Democrats Need to Be More Negative

A positive program isn’t enough

One common left criticism of Democrats over the last decade is that they have defined themselves solely in opposition to Trump and have no real program of their own. “Orange man bad,” the argument goes, is not inspirational or aspirational. Rather than denouncing Trump, Democrats need to offer positive programs for change: medicare for all, student loan relief, higher minimum wage, free child care, and on and on through the long left policy wishlist.

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I too would like to see medicare for all, a higher minimum wage, a jobs guarantee, UBI, an end to at will employment, and more. But I think it’s a mistake to think that these, on their own, can defeat fascism. Fascism is not a response to economic anxiety, and simply addressing economic anxiety is not going to sway voters from fascism.

We know this is true from hard—though often erased—experience. Though both centrists and leftists are loathe to admit as much, Democrats under Joe Biden largely followed the left’s proscription for fighting fascism.

Biden avoided targeting, or often even speaking, about Trump directly. He chose an attorney general he knew would be leery of prosecuting Trump and left most of the investigation of January 6 to Congress—and especially to the Republicans on the January 6 committee. Biden himself focused on delivering progressive policy gains—trying to raise the minimum wage, fighting for clean energy, forgiving student loans, lowering unemployment, empowering the labor movement, and (especially) passing massive stimulus measures. Republicans blocked some of these but by no means all, and Biden was hopeful that delivering real gains for many Americans would undercut Trump’s fascist appeal and prevent him from seizing power again.

But as we know, that was a failure. Trump won despite the most progressive economic agenda in 50 years, or possibly ever. A positive economic program is good in itself, because it helps people and helping people is an important goal of government. But fighting fascism through a positive economic program didn’t work.

Maybe we actually need to oppose fascism

Progressives generally respond to this argument by insisting that if only Biden had gone further—passing M4A, passing UBI, etc.—he would have won. But again, Biden had the most progressive economic program in decades. If passing real progressive economic gains doesn’t lead to an appetite for more, but instead leads to fascism, then progressive economic gains are probably doomed. You’re never going to be able to pass everything all at once, and if major positive change leads to backlash…well, saying over and over, “we need to do more” when more leads to nothing but backlash doesn’t seem likely to be a realistic path forward.

There is another approach though. Rather than insisting that we can defeat fascism by ignoring fascism and concentrating on economic progress, maybe we need to fight fascism by…actually fighting fascism.

What would that look like? As I’ve discussed in the past, it would mean prosecuting Trump and everyone around him vigorously and immediately. People who have committed illegal acts at Trump’s behest, companies that have bribed Trump, universities which have embraced racism at Trump’s order—they all need to be investigated, and those responsible forced from positions of authority, prosecuted and ideally bankrupted.

But accountability in itself isn’t sufficient either. Fascists, as we’ve seen, are laser-focused on seizing control of and dominating political and civil society. They use the power of the state to attack rival institutions—to silence media critics, to crush dissent in universities, to marginalize and terrorize groups like Black people, LGBT people, and immigrants who they see as enemies.

Antifascists should not build concentration camps to torture and murder their enemies as fascists do. But we could do much more to target and break fascist power.

For example, Democrats could vigorously investigate right wing churches which endorse Republican candidates and revoke their tax exempt status. They could do the same thing for right wing universities. They could finally admit that the charter school movement is a dagger aimed at the heart of public education and work to pass legislation making charters illegal. They could investigate right wing media monopolies and destroy them. They could actually try to use Musk’s violation of consent decrees at twitter to destroy the company, rather than just shrugging. They could use the vast resources of the federal government to combat and crush right wing extremist networks, even when—or rather especially when—those networks overlap with the Republican party.

In short, Democrats could treat fascism like a deadly threat to the Constitution and democracy, and could use all the resources available to break the power of fascism and the power of the Republican party, which are the same thing.

More meanness

Democrats—and even some on the left—are very reluctant to take steps like this. There are a range of reasons for that. Open, partisan attacks on the Republican party seem divisive, ugly, unfair. More, as I’ve discussed here, Democrats for structural reasons and ideological reasons tend to center their appeals on rural white voters, who have disproportionate voting power and who are seen as the core heartland soul of America. Crushing right wing churches seems, from this perspective, like an assault on Americanness. Why not avoid that kind of bad optics and bad feeling, and just focus on raising taxes on the wealthy, which is wildly popular with everyone?

The argument seems persuasive. But again, as we’ve learned to our sorrow, just passing good policy is not enough to defeat an entrenched fascist party with a massive infrastructure of fascist think tanks, churches, corporations, education, and media. Civil society cannot function in a democracy in the face of well-funded, powerful institutions dedicated to its destruction. And voters simply are not equipped to fight fascism without a robust civil society.

Democrats (and the left also) want to focus on improving people’s lives in concrete ways; they want to find policies which appeal to all and then ride those policies to victory. But progressive policy without vigorous antifascism is doomed, because when fascists build power they destroy not just progressive policy, but democratic institutions which can translate the will of the people into support for things that will help the people. It’s nice to say “when they go low, we go high”, but the truth is unfortunately that if fascists stick a bayonet in your stomach, you’re not going anywhere. You’re just going to bleed out. Which is, as you may have noticed, what is happening to our democracy.

Fighting fascists is messy; it’s ugly; it may even require some moral compromises. But the alternative is…well, what we have now. We need to pass policies which improve people’s lives. But passing those policies is impossible, and ultimately useless, if we allow fascists to build power unimpeded. Both the left and the Democrats need to understand that destroying the fascist Republican party is our only path to progress and democracy at this point. MAGA needs to be crushed and the earth salted where it stood. We need our leaders to be partisan; we need them to be ruthless; we need them to be vindictive. I wish the alternative to that was a positive program of economic redistribution, but it is not. The alternative, as we have seen in the last decade, as we saw following Reconstruction, as we have seen often in the history of this country, is fascism.