State Of Failure
As the four-year anniversary of the most dangerous attack on our democracy since the South’s secession in 1861 passes and the accession to the presidency of the man who led that attack is just days away, it is hard to grasp just how much of our entire system of governance has eroded, not just since 2016 but for the last quarter century. In so many areas of civic life, we see an erosion, even collapse, of institutions, capacity, accountability, and civility.
Certainly the most destructive political force over these years has been the transformation of the Republican Party into a neo-fascist cult that exists only for power. Multiple analyses of Republican policies have put them farther to the right than many of the European far-right parties, especially with its diminution, even rejection, of core democratic principles. The Party’s incessant threats to stop funding the government and/or forcing it to default on its debt are the tactics of extortionist gangsters. The extreme partisan gerrymandering, the efforts to exert partisan authority over the running of elections, and the constant efforts to strip Democrats of power when they do win elections are the antithesis of democratic governance. The Party’s open declaration that they would never consider a Supreme Court nominee from a Democratic president is and was a violation of their constitutional duties. The infamous Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the vote count in Florida in 2000 was merely a precursor to the insurrection on January 6th, which itself was just the most egregious of the Trump’s violations of law and the Constitution that included rampant self-dealing, writing payoff checks from the Oval office, using the IRS and DOJ to investigate his opponents, extorting foreign governments to interfere in our election for his benefit, and more. Not only did the Party refuse to impeach him for these crimes, it renominated the druggie/delusional dolt for a third time even after it became clear he stole classified documents, was found civilly liable for a sexual assault that most consider rape, and became a convicted felon for falsifying business records. Today, Trump is getting paid $2,000 per day by Elon Musk so that he can literally sit in on any meeting with the President-elect that he wants to, to say nothing of the other opportunities for self-dealing in the obscene inauguration/library fund and exemptions from proposed tariffs, and all with not even a peep from the Party.
The Republican Party will not “come to its senses” after Trump simply because Trump is the culmination of the transformation of the Party itself. Trump never “took over” the Party; the Party selected Trump. If the GOP still had members of limited integrity such as Bill Cohen, Barry Goldwater, and Howard Baker, then Trump would not be a political force. But those days passed long ago. Today, people like that – Bob Michel, John Boehner, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney – simply get drummed right out of the Party. This present Republican Party is the creation of nihilists like Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Denny Hastert, Mitch McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and J.D. Vance.
While the Republican Party has transformed for the worse, the Democratic party and its sclerotic, geriatric leadership still seems stuck in the triangulation mode of the 1990s, forever hedging their positions in the hope of winning over “swing voters” who no longer exist and looking for bipartisan compromise at every opportunity which merely comes across as weakness and capitulation. When the GOP successfully extorts some unrelated policy change by threatening not to fund the government or pay the debts that have already been incurred and the Democrats pat themselves on the back for being the adults in the room for coming to an agreement that prevents that from happening, it is instead perceived by the public and the base of their own party as more capitulation that just encourages more Republican extortion. When the party loses a close election, even when they simultaneously win the popular vote, it completely caves. We saw that with the Bush tax cuts, the Patriot Act, and the Iraq War, and we appear to be seeing the same today. The party is constantly sabotaged by an ever-changing but consistent group of reactionary centrists who always believe that they are best positioned between an increasingly radical Republican cult and the core of their own party. The party is unable to respond quickly to events because it relies so much on poll-testing its responses with the result that the public’s perception is already baked in by the time a coordinated Democratic response emerges. Incredibly, today, in this post-election interregnum, having spent the entire campaign properly declaring Trump to be a wannabe dictator and Trump confirming just that, the reactionary centrists are talking about working with the new administration, the rest of the party is apparently still discussing whether or not to surrender to Trump and a corrupt cabinet seemingly designed to destroy the institutions they would lead, and the most popular Democratic politician is joking around with the avowed fascist at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. No wonder the party has little credibility with the voters.
When it does gain power, the party refuses to fully implement it, seemingly scared of its own shadow. It passes really positive, powerful legislation like the ACA or IRA but ensures that the effects of the legislation are largely postponed until after the next election. In the interim, the policies are, as always targeted by GOP attacks and Democrats barely try to defend them with the result that the program are largely discredited in the public’s mind even when the policies become popular. The same thinking produces absurdities like the concept of “self-impeachment”, the limiting of the charges in the first impeachment, and the refusal to call impeachment witnesses in the second in order to get home by Valentine’s Day. Worst of all is the incessant impulse to “move on” and “look forward”, ignoring the crimes of the Bush administration during the War on Terror, the crimes of the Wall Street bankers who created the Great Financial Crisis, and the myriad of crimes that Trump committed.
The Democratic party has still yet to understand that, in today’s world, the primary role of the opposition party is to oppose. Its legislative leaders are terrible communicators. Democratic administrations have produced far better economic outcomes than their Republican counterparts over the last thirty years, yet somehow are still trusted less on that issue than the GOP. They couldn’t even manage to successfully discredit the man who tried to overthrow the government, preferring to resort to the failed tactic of talking about “kitchen table” issues. The party is addicted to following the rules, defending the sanctity of clearly failing institutions even at the expense of the country’s general welfare, and adhering to norms its opponents refuse to abide. It continually sabotages its dynamic younger members in favor of protecting its more senior leaders, some of whom are clearly corrupt and even oppose core Democratic policies. In so many areas of this country, Democratic policies are clearly popular, but the Democratic message is never heard and the brand has become simply toxic.
Even so, much of the erosion of our democratic institutions flows from the transformation of the Republican party into an anti-democratic force. Our legal system, which was already seriously flawed before, has become hopelessly partisan and functionally ineffective in combatting the euphemism that is “white collar crime”, otherwise known as theft. We can again look back at the 2000 election and the Supreme Court’s decision of Bush v. Gore which foreshadowed the Court’s usurpation of power from the executive and legislative branches as well as its own lower courts, and was so legally baseless that the majority warned against using it as precedent. The Court has now moved on to obliterating decades of precedent in multiple areas of the law, often without providing any guidance for how lower courts are to resolve disputes in those areas, and often with legal principles inconsistently applied across a range of cases and occasionally within a specific decision itself, and usually to the benefit of one particular Party. It has invented legal theories almost out of thin air. Certain Justices on the Court have continually violated the legal requirements for reporting so-called “gifts” and ignored the normal judicial ethical requirement to recuse in cases where they have an interest, but instead declare themselves bound by no ethical rules at all.
The Roberts’ Court is now a lawless American politburo creating the legal framework for even more lawlessness. “No one is above the law” was always a useful aspiration even if it was largely fiction in practice, but the Court has now declared that the President is constitutionally protected for the crimes he commits in office. It has enshrined the right to bribe elected officials. It has turned our electoral system into an exclusive club for billionaires and their puppets and which allows the disenfranchisement of whole swaths of eligible voters. It has given rights to corporations without imposing any of the usual responsibilities or means of accountability. The Court has grabbed even more power by overturning the decades-old Chevron doctrine and transferring decisions about complex business matters to themselves instead of executive branch bureaucrats, who are at least accountable to the elected administration. It ignores the simple fact that the federal judiciary does not have the capacity to make such decisions and even those that are currently litigated often take years or even decades to resolve. In doing so, the Court has only encouraged more corporate criminality. The Court’s unique interpretation of the Second Amendment as providing an individual right to bear arms, upending over two centuries of legal understanding, has led to levels of gun violence not seen in any other developed country and is now the leading cause of death among children. And, whatever your views about abortion, only a sick legal mind believes that the Constitution allows for a 10-year old child to be forced to carry her rapist’s child to term.
The lawlessness at the highest court, of course, filters down to the lower courts and the rest of the legal system. The Fifth Circuit, covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, is even more lawless than the Supreme Court. It has become a favorite and increasingly used venue for conservative plaintiffs simply because they can judge shop – filing cases in specific districts where they know exactly who the judge will be and can almost guarantee the verdict they are seeking. Worse, many of these judges also engage in a massive power grab using their expansive view of both their jurisdiction and the plaintiffs standing. Similarly, Ailleen Cannon in Florida has issued multiple legally questionable decisions in her effort to protect Trump. Beyond the Fifth Circuit, a recent study found that judges across the country did not recuse themselves but instead oversaw hundreds of cases where they had a vested interest. The country suffers from rampant prosecutorial abuse and lawyers act more like co-conspirators these days than officers of the court. Ever expansive interpretations of qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture fuel state corruption and legalize violations of citizens’ core constitutional rights.
The dysfunction in our three branches of government has, until recently, overshadowed the collapse of the Fourth Estate. The print newspaper business has never really found a way to stay profitable in the digital age of the last quarter century, largely because of the loss in advertising revenue to digital middlemen and the preference for social media. Since 2005, one-third of US papers have closed and around two-thirds of American journalists have lost their jobs. The majority of the remaining papers are just weeklies. In 2023, an average of 2.5 newspapers closed every week. The few successful digital news outlets are primarily focused in big metropolitan areas. The result is that half of the counties in the country are now news deserts. News deserts result in increased local corruption, greater political polarization, and less civic participation. The large cable news channels are all now part of larger corporate behemoths that clearly direct the overall approach to coverage within their preferred parameters, with Fox being an outright propaganda outlet. In fact, just six conglomerates control 90% of US media. The three big national papers – New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times – are all now owned by millionaires/billionaires who have directly interfered with editorial independence at their papers, destroying their already limited credibility. The void created by the collapse of traditional media is now filled with social media that is designed to amplify misinformation and whose owners have no interest in fixing that. The end result is that the country has an ever-growing misinformed electorate that is easily misled and with no trusted sources for a common set of facts. In other words, a recipe for disaster for a well-functioning democracy.
Misinformation is just part of a broader attack on an educated citizenry that now includes assaults at every level of our educational institutions. Multiple states have instituted book bans, some of which even extend to public libraries. In Oklahoma, public schools are being forced into religious indoctrination. The charter school and voucher movements are really designed to both starve public education and use that money for private institutions, usually religiously based. States are literally whitewashing history in their public school curriculum and, at the college level, whole swaths of studies in the humanities are being defunded. University administrators are now getting fired for standing up for the principle of free speech. Peaceful civil protests on campuses are being banned by school administrations and also forcefully, often violently, broken up by police forces brought in the from the outside. Over half the public schools in the country now have a police presence inside their buildings, abetting the school-to-prison pipeline and widespread abuses of students’ civil rights with very little evidence that such presence adds to safety.
In another time, we might have seen business or religious leaders standing against this rising tide of intolerance and the collapse of civic life. Instead, the evangelical movement is fully onboard with the Christian nationalist project as is what can be described as the Opus Dei wing of the Catholic Church. More liberal Catholics and Protestants are forever tainted by the decades of sexual abuse they tolerated and wracked by internal squabbling between orthodoxy and modern relevance. Similarly, our economy, where a handful of companies control the market in nearly every consumer sector, is now controlled by oligarchs who are no longer interested in the independent protections that our legal and political systems provide to allow real market capitalism to thrive, but instead are far more focused on sustaining their dominant economic position either through the destruction of that independent state power or, increasingly, controlling its use to protect and enhance their existing dominance. That process has been made far easier by the previously mentioned Supreme Court’s decisions demolishing the limits on campaign finance and political bribery.
Who knows what the next four years will bring? We can be certain that in some ways it will be worse than we can imagine. After all, who envisioned kids in cages in 2016. Federalism may temporarily protect some of us from the worst. But we can be also sure that some of our neighbors will lose their families, their livelihoods, and even their lives due to Trump/Republican policies. We are led by a self-declared dictator and a fascistic Party that will do almost anything to retain power, including threats and violence. We can assume that the power of the state will attack any emerging serious opposition to its power and acts of violence by the Party’s rabid supporters cannot be ruled out. It will be abetted by a legal system that bends the law to favor that Party and cripples its opposition. The opposition party has shown itself to be totally incapable of rising to the enormous challenges that confront us. We are awash in Party propaganda and the billionaire media owners are totally on board with the fascist project, as are many of their other cohorts in the executive suite.
Make no mistake, we are living in the initial stages of an illiberal democracy/competitive authoritarian style of governance. The fever will not break. There is no coming back anytime soon from where we are now to where we were pre-2016. This will not be solved by an election in 2026 and/or 2028. It will not end when Trump eventually leaves the political scene. This will be a generational fight, probably multi-generational. We have been here before. For nearly a century, the country largely lived with racial fascism. We have seen it in other countries, like Poland and Ukraine and now Georgia. It doesn’t end at the ballot box. It only ends when enough of us stand up in public, in the streets, day after day, week after week, and say enough.