Responses to Populism Show Why Democrats Are Failing
Responses to Populism Show Why Democrats Are Failing
An uprising within the GOP should shame “progressive” Democrats
This week, the Washington punditry critiqued a seeming exhibition of congressional dysfunction as the new GOP House majority struggled to reach consensus before eventually making Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) the new Speaker of the House. Dissent within the Republican ranks forced 15 rounds of voting before Trump’s reported intervention, coupled with a variety of concessions to the populist flank, finally won McCarthy a majority after several days of voting.
Many of McCarthy’s concessions to the GOP right wing have been criticized by both Democrats and centrist Republicans. Some of those concessions, however—not to mention the tactics that secured them—offer potentially surprising lessons for populists in the Democratic Party who have yet to achieve the same influence as those in the GOP. While Republicans may be caught in the mounting crosswinds of populist outrage towards Washington, the corporate center continues to dominate the Democratic Party.
History might not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes
On the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, a pair of members of Congress engaged in a physical altercation on the House floor for the first time in decades. One, Mike Rogers (R-AL), was restrained by another, Richard Hudson (R-NC), while angrily approaching a third, Matt Gaetz (R-FL), seemingly in retaliation for Gaetz’s refusal to support McCarthy in the 14th round of voting.
Lost on no one was the timing of the event: exactly two years—to the very date—of the violent insurrection that shook the world’s confidence in Washington and led to dozens of arrests and convictions of participants across the United States.
Looming in the future are the likely repetitions of other recent examples of government dysfunction, particularly the shutdowns that shuttered government agencies across the country in 1995, 2013, 2018, and 2019. With the GOP’s populist majority emboldened by the concessions they won from McCarthy (including a reduced threshold for considering a new Speaker, limits on government & Pentagon spending, and separate votes on each of the government appropriation bills that Democrats have historically lumped together in order to derail debate & deliberation), they are well poised to repeat the tactics that previously forced federal agencies to furlough hundreds of thousands of employees around the country who went without pay for months at a time.
Democracy is at risk, but Democrats mistake the source of the threat
Many Democrats have observed the GOP’s weak commitment to democracy, while conveniently overlooking their own party’s thoroughly documented complicity in authoritarianism.
The January 6 insurrection certainly offended democracy. Responding to congressional certification of a presidential vote by storming the Capitol is hardly a reflection of a peaceful transition of power.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, the January 6 insurrection showed how little right wing populists actually care about the “law & order” they claim to champion when confronting advocates for police reform or abolition, while also demonstrating the uselessness—and corresponding fraud—of Washington’s various duplicative and fraudulent “security” budgets, as well as the community of law enforcement professionals who proved to be unfortunately complicit in the insurrection.
But the insurrection offended democracy no less so than the preceding decades of congressional consensus supporting runaway increases in military spending, recurring tax cuts for millionaires, bailouts for businesses, and subsidies for fossil fuel corporations at the same time that Congress has frozen the federal minimum wage for well over a decade. Each of these decisions reflect a broad bipartisan consensus among politicians supported by corporate interests, conspicuously ignoring the voices of the millions of people who are impacted by them.
The biggest threat to democracy in America is the bipartisan consensus supporting impunity for the executive branch and its continuing violations of civil liberties and civil rights across the United States and around the world.
Whining about democracy while focusing on the theatrics of the GOP majority risks leaping from a frying pan into a fire, or perhaps ducking into a punch. The biggest threat to democracy in America is not the specter of confusion surrounding our elections. They have exhibited consistent irregularities since at least 2000 while at best being reduced to corporate fundraising contests, all ultimately steered by the omissions, fabrications, and self-promoting navel gazing of journalists beholden to the establishment.
Even if attacks on voting rights and procedural democracy were the greatest threat to our Republic, Democrats would remain complicit. They continue to fight to block Green Party candidates from ballot access, and have long played an active role in the arms race that has reduced elections to corporate fundraising contests. Some Democrats, including the current President of the United States and the former Speaker of the House, have even openly advocated for—and even gone so far as to unilaterally impose—Republican policies after winning office as Democrats.
Any of these measures verge on election fraud. Together, they reveal the hypocrisy of Democrats who claim to care about democracy.
The biggest threat to democracy in America remains the bipartisan consensus supporting impunity for the executive branch and its continuing violations of civil liberties and civil rights across the United States and around the world. That theme has defined my work for well over a decade, and the emergence of support within Washington for long overdue scrutiny of the defense and intelligence establishment’s corruption is welcome.
It is also deeply ironic, considering the source.
Can you hear me now?
I’ve been publicly pleading for nearly 20 years for Congress to finally investigate the national security agencies that it caught in the 1970s after decades of assaulting peaceful Americans and their constitutional rights. I’ve written dozens of articles, spoken at hundreds of events around the country, and advocated in more settings than I can count for democratically elected policymakers to scrutinize—and impose restrictions limiting—executive branch agencies that have run amok for three generations.
My arrest in the U.S. Senate in 2015 was prompted by my posing a question that no policymaker has ever demonstrated the independence to ask: Why do executive branch officials who get caught lying to Congress enjoy prestige and public pensions, while powerless Black Americans are routinely killed without charge, trial, or even reasonable suspicion of any criminal offense?
(Paid subscribers can access video of my 2015 arrest below, along with related video from the 2014 Cato Surveillance Conference, where my question was broadcast on C-SPAN and prompted a response from an executive branch official that I found deeply unsatisfying.)
It was this theme of executive unaccountability that initially inspired my campaigns for Congress. I have witnessed not only 20 years of serial executive lawlessness, but also the longstanding complicity of an oligarch in Congress whose role journalists still refuse to acknowledge, and recognized that the only path to institutional accountability involved removing the agencies’ protectors from Congress.
Given that history, I’m thrilled to see the incoming majority announce the creation of a new congressional subcommittee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” against the American people and our rights. This step is long overdue, though given the composition of Congress, I have little hope that it will achieve the same impacts as the Church Committee that exposed COINTELPRO, including crimes by the CIA and the FBI in a previous era.
Hope? Not so much
While it’s encouraging to see the incoming House majority take more seriously than its predecessor the responsibility to oversee the executive branch, there’s no reason to think that it will do much—or even anything at all—to effectively curtail the influence of the military-industrial complex in Washington.
Ultimately, the GOP is no less committed to subsidies for weapons companies, or fossil fuel corporations, than Democrats. And as long as those industries remain the leading beneficiaries of Washington’s bipartisan largesse, the future will continue to pay a price.
“Progressive” Democrats let GOP maniacs steal their lunch
Given all these machinations of populist wings in both parties against their respective corporate centers, one might expect progressive Democrats to recognize the tactical success of their GOP counterparts—whether to emulate them or instead better counter them. If nothing else, they at least reflect the increasingly visible failure of corporate politics.
One would, in that case, be disappointed.
Rather than recognize the destabilization of the same corporate center that they claim to have gone to Washington to challenge, progressive Democrats have instead joined the centrist establishment, parroting its talking points against bogeymen including the populism they themselves claim to embody. Characterizing dissent within the GOP as chaotic, they have declined to learn the lesson that it could have taught them: challenging the center at critical points of accountability (ie the election of a new Speaker) can force otherwise untenable concessions.
Throughout Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as House Speaker, Democrats who claimed to stand for progressive policies repeatedly caved to her political pressure, publicly backing her even while she blocked Congress from debating & voting on their signature policy priorities.
In the summer of 2020, the one place in America where you could not find any debate over universal healthcare was inside the U.S. Congress. The entire progressive caucus claims to support it, while also supporting an insider trading oligarch whose opposition to their consensus has grown legendarily farcical.
Similarly, advocates for the Green New Deal—including one whose very first act in Congress involved a sit-in at Pelosi’s office to champion it—have thrown their support behind corrupt centrist leaders, even while those leaders kick them down the stairs in public and betray their goals in the shadows, prompting the ire of grassroots activists who might feel some measure of disappointment as a result.
While vastly overstating the case by comparison, the pattern brings to mind Kyrsten Sinema.
Briahna Joy Gray offered an excellent critique of progressive Democrats, noting their abject failure to rise to the moment.
Thomas Frank, author of “Listen, Liberal” and “What’s the Matter with Kansas” joined her after penning a thoughtful op-ed for the New York Times. Among the themes they explored was how Democrats have long created opportunities for right wing GOP populists by abandoning labor starting in the 1990s.
When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995, ending decades of Democratic majorities, he rode a wave of broad-based anti-elite outrage that has demonstrably inflected every election since then. Similarly, when the Tea Party won the House in 2010, it delivered President Obama what he called “a shellacking” only two years after the GOP was widely disgraced by the 2008 financial crisis. How did the GOP overcome a crisis in public confidence? It was largely because Obama “totally dropped the ball” on holding accountable the architects of the financial crisis, instead inviting several of them into his administration as it proceeded to bail out banks but never homeowners or renters.
It is the shameless allegiance between Democrats and Wall Street—which has grown only stronger in the years since then—that has opened the door for the GOP’s majorities.
Yet instead of challenging the insider trading Wall Street millionaires who dominate the Democratic Party, the upstarts within it who claim the populist mantle have instead absurdly aligned with their party’s elites, creating even more opportunities for right wing self-styled “populists” who remain willing to give voice—even if disingenuously—to the frustration of millions of Americans abandoned by Washington long ago.
Paid subscribers can access below a video of my arrest in the U.S. Senate in 2015, prompted by a question I was well within my rights to pose that no one else in Washington has ever demonstrated the independence to either ask or answer. Paid subscribers can also access video and a short transcript of my related comments from the 2014 Cato Surveillance Conference that were broadcast at the time on C-SPAN.
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