The new year is a time for the usual pieces about how awful the old year was. I’ve been guilty of this end-of-year-Eeyore stuff myself from time to time, and I won’t do it again this year.
That doesn’t mean we’re not in for a slog in 2022. COVID-19 crashed the New Year’s Eve party in 2019 as a murderous uninvited guest, and it’s still here. Worse, we’ve reached the first anniversary of the attack on the Capitol by reality-starved insurrectionists, and not only have the ringleaders so far escaped accountability, but the whole violent fandango has become more than acceptable to the kooky fringes of the Republican Party—which is to say, the Republican Party.
Democracy is in danger and we have about a year to save it. What do we do?
We could, I suppose, keep bickering about policies and legislation. This would be reassuring and make us feel normal, as if we had survived our authoritarian moment. It would also be pointless, because if Americans elect a Republican House—and maybe even return the Senate to the GOP—the stage will be set for the accelerated collapse of American democracy. (I will write another time, soon, about what I think that would look like.)
Instead, I propose an active effort here for people of all political persuasions—liberal, conservative, libertarian, New Agers, Old Believers, you name it—to seek each other out and form a coalition.
And not just a political coalition. The past decade, and especially the past five years, has broken apart friendships and in some cases families. So maybe it’s time to make new friends, as intolerable as we might otherwise find each other.
Of course, voting en bloc for the Democrats is the most important thing we can do together in the short term. But temporary and purely utilitarian coalitions don’t usually last very long. The Spartans and the Athenians held off the Persians, and then tore each other to pieces and ended the reign of the Hellenic world forever. It took five tries at a coalition before the major powers of Europe could get their act together long enough to beat Napoleon. The East-West alliance crushed Hitler and then proceeded directly to a mutual nuclear stranglehold during the Cold War.
Still, even temporary coalitions need to secure the objective that allows them to survive and fight another day. Whatever else happened later, the Persians retreated, Napoleon was exiled, and Hitler ate a bullet.
So we don’t have to get married, but we’re going to need something resilient enough to weather this year and then the subsequent attacks that are sure to come if Trump and his various minions are kept from the levers of power this time.
I have more specific advice for people of both the right and the left, but first, a few general rules for this group. (We should also pick a name.)
Please note here I am addressing people of goodwill and rational mind. This is not a recommendation to go out and convert Trumpers (or, for that matter, far-left anarchists). Those people are lost and they’re not coming back. I admire the efforts of folks like former Representative Joe Walsh to engage today’s Republicans, but I think that’s a waste of time and energy.
Instead, the objective should be to provide a common framework for people who otherwise can’t get along with each other at all, in order to make sure that as many of us as possible show up and vote, and perhaps bring along people who have so far refused—understandably—to join in any of the tribal-camp chants.
The most important principle in this coalition is that you must be committed to the rule of the law and to our constitutional democracy.
I’m about to be a former federal employee, and it is still one of the proudest moments of my life when I was sworn in over 30 years ago. I raised my right hand, and affirmed that I would “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and that I would bear “true faith and allegiance to the same,” so help me God.
Need some daily inspiration? Print out that oath of service and paste it above your mirror or your desk for the coming year.
This is more than lip service. This is a vow that you would choose the continued existence of our Constitution over any other political priority that might be dear to you. It means that as much as you think some of our institutions are screwed up, you will respect them even while you work for change. It means you will go to the barricades for the basic rights of the worst human being you’ve ever met if those rights are threatened. It means you grit your teeth while defending the right to burn flags or engage in racist hate speech. It means you will respect the limits of political victories and, yes, accept the necessity of political losses.
If you can’t do any of that, I thank you for your attention, but our discussion is at an end. Oddjob will see you out.
Without this commitment, nothing else matters. Without the Constitution, there is no advocacy and argument and negotiation under the aegis of law and equality; there is only an eternal struggle for the upper hand and the constant attempt to use temporary advantages to exterminate the rights of opponents.
If we save the Constitution, we can argue like werewolves and vampires later over policy while remaining, in some civic sense, friends. And together we can shun those who show contempt for the Constitution, like John Eastman and Mark Meadows and Peter Navarro and the rest of Trump’s goons.
Another requirement here is that you must be an adult in age and in spirit. You may not whine. You may not bellyache about unfairness. You may not wishcast about how great things would be if only the Founders hadn’t included that stupid Electoral College or the Second Amendment—or the Fourth, Fifth, Eight, Tenth, or any other. (You may excoriate that nitwittery about Prohibition at will.)
As part of this adult citizenship, you must make some modest effort to be sociable. You cannot be a complete jerk. (You may be a partial jerk from time to time. I insist on this so that I do not end up excluding myself from my own coalition.) We all have to row in the same direction. Arguing about who’s to blame and who could have done better—I have done this—is like being at the Battle of the Bulge and arguing about whether FDR was right to ally with the Soviets while treetops are exploding over your head. We’ll sort that out later; right now, Montgomery and Zhukov and Patton are all on the same side, so dig that trench.
I have a few comments here for each political tribe.
To Liberals: The Struggle Is Real
Some of you will not want to hear about working with your new coalition partners, who gloated while handing you some of your most painful defeats over the years. And you’re right that our worst elements are, in fact, the kooks and racists you thought they were. You justifiably hold us responsible for a lot of the damage we all now must cooperate to undo. So please accept this in the thoughtful way I intend it:
Get over it.
If you truly believe—as I do—that we are facing an existential crisis of constitutional government, then act like it. The danger is real. Anything that detracts from that struggle has to wait. Yes, anything. Sure, some of your new partners were pretty nasty opponents. But you, often turning a blind eye to some of the worst parts of your own movement, were hardly blameless. We can all fight about that one day.
But today is not that day.
Today is the day you learn to do something that does not come naturally to you, especially the progressives among you: Cooperate with people you don’t like and accept that you’re not always going to get your way. And get past thinking that voting for Democrats puts us in “your house” or on “your ship.” Coalitions do not belong to you. That’s why they’re “coalitions.”
On this, your conservative allies from the now-deceased sane wing of the GOP can actually teach you a few things. We’re generally better than you at compartmentalizing our emotions about our candidates. Republicans who hated John McCain and Mitt Romney and both George Bushes pulled that lever. We know a lot about the long game, and especially about investing in state and local elections, the true Achilles’ heel of the Democratic Party.
Also, we show up. That’s worth a lot.
Listen to your new allies about how to play hardball. You used to know how to do this. The old Democrats back in the day were street fighters, but that’s not you these days. You need to be a bit more Bud White than Ed Exley, and we can help you do that.
Finally, try to internalize that while you may be the current majority party, your progressive wing is a definite minority. Many of your new shipmates from the Republican center are a lot more plugged in to the ordinary voter than Democratic Twitter or the college-student wing of your party is; in many places, we know the terrain better than you do and can help you with things like messaging.
To Conservatives: Repent and Join
Listen, we blew it. We didn’t want to believe how many of our comrades were abject cowards, despicable opportunists, or odious, would-be gauleiters. That’s on us. We were in denial and convinced ourselves that decent people would always be in charge. Plenty of prominent Republicans have shown repentance for this, and as the self-declared champions of personal responsibility, we should embrace that contrition.
We also failed to count heads, to know that we were outnumbered. And so we lost. It stings when Democrats tell us this, but they’re not wrong. It does little good to note that Hillary Clinton also lost; that was inevitable, but it was our job to confront the Trumpist cancer in the party in 2016 and we failed.
And so for the sake of the country, we’ve got to support the Democrats as our common vehicle for electoral battle. But yes, I get it. Liberals are infuriating. They are emotional and often as intolerant as the people they claim to hate.
Fine. So stipulated. As I just said to them: Get over it.
You’re just going to have to accept that they talk—and talk and talk and talk—about a lot of policies that you will absolutely hate and would not want implemented. But we lost the right to govern, and they’ve earned it. And they’re going to pass some things you don’t like. The chances of policies you want? Near to zero. That’s how it’s going to be.
Also, it’s not heresy to admit that Democrats have some good ideas. They’ve always had a fair number of policies that both make sense and are popular with voters, even if they’re bad at selling them.
More to the point, it’s time to get past the hangover paranoia that afflicts too many former GOPers. It is dishonest of you to say that you can’t cooperate in this coalition because of a future President AOC and Secretary of State Ilhan Omar. The danger is here and now, not in your dystopian fantasies about 2028. I mean, come on. You can’t honestly complain about how the Democrats have plans for a giant socialist takeover when their party, to use an old Soviet expression, is about as organized as a brothel on fire during an earthquake. They’re Democrats.
And Joe Biden is the decent man and political centrist many of you said that you could vote for back in 2016. (And don’t deny it, because I heard it from you with my own ears.) Remember that?
In the end, this is about stopping our former party so that it cannot shred the Constitution. If you can’t do that, you’re not much better than the Trumpers we walked away from.
Finally, if you’re trying to motivate your otherwise noncommittal neighbors to vote, be the good example of a conservative who wants to conserve something: “I don’t agree with a lot of these policies, but I am letting go of that for now and I am voting to defend the Constitution. This is the one thing I expect from the Democratic Party.” Leave it there.
You’d be surprised how many people will agree with you on that.
To Everyone: “This is Kang. Cease hostilities. Disarm.”
As one of my Twitter followers noted recently, one of the better episodes of the old Star Trek original series has a good lesson for us to carry into the new year. The Enterprise encounters an evil entity in space that sustains itself on emotions of hatred and anger. The entity takes over the ship and traps the crew with a group of its Klingon enemies, keeping them alive but forcing them to fight in hand-to-hand combat so that it can feed off of them forever. In the end, the Enterprise officers and the Klingons realize that an effort to create goodwill and camaraderie is the only way to drive the entity from the ship.
The Klingon commander Kang and Captain Jim Kirk order all fighting to stop, and engage in some laughter and backslapping to win the day. “We need no urging to hate humans,” Kang tells the entity. “But for the present, only a fool fights in a burning house.”
Words to live by, even from a filthy Klingon. The house, our common home, is on fire. Let’s not be fools about this.