has not been reversed or countered with effective national legislation. In general, the attempts to roll back the post-1960s civil rights order keep radicalizing, manifesting in an escalating assault on abortion rights and bodily autonomy as well as on the rights of the lgbtq community, particularly those of trans people. The systemic issues that make it so much harder to defend democracy against these reactionary forays also persist: One of the two major parties is dominated by a shrinking, radicalizing minority of white Christian reactionaries who are increasingly willing to embrace authoritarianism to entrench their dominance; they are being helped in the pursuit of this minoritarian project by the many counter-majoritarian distortions of a political system that consistently awards them a disproportionate amount of power; the necessary reforms to structurally democratize that system are certainly not coming while Republicans hold the House – nor is the desperately needed legislation that would guarantee certain minimum standards for voting rights nation-wide; and oh, by the way, no one on the Democratic side has figured out how to handle the fact that one of the major institutions, the Supreme Court, has itself become the spearhead of the reactionary assault on democracy. In order not to rely entirely on our day-to-day barometer of volatile feelings and mood swings, it might make sense to consider these issues as something of a (still woefully incomplete) checklist of problems, threats, and challenges – and then ask ourselves: Has any of this been meaningfully addressed, rectified, reversed, or solved?

Without wanting to psychologize or generalize from my own experience too much, a lot of people will remember how they felt in November 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to be president; or in the summer of 2022, when the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court let the mask slip and released a flurry of decisions that dealt severe blows to the project of realizing the promise of multiracial, pluralistic democracy while supercharging the country’s dissolution into two very different systems. Against this background, I completely understand the desire to latch on to any victory, no matter how small – anything that might counter the feeling of helpless anger. But let’s not have the pendulum swing relentlessly between despair and euphoria and constantly re-calibrate the overall assessment of the state of American democracy based on whatever is the latest twist in Trump world here or the latest election result there.

On this front, the “Left” and the pro-democracy camp more generally can perhaps learn something from their opponents: The Right has no trouble keeping the big picture in mind and has long thought of the political conflict as an all-encompassing struggle against what they perceive as fundamentally “un-American” forces of radical “woke” progressivism and extreme leftism; as a result, they have developed a comprehensive strategy to counter the supposed “leftwing” domination of most major institutions – one that takes into account that they lack majority support in the population and that the battle will have to be waged over decades. After the Supreme Court abolished the right to abortion, for instance, the overwhelming message on the Right was: We are not done yet – Dobbs was just “the end of the beginning” and a “resounding first step,” nothing more, as the religious reactionaries over at First Things put it.

The message should be: Accept the ideological nature of the conflict, the fundamentally irreconcilable visions for American society that fuel it, the long-term horizon of the struggle – and keep at it.