Molly Ball wrote a deeply reported piece in Time last week about the campaign to prevent Donald Trump from trying to steal the election. Her main character is Mike Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, who figured out a year ahead of time that Trump was likely to yell fraud if the 2020 election was even remotely close. A few months later he was ready to put a counter-offensive in place:
On March 3, Podhorzer drafted a three-page confidential memo titled “Threats to the 2020 Election.” “Trump has made it clear that this will not be a fair election, and that he will reject anything but his own re-election as ‘fake’ and rigged,” he wrote. “On Nov. 3, should the media report otherwise, he will use the right-wing information system to establish his narrative and incite his supporters to protest.”
....In April, Podhorzer began hosting a weekly 2½-hour Zoom....The meetings became the galactic center for a constellation of operatives across the left who shared overlapping goals but didn’t usually work in concert.... “Pod played a critical behind-the-scenes role in keeping different pieces of the movement infrastructure in communication and aligned,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. “You have the litigation space, the organizing space, the political people just focused on the W, and their strategies aren’t always aligned. He allowed this ecosystem to work together.”
This is a good read all by itself, but the really important stuff comes later. Apologies for the length of the following excerpt, but I promise I have a point to make:
Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying [online disinformation] a few years ago.... The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.... In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home.... “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others.
....Beyond battling bad information, there was a need to explain a rapidly changing election process.... Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist...worked his contacts in the private sector to put $20 million behind the effort.
....About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk.... “With tensions running high, there was a lot of concern about unrest around the election, or a breakdown in our normal way we handle contentious elections,” says Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer. These worries had led the Chamber to release a pre-election statement with the Business Roundtable, a Washington-based CEOs’ group, as well as associations of manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, calling for patience and confidence as votes were counted.
But Bradley wanted to send a broader, more bipartisan message.... Agreeing that their unlikely alliance would be powerful, they began to discuss a joint statement....As it was being finalized, Christian leaders signaled their interest in joining, further broadening its reach. The statement was released on Election Day, under the names of Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, and the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network.
There's more, and Ball could have added that once the Trump disinformation campaign went into full swing after the election, every single person in charge of counting votes—county clerks, attorneys general, secretaries of state—opposed Trump's effort. The same goes for judges in the several dozen lawsuits Trump launched. He lost them all, regardless of whether the judge had been appointed by a Democratic or Republican president.
Now, the normal takeaway from Ball's piece is shock and dismay that it took a fight of this magnitude to overcome Trump's anti-democracy jihad. But I take something different away: If you put everything together, it turns out that literally no one except for the most cultish of Trump's followers supported his democracy-bashing efforts. Everyone opposed them
This is why I continue to think that democracy in the United States is way stronger than people are giving it credit for. It took a devastating punch from a uniquely demagogic president supported by hundreds of Republican politicians and the massed media efforts of Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media machine. Despite this, everyone outside of Trump's cult opposed him and the effort failed miserably. That's not bad.
There is, of course, a different takeaway: what if the business community had decided to throw in with Trump? How big a difference would that have made? And what are the odds that some future demagogue might be self-disciplined and corrupt enough to bring the business class on board?
That's hardly an impossible scenario, though I think it's only likely if the business community is brought along slowly. For now, they seem to remain pretty firmly in the conventional class of Americans who believe strongly in democracy and don't think that a Democrat in the White House is going to bring the country to its downfall. As it turns out, most Americans not in thrall to Fox News believe that too.
My argument was always three-fold:
1. DTJ is an actual threat to democracy.
2. Unlike the classic example of Germany, we have an imperfect, but long history of democratic norms that will be unlikely to break in 1 term
3. a second term would have ended our ability to function in our current form of democracy
Pence definitely would have been shocked to see he wasn't the heir apparent in 2025.
Hitler's first attempt at a violent coup failed. Subsequently he decided to try again staying narrowly within the law on the second try, and was successful. I think and hope that Trump is finished as a political force in America, but eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Trump was already almost unelectable, losing by millions of votes both times. If we keep closed Republican primaries then their next candidate will be somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, actually unelectable. Eternal vigilance and all that but I don't think we're getting another Trump type on the national stage for a while.
When Marjorie Taylor-Greene is taking on the #OurRevolution regiment of March for Our Lives, I say, "Let them fight".
Let the children like Taylor-Greene & the Hoggs, & Ocasio-Cortez & Boebert, tear each other apart while the grownups like Davids, Spanberger, Underwood, Jeffries, & Lamb get shit done.
There is no reason to assume that no one more electable than Greene will arise. Think about someone who has universal name recognition but is not identified with the big-money Republican establishment, probably someone in entertainment or sports. Someone like Schwarzenegger for example, just a few degrees more rightist (and a native American). Or how about someone like Tom Brady? What exactly are his politics? Trump did not need the QAnon stuff to get elected in the first place. He may not even have needed birtherism - racism can be signaled in more subtle ways than that. If Trump is out of the picture for one reason or another there are lots of people who will try to take his place.
Tom Brady, unmasked as he walked to the stadium before the big game, is definitely the sort of NorCalian privilege class who could put up a Reagan style presidential victory with a MAGA2.0 platform.
(Well, I guess 3.0, since Reagan also had "let's make America great again" as a slogan.)
(Oh, & Alex Guerrero as Nancy's astrologer.)
How far up his [redacted] does Kevin have his head buried, to keep saying democracy is safe as every Republican-majority legislature is considering measures to make it harder to vote? Hell, Arizona is fielding the bill that would allow the legislature to nullify all votes for President in the state and name a winner by decree.
Will be interesting to see how Shakes brings Chav, Handmaiden, & Son of Anne along in finding the nullification of all cast votes unconstitutional.
Even more disturbing is that they are scrambling to suppress votes despite gaining seats in the House and retaining a close Senate. What might they do if they take a ‘shellacking’ in 2022 or 2024?
My concern is that the local and state elected officials were caught by surprise and most of them reacted by doing the right thing. But next time, either the same folks will be under a ton of pressure leading up to the election, or, worse, seditionists will have actively worked to be in those roles.
I suspect that in some states it will be ‘worse’. The broad-based effort to preserve democracy must continue for the foreseeable future, and work at local and state as well as national levels.
Were they caught by surprise? Trump had been saying for months that he couldn’t lose a fair election, but victory might be stolen from him. But they may not have expected the intensity and persistence of his attacks. So I give them props for doing the right thing for the right motives
Months? Trump has been saying for years (since 2016) that the only way he could lose was through fraud. Still, Trump has a reputation as a very "sharp" businessman. Deep down it must hurt to have to go with the idea that stable genious Donald Trump got swindled by Sleepy Joe.
Am I the only most surprised by Richard Trumka not being on Team Autokrat?
*am I the only one
I put it to you that you're not able to see things that are invisible to you. What I mean by this is that conservatives are being taught a curriculum that claims democracy has failed and that a fascism-based political system is better.
I also put it to you that democracy, much like certain freedoms guaranteed by it, are fragile, open to modifications by the majority. Given how weak the D majority is, are you sure you understand how close we are to a fascist state?
upvote!
Kevin's right that the widespread rejection and underlying strength of our system IS an underreported story, but I also think he's drawing exactly the wrong conclusion about this for the future. If anything, we got lucky that the instigators this time were so feckless, incompetent, and (especially) unpopular. Meanwhile, another generational cycle is groomed to see basic democratic norms as enemy obstacles...
As for the future, our society's political and cultural momentum clearly isn't taking us in the direction of everyone settling down and hoping to move on -- for which Kevin's prescriptive reassurances would be more appropriate -- but instead toward everyone gearing up for the next big series of battles. Encouraging complacency is the last thing we need.
The comments provide appropriate balance to Mr. Drum's positive assessment of the durability of our democracy. It can happen here. Our democracy is indestructible, until it isn't. Ask the people of Hong Kong, Venezuela, Hungary or Myanmar.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Predictably enough, the articles and commenters at the right wing fever swamp web sites are using that Time article as proof positive that the Democrats/Leftists/Communists stole the election from Trump.
The people who saved Democracy may have been the Independents and other less-partisan voters who switched from Obama to Trump and then back to Biden. There were only a few tens of thousands involved (on net). If Trump had been re-elected it is not certain that democracy would have ended but there would have been a very good chance. It would not have been necessary to have violent insurrections - the power might have been seized in more gradual ways that would have had the support of essentially all those who voted for Trump.
Given that 47% actually voted for Trump despite his obvious anti-democratic tendencies among other faults and that most of these people then swallowed the lie that he actually won the vote, there is considerable peril to the continuation of democracy in the future. For example if there is a massive economic downturn during Biden's administration he will be blamed and practically any Republican could be elected in 2024, aside from Republicans sweeping Congress. If Trump isn't around there could be another more competent rightist demogogue to get the nomination.
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Consider, on the other hand, that the person who almost lost democracy for all of us was a far-left egotistical narcissist, Jill Stein, who put her own 15 minutes of fame ahead of the reality of trying to govern the country. There was not one person who voted for her who chose her over Trump, their second choice. If Jill Stein's voters had stayed in the Democratic column Trump would have lost the election, and all this brouhaha would be a fantasy of "what if" instead of the scary reality we have to deal with.
'This is why I continue to think that democracy in the United States is way stronger than people are giving it credit for. '
Counter argument 1: A sitting President incited an armed insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, and he will not be convicted for any crime associated with it. Therefore- IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.
Counter argument 2: the very GOP "heroes" that were identified as standing up to Trump, never stopped suppressing the vote in their own states, and continue to do so, especially if the vote went against the GOP. Over 120 voter suppression bills have been introduced since the election nationwide. This election didn't convince the GOP to stop sabotaging Democracy- it convinced them that THEY WEREN'T SABOTAGING IT ENOUGH.
"If you put everything together, it turns out that literally no one except for the most cultish of Trump's followers supported his democracy-bashing efforts."
Sure. But as you allude to later, this comply means we were very possibly (i'd say very likely) a hairsbreadth away from our democracy catastrophically failing and the same thing can happen again and again and again. We have to win this battle every time, the fascists only once. So we cannot say "wow, this proves american democracy is strong", we have to say "oh shit, this proves our democracy is extremely vulnerable and under active attack".
Yessir, that is exactly right.
Bingo.
Upvote-by-Comment III, Esq. 😏
Methinks your optimism is misplaced, Kevin. I see two forces here: the dimunition in the depth of political awareness due to the popularity of magical thinking pervading the voting population, and the continuing uninhibited influence of money in politics, making access conditional on wealth.
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