The Democratic center that is more in touch with American values, history, traditions and constitutional law.
Last week, the United States celebrated its 246 birthday amid the usual flag-waving enthusiasm. But dire national divisions and the unambiguous threat to democracy posed by an increasingly extremist Republican right, and to liberty posed by the equally extreme Supreme Court, raise difficult and urgent questions.Yet it’s a golden opportunity for the Democrats to redefine the terms of the American debate, if they answer them properly.
What do “freedom” and “liberty” really mean? And why have mainstream Democrats, including the Joe Biden administration, not fought harder over these crucial national tropes and symbols that are often absurdly monopolized by right-wing extremists who are typically the antithesis of patriotism?
The anti-Constitution and anti-democracy mob that attacked Congress on January 6, brutally assaulting police with flagpoles still bearing the US and pro-law enforcement banners, is the ultimate example of this political and cultural dissonance. Right-wingers who joined, supported, or tolerated the insurrection invariably call themselves “patriots”, even as they violently attack the country’s foundational system.
Their leader, former president Donald Trump, is a master of phony nationalistic virtue-signaling. At a notorious annual right-wing jamboree of anti-American lunacy, Mr Trump famously hugged and kissed the US flag, grabbing it as if it belonged to him –- as if it were one of the “beautiful” women he told Access Hollywood, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet… I don’t even wait….Grab them by the pussy.”
Yet he habitually sided with US adversaries, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggested his innumerable vicious assassinations were not an issue because “our country does plenty of killing also,” and routinely savaged core institution such as the military, FBI and intelligence services.
Nonetheless he succeeded in establishing himself as a “nationalist” with his “America First” slogan (that has a long and sordid pro-fascist history). Similarly, the most oppressive and exploitative right-wing extremists in Congress unite in a “Freedom Caucus.”
Democrats rarely play this patriotism-signaling game, but it’s a big mistake. Their extreme left-wing is, at best, uncomfortable with patriotic sentiments and symbols due to their, often reasonable, critique of US racial history and realities, and also their utterly deranged slogans like “defund the police.” Republicans have used them to paint all Democrats as anti-American nuts.
Yet the mainstream Democratic Party, led by Mr Biden, remains centrist and sincerely patriotic. Though they’ve been far more supportive in recent years than Republicans of not just the Constitution but also the FBI, CIA, veterans and often the military itself, Democrats have allowed themselves to be perceived as insufficiently patriotic.
This nationalistic virtual-signaling deficit is largely their own fault. Although the Trump-inflected Republican Party generally speaks exclusively to and for non-urban, white and Christian Americans, and pushes an exceptionally divisive agenda, they nonetheless speak to Americans as a national identity group. In their speeches, Democrats often sound like they are going down a rhetorical checklist of key constituencies instead of promoting a broadly unifying national narrative, although exactly that message of patriotic unity delivered eight years in the White House for Barack Obama.
The January 6 hearings are an ideal starting point for Democrats to contrast their own support for democracy versus the attack on constitutional order, and therefore the country, orchestrated by Mr Trump, who remains an unrivaled Republican leader. Even if he’s fading as I recently argued he clearly is following Cassidy Hutchinson’s devastating testimony at the House Committee hearing, most of his potential successors are striving to echo and emulate him, while his rare and isolated patriotic Republican opponents like Representative Liz Cheney are being purged.
Despite having significant perfectly reasonable reservations about some of its provisions, especially those that form the bedrock for a developing pattern of anti-democracy minority rule in the US, most Democrats uphold the Constitution that US officials vow “to support and defend,” while all but a handful of Republicans are hostile or, at best, indifferent. Democrats must stress that the Constitution IS the Republic, and that both are clearly founded on the principle, only fully realized in 1964, of majority rule..
Between Mr Trump’s failed coup and near-universal Republican support or acquiescence for his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen – and recent highly unpopular, supremely-unrepresentative Court decisions that strip Americans of long-established individual rights based on minority religious dogma in the face of law, history and the principle of separation of church and state – Democrats a golden opportunity to refashion themselves as the party of freedom and genuine patriotism.
They must force the questions of what freedom and liberty mean in the contemporary United States.
When the Court eliminated the constitutional protection of reproductive choice, it sentenced women in many states to the extreme servitude of forced pregnancy and delivery.
Democrats have traditionally supported regulation, especially regarding commercial activities or land-use, that sometimes goes too far, becomes absurd or is used to advantage certain interests. But now they should launch their own campaign against administrative overreach, especially since Republicans, above all in Florida, are now using regulatory authority to punish corporations uncooperative with their extremist policies.
Crucially, there’s no Democratic equivalent to the Republican rush to use state power to force women to bear children against their will, often even with no exceptions for rape or incest. Mr Biden emotionally cited a 10-year-old rape victim who had to leave Ohio to avoid giving birth to her tormentor’s child. Innumerable tragedies, avoidable deaths, and nightmarish, Kafkaesque prosecutions are inevitable.
Yet the same far-right Court majority insists Americans have a brand-new, yet somehow inviolable, right to wield military weapons of incredible destructive power in most public spaces. States, therefore, are perfectly entitled to use the power of government to force raped little girls to endure a completed pregnancy and deliver a baby into who knows what reality, which the court does not address. But they are not entitled to prevent American men, or others, to brandish instruments of utter mayhem, designed only for the killing and devastation of human bodies, in most public places, although courts, interestingly, are specifically exempted.
The achievement of such cherished goals ought to destroy the right’s ability to pretend to champion freedom as most Americans define it.
Where is the real liberty balance between a supposed right to wield the most terrifying instruments of human destruction in public versus the peaceful, normal, majority’s right not to be menaced, as they go about their daily business with their families, by random strangers flaunting machines designed exclusively to kill people with extreme brutality and almost unimaginable speed?
What’s the calculation between the effectively entirely religious, and distinct minority dogma, that insists on the full legal personhood of the most rudimentary embryo versus a woman’s autonomy over her own body in the early stages of pregnancy?
Democrats shouldn’t be reduced to hugging and kissing flags. But they must prioritize insisting they are the true patriots, supportive of core national institutions and the constitutional and democratic system and therefore far more reliable guardians of real liberty and actual freedom.
These include the freedom not to be forced to live in a society insanely characterized by daily massacres and the unrestricted public flaunting of the apparatuses of masculine, or to be compelled to give birth because of a minority-held, untestable, irrational and fundamentalist insistence that every conception, possibly even in a test tube, represents the will of God, and that the state should use its authority to intervene on behalf of the almighty but oddly powerless divinity in these godawful cases.
Recognizing few limits, the Court’s right-wing theocrats will next target contraception access, marriage equality and other gay-rights, and much more. Everything based on the assertion of a constitutional right to privacy is now up for elimination, even though privacy is only one of scores of establish rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and are not being overthrown by the Christian extremist majority. Democrats must remind Americans that government exists to protect them from, not force them to obey, religious doctrines they, and the vast majority of of their fellow citizens, don’t share.
The right can drone on about taxation and overregulation. But it has completely lost its credibility on fundamental freedom. And the dominant Trump-wing of the Republican Party isn’t just unpatriotic. It’s downright anti-American.
Democrats can and must redefine themselves as the party of patriotism, liberty, and the right of Americans to live their lives as they see fit. But they must start speaking to Americans as a unified nation with a shared identity and common interests that, unfortunately, the Democrats now defend almost entirely alone.