The "Tourniquet Election, or Tourniquet Presidency?" Edition
It's hard to assess what Biden might accomplish when Trumpists still deny he won
The Big Idea
When you’re injured with massive hemorrhaging—like an arterial bleed—you need a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding and stabilize you in that “golden hour” to get you to proper medical care. Applying a tourniquet is the core medical skill soldiers and diplomats get before deploying to combat zones. I took one class where in the middle of instruction on an unrelated topic, the instructor would shout out, “your right arm!” or “your deskmate’s left leg!” and you’d be expected to whip out and apply your tourniquet correctly.
The election of Joe Biden is a tourniquet on America. Using just the powers of the Presidency, he can stanch our most serious bleed—COVID-19. Just by not being Donald Trump, he can prevent our democracy from bleeding out.
But is that it? America needs more than a tourniquet to get through the next four years, to say nothing of the next generation. COVID and authoritarianism may be our hemorrhages, but climate change is the cancer killing us. If Republicans control the Senate, though, we won’t be able to do much better than just that tourniquet.
This is why Democrats are depressed despite Biden’s considerable win. We didn’t win the Senate, took losses in the House, and made no gains in state capitals. Amazingly, more people voted for Trump in 2020 than did in 2016—people who didn’t back Trump in 2016 looked at the last four years and thought, “Yeah, more of this would be good.” I personally can’t begin to comprehend that, but the fact is plain.
Moderate and progressive Dems already are casting blame at each other. I think both are right. Progressives are correct that:
· Progressive policy priorities actually are broadly popular among Americans;
· Republicans will call all Democrats “socialists” no matter what Dems say;
· Moderates sometimes pursue unimaginative tactics, both in campaigning and in governing; and
· Dems exist at a structural disadvantage against the right-wing media ecosystem, from FOX to QAnon, that they haven’t figured out how to combat.
Moderates are correct that:
· Progressives actually aren’t the “base” of the Democratic Party—if you assume that base is primarily people of color, it’s worth noting Trump did better among them, though still horribly, than he did in 2016. POC as a group simply aren’t that progressive;
· Meanwhile, Biden conquered among college-educated whites, especially women, who hate modern Trumpist conservatism but also don’t lean as far left as Progressives might wish;
· Phrases like “Defund the Police” really were harmful; and
· Progressives’ core demographic is the youth vote, which may someday dominate, but doesn’t right now. When you think of “The Squad” as the archetypes of progressivism, their most salient feature isn’t that they’re women, or of color, it’s that they’re all under 50.
Getting past all this infighting, the question must be, what can Biden accomplish beyond just the tourniquet if Democrats don’t make lightning strike twice in Georgia in January? The good news is, looking back at the stabilization strategy I’ve laid out, he can pull off a lot of it using executive powers, and several things I proposed—restructuring Homeland Security or creating a national service first responder program—might be negotiable with Republicans. The problem is, the core strategy is still the Democratic legislative agenda, and Biden can’t do that without the Senate.
I’ve written before how we need to give more weight to our most democratic institutions while curbing the power of our least democratic. In order, those institutions are: the House, the Presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. If the Democrats can’t advance their legislative agenda, the next-best thing Biden can do is curb the powers of the Senate and the courts.
It’s time for Democrats to stop bringing knives to gunfights. I pray Biden doesn’t believe he can do real business with Mitch McConnell. Biden can’t work around most of the Senate’s powers, but he should be creative in figuring out how he can. The easiest target is appointments.
McConnell already has spoken of forcing Biden to pick only appointees McConnell considers acceptable. This flies in the face of the tradition that a President deserves deference in their appointments unless a candidate is patently unfit, which is exactly what the Senate should check. Biden shouldn’t surrender to this blackmail. He should tell McConnell, approve my appointees, or I’ll install them as actings just as you let Trump do. This isn’t Biden abusing the Senate’s “advice and consent” powers; it’s him acknowledging McConnell’s degradation of them.
Biden also should feel free to blow past Congress’s appropriations powers to allocate money across the Executive Branch as he sees fit, assuming support from the House. Again, this is something the Senate failed to prevent Trump from doing. Biden can tell McConnell, if you want proper constitutional order restored, it’s on you to change your behavior. Otherwise, sauce for the goose…
The Court is harder for me to address. John Marshall is a revered ancestor in my family, and obviously I think he was right in his constant conflicts with Andrew Jackson. But after almost 200 years, it it’s time to recall Jackson’s comment: “Mr. Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it.” Biden can argue that his oath of office obligates him to “faithfully execute the laws,” and says nothing about “as the Supreme Court tells you to.” While not all Court rulings impact the Executive Branch—there’s not much Biden could do if the Court invalidated Roe v. Wade—he could refuse to enforce those rulings that depend on the Executive Branch for their enforcement, based on his own “faithful” interpretation of his responsibility to the laws.
I worry less about this scenario because I believe that Roberts and Gorsuch, at least, take both the Court’s and their personal credibility very seriously. Even Kavanaugh has shown flashes of this sense of responsibility, and it’s too soon to tell with Barrett. A few subtly-conveyed messages could say: don’t mess with my credibility, and I won’t mess with yours.
I expect Biden’s instinct will be to support norms by following them. This is understandable and laudable in principle, but again is just a knife in a gun fight. When one side decides to play hardball, you either back down and let them win, or you play hardball too. You have to hope they eventually see the same escalation risks you do, and negotiate a climb-down. You may both escalate to mutual defeat, but your own defeat is certain otherwise.
Pressing on with these tactics could turn Biden’s administration from a “tourniquet election” into something more like a “stabilized in the hospital” presidency—a big improvement. If COVID and the economy improve in his first two years, he might even be the first president in my lifetime to gain seats in a midterm election. If not, however, it will be time for plan B: radical federalism. I’ll get into that next week.
The Week
Nothing short of martial law—and not even that—will prevent President-Elect Joe Biden from swearing in as President on January 20. Second Confederate President Donald Trump can flail all he likes, but there is no series of Republican machinations that can overturn or nullify electoral outcomes in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia. Indeed, he’s getting laughed out of court so badly his lawyers are dumping him.
Meanwhile, Trump is obstructing the presidential transition, placing our national security at risk, to say nothing of how he’s totally deserted us in our darkest hour of COVID. Truth be told, this transition silliness doesn’t bother me much. Biden isn’t Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, with no executive experience; he and his team know what they’re doing, and haven’t been out of office that long. If you knew a guy who’d been a building contractor for 50 years, and just bought a condemned property to rehab, would you worry he wasn’t consulting enough with the family of rabid raccoons occupying the building? That’s what this transition would be if it was going smoothly.
So what are the Trumpists trying to do?
Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor coined the kind of phrase that makes you wish you’d thought of it: the “MAGA-Industrial Complex.” He might have phrased it better, though, as a “MAGA-Entertainment Complex,” or, like Marvel, a “MAGA Extended Universe.” While there are plenty of genuine authoritarian white nationalists and Ayn Rand devotees in what’s left of the Republican Party, at its core “Trumpism” is a grift.
You might argue this has been true of conservatism since at least Richard Viguerie’s first direct-mail campaign, but whereas once upon a time movement conservatism was a political ideology you could make a lot of money supporting, it’s pretty clearly transformed into a business whose profit model is built around persuading angry white people to give you money. Winning elections is a sideshow. In fact, like with gun sales, Democratic victories might even be better for the bottom line, as they stoke more anger to monetize. The tipping point probably came in 2012, when every single Republican presidential candidate to run against Barack Obama was a paid FOX News contributor.
Trump is trying to monopolize this Complex into a single Trump Political-Entertainment Empire. To date, the Complex hasn’t been a monolith: sure, FOX is the leader, but Limbaugh is his own brand, as are many personalities on and off FOX such as Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, et al. Then there’s the crazier fringe-moving-into-mainstream like Breitbart, InfoWars, OANN, and even QAnon. Trump intends to be the One Ring To Rule Them All.
Trump is just going through the motions of an “autogolpe”—people keep saying “coup,” but a leader illegally keeping himself in power is an autogolpe. He wouldn’t have spent the last two weekends golfing if he was serious about seizing power. He’s doing now what he intended to do in 2016: use grievances to turn his political base into an audience/customer base he can monetize. As an ex-President, almost certainly vowing to run again in 2024, he’s got tens of millions of potential donors to his Political Action Committee (PAC). Given our fucked up campaign finance laws, he can spend that money pretty much any way he wants, even if he doesn’t run in ‘24. It’s a grift he easily can ride for the rest of his life.
A lot could derail this plan: Trump’s native laziness and stupidity; criminal prosecution; Murdoch buying him off with a lucrative FOX show, etc. But if it works, the rest of the GOP will fall in line. What else can they do? There’s no way to get elected anywhere as a Republican without Trump’s voters. The GOP acknowledged this at their convention, when they abandoned any kind of platform to just affirm support for whatever Trump was going to do. It truly is the Trumpist Party now. They may not know what exactly “Trumpism” is from a policy perspective, but then, neither does Trump—it’s whatever impulse fires him up today. It does, at least, have two guiding guardrails: grift and grievance.
Is this bad for America? Fuck, yes! What is the word for a secession that doesn’t actually secede—that just stays there and makes the country ungovernable? It’s like a couple divorcing who can’t afford to actually split up. I guess for most of our history, it was called “Southern Democrats,” but they were contiguous to the South, and didn’t directly affect the rest of the country, at least when they weren’t seceding. Now, the same mentality exists in every state, jeopardizing any efforts at broader national unity.
Roughly one-third of our country, spread across our country, lives in a parallel America, with a single leader and information source undercutting whatever Biden does. Trump lacks the courage to start a real civil war on purpose. He values profit more than political power, and he’ll get plenty of profit by exploiting the grievances of those who feel powerless. But he’s also totally indifferent if violence results from what he says—and his words will inspire more violence, hopefully from only very unorganized people.
Worse, such a large and dissident element of our society, built around greed, will be open for business with foreign interests. We are the world’s “sick man”—a country with the military and economy of a great power, but politics so divided that foreign governments are freely able to interfere by creating proxies for themselves inside our governing system. This is the position both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires found themselves in in their last decades. The t-shirt “Better a Russian Than a Democrat” will get more popular.
This image is from Amazon.
There is a silver lining: while defeat clearly won’t make Trump slink away into the shameful shadows he belongs in, it also means the GOP can’t go looking for a new leader as long as Trump continues to suck up all the white grievance oxygen. The more cunning Trumpists like Cotton, Pompeo, Hawley, and Cruz have to wait in line, enriching themselves, but denied the power they crave. Worse still, they’re in line behind Don Jr. too. A Trumpist GOP is the dumbest GOP we could face.
The Washington Post’s art critic Philip Kennicot has a great take on Trumpism as America’s preexisting condition. It’s a good summary of Jonathan Metzl’s book “Dying of Whiteness.”
David Corn looks at what lies ahead for America as our cold civil war continues.
The Berggruen Institute has a take on how to promote better citizenship. It’s quite good for, say, high school classes, but it totally misses the sense of a citizen’s lifetime obligations to, and interactions with, the state.
Elie Mystal lays out how unlikely it is Trump remains in the White House. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s not still a threat.
Alliance for Peacebuilding is a great group, with very good thoughts here on how individual Americans can be more conscientious in promoting peace rather than faction. But I do think they left out completely the importance of developing a shared reality, which I fear is critically lacking.
Security Sector Reform
We talk a lot about the “militarization” of American policing, so Task and Purpose does a public service with a look into how Military Police actually work. They have their pros and cons, but one thing that jumps out is that they very strongly feel themselves to be an intimate part of the community of soldiers they are policing, in a way that isn’t evident in much of civilian police.
Good Reads
Lawfare has an excellent op-ed on the good news and bad news of Biden’s victory.
Anne Applebaum shows how Trump and Trumpism won’t retreat into that good night.
Yale’s incomparable Timothy Snyder reminds us: when your narrative is built around a “stab in the back,” it’s an invitation to fascism and violent revenge against your perceived enemies.
We cannot have enough reliable local media. Marc Ambinder has a great take on how we can ease polarization with vibrant local news. Good local news promotes trust in broader media, because it’s too easy to catch local news in any lies.
Finally, I served for far too brief a period under Ambassador Ron Neumann in Afghanistan, and he remains one of my favorite career diplomats. He writes here about what diplomats could recommend for addressing current American internal conflict, and he centers it around “listening.” To my surprise, I disagree: the first quality I would attach to a diplomat—which I’m sure he just took for a given—is integrity. Your counterpart won’t engage if they don’t trust in your good faith. I’m more skeptical than Neumann of the value of listening in a time when we don’t trust in the good faith of our fellow citizens.
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