WE'RE DESPERATE, GET USED TO IT

In Berlin, in 1987, Ronald Reagan demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.”  By 2016, though, Republicans were ready to embrace both walls and Russian dictators.  Now it’s “build the wall” and “Russia, if you’re listening.”

For a while, it looked like there might be a different outcome.  In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, members of the Republican Party establishment conducted a self-examination and concluded that they’d allowed their base to become too narrow.  They were still fixated on Ronald Reagan long after the Gipper was dead and buried.  “Morning in America” turned into Groundhog Day.  Reach out to minorities and gays, they said.  We’ve got to be more than just the party of old, wealthy white people.

Not so fast, the old, wealthy white people said.  Whose money made the modern Republican Party possible?  Over and above campaign donations, they funded think tanks, lobbying firms, publishing houses, and even media empires – all of which offered part- or full-time income streams for good Republican foot soldiers.  They weren’t about to go gentle into that good night.  They made their peace with Donald Trump.  And with Putin.  Russia was indeed listening, and they helped the Republican Party sweep the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

So we know that Republicans cheat.  But why?  Why did they choose blatant oligarchy over even a small number of mostly cosmetic compromises?    

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE, offer an answer.  Last September, they wrote a New York Times op ed piece entitled “Why Republicans Play Dirty” (link below), and this is the heart of their argument. 

“For parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.”

In other words, Republicans saw the writing on the wall, and decided to tear down the wall. 

OK, that’s good to know, but then what?  When one side plays dirty and wins, what’s the other side to do?  In the five presidential elections in this century, Democrats won the popular vote four times.  In two of those elections, though, the structural inequities built into the Electoral College (plus some blatant cheating) handed the White House to a Republican.

Maybe the most important question isn’t why Republicans play dirty.   Maybe we should be asking why Democrats DON’T play dirty.  And what would happen if they did?  

What if Democrats went full-on Republican dirty, including a “China, if you’re listening” appeal for help in countering hacks from Grand Old Putin.  What if Yang, Bloomberg, and Steyer, for instance, decided to pool 10% of their wealth and create a bizarro world Fox News, dedicated to lying about the Right like Fox lies about the Left?  Not a legitimate news service, but a fake news propaganda outlet?

Mainstream media would probably scream.  Their worldview sees Republicans as hard-nosed realists.  Republicans will do whatever it takes to win, even if they have to play dirty.  What else would you expect from hard-nosed realists? 

But they’ve assigned Democrats the role of earnest but inept do-gooders.  Well, that and occasional comic relief.  The mostly male pundit brigade must be amused at all those Democratic women who persist in running for president.  It’s like they haven’t figured out that the game is rigged, that talking heads will call them shrill, mock their appearance, and question their electability.

NBC and the Wall Street Journal took it up a notch earlier this week, ghosting Elizabeth Warren entirely.  They commissioned a series of head to head polls, pitting five of the six top Democratic candidates against Donald Trump, both nationally and in several key swing states.  Guess which candidate they left out?  I’ll bet the old boy network got a good chuckle out of that.

So while I’m convinced that Levitsky and Ziblatt are onto something, I think it’s important to address the implications of their thesis.  Republicans hold power by playing dirty.  No serious observer disagrees.  But if Levitsky and Ziblatt are correct, it means that a major role reversal has taken place.  Voting models show that Trump has a path to victory in the Electoral College, even if he loses the popular vote by 5 million.  If that happens, desperation will set in real soon.  Then what?

I don’t want Democrats to play dirty.  If I wanted to belong to party that played dirty, I’d be a Republican.  But neither do I want a system of sham elections in which my side has to follow rules and the other side doesn’t. Ivanka and Don Jr. are tanned, rested, and ready.

The 18th century Irish orator John Philpot Curran could have been talking about Donald Trump when he said, "In this administration, a place can be found for every bad man."  But Curran’s most urgent message to 21st century Americans came in a speech in Dublin in 1790: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

It’s too bad we can’t be vigilant retroactively, because I fear that we’re approaching the point of no return.  We have an uphill climb ahead of us in the best of circumstances.  But if we keep acting like Charlie Brown, letting Lucy fool us yet again, we may not get another chance. 

I’ve been thinking about “The Second Coming.”  Not the one in The Book of Revelation, but the poem by William Butler Yeats, in which “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”  It gets worse from there.  Let’s turn this battleship around before it’s too late.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/opinion/republicans-democracy-play-dirty.html