Beutlerian Jihad

Just a thought.

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Brian Beutler, a veteran of Talking Points Memo and The New Republic, now mainly active as a Substacker, is one of the best at doing this one thing I can’t stand, which he was up to again over the weekend: getting himself so worked up over Democratic politicians’ failure to thwart the far right in its evil plans that he ends up assigning them all the blame, in a kind of vicious Murc’s Law feedback loop—since only Democrats have agency, they are the effective actors when the right succeeds: they must be the ones responsible for the way our country is turning rapidly into a police state, they literally made it happen, through their fecklessness and timidity and lack of leadership. While Miller and Vought are diligently constructing fascism, Beutler is so busy complaining about Schumer and Jeffries that he hardly has time to talk about that.

Which isn’t to say he doesn’t have a point about Schumer and Jeffries, or whoever he’s mad at at a given moment. What I want to say, rather, is that it isn’t a good approach to doing something about it; it’s a counsel of despair, frankly, which precludes the reader from trying.

This was especially evident in this particular post, where he’s responding, precisely, to readers asking “What can we do?”

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...the answer is unsatisfying, because it’s the same one you’ll get everywhere: Do what JB Pritzker says. Protest peacefully, record abuses on your phone, share the videos widely. Join organized marches—if you’re a U.S. citizen, the incremental risk of protesting is minimal. You’re likelier to be hit by a falling object or trampled to death at a concert than you are to be targeted for carrying a sign, or being an Indivisible volunteer or anything else. If you’re able, and if it comes to it, engage in genuine civil disobedience, though there’s more danger there: a greater risk of arrest, assault, political harassment.

But my sense is that what costs people like us sleep at night isn’t that we aren’t doing enough. It’s that we’ve lost confidence in the people who are in positions to do more. It’s become fashionable to repeat cliches like “nobody is coming to save us,” and “we’re going to have to save each other.” We surely do need stamina and self-sufficiency, but mantras like these let people in power—people who sought power, and people who have power by dint of wealth—off the hook too easily. They should know what we expect of them.

That last sentence sounds like a pretty good suggestion, except it turns out to be a suggestion to tell the politicians not what we want them to do, but who we want them to be: Imagining himself in the position of a future historian after decades of post-constitutional decay followed by a restored republic, Beutler wonders not whether the denizens of the past could have saved themselves, but how he would go about judging them, like the historian as Dante, assigning them to their various circles in Hell or Purgatory or Heaven; how he’d

assess the actions of the people who had the most power to slow or stop the authoritarian takeover. People like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and (before Jeffries) Nancy Pelosi. People like Pritzker and Gavin Newsom, but also people like Joe Biden and Merrick Garland and Gretchen Whitmer and John Fetterman and Tim Cook and Bill Gates and on and on.

Who would come out of that analysis looking good, and who would come out looking bad? Who would emerge as an unheralded prophet, and who would be remembered as the most Chamberlainesque appeaser?

I mean, why not imagine a history where the disaster is forestalled, and speculate on how it was done? Where the German Communists reject Stalin’s orders, you know, and form an electoral alliance with the Socialists? Or whatever it takes in a particular case? Instead of whining about how octogenarian Nancy Pelosi seems to have taken a dim view of progress in recent years, let’s remember how she counted the votes on behalf of legislation that will endure when she was a sprig in her 70s.

More broadly, it seems to me that dismissing “Nobody is coming to save us” as a fashionable cliché is showing a crucial misunderstanding of representative democracy and how it works. The point of saying it is that you can’t expect your legislators, in particular, the people who come to power through the inevitable compromise and trimming of the electoral process to be paragons of imagination and bravery, because that’s mostly not what gets you elected. They need to be encouraged to save us; they need to be shown what they have to do and assured that they can get away with it. Our responsibility as citizens has to extend beyond election day to helping them to figure out what to do next, and not, by the way, by yelling at them for the disappointment they’ve brought us; but by showing a little faith in their willingness to help and their native intelligence.

Which might not have worked with Joe Manchin, you know, because of the intelligence thing, but might with the normally disappointing Ritchie Torres, who’s come out as a real combatant in the ongoing shutdown in the last couple of weeks:

Look, my constituents want the Democratic Party to fight. Like, those of us who are Democrats have a simple choice. We can either stand by passively and allow Donald Trump to gut our democracy, to gut our health care, or we can fight. And we’ve chosen to fight for the health care of the American people. And the majority of Americans want to see an agreement that both reopens the government but also preserves health care - affordable health care for tens of millions of Americans.

Just for example. Note how he doesn’t dismiss the democracy issue in favor of the kitchen table issue in there, the way you might have expected his kind of “moderate” to do, he incorporates the democracy issue into the argument, which is pretty good. Where Beutler complains about politicians who want to

[i]gnore everyone demanding more fight in the here and now—they’re liable to push you into a “trap” that will “increase the salience” of crime and immigration. Talk about health care instead.

Torres has found the stuff to use fighting words as he’s talking about health care, and that’s an improvement. Maybe somebody talked to him.

You know what else people are talking to their congressmembers about is immigration, as videos of ICE abuses circulate, and a lot of simple old rural white folk are starting to get upset with the mistreatment of people they like from personal experience. That’s an issue more directly keyed to the questions of constitutionalism, because of the flagrant disregard of human and constitutional rights. It will take Congress a lot longer to get around to it, probably, given the current Republican majorities, but we can start preparing them now.

The main thing is, fixating on Real Leaders too often lands us with the ones who aren’t interested in doing what we want them to do; democracy promotes the Profiles in Discourage, so to speak. And that’s a good thing, in a sense. If nobody’s coming to save us, that’s democracy: it’s our job to make them.