Our 50/50 America (Part III): The World WILL be rebuilt. The only open issues are: How and by Which Side?
Voters want REAL CHANGE RIGHT NOW... The red side of 50/50 America is giving their answer; the blue side is flopping and flapping like a dying fish on a dock
“Storytelling and narrative help change events,” Parry Bacon Jr. wrote in the New Republic just a few days ago. That’s why he wants the media do better in telling the story of our current political predicament:
What’s missing and desperately needed is these events being connected to one another and presented collectively and aggressively by the media, the Democratic Party, and other prominent institutions as one megastory: Trump’s attempt to become America’s dictator.
*Sigh*
As important as that “megastory” is, and as compelling as Mr. Bacon’s writing is, he’s still getting a huge part of the story very wrong.
As I have argued many many times: Stop talking about Donald-fucking-Trump.
Why?
Because “Trumpism” does not exist.
Trump and “Trumpism” are cheap distractions from the real story:
The GOP’s dictatorial impulses are rooted in a decades-old heroic myth that has captured the American right:
They are heroes saving the nation from domestic enemies and restoring the “real America” to its authentic “conservative” self.
The red side of America’s 50/50 divide has been building a dictatorial new “real America” for the past 70 years at least; they’ve been engaged in “fascistic” politicking against domestic enemies for my entire voting life (40+ years); and they’ll continue on with that project Trump or no Trump.
The movement began decades before him, will continue long after him, has replaced any true conservatism in the GOP like an invasion of body snatchers, and it owes Trump nothing, except maybe his head on a coin for taking the movement further than anyone else to date.
He is not rebuilding the world.
They and their myth are rebuilding the world.
And make no mistake, the world WILL be rebuilt.
The only question is whether the red side of 50/50 America will get its way and build an anti-pluralist autocracy, or whether the pro-pluralist coalition will get its act together and figure out how to address the social and economic pain that’s driving voters further and further toward more and more radical candidates.
Our story of “50/50 America” is starting to change, but not nearly fast enough, and perhaps not far enough.
Perry Bacon Jr. is right about one thing: stories can change events.
That’s why, in these articles, I keep coming back to the aim of LiteralyMayhem: to challenge the stories we tell ourselves about the world when those stories are outdated, especially when the reliance on old stories prevents us from engaging with the world as it is—rather than as we believe it to be.
The story of America’s encroaching darkness is one that is not changing fast enough to keep up with our current reality:
the federal government is in the grip of autocrats;
pluralistic governance in America is on life-support;
this is the culmination of decades of planning and implementation;
the roots of their anti-pluralism run deep (economic, social, ideological, even spiritual);
their politicking and policies are fascistic;
the red side of 50/50 America would prefer to live under a dictator they agree with than an opposing President they don’t; and
they will not be persuaded by reason to relent.
Yet, way too many otherwise reasonable people refuse to acknowledge that this is what we’re really talking about when we talk about a “50/50” and a “polarized” and a “divided” America.
Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Open Society Project recently said in Persuasion that when he first wrote about an encroaching autocracy, his writing was met by eye rolls from those on the center-right:
These are people who recognize that Trump is bad in various ways, but they’re convinced the political system will remain what it always has been, with regular free and fair elections, judicial review, separation of powers, and so forth.
I was skeptical during the first Trump administration of those who warned about Trump overthrowing democracy and replacing it with a form of autocracy. (Back then I worried more about the prospect of civil war breaking out, even while considering that to be a fairly remote possibility.)
But the opening months of the second Trump presidency have changed my mind. I now think the United States may well be evolving to become a competitive authoritarian system in which free elections are still held but fall far short of fairness.
Linker has evolved his story about what the red-shirts are up to, but as he said, much of the political establishment still believes, and wants to act like:
pluralism defined by a two-party, red-blue system of give and take remains our default condition, and
we’re destined to get back to the status quo once this unfortunate episode is over.
That story is dead wrong.
As Anne Applebaum said recently, the Russian dissident Gary Kasparov sees what many of us don’t, that this 50/50 divide is NOT about conventional partisan politics:
I think that he, as an outsider, understands something that a lot of Americans find difficult to understand: that actions of the Trump administration cannot be explained in the context of partisan politics. This is no longer a “normal” left-right debate, and normal political responses are insufficient. Trump’s entourage doesn’t want to just change policy, but to change the nature of the constitutional system itself.
For a mainstream leftie rewrite of the “50/50 America” story, there’s always Rachel Maddow’s take:
We have crossed a line. We are in a place we did not want to be, but we are there. The thing we were all worrying about for the last few years is not coming. It is here. We are in it. This is what it’s like.
It’s a Monday, and every day the sun rises and sets, and there are sports, and movies… there’s everyone’s quotient of family drama.. and money worries… life has not stopped… but at the same time, life in the United States is profoundly changing and is profoundly different than it was even six months ago. Because we do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.
The unpleasant fact that blue-shirts won’t confront: Restoration is now impossible, remaking is the only option
Even as media narratives come around to the idea that the red side of 50/50 America is too busy rebuilding the “real America” to be interested in pluralism—and in fact they seem determined to erase it—the media have not grasped the reality that restoration of the old status quo is impossible.
I wrote about this idea — i.e., that “there’s no going back” — in a piece for The Long Memo (TLM), titled No Story Left to Believe.
William Finnegan, proprietor of TLM, recently snarked at Rachel Maddow’s take about the red side of the 50/50 divide calling it “phony nonsense,” and while I’m a big fan of Finnegan I’m not sure why he was vehement. Because it seems that he and Maddow agree on the main point: the red side of 50/50 America is openly authoritarian.
I think where they may differ is how far along we are on the path to a “consolidating dictatorship.” Finnegan uses the 12-point scale created by Mallen Baker and believes we’re at 25-31 on a scale of 0-60: he says, “not great, but not Hitler either.”
I think they also differ (instructive for our purposes) on how to counter the intentional authoritarian embrace of team “red-shirts.”
Here Finnegan is explicit about the fecklessness of team blue-shirts, which I have been kvetching about for years:
The Democratic Party loves to cast itself as the last bulwark against authoritarianism. “We’re defending democracy,” they tell you, usually while fund-raising off the latest outrage from the right. And yet, when it comes to doing the actual hard work of removing the conditions that breed authoritarian politics in the first place, they’ve been asleep at the wheel for decades…
They’ll give soaring speeches about “our values” while ignoring the lived economic collapse under their feet…
This is what the Democrats don’t get: You cannot shame people out of voting for authoritarians if their daily reality feels like a slow bleed. You have to give them something tangible — not in 2050, not after another two years of “stakeholder engagement,” but now. [emphasis original]
People are desperate for change, and not the hopey, changey, incrementalist Obama kind of change. They are done with all-a-that.
Americans keep demanding deep, radical structural change.
It’s as if each wide swing of the pendulum is a roar from the electorate that they want, “REAL CHANGE RIGHT NOW!!!”
Regardless of what you think about the results, Trump and the red-shirt brigade heard the demand and are giving it to them.
Surely, the red-shirt version of radical change is radically authoritarian, and destined to hurt their own voters the most, but they are delivering deep, radical, and structural change nonetheless—sold to them as a heroic myth of a resurgence of the “real America.” (That mythmaking was the entire gist of our BIG Big Lie series.)
So, what are the blue-shirts giving them?
More status quo bullshit.
Presumably because they believe that winning “independent voters” by offering “sensible policies” on “kitchen table issues” is the way to go.
As explained by Aaron Regunberg in The New Republic:
Having failed to learn the key lesson from last year’s defeat, party leaders are promoting moderate candidates to run against populist progressives in next year’s elections.
[Kamala Harris] significantly underperformed with working-class voters compared to Joe Biden in 2020, and became the first Democratic presidential nominee in decades to receive more support from Americans in the top third of the income bracket than those in the bottom two-thirds.
That is why there has been broad agreement—even David Brooks is in this camp—that if Democrats want to defeat MAGA Republicans, they need to stop embracing anodyne, corporate-approved messaging and start giving people something to vote for...
[But] again and again, in must-win House and Senate races, rather than embracing candidates that are proving their capacity to spark grassroots Democratic enthusiasm and tap into the populist ferment of the American public, establishment leaders are working to tilt the scales in favor of exactly the kind of uninspiring corporatists that dug the party’s current hole.
The New Republic piece details race after race where the Democratic establishment is refusing to heed the sharp cries of voters demanding that politicians remake and restructure America’s governing priorities—cries that that have been ringing in our ears since the HOPE/CHANGE election of 2008.
By contrast, the pro-pluralism blue-ish side of 50/50 America is doing fuckall.
In Maine’s upcoming primary, they’re hoping to run an octogenarian party loyalist against a young, populist veteran. SMH. (An entertaining take from Wonkette here.)
Voters want REAL CHANGE RIGHT NOW!!! The red side of 50/50 America is giving it to them.
When the pundit-driven media coverage reverts to form this coming election season, telling us a story of a “50/50 America” that wants sensible centrism, I don’t buy it.
That’s an old, outdated story that may have been true once, but is no longer.
The margin in the middle is just as put out and frustrated as every other voting group.
They’ve been flip-flopping for decades… blue to red / back to blue / back to red… over and over since “Reagan Democrats” caused a political earthquake more than 40 years ago in 1980.
But that flip flopping isn’t evidence “centrism,” it’s evidence of exasperation, and in election after election, voters have been demanding REAL CHANGE RIGHT NOW.
The reds have answered.
So, the blues need to figure out what kind of deep, radical, structural change they want to offer — RIGHT NOW — because voters are no longer satisfied with triangulation and incrementalism.
The red side of 50/50 America is building a radically new political, social, technological and economic machine — to remake the world.
One of Finnegan’s more helpful metaphors from the Never Again post is the image of authoritarianism as a machine — one built through trial and error:
Authoritarianism doesn’t usually succeed on the first try.
As I previously wrote, the Nazis failed twice before they ascended to being the controlling power structure. Each failure was a rehearsal: the rhetoric hardened, the propaganda sharpened, the organization tightened. By the third run, they weren’t just angry street brawlers — they were a machine…
Trump may be America’s second run… The danger is in the third act.
That’s when someone comes along who understands the machinery Trump banged together — and runs it with competence.
We’re watching in real time as the red side of 50/50 America rolls out its version of deep, radical, structural change.
They are building an autocratic machine to effect and enforce a version of the heroic “real America” that conservatives have been crowing about for four decades. This machine is actively tearing down and remaking America in its own image, every single day.
What kind of machine is the blue side of 50/50 America building? A taco stand in front of the offices of the Republican National Committee.
Pathetic.
A truthful story of “50/50 America” would make it clear that the world WILL be rebuilt one way or another. The red side of the political divide is showing us their answer to “real change right now,” which is to destroy institutions and processes of pluralism and replace them with the iron grip “conservative” power.
Example: In the newest front in that battle—i.e., the fight to remove Fed governor Lisa Cook—an analyst from the Dutch banking conglomerate Rabobank observed that old ideas are “little protection against the new paradigm of raw power politics”:
Just as the interpretation of law is inherently political, the price of money is inherently political, and all aspects of national policy are being co-opted to support the MAGA vision of the United States and its place in the world.
For many of us, what the red side of 50/50 America is building is a terrifying place that gets darker with every passing day.
But their movement of “raw power politics” is going nowhere, even if they lose one or two elections. They have demonstrated over many decades that they will keep pressing, and refining, and perfecting a machine that co-opts all dimensions of national power to serve their purpose.
And yet, even as that steamroller of right-wing authoritarianism flattens everything in its path, we still don’t know what kind of deep structural change a blue vote will get us.
Voters are demanding REAL CHANGE RIGHT NOW. The blues have NO answer. That’s pretty stunning.
The red side of 50/50 America is at least delivering something.
The blue side is serving up crusts of stale bread, and that’s why the other side keeps winning. And if no deep, radical, structural relief is offered to voters by the blue side of 50/50 America, voters will keep pulling on their red shirts and pulling the lever for the autocrats.
As journalist and historian Garrett Graff said yesterday in the post America Tips Into Fascism: Today is different than before (on his Doomsday Scenario Substack):
For years in covering the rise (and return) of Trump and Trumpism, I imagined there was some line that the GOP would not be willing to compromise for greed and power… Even after January 6th, I held hope that might be the end. But then Eric Cantor’s buddy Kevin McCarthy showed up at Mar-a-Lago and the rehabilitation tour began.
It has led here, to this moment, where all three branches of the GOP-controlled government have been willing to torch the republic and democracy that generations of elected officials and citizens have tended for 249 years…
Whether we can come back from this moment is a story yet unknown. But it’s clear today America is different and, even if we fight our way back, it will never be the same again. [emphasis added]
This, now, is the only proper departure point for any rationale appraisal, discussion, and analysis of “50/50 America”: incrementalism is dead, pluralism is on life-support, and America absolutely WILL be remade in radical fashion.
The only question is: How, and by which side of the 50/50 divide?
If the blues won’t provide the deep structural change voters are demanding, then the reds will.