26. Taking Stock: The State of American Democracy Heading into Summer

Let’s survey the political landscape and take stock of where things stand almost halfway through 2023. We started this podcast a little over half a year ago, just a few days before the midterms. The election ended in a better result for Democrats than most people expected. That led to a lot of commentary about how the guardrails were supposedly holding, the system was working. Then in early December, the January 6 Committee referred Trump to the Department of Justice for prosecution. All that convinced a lot of commentators that 2022 had been a good year, that the ship had been turned around, that democracy was winning. It says a lot about our current predicament that, in June 2023, such a big-picture look at the political landscape still has to start with Donald Trump. What are we to make of the fact that Trump, despite all the recent legal trouble, is still the clear favorite to be the next Republican presidential nominee? We also look at his wannabe-authoritarian challengers, particularly at Ron DeSantis, and why there seems to be little appetite on the rightwing base for his kind of Trumpless Trumpism. We then look at the escalating assault on equality and the post-1960s civil rights order – on women’s rights; on the lgbtq community and the rights of trans people, in particular; on public education, academic freedom, and freedom of speech. There are signs of an anti-reactionary counter-mobilization – against rightwing book bans, specifically – and we’ll need a lot more of that, as it’s difficult to see how America’s slide into authoritarianism could be stopped without a mass mobilization of pro-democratic civil society forces outside and beyond the established political institutions. We look at those institutions next – and the Democratic Party’s response, in particular. We specifically discuss why Democrats have been unable and/or unwilling to hold Clarence Thomas accountable for the cartoonish level of corruption in which he has engaged, and why there is still no plausible Democratic answer to the problem that the Supreme Court acts as the spearhead of the reactionary assault on democracy and the modern state. It's obviously not all the Democrats’ fault. The mainstream media is also not coming to the rescue of democracy. We talk about what to make of the disastrous CNN Trump town hall and the way the “both sides” coverage of the debt ceiling crisis once again displayed all the usual, harmful tropes of the “Dysfunction in Washington” narrative that only serves to obscure the extent of Republican sabotage. We then turn our attention to the problem of political violence. Across the political spectrum, the percentage of people describing political violence as potentially acceptable has significantly increased. But in practice, the rise in actual violence has almost entirely come from the Right. And, crucially, the reactions to the killing of Jordan Neely on the NYC subway were a reminder that all strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are now openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence. Finally, we reflect on where that all leaves us. As we are heading into summer, normalcy bias is destined to take over even more than it always does. One of the key challenges since the start of the Trump era has been how to communicate effectively to the American public that something other than “politics as usual” is going on, that the threat of democratic erosion is real. The crucial question remains: How do we pierce that sense of “normalcy”? How do we create moments of meaningful disruption? Follow The Show⁠ ⁠Follow Thomas⁠ ⁠Follow Lily⁠ This episode was produced by ⁠Connor Lynch