We’ve Got a Domestic Cold War on our Hands
Authoritarians are electorally entrenched and advancing on the ground while SCOTUS provides critical “air support”
I know there has been quite a hiatus here since my last post — for two reasons:
Like many, I was pleasantly surprised by the recent (November 2022) mid-term elections where Democrats did much better, and Republicans did much worse, than almost everyone predicted. I was, therefore, intent upon both decompressing a bit and also on taking time to better understand what the results might mean for our political landscape and its trajectory. I did both.
And then, I was locked-out of my Substack account for several weeks by some problems with lost two-step verification codes — which problem has now been resolved. (Hallelujah!)
And so, here is the first of a number of Thinking Out Loud posts to expect in the near term.
The Midterms
Overall, I think that the midterms indicate that we are still in the early stages of a newly explicit fight with what, in polite elite media circles, are called “illiberal” forces at home and abroad. In this, I do want to credit Trump with a signature accomplishment: drawing into the open the depth and breadth of the anomie, resentment, and militancy that has been building in our working/middle class for decades. I ascribe this largely to the consequences of Reaganite “trickle-down” economic austerity policies invented and imposed in the midst an unprecedented (some argue, necessary) U.S. effort to dominate the globalization of international trade and finance, as well as the consolidation of U.S./allied military superiority.
The midterms showed us that, because of some basic “facts on the ground,” including some hard core mainstream “American” dispositions and values, there is a solid foundation upon which to continue to advance a liberal democratic agenda both domestically and internationally. In our current political crisis, a bare majority of Americans put the brakes on “extremists” where gerrymandering or deeply polarized conservative majorities did not preclude this.
Nevertheless, as Rachel Kleinfeld implicitly points out (in a recent interview here with Yascha Mount on his SubStack Newsletter, Persuasion), we now face a daunting challenge to our Republic. We now have more anti-democratic, illiberal one-party states than we had during the Jim Crow era:
We have about 16 states now where there's trifectas—a state in which the governor, the attorney general and both chambers of the legislature (basically all of your major executive roles that would control elections) are all of one party. In about 15, maybe 16 states, those are all Republican and a number of election deniers were elected to those positions. It's worth remembering that the Jim Crow South was only 11 states, really, in its full form of election suppression against African Americans and poor whites. It doesn't take the entire United States to have an authoritarian enclave somewhere.
And, so, what the midterms showed was that, while a lot of hard campaigning and organizing helped to defeat just enough MAGA extremists to hold the Senate and minimize losses in the House, the MAGA movement is very much in play and very much in power in some pretty substantial enclaves. But referring to these states or regions as enclaves risks obscuring their true significance.
An Emerging Confederacy
What we have experienced in just a few short years, starting with the backlash to the Presidential elections of Barack Obama and then the MAGA-catalyzing campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, is the dizzyingly fast establishment of a renewed and enlarged “illiberal” confederacy.
As we have come to know full well, this is not the ”Rockefeller Republican” agenda of a bygone era.
Let’s just stop for a moment and take this in: The MAGA forces are not just a movement. They are not just a group that marches or riots in the streets and lays down in front of police or even tanks. MAGA has become a big, institutionalized, and militant political force that can compete for and win the control of states and, of course, federal power, including the congress, the presidency, and the judiciary. And it has intentionally encouraged, rallied, mainstreamed, and celebrated the use of intimidation and violence as a political tool. It even has a “foreign policy” — having forged formal relationships with many of the most successful autocrats and autocratic forces in other nations.
MAGA has moved from an illiberal movement to an insurgent juggernaut. And the MAGA-controlled states are moving towards a renewed type of confederation around shared values and goals. The author and political analyst, David Pepper, has labeled these states, “Laboratories of Autocracy.”
This renewed confederacy is poised to become more and more established and to achieve much greater power by virtue of MAGA monopolies on political power in these laboratories of autocracy — abetted by the rapid capture of many state and federal judiciaries — including the Supreme Court — by Federalist Society originalists and reactionaries.
It seems likely that, for the foreseeable future, our politics, nationally and at the state level, will be framed around and defined by the struggle between those people and states working from the liberal idea of “e pluribus unum” to form a “more perfect union,” and those committed to an anti-liberal MAGA-esque world-view anchored in a loose confederacy of essentially one-party states.
Sound familiar?
Well, of course it sounds familiar: We are still fighting the once-hot Civil War, but by other, somewhat cooler, means.
This makes for some pretty serious political challenges.
The American Cold War
In this new incarnation, the emerging confederacy is being forged not for a “hot” war, but rather for a “cold” war of hard-charging partisan insurgents “on the ground” supported by a Supreme Court that has been captured by these forces and politically/ideologically-supercharged to provide essential, potentially outcome-determinative, “air support.”
No hot war is needed when an insurgent party, with extraordinary speed and effectiveness, can erect political, legal, and ideological walls along and around state borders, in league with a rogue SCOTUS acting to recast the Supreme Law of the Land around an authoritarian agenda. And this is exactly the agenda of this court as it rushes to clear away the authority of the federal government to regulate commerce, to protect voting rights, to delegate legislative and enforcement authority to executive/administrative agencies, to protect the rights of women over their own bodies, to control immigration policy, and so much more.
This is a 30,000 foot framing that I hope is helpful to get some purchase and perspective on out current political crisis. The American Civil War is still with us, but has been forged into a new form of “indigenous” cold war by the takeover of so many states and SCOTUS, and the demonstrated capacity to contest for America’s future at scale. Our new domestic cold war underscores how deep are so many issues that still divide us and how seriously we must continue to fight for our democratic experiment.
Alarmingly, given the electoral landscape for 2024, there’s a pretty good chance that Republicans could soon achieve a federal electoral “triumvirate,” winning the House, Senate, and presidency. If they can achieve this, the cause of preserving more than a century’s worth of extremely hard-fought democratic gains will become very much more difficult. We must do everything we can to prevent this from happening and, as evidenced by the midterm elections, there is much that we can do. Stay tuned for upcoming posts on how our democratic experiment might prevail in our domestic Cold War.