Being More Like Republicans

I've been thinking a lot these days about the rising religious fascism and murderous oligarchy of the Republican Party, which clearly is the culmination of a decades-long strategy, and also about the near-total capitulation ahead of the fact by the Democratic party, which also seems to have been the result of a decades-long strategy. And I've been thinking a lot about opposition, and what it will look like for us to become the opposition that we need and which doesn't yet exist.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the system we've inherited—the billionaire system. It's a murderous scam, based on foundational lies, energized by every bigotry, a people-eating machine that never stops eating as long as there are people to eat, which means that it is not only murderous and corrupt, but unsustainable and doomed, and the only real question is whether it will be allowed to doom all of the rest of us as well before it destroys itself, especially now that an openly fascist, openly white-supremacist, openly theocratic party is going to take full control of it.

That was part one. This is part two. I’m going to do a foolish thing now. I’m going to contemplate why a fascist party is taking over our system, which means I am going to write an election postmortem.

“Election postmortems” are these things where supremely confident people tell you what made the election go the way it went, and what thing could have happened that would have made the election go a different way. And the thing that could have happened that would have made the election go a different way is usually whatever the supremely confident person has always wished would happen, even if this involves ignoring the fact that thing the supremely confident person wishes had happened was the exact thing that actually did happen.

This is how you get Sunday morning political TV talk shows, featuring the same centrist Democratic operatives who actually ran the most recent losing election campaign, asserting that the lesson of the loss is that the Democrats should not have done something the Democrats did not do—that is, strategically appeal to marginalized communities by promising to fight for them. Instead, the centrist Democratic operatives aver, the Democrats ought to have done ... exactly what they did do, which is to say hire expensive centrist Democratic operatives, just like the ones the Democrats actually hired, to run a campaign exactly like the one that they just actually ran and lost. There’s usually somebody else on the panel to agree with the centrist Democratic operative, and it’s usually another centrist Democratic candidate, often one who recently lost their own election, who is giving advice on how Democrats can win, which, again, usually involves the exact strategy they themselves just rode to a loss. Sometimes the person giving the Democrats advice on how to win elections is even a Republican—a person who spends all their time figuring out how to make Democrats lose, but who within this context is suddenly, strangely, and very temporarily concerned about Democrats and apparently desperate to help them win. Whoever it is, the advice is always “Democrats should be more like Republicans,” which usually involves flattering Republicans for a decency that is not in evidence, and finding points of agreement to win over Republican voters who have shown no interest in being won over, and always involves abandoning some already at-risk group of people that Republican voters hate and fear and seek to terrorize and abuse and institutionally expel and murder. Trans people and immigrants and homeless people are on the griddle first, and apparently trying to get them off the griddle is bad strategy, according to people whose strategy has been repeatedly tried, and has repeatedly failed, and has led us to this point, with a fascist party taking the reins of an oligarchical murder machine.

It almost seems as if the purpose is not winning elections or accomplishing necessary things, but simply maintaining the existing system.

I’m not a centrist Democrat, nor am I a Republican who is apparently very briefly concerned about helping Democrats win elections, and I’m not very confident about my grasp on electoral strategy, so this isn’t going to be the usual election postmortem. I will not assert that following the advice implicit in my perspective would have swung the election, because I don’t know if it would have. Nor will I assert that the points I’m touching upon are the only salient points to consider relative to the election, because an election is a complex thing by all accounts, and there's only so much time.

And I'm going to assume that there will be elections in the future. It's an iffy thing, I know. If you think there won't be, I get it. That's certainly the fascist intention. But I'm not ready to give up on democracy just because fascists intend to demolish it, if only because that's clearly what fascists would like me to do, However, I'll try to draw conclusions about opposition that are applicable within and without the electoral process.

And I'm going to criticize Democrats, because they lost the election, and in a postmortem you don't usually conclude that the losing party did everything perfectly, unless you are a well-paid political operative who just ran the losing election campaign and would like very much to be paid well for running failed election campaigns again in the near future. Again, this throat clearing is necessary, because when you criticize Democrats, I've noticed, there are a lot of people who think you're saying things you aren't saying. So there will arise a temptation to tell me about one thing or another that Democrats have done or proposed that actually make, or actually would make, a positive material difference in the lives of thousands or millions of people, and if this is you, I want to assure you that I see these distinctions. However, we're asking the question "why did Harris and Democrats lose?" and we are doing it for the very good reason Harris and Democrats lost. They did what they did, and they lost. By the very nature of the exercise, this is not going to involve praise. And, because I'm talking about the particular points I'm talking about, it will not involve all the other points that I am not talking about, even though I'm sure some of them are very good points.

The Democrats needed to get the most votes, and what they did didn't accomplish that goal, and it seems to me that doing the same thing again probably won't do the trick, either. I am going to suggest that, if victory in 2024 was possible, and if future victories are going to be possible, it probably lies in doing something different.

The person who won the election is Donald Trump, who is an antidemocratic fascist oligarch dipshit, and not a secret antidemocratic fascist oligarch dipshit, either. He couldn't have been more upfront about what he intends, and everything he did during his previous term as president and everything he's done since winning this time indicate he definitely meant it. He ran on retribution and violence and menace and proud ignorance and open corruption and astonishing incompetence. And he won. Again.

A lot of people are disturbed to find that so many would vote for a man of no positive qualities, when the danger he represented was so clear. So am I.

Trump's opponent was Vice President Kamala Harris, and she was very polished and prepared and professional and competent and qualified, and she ran a very traditional Democratic campaign, which is to say a campaign that distanced itself from the left-leaning priorities of its base and mostly focused on garnering support from an anticipated block of center-right Republicans and conservative independents who it was hoped didn't want authoritarianism as much as they wanted competent continuance of our existing system. So the Harris campaign spent the summer and autumn doing their best to convince conservatives that she would not change the system that favored them, and that she shared a great many of their conservative values, that she was aligned with them on the economy and gun ownership and foreign policy and so on.

Well, it turns out that the center-right coalition was a desert, and the idea of a country-over-party Republican whose conscience doesn't allow them to support authoritarianism was a mirage. The votes weren't there. Conservatives don't actually want small government and individual liberty, and they never did. They were lying about that, and they always were. Despite the open appeal to their ostensible values, Republicans would much rather vote for Republican bigotry and supremacy and terror and destruction, and by many accounts Harris received even less of their votes than Joe Biden did, perhaps due to the aforementioned bigotry. Meanwhile, a lot of people who voted for Biden last time stayed home, and Harris lost. And, as always, "did not vote" carried the election by a landslide. A huge number of gettable votes just didn't bother.

A lot of people are disturbed to find that so many would stay home, when the stakes seemed so high, when a qualified and competent option who was not espousing Nazi rhetoric was available. So am I.

So that's the election mortem.

Election postmortem time!

Here's what I think is going on: Our system is foundationally built to devour human beings in order to enrich the already wealthy, and it's moved so far down that road that a critical mass of people now understand this, for the very good reason that they are now being devoured.

Because of this, we're in a time when most people understand we are in a systemic fight, and so most people want a fighter—and, to the perceptions of most people, Trump and the Republicans are fighting, and Democrats are not. This is a time when most people desperately seek radical transformation of our national spirit and our institutions—though the transformations they want to see come about differ radically—and, to the perception of most people, Trump and the Republicans represent radical transformation, and Democrats do not. Finally, radical transformation typically needs leaders of some sort, and, to the perceptions of most people, Trump and the Republicans are leading, and Democrats are not.

What this means is that the people who want all of the horrible and destructive things that Republicans want—a voting block which includes pretty much all Republicans—believe that they are well-represented, and are coming out to vote in roughly the same numbers as before, which is to say enough to win, provided enough other people stay at home. Meanwhile many people who don't want these things at all increasingly believe they are not represented at all, and, seeing little option for themselves, stay home.

Perhaps this troubles you. It troubles me. Perhaps you want to blame them for staying home, and if so I can't stop you. But I am troubled. I would very much like Democrats to do something to convince more people to turn out, because we're going to need somebody to, and they're the only other party with an already viable national political apparatus, so if they would stop trying to get the votes of people who will never vote for them and learn how to get the votes of people who might vote for them, it might save us years of infrastructure-building at a time when we don't really have years to spare.

Let me suggest something radical: Democrats do need to be more like Republicans—not, as well-paid failed centrist Democratic operatives and suddenly-if-temporarily concerned Republicans would suggest, in their intentions and goals and beliefs, or in their targets, or their bigotries, or their and bullying and abuses, or in the voters that they try to win, but rather in their willingness to set goals without ever compromising them, and their determination to make those goals come about despite all obstacles.

My election postmortem boils down to these observations, which I—while not confident in my ability to predict electoral outcomes—nevertheless believe to be true and applicable, and perhaps helpful for winning elections. I'll name them, then spend a few paragraphs on each.

1) Defending a people-eating system is an electoral liability.

2) You don't win fights if you don't fight.

3) You aren't the opponent of those you won't oppose.

4) If you don't lead, you're not a leader.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you subscribe to independent journalists and writers instead. This week I'm suggesting Pro Publica again. They do the important work of real journalism without being beholden to billionaire interests.

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Defending a people-eating system is an electoral liability

It seems to me a truism that any election involves competing narratives. To my perception, the competing stories in 2024 were fundamentally about fighting to demolish a system vs. fighting to maintain and defend it.

To define the system, I return to the Billionaire System upon which our system was founded; that old murderous scam built on genocide and slavery, which points, in the obfuscating manner of all scams, toward true and good things: universal human equality under the law, for example, and the fact that government exists to protect human thriving and happiness, and the establishment of individual freedoms that make such thriving and happiness possible, all of which are present in our founding documents, cheek-by-jowl with passages that make a Black person count as 3/5 of a white one and establish institutions and practices that are deliberately designed to structurally favor white slaveholding oligarchs over everyone else. This dichotomy—a scam built to devour humans, disguised as a bastion of freedom—has created, to put it politely, a narrative tension throughout the history of my country, the United States. Our documents claim to establish universal protections for all human rights and human thriving, yet our practice effected, and often still effects, the opposite.

Over the centuries there has been progress—real progress—that has brought our practice more in line with the promise of our founding documents. What I want to point out is that each of these instances of progress—votes for women, votes for Black people, interracial marriage, gay marriage, disability rights, regulatory protections, and many many many many others—has required a fight to establish, and a fight to maintain, while load-bearing structures of supremacy like the Senate and the Electoral College need no fight to retain; they exist without need of defense, so systemically well-protected by our rules and practice and our national spirit that the idea of changing them seems as impossible as leveling a mountain.

This fact—that every bit of human progress required a fight to establish—assists us in understanding the nature of the tension within our national narrative. Every act of progress was a fight—a long, hard, frequently bloody fight—against the institutional supremacy codified in our laws and etched in the supremacist American spirit. It also teaches us that fighting for change works to create it, if we are willing to pay the cost of a fight, which makes fighting for change a hopeful thing.

The fact that every bit of human progress also requires a fight to maintain can lend us further clarity: In the United States, progress is an uphill thing. The center of gravity of our system seems to bend naturally, not toward justice and human progress, but toward lies and injustice and genocide and corruption. It also teaches us that every bit of human progress—every bit of it—is currently opposed by people who would rather create as much supremacy as possible, and are quite willing to cheat and steal and kill to get it.

And the Billionaire System is accelerationist, which means that it always keeps eating more and more people, and, as it eats, it creates more and more desperate people, which creates more and more unrest. For a time, it was able to mostly devour the Black people it enslaved and the Native people it destroyed, but there came a time when it finally began eating so many people that the system began to collapse, and then we had a war, and in the end we did the best thing our nation has ever done, a great redistribution of wealth, in which the bodies and lives of millions of human beings were returned back to themselves, and we amended our founding documents to fix many parts of our unjust foundation. For a time it looked like we might have a reconstruction of our entire system, but in the end we compromised, in the name of protecting our systems, offering white supremacists redemption before they had done anything redemptive, and the scam was allowed to begin again. Came a time when the system was eating so many people that it became clear we needed a New Deal, and so new instruments to redistribute wealth were devised, and from 1920 to 1970 new instruments of civil rights made the vote available to all and codified and protected the right of everyone to access freedoms that had previously been accessible only to a few.

This new reconstruction established a social safety net and civil rights, and might have effected the birth of a new and more equitable system. But the Billionaire System is a foundational lie, the greatest of which is that only some people deserve life while the rest do not. So it lied, and convinced millions of people that it would be better to totally demolish the parts of our system that protect everyone—including themselves—rather than to have to share any of it with any of those who did not deserve it: immigrants and poor people, and Black people, and non-Christians, and gay people, and disabled people, and on and on. The Billionaire System and its allies have been working with ruthless determination ever since to demolish all of this progress, and they have not let any obstacle—whether law, or courts, or the unpopularity of their positions, or the rules, or setbacks, or individual election results, or the hypocrisy of their position, or basic human decency—stop them, nor have they ever compromised unless that compromise helped them attain their goal of demolishing all human progress already established within our system. And now it just may be that they can do it.

From this we can learn that our system always consolidates its wealth to those ruthless and inhuman enough to murder and steal, while human progress, founded in natural truths of human connection and the strength of its diversity, always involves redistributing wealth back to the people from whom it has been stolen, who generated it in the first place. I imagine this is why redistribution of wealth is presented as dangerous in a way that predatory greed never is.

And from this we can be reminded that establishing progress and maintaining it always needs a fight, while the thing that causes progress to be lost again usually comes in the form of compromise: by unthreatened parties, with those who were never going to budge, in the name of maintaining our foundational billionaire system.

Let's return to this year's election narratives.

The Republican narrative to the voters was that the system was broken and was devouring them and what was needed was radical change. This was a convincing story, because our system is broken and it is devouring them and radical change is needed—Republicans have made sure of that. The Republican narrative is a promise to fight and demolish our system—not the billionaire system we actually have, but the open, free, and diverse part, the part dedicated to human thriving, in which all people are deemed to be equal under the law, the part we inherited from those brave enough to fight for it, the part that supremacists falsely believe is the cause of all their suffering. This part of their story is also convincing, because the foundational lie that only some people deserve life is a very popular one in the United States, and the Republicans are fighting to demolish human progress, and they have been demolishing it for decades, and so anyone who fears and hates justice and equality has their support, no matter—or, more often, because of—how shockingly and openly corrupt and hateful they become, no matter how obviously they lie.

The Democratic narrative to the voters, on the other hand, was that the system is imperfect but fundamentally good; and, because the system is essentially good, most people in it want the same good things and our only differences are differences of opinion on how to achieve them, so what we need is unity and compromise, not fighting, and this is how we will overcome the dangers of the Trump movement, which are unique and new and external to our system. This is a pretty convincing message to those people for whom our system still works—those who our system has not yet gotten around to eating. The problem with this narrative is that our system actually is not good, Trump's movement is not a new external element but an expression of the same supremacy our system was founded upon, and our differences are not over how to achieve good things we all agree about, but rather over whether or not life must be earned, and who has earned it least, how those who have not earned life might best be abused and/or killed. And all of this, I think, made the Democratic narrative very unconvincing to those aware of the truth, particularly those who are already being abused by supremacists and devoured by our system. I think it probably masks those very real very good things that Democrats have done by working within that system.

You may be like me. The billionaire system may still work for you, in that it isn't actively consuming you yet. You haven't gotten the bad diagnosis, the chronic pain, the layoff, the rent hike, and neither have your parents or children or spouse—not yet. If so, I'd like to invite you to realize that, for millions upon millions of people, the system does not work or never did, because they stopped earning life and now the system is eating them. So, if we want to maintain the progress we've inherited, if we want to effect further progress that we desperately need in order to meet today's challenges, we are going to need to stop defending the people-eating system in hopes of establishing unity with those who have proved that they despise the idea of unity, and engage in the fight that's already going on, not just as a moral imperative but a strategic one.

It appears that defending a people-eating system as inherently good rather than pledging to fight radically in order to radically transform it isn't only unwise but impractical. It just doesn't appear to have the votes. I think committing to this sort of thing might result in a loss. In fact, I think it did.

So let's say that Democrats should be more like Republicans in their willingness to advocate for systemic transformation—not to demolish all human progress but to expand it; not to expand supremacy and injustice and bigotry but to demolish it.

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You don't win fights if you don't fight

I think of the narrative tension inherent in our country's system, of the way a murderous scam hides itself behind claims of universal human freedom. And I think of the history of progress; the struggle of it, the effort we've inherited of those who managed to push the supremacist boulder up the mountain, who have managed to hold it against those trying with all their might to push it back down again.

And I think of our history of compromise made by comfortable people not situated beneath the boulder's path, made with people who oppose human progress, in the name of defending institutions rather than protecting the people those institutions are meant to serve.

I said some time ago that something old is dying and something new is being born.

One thing that I hope may be dying now is this false but popular institutionalist idea that we could build lasting good things without also fixing the bad foundation, and that we can achieve universal unity by compromising with supremacy.

Think of the impossible things that we need now. Think of radical transformation of infrastructure and energy. Think of housing projects and national public transportation. Think of police and prison abolition. Think of taxing billionaires out of existence. When you think of the obstacles to these things—anti-democratic institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate, the radical capture of our courts—don't think of them as reasons to stop but as a foundation that needs to be repaired and replaced. Think of right-sizing the courts with executive commands. Think of constitutional amendments and elected and appointed officials willing to break comity and civility and norms and standards and rules in order to fight and defeat and demolish supremacy. And yes, that seems unrealistic, even impossible, but keep in mind that Republicans have in 50 years accomplished many unrealistic and impossible and horrible things, by determining that they would do them and then not letting any obstacles stop them, by pushing every advantage against anyone who would try to stop them. It seems to me that impossible things are possible, so we should try to accomplish some wonderful impossible ones.

So let's say that Democrats need to be more like Republicans. Not in what they fight for, but in the willingness to imagine "impossible" things, then fight for them.

You aren't the opponent of those you won't oppose

Everywhere I look these days, I see institutions and leaders surrendering in advance to an incoming gang of the most gleefully cruel, openly corrupt, proudly ignorant, deliberately destructive, utterly incompetent, vigorously hateful and bigoted people our nation seems capable of producing—a genuinely menacing klan of thieves and murderers. The oligarchs who own things that should not be ownable, like our channels of commerce and health and education and journalism, are lining up to "contribute" to Trump's inauguration fund, while the national newspapers and cable news and other arms of legacy media that they own are accepting fascist frameworks with little or no skepticism. I know this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, but it's impossible to miss the recent ramp-up.

Senior Democratic Representative James Clyburn recently suggested that Biden should pardon Trump of his many crimes so "we can clean the slate," an act that would surely serve only to certify fascist lawlessness. And Democrats are doing the same old “work with Republicans now to beat them later” thing that has led us to this point. And Joe Biden famously hosted Trump at the White House and glad-handed him and generally treated him in far more friendly fashion and the situation in a far more relaxed fashion than you'd hope for when greeting a fascist proto-dictator and a threat to global national security and democracy and human survival, which is what Biden had said he thought Trump is, and what people of clarity and awareness still know he is. And there's no end to politicians and strategists who think that the Democrats, who lost while tacking to the right, need to tack further to the right, by which they mostly seem to mean abandoning trans people and immigrants to fascist harassment and persecution and death, in order to achieve no practical goal that I can detect other than finding out a little faster who the fascists want to round up and kill next.

Whenever this happens, it means that those who are empowered to be the opposition have decided to not be the opposition. It's the sort of thing that can take the hope from you if you aren't careful. Hopelessness in one place makes people look for hope elsewhere—and not always, I’ve noticed, in very healthy or truly hopeful places.

This is why talk of leaving electorally unstrategic people behind is so corrosive. If you’re willing to abandon trans people—or any people—simply because solidarity might carry some political or personal cost you'd rather not pay, you aren’t picking your battles, you’re picking your side. Your strategy is to lose before you even start. Even if it wasn't morally unsupportable, it's strategically foolish. People who want to kill trans people or homeless people or immigrants already have a team fighting for them and clearly don't want the diet version. There's no support to find there. It's a desert full of mirages, and the Democrats appear to have just died there last month.

Remember that Republicans never compromise on the people they intend to expel and harm and abuse and kill, or on the things they intend to demolish, or on the ways they'd like to rob us. They never take a loss as a sign that their mandate was gone. They never lose an election and decide that they need to become more like the party that beat them. When they win elections, they make gains by opposing without compromise. When they lose elections, they make similar gains by opposing without compromise.

So let's say that Democrats need to be more like Republicans—not in what they oppose, but in their determination to oppose. To treat those who have chosen to be our enemies as if they are enemies rather than pretending they are friends. An unshakable determination to oppose all injustice and never join with it is the sort of thing might rally those who want to fight for justice, in a way that politeness and comity never will. After all, Republicans have rallied all those who desire injustice by opposing all justice and never joining with it.

If you don't lead, you're not a leader.

The thing about all these things we need to fight for is, we need them. We absolutely need to address very real challenges before us, from crumbling infrastructure, to the predation of capitalism to the reality of white supremacist violence, to the looming threats of climate catastrophe.

We need solutions to these things. These solutions need to be our destinations, are where we are not, and are where we need to go. These are existential issues.

When people need to go somewhere, and the leaders don't go there, then the leaders aren't leading the people. If they instead protect the institutions, then they aren't leading at all; they're simply following the institutions.

When somebody with the power to fight oppression decides to compromise with the oppressors instead, people who need someone to fight for them despair, while people who are otherwise comfortable assume that the compromise means a fight isn't needed.

But when somebody fights, people desperate for someone to fight for them can find renewed hope, while people who are otherwise comfortable assume that the fight actually being engaged means a fight might be necessary.

Bullies hate fights and run from them, which is why I think we ought to give them fights. Whenever people need a fight, they will follow whatever fighter presents themselves, so if we would like them to follow fighters of good will, I think people of good will ought to become fighters, and if we don't see the leaders we want, we may need to think about becoming those leaders—which may find many expressions, ranging from joining local grassroots organizing programs to joining national programs, from pressuring existing status-quo officials to supporting a primary campaign against any official who doesn't respond to pressure. For some it might even mean agitating and organizing on a national level, or running as a candidate in a primary campaign, until we have a great many leaders where presently we have very few.

Ultimately we have to recognize that the people who won't go where we need to go aren't our leaders, and we need to replace them, as much as we can, wherever we can. This sort of focus of intention worked for Republicans to achieve the horrible destructive hateful things they are on the verge of realizing. It might just help us achieve good and necessary things, too.

So let's say that Democrats need to be more like Republicans. Not in the vile reasons they had for replacing unresponsive leaders , but in the willingness to refuse to accept leaders who weren't leading them, and to become those leaders themselves if the ones they had refused to comply.

OK? That's my postmortem on the election, and what I think Democrats will need to do if they want to actually be our leaders.

When a system is inherently unjust, fight it despite the cost or obstacle.

To win the fight, join the fight with intensity of purpose.

Oppose your opposition, and oppose it without compromise.

That's how a leader becomes a leader.

It also appears (for those interested in winning) to be how you win.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He feels like a stranger.