Like many American voters, I’m a mass of nerves today. I was a mass of nerves yesterday; I will continue being a mass of nerves tomorrow. I would like this to be over. We all would. The week leading up to the election—an election that started even before Trump took office the first time—has been especially agonizing. It’s not just because the news is bad, and it’s not just because we’re watching legal fight after legal fight in swing states where Republicans are suing to keep votes from being counted. It’s because, as when you’re exercising, the knowledge that you’re almost done has peculiar effects. Sometimes it saps the will. Sometimes it builds to a final depleting burst of effort. But if neither is happening at present—if you are like me, if your anxiety is vibrating in a way that is not consistent with the idea that this all ends on election night—that’s not just because a Trump defeat is far from certain. It’s because whatever relief we’re all anticipating once the results are known will be a mirage regardless of the outcome. This moment in American politics does not end in a well-earned rest.
For one thing, it is quite possible that Trump will win and we will all have to keep fighting a frightening current, captives to an authoritarian president backed by a radical court. But even if Trump loses, even if Trump loses and the Senate flips, Republicans’ last-minute confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is one of several emergencies—including the economy and the coronavirus—to which Americans must immediately tend. Beating Trump, should it happen, will not be enough.
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The political landscape in America is pretty clear following Barrett’s confirmation. Against norms he himself established, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell installed a Supreme Court justice while the U.S. election was already underway, thereby achieving a minoritarian Republican supermajority enshrined by an impeached president. It is a naked power grab, the empty rationale for which is meant to feel like the insult that it is. The consequences will be a disaster: for climate change, for women’s rights, for civil rights, for voting rights, and also, crucially, for the legitimacy of the judicial branch. Republicans have done it anyway. The GOP no longer considers legitimacy a factor in its political calculus; having accepted that it’s unlikely to win the popular vote, the priority now is acquiring and exerting power through any means at all. One major, defining benefit of doing so is that Republicans will be empowered to judicially prevent Democrats from being able to put progressive legislation into practice. This is not a matter that voting once can overcome. It is a structural emergency. Look what happened in Wisconsin.
Should Democrats win the Senate and the presidency (which is just possible), they could do several things “by the rules” but in violation of norms to mitigate the damage. Popular proposals include expanding the court or limiting Supreme Court appointments to 18 years. As Matthew Yglesias put it in a since-deleted tweet, “Republicans are 100% right: Winning the presidency and a senate majority with a minority of the votes and using that power to fill court vacancies is unquestionably within the rules of the game. So is statehood for USVI, Guam, DC, and Puerto Rico and court expansion.”
The question is: If Democrats were so empowered, a) would congressional Democrats take those steps and—most importantly for my purposes—b) would their Democratic but nonprogressive constituents want them to? That the question must be asked at all is no small source of desperation to those of us who have watched the Republican Party’s embrace of naked authoritarianism and felt that Democrats have responded with nothing but stern statements about procedural disrespect. But the second question must matter more than the first, because if Joe Biden wins and becomes president, the coalition voting for him—the coalition that seems, in many ways, to be motivated and unified by the idea of ousting Trump—will dissolve into competing factions the moment he’s sworn in. Despite proof that Republicans no longer respect any norm or agreement, many Democratic voters remain reluctant to fight back with anything like proportional aggression. Why is this? And how can progressives try to persuade them that action on this front is so urgent that failing to do so will capsize Democratic influence and decimate Democratic priorities for three or four decades?
Addressing these questions will require understanding some peculiar effects of Donald Trump’s presidency. Take the importance of norms. Donald Trump subjected a lot of unwilling Americans to an ongoing crash course in civics by violating norm after norm—norms that many or most of us didn’t even know the country had, norms whose role in the gears of government became clear to many Democrats only after dysfunction and domination replaced them. A lot of Democrats know what a floor vote is now. People who never followed politics before have thoughts about the filibuster. If you’ve watched Ivanka Trump violate the Hatch Act eight times in 48 hours, with no consequence or reprisal, of course you’re going to long for a less corrupt system. Americans have learned to cherish norms in their absence. It makes perfect sense, then, that many of us now regard norms as precious things to be restored and preserved; we have learned through bitter experience how painful and corrosive it is to lose them.
The trouble is, those norms remain lost. We cannot ameliorate their destruction by scrupulously respecting their gravestones and paying homage to the limits they once exerted on political action. There is no future in American politics where Republicans sincerely respect norms again; that contract was shredded by the party as a whole, not just Trump. The damage deserves to be mourned, but it cannot be undone. Electing Joe Biden does not magically revert us back to where we were before, no matter how many times Biden himself insists that bipartisan collaboration is his goal. Democratic respect for norms is a defense mechanism protecting us from despair over what this country can become when one party descends into savagery. But it is 100 percent maladaptive. It’s a sentiment that prioritizes a deprecated proceduralism that cannot be recovered over effects that are anathema to Democratic principles and beliefs. Playing hardball in response to Republican thuggery is essential—not simply to even the playing field or to protect civil rights but to save the planet by doing something about climate change. The stakes are not political; they are existential.
It’s worth saying, too, that the damage Trump has done is cumulative; there is no “fixing” it in a way that restores us to a neutral state. We can’t just get back into the Paris Agreement; we have to make up for all that’s been lost since thanks to the environmental protections Trump shredded and the regulations he weakened. We’ve lost four years we could have spent dealing with climate change, which means that we will have to do more because of him. Ice caps have kept melting under his presidency. The Arctic sea ice is still not refreezing. Wildfires and hurricanes have gotten bigger and worse.
While Democrats argued over whether McConnell can be said to have stolen one Supreme Court seat or two, Republicans did the stealing.
We have to keep going, and we have to do more is not what most of us want to hear during this last week of an exhausting electoral era. But the exhaustion you might be feeling deserves a second look too because it is, itself, a cumulative effect of life under Trumpism. Coping is tiring. Coping also distorts. As the challenges Americans are dealing with have skyrocketed, a side effect of coping has become impossible to ignore. It is that the defense mechanisms anti-Trump voters deploy in order to cope with the current environment frequently have powerful—and politically enervating—side effects. Most of us aren’t aware of them, because coping mechanisms exist to mask our distress enough that we can function, after all, and function we must. That means repressing, and repressing has costs we must recognize and deal with as we consider what might come after Trumpism (if we are lucky). It’ll be difficult because the more crap people must cope with, the stronger the mounting cognitive interference of competing defense mechanisms becomes. You start taking shortcuts that land you in positions that might not serve you in the long term. This is how “we must preserve the norms” can become a bedrock value for centrists, even though it won’t actually make anything better. (It might make them feel like something is better, though, which explains the attraction to the position.) The impulse to go backward—back to a time when things at least felt more normal—is very strong.
Here’s another example: Folks who don’t like Trump want him out of office, obviously. But it’s also been extremely painful to witness each new instance of Trump’s corruption and the GOP’s capitulation to it. In response, a tic has developed: the “and you’re surprised?” retort to each new such revelation. As a defense mechanism, this makes excellent, ego-preserving sense. It feels better than pure chagrin or horror; expecting the worst is the only illusion of control many of us have, after all. If you can’t win, at least you can take some pleasure in having been proved right. As a political response, though, it’s disastrous. The “and you’re surprised” posture implies that there is little value in further investigating Trump’s unfitness because new revelations will not matter or “surprise” the electorate. It indirectly promotes a jaded passivity that’s at least in principle at odds with the force of the anger that sparked the defense mechanism in the first place. The result isn’t just enervating to the individual; it directly counteracts movement-building. If we are ever going to be a functioning country where accountability matters, we will need the political will to punish wrongdoing. Professing a lack of surprise will not be enough.
Democrats are motivated right now. But if Biden wins, his coalition will shatter. Never Trumpers are likely to go back to being Republicans. Progressives and centrists will exert different pressures on the new president. But a lot of people, tired of political hypervigilance, will want to rest. Look: It’s totally understandable for people exhausted by political acrimony to want to tune out after the election if Biden wins. They crave a return to normalcy. That’s what a lot of them are voting for: for this whole mess to be over. This is both perfectly understandable, and a recipe for minoritarian Republican supremacy. It will take a lot of work for progressives to convince those desperate to reconstruct some sense of normalcy with a bipartisan consensus that we cannot stop here, that there is still serious work to do.
Progressives will have to do that work because Biden will not, and a Democratic distaste for hardball tactics speaks to the basic asymmetry in how Republicans and Democrats are still thinking about politics: Republicans love it when their politicians grab power and trample the opposition, whereas Democrats remain obsessed with questions of fair play. Republicans are openly working to delegitimize American elections, stop people from voting, and stop the votes that are cast from being counted—the governor of Florida literally suggested that only the votes that could be counted in 24 hours should count—while Democrats try to win fair and square. It’s genuinely nightmarish that even the Associated Press is reporting a Supreme Court decision allowing all votes to be counted in North Carolina as “a win for Democrats” rather than for democracy, but that’s how stark things have gotten. Democrats are overwhelmingly likely to win the popular vote, but they can only win the Electoral College for sure if it’s an absolute landslide, and so that’s what they’re focusing on. Meanwhile, Republicans, who know they’re extremely unlikely to win a popular vote, look for legal ways to literally ignore the electoral results and substitute their own. (“Legality” is no longer a real obstacle, anyway: With a 6–3 Supreme Court in their corner, legal pretexts will be found, and the conservative wing of the court has already signaled how far it’s willing to go.) This cannot continue, because here’s what happens when it does: While Democrats argued over whether McConnell can be said to have stolen one Supreme Court seat or two, Republicans did the stealing.
If Biden wins, the temptation to tune out will be enormous. But we cannot afford to collapse into stasis out of a mistaken sense of relief. And who knows? There’s some evidence that the shameful spectacle of Republicans suing to invalidate legitimate votes in state after state has been radicalizing all on its own, judging by the unprecedented turnout. If they keep it up, maybe there will be enough momentum to Democratic outrage to keep from relapsing into the old accommodationist habits. But one thing is certain: For Democrats, winning isn’t enough.
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