The Way We Live Now, Part Three
Source: Michael Valdon; U.S. Congress, photo via Wikimedia Commons; State of Florida, photo via Wikimedia Commons; photo via Wikimedia Commons(BY SA 4.0)
Author’s Note: This is the third installment in a series on the current public climate of fear and intimidation that has dominated national life in the United States since the kick-off of the last presidential campaign in 2015. Part One, “The Emotional Toll of Public Bullying and Political Intimidation,” focused on the experience of the sheer power and psychological effects of bullying in general and public bullying and political intimidation in particular. Part Two, “How Political Bullying and Intimidation Work: A Practical Guide,” looked at how public bullying works as a concrete method and set of political tools and provided readers with a map through this potent minefield and a way to anticipate future acts of aggression.
Aggression and Response
In the wake of the tumultuous Kavanaugh hearings marked by wrenching accusations of sexual assault and extreme examples of political bullying, in Part Three I focus on the two major political parties to explore why over the years Republicans and their right-wing supporters have freely resorted to extremely aggressive political tactics and — just as important — why Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies have often failed to take seriously such acts of political violence and skullduggery by their opponents and respond accordingly. Part of the answer, I argue, lies in their respective practices of loyalty and identity, social composition, and conceptions of governing. This may help explain the difficulty people face in galvanizing the Democratic Party establishment that has shown reluctance to aggressively and publicly confront longstanding Republican tactics in time to repulse the right-wing onslaught in Washington and statehouses targeting electoral processes, voter participation, legal and social protections, citizens’ and residents’ economic security, and immigrant rights.
Party Loyalty, Social Identity, and Conceptions of Governing: The GOP
Among Democratic and Republican establishment leaders there are active cultures of loyalty that are tightly bound to political and social identities that in turn shape their respective concepts of governing and national campaign strategies — and their relationship to political violence. Here we observe that political loyalty actually entails not one but two components: first, an internal one to the party and then, a second one to the institutions of government. Influencing these practices of loyalty and identity is the respective social composition of each party.
Let’s begin with the Republican establishment. Today, it is still very white, moneyed, and majority Protestant, and often operates like an exclusive country club whose members practice a ruling class’s discipline and form of internal loyalty that put Democrats to shame. This seems to flow naturally from Republicans’ more homogenous social composition, though the disruptive rise of the Tea Party and Trump’s unexpected triumph in the primaries gave party leaders pause and stimulated talk of creating protocols that would blunt internal insurgencies in the future.
Loyalty has generally served the GOP well: after internal squabbles, GOP leaders almost always fall back in line. Even insurgent far-right populist candidate Pat Buchanan in the 1990s submitted, and so did John McCain after being subjected to vicious smearing by George W. Bush’s campaign operatives in 2000. It is still true today: one only has to look at how quickly rival Republican politicians including Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz lined up behind Trump after a spectacularly brutal primary season. And now even as Trump continues to clash with GOP leaders and berates them publicly, they and their base support him as strongly as ever with 83% of registered Republicans expressing approval of Trump’s performance (August 14, 2018). Republicans also practice a form of omertà that until recently has kept their sex scandals in-house and largely out of the public eye; rare has been the Republican woman who goes public with kiss-and-tell stories and stays by them (although denunciations by conservative female Fox News hosts including Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson of sexual harassment by Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes suggest this may be changing).
What’s more, Republicans have a proprietary relationship to government: they think they own it, or if they don’t, think they should. This is the very measure of their elitism. They act as if they were raised not only to govern but, as full-throated capitalists, to rule over others. Born in the anterooms of power, they do not have to justify their claim to power or demonstrate their citizenship or patriotism, nor does the public demand it of them. Such is the special status afforded them by the American free-market culture that respects wealth and success. This may help explain the public’s greater tolerance of acts of intimidation and skullduggery by Republicans compared to Democrats, who try to stake a claim to higher ground. Accountable to no one other than their own kind, as owners and senior executives, members of the Republican establishment view rules and regulations as written for others rather than as applying to themselves, especially when they feel their interests threatened. If anything, their displays of raw patriotism often serve as a cover to their abiding self-interest more than anything else.
They are the very embodiment and force of a capitalist entitlement that promotes a populist discourse of personal fulfillment and social mobility through individual initiative, aggressive entrepreneurship, and free markets untrammeled by government — a discourse to which CEOs and many ordinary people alike subscribe as a virtual American birthright — and combines it with class privilege. Borne along by the larger society, Republican leaders’ belligerent sense of entitlement is the envy of many citizens and residents. This is what Trump incarnates in the extreme. He is the aggressive CEO/politician as capitalist folk hero and defiant white man who is granted every indulgence and every reprieve by his followers. (For more on Trump as a figure of potent political authority uniquely rooted in U.S. culture, see Part Four, “The Political Synergy of Donald Trump’s Multiple Identities.”)
So, Republicans don’t always see their interests served by active government, and their loyalty remains primarily to themselves and less to the nation as such. In national politics, they, unlike Democrats, don’t always seek popular validation in the form of voter majorities or pluralities — their sense of self is independent of politics and precedes it. In other words, for them politics is a means, not an identity. Like Machiavelli’s Prince, for them winning is everything, and they accept being feared rather than loved. This is especially so since their radicalization under the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995 and, later on, with the rise of the Tea Party faction after Obama’s election. So, preemptive rewriting the rules of procedure or decorum and shifting the goalposts to keep opponents off balance are all in a day’s work.
Examples include: the Supreme Court Republican majority’s decision to intervene in state election processes (stopping the 2000 Florida vote recount) in violation of all precedent; Republican Congressional leaders’ unheard-of nine-month-long refusal to consider Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland and one hundred other obstructed federal judicial nominations; advancing major legislation without prior committee hearings (Trumpcare and corporate tax cuts); undercutting congressional investigations (of Russian electoral meddling); defaming the Congressional Budget Office; and so forth.
When given the chance, especially after winning new majorities in Congress, historically, Republicans have generally had no qualms in breaking the rules, starting in the earliest days of the Cold War in the 1950s when they turned President Truman’s anti-communist crusade and loyalty program into a wave of rabid red-baiting (McCarthyism) against Democrats, the New Deal, and federal agencies, and later when Richard Nixon launched in 1968 the “Southern strategy” of fanning the flames of white voters’ racial fears.
These aggressive tactics continued up through the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1999 and the stolen presidential elections in 2000. Today, it extends to voter suppression initiatives and the interference in the presidential campaign by then FBI Director James Comey and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Often this has involved delegating the most unsavory tasks to political operatives (Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and their lieutenants), rogue politicians (Joseph McCarthy), political action committees (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth), and more recently Super PACS funded by billionaires like David and Charles Koch and Robert Mercer.
Of late, however, with the advent of the Tea Party and Donald Trump, publicly dropping the velvet glove comes more and more easily to them. The mailed fist is visible for those who have eyes to see. So, as I stated in Part Two on how political intimidation works, today Trump and his Republican allies don’t mete out measured doses of political intimidation and bullying only occasionally; it is extreme, 24/7, and all the time. In the rough-and-tumble arena of politics, what now distinguishes Republicans from Democrats is that in their hands political violence and skullduggery have graduated from being occasional tools to constituting a full-blown political program. In a sense, Trump has completed the process of converting campaigning through intimidation and fear-mongering into an effective form of governing begun sixteen years ago under George W. Bush and the War on Terror.
The Democrats’ Brand of Identity and Loyalty
In the case of Democrats, their identity is largely one based on a self-image rooted in Democratic political achievements of the past. This includes social, economic, and legal protections afforded by government established during the New Deal in the 1930s and 40s and expanded during the 1960s and 70s by the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society legislation, and, most recently, by the Affordable Care Act. In this sense, unlike Republicans, their identity does not precede politics but derives directly from it. Moreover, Democrats seem to view their political record as one of generous or liberal intentions and an adherence to ethical principles that speaks for itself and requires little in the way of new translation and fresh political messaging by candidates to the larger voting public beyond what, say, a Bill Clinton or Barack Obama can do. Call it a discursive “firewall,” if you will, that Democrats take for granted and think will protect them from the opposition’s misrepresentations and lies. Even in the absence of charismatic candidates, apparently no further vigorous defense or even education of the public about what government is capable of doing to promote individual and general welfare is deemed necessary. In this view, Democrats have simply been “good people,” whose works should command loyalty and gratitude. How else to explain in federal elections (if not the primaries) Democrats’ historical distaste for hardball politics and reluctance to descend into the ring and respond in kind to Republican attacks?
Reliance on their high-minded self-image has proved to be a fundamental political vulnerability for Democrats over the last thirty years, for it has tended to encourage investment as much in their identityas in political action. Moreover, it creates an inviting target for smears of Democratic intentions and motives that are hard to refute in a harsh political climate. Instinctually, politicians like Trump seek to besmirch that self-image, for they know full well that for Democrats to respond would not only dignify both the attack and the attacker but also undermine their own honorable reputation. In the cheap cynical script that dominates U.S. public life, both the target and the attacker are held equally to blame, an attitude that almost always favors the assailant, who most often couldn’t care less about his or her reputation, so long as he or she emerges as the most powerful party. Power is its own positive PR. However, this form of identity politics remains a core Democratic strategy even today as when, just this summer, Nancy Pelosi declared that her party was the party of “civility.”
Paradoxically, the Democrats’ self-image on the national stage clashes with that of local Democrats, who throughout the twentieth century excelled in the rough-and-tumble politics of urban and state politics, perhaps because, unlike at the national level, the benefits of political victory are so immediate and tangible (better schools, transportation, and refuse collection, access to municipal and state government jobs, etc.). Here, it is worth noting that Democratic presidential candidates most adept at hardball politics have had the closest ties to local political machines. One thinks of John F. Kennedy (Irish-American organizations in Boston and Chicago) and Lyndon Baines Johnson and Bill Clinton (state politics in the Deep South).
Compounding this political complacency was the Democratic Party’s shift to more centrist positions in the 1980s and 1990s. Under the New Democrats led by Bill Clinton the party establishment eschewed economic populism in favor of strategies centered on conservative fiscal policies, market-based solutions, and hopeful bipartisanship meant to attract moderate white suburban voters. In so doing, Democrats largely ceded the field of public discourse to the apologists for fiscal austerity and small government, with few opposing voices to make the case for robust public services. Arguably, it was at that time Democratic politicians began to rely on cultivating large donors, technical policymaking over new political messaging and mobilization (except through a charismatic candidate) whose fact-based discourse expressing traditional Democratic values presumably spoke for itself to voters, static core constituencies (union households, Blacks, Latinos, and women), and faith that demographic shifts trending Democratic would automatically translate into meaningful votes. What started out as an opportunist centrist strategy became something of a new political identity by the 2000s.
In terms of their social composition, Democrats are an economically, ethnically, and racially composite group that is publicly fractious and poorly disciplined. To be sure, many are very entitled — they want and expect many things — but most can’t be said to have been raised since birth confident that government and management of the fate of others and of the entire nation were their destiny. Mastery of their own fate? — defiantly, yes. But mastery over the fate of others? — less so. At the same time, they seem to express the hope and belief that national political institutions and their rules (including laws) will protect them and guarantee political enfranchisement.
Their loyalty to the federal government more than matches their loyalty to the party, but it is a nervous one. Democrats seem to embody the almost middle-class sense of propriety of the upwardly mobile, anxiously seeking public recognition of their new-found status that their Republican opponents rarely grant them: on the contrary, they are often viewed as so many barbarians within the gates by the Republican establishment and treated as such. In this respect, as Nixon political biographer Carl Freedman points out (personal communication), as liberal or reform-minded capitalists, Democratic party leaders — even as they practice greater loyalty to federal institutions — operate more from the ideological margins of the free-market economic system, and thus from a position that is experienced as less legitimate. Certainly, Republicans have always thought so, and since the 1950s they have made that much clear through political smears and red-baiting of Democrats questioning their patriotism, especially during the Cold War. (Which goes to show that political intimidation of this kind has always had more to do with delegitimizing domestic opponents than with combatting a foreign menace.)
So here we are presented with a political paradox: often viewed with disdain by Republicans as less than mainstream and “American,” Democrats and many of their liberal and progressive allies profess a deeper loyalty to the nation-state and its federal institutions than their opponents, who see themselves as true nationals or “natives” but express increasing contempt for the welfare of the nation and its government. Democrats’ anxious sense of vulnerability and loyalty may help explain why Democratic Party politicians have been prone to bouts of patriotic frenzy when they think national security is threatened.
Less secure in their social and ideological status, certain Democrats act as if they still seek acceptance by their abusive social and ideological betters, an acceptance that will never come. It’s like looking for love in all the wrong places. Reticent before the necessity of dirtying themselves publicly and compromising their status as accredited players, they have come to prefer managing politics at a safe hygienic distance through hopeful bipartisanship, the strength of their detailed policy initiatives based on large data aggregates, and voter turnout drives of traditional constituencies that they have tended to take for granted (what Hillary Clinton called her “firewalls”). Dropping the adversarial politics of economic populism dating from the New Deal was a fatal error, for Democrats and liberals lost the ability to mobilize their base and draw legible lines between themselves and Republicans in nationalist terms that in the past countered the Republicans’ “us-them” strategy of political smears and red-baiting that attempted to delegitimize Democrats and their policies and ostracize them from the political arena as “unAmerican.”
Jeopardizing their fragile legitimacy by engaging in hardball tactics with Republicans is now considered by most Democrats as too risky — or so it would appear. The record of Democratic responses to political intimidation is not a strong one: from their reluctance to call for what it was the judicial coup d’état that put George Bush in the White House in 2000 and their feeble opposition to the War on Terror after the 9/11 attacks; to their slow reactions to the smears of the military records of Max Cleland (a triple amputee no less) and John Kerry (the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad campaign) in 2002 and 2004 that crippled their respective senatorial and presidential campaigns; to, finally, the silence with which they met the claims of the birther movement and calls on national cable TV by Fox News host Glenn Beck and CNN ‘s Lou Dobbs to armed insurrection against the new Obama administration. Even a clear-cut act of Republican inspired political terrorism such as the Tucson, AZ mass shooting in January 2011that severely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and left six other people dead drew only a clichéd response from Democrats, who contented themselves with joining Republicans in denouncing the attack as a national tragedy and issuing calls for the cooling of political rhetoric, as if both parties were equally culpable. Finally, astonished liberal and progressive voters watched how Hillary Clinton’s defiant campaign confronting Trump’s acts of intimidation failed to take seriously her own vulnerabilities to potential attacks concerning the hacked campaign and DNC emails, possession of a private email server while Secretary of State, and the dysfunctional actions and relationships of the Democratic National Committee and campaign staff.
Finally, we must not forget that the Democratic Party establishment’s longstanding internal culture of loyalty and identity presents one other paradox: in marked contrast to their actions towards their Republican opponents, it seems to authorize the most high-handed and disrespectful treatment of insurgent candidates like Howard Dean, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders who threaten their control of the party. They appear to save their most aggressive actions for internal party struggles.
Today, content with their self-image and identity, Democrats and many of their liberal allies continue to forget that elections are not popularity contests but rather bids for power and that to the victor go both the spoils and control of the public narrative. Winning bestows its own rewards: more often than not, victory makes right, so to speak, not the reverse. Donald Trump, entrepreneur turned politician, never forgets this.
Donald Trump’s Identity and Aggression
Donald Trump broke with the practices and self-images of both parties. Nominally and expediently Republican, he has none of the GOP leaders’ loyalty to the party and even less of their sense of discipline and discretion. He is the attack dog become master. What Trump does share is the Republicans’ instrumentalization of government for private gain and their cynical disregard for rules and regulations, but again, unlike the GOP old guard and like the vulgar tabloid politician that he is, he makes no secret of it. It is his version of transparency and brutally so, to the thrill of his angry supporters. Trump may be a private-school-educated WASP born to wealth, but he is also a second-generation American with little patience for the niceties of good manners and establishment hypocrisy. Capitalist folk hero, he is the captivating embodiment of the defiant, mythical free-born white man openly hostile to government and people who depend on it.
When it comes to acts of intimidation and violence, Trump outdoes Republicans in every way and won’t hesitate to heap abuse upon his own allies. He has combined longstanding Republican aggressive tactics with his own rough brand of political intimidation and violence and in so doing has transformed the Republican Party and made it his own. He has clarified the GOP’s deepest tendencies, the freedom (to be violent) of the old conservative elites and recast it to include a new populist vein. The advent of Donald Trump has highlighted an under-appreciated aspect of violent politics: it’s transformative power.It doesn’t leave the political field as it found it.
Not only can smears, physical threats, and skullduggery paralyze and defeat opponents, but they can also legitimize the most authoritarian politics and energize the movement or party that deploys them, be it through political speeches, tweets, rallies, protests, or policies. Right-wing politicians and their followers revel in intimidating and threatening others, glory in it, and find each other and bond through it, even forge a new group identity by means of it. In this sense, with Trump’s politics, or rather his political violence, politics is no longer simply a means, as with the old Republican establishment, but also a populist identityforged in the heat of campaigning and governing. For many supporters Trump’s violence is the very measure of his liberty and credibility. It is striking that Trump’s verbal intimidation and threats against immigrants, the news media, etc. no longer put off establishment conservatives but rather draw them in; they have fallen behind him, not the reverse. (For more on Trump as a powerful and effective figure of political authority uniquely rooted in U.S. culture, see Part Four, “The Political Synergy of Donald Trump’s Multiple Identities.”)
This is the dark information that Democrats failed and continue to fail to factor into their political thinking.
Conclusion: Taking the Offensive
Over the last thirty years, the Democratic Party’s internal culture of loyalty and identity together with centrist strategies have contributed to undermining Democrats’ resolve in responding to Republican acts of intimidation and skullduggery. Reflexively choosing silence over aggressive reframing of issues and themes and trusting in the public to reject unscrupulous political bullies have not served Democrats and liberal and progressive causes well in a harsh public climate. All too often this has left the initiative in the hands of their political enemies whose slanders and misrepresentations always seem to dominate the news cycle. Even less effective has been relying on the enunciation of abstract principles over action, adopting purely reactive stances and attacking only when provoked, or pursuing hopeful bipartisanship in the face of remorseless opponents who think only of winning.
So what can concerned activists and citizens do to get Democrats out of their political rut?
It took the outside candidacy of seventy-four-year-old Bernie Sanders to show the way and depart from the standard campaign script. In reviving the old economic populism and denouncing the policies of the 1%, he dropped the party’s reactive stance and went on the offensive. His campaign broke with the Democratic Party’s longstanding cautious strategy that committed precious energies and resources to a narrow strategy of internal party controland predictable electoral outcomes. Ever since then, following his example, in recent local and Congressional races Democratic candidates like Chris Hurst, Danica Roem, and Kathy Tran (Virginia House of Delegates), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York City), Stacey Abrams (Georgia), Ben Jealous (Maryland), and Andrew Gillum (Florida) have surprised seasoned political observers with their victorious campaigns. Against reigning political wisdom, and with the active support of new activist organizations like Sister District Project, Indivisible.org, Swing Left, etc. they’ve practiced expansive, risk-taking strategies that avoided chasing after the ever-elusive moderate voters and instead mobilized support by addressing local issues that many more constituents care about and will continue to care about in the future (a living wage, a secure retirement, tuition-free college, student debt relief, affordable healthcare, accessible public services, gun reform, fair immigration laws, etc.). As Ocasio-Cortez explained, “It’s not by rushing to the center. It’s not by trying to win spending all of our energy winning over those who have other opinions. It’s by expanding the electorate, speaking to those that feel disenchanted, dejected, cynical about our politics, and letting them know that we’re fighting for them.”
Complementing an aggressive populism is the adoption of what I have called a nimble politics of anticipation. It is laid out in detail in the conclusion to Part Two. That includes a clear-eyed assessment of one’s own vulnerabilities and taking preemptive countermeasures before the political intimidation and thuggery occur (hacking into email accounts and election machines; stigmatizing social identities; smearing one’s character, motives, social background, education, or political record, etc.). Perhaps part of this involves recognizing in ourselves our own capacity for intimidation and bullying so as to identify it more readily in others and anticipate it.
In response to local electoral successes, there has been some movement by party leaders that have decided to encourage local and Congressional candidates to pursue strategies that work best in their district. This comes none too soon. Without recasting its image more in alignment with the kind of political battle that we are fighting, as a party that aggressively defends and takes care of its own in a convincing way to disaffected citizens, the new tactics will be open to mockery or simple disbelief. The Democratic Party and its leaders will continue to appear to be a group of so many failed paternalists who have proven to be unable to protect their own people from the depredations of radical Republicans and their right-wing allies. Absent a political revolution within, the Democratic Party itself in terms of identity, self-image, culture of loyalty, political messaging, forms of mobilization of the liberal and progressive base, and appeals to distressed voters, it will continue to be the private quasi-monopoly of access to political power and public office and the ineffective force that it is today.
Finally, aggressive populist strategies based on substantive issues allow candidates to bypass the all-consuming focus on Trump and his malfeasance and the inevitable personalization of national politics, which, in this writer’s opinion, has so distracted from defining for the electorate what Democrats will do for voters, and worked in Trump’s favor by allowing him to dominate the news cycle day in, day out. The election has to be more than a referendum on a dysfunctional and violent political personality and his web of corruption and criminal activity.
Post Scriptum: Readers seeking to know more about the 30-year history that led to the current state of affairs in U.S. national life may want to consult my recent book, Confronting Political intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond (2017). It includes informative accounts of the legacy of the War on Terror and the revolution in the limits of acceptable public behavior and speech in the workplace and media in the 1980s and 1990s, and how they contributed to the rise of our extreme public culture of intimidation and bullying in politics.
Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus, UC San Diego(rreid@ucsd.edu). He is a member of Indivisible San Francisco.
