Standoff, by Washington insider Bill Schneider, is an amalgam of political factoids and deeply conventional wisdom about Democrats and Republicans. Some of it is annoying, none of it is surprising and the author is prone to some rather dubious pronouncements.
It’s Time to Fight Dirty, by political scientist David Faris, is the polar opposite: a bracing polemic with brutally accurate judgments, offering a series of dramatic steps the author thinks are necessary to right the American ship of state, lest it follows the Titanic to the bottom of the sea.
Two passages give a good idea of the sharply different approaches. Schneider, a journalist, academic and thinktanker, writes that the “basic difference” between the two major parties is: “Republicans believe that economic growth is sufficient. If the economy is growing, people can solve their own problems. Government should just get out of the way. Democrats believe economic growth is necessary but not sufficient. Government has to provide a safety net.”
Compare that to Faris: Donald Trump “is merely a symptom of the long march into the ideological wilderness of the party he captured, which has proven … to be almost utterly devoid of public spirit and respect for democratic traditions … The real danger is that the GOP will succeed in tearing down American democracy and building, in its place, a hybrid regime that looks like a democracy but in fact is nothing more than a vehicle for wealthy, white Americans to enrich themselves at our expense while subjecting the rest of us to a grinding nightmare of insecurity, poverty, climate change, and discrimination”.
Like many of the contributors to Can It Happen Here? another wise book about the current American emergency, Faris believes our democracy is in “mortal peril, and the elections of 2018 and 2020 may “afford Democrats … one final chance to prevent our society from careening off the highway and into a gulley. If that sounds apocalyptic, that’s because the situation facing this country is indeed an end-of-the-world scenario, a crisis just as grave as that faced by our political elites prior to the Civil War itself”.
Faris says that the Democrats must “stop bringing pistols to the nuclear war”. In the short term, they must imitate Mitch McConnell’s exact strategy, when he boasted his only goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president.
“Democrats must be prepared to mimic their tormentors by intentionally destroying the Trump administration … They must ruthlessly ape their Republican tormentors by obstructing, delaying and deligitimizing President Trump and the Republicans until the day [the Democrats] take office … They must resist the temptation to cut deals with the GOP and to normalize his Vichy Republican enablers.”
If the Democrats do manage to recapture the Congress and the presidency in 2020, Faris has extremely radical ideas about what they must do to modernize American democracy.
To redress the absurd political advantage the constitution gives to smaller states by giving every state two senators (even though California has 67 times as many voters as Wyoming), the Democrats must give statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, “break up the blue behemoth” of California “into seven or more states”, expand the House of Representatives, replace winner-take-all elections for the House with ranked-choice voting, enlarge the supreme court (which can be accomplished by a simple act of Congress, although Franklin Roosevelt discovered that wasn’t quite so simple) and pass a new Modern Voting Rights Act, which would mandate automatic voter registration, relief from punitive felony voting laws, the elimination of racist ID requirements and a national election day holiday.
Faris points out that the Republicans are “the only major political party in the entire democratic world that advocates policies that make it harder for citizens to vote, the only conservative party that marries an aggressive ethnonationalist fervor to a lurid vision of stripping the modern state down to its preindustrial shell.”
Another example Faris gives of good politics which is also good policy: once in power the Democrats should immediately pursue a massive amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants.
“Not only would this rectify” a “terrible injustice”, it would also “add millions of Democratic-leaning voters” to swing states “like Texas, Arizona, and Florida. Republicans have always feared that immigration would change the character of American society. Democrats should reward them with their very worst nightmare.”
“Under normal circumstances,” Faris writes, “altering the political system, suddenly” and in myriad ways “would be a dreadful idea. But normal circumstances assume that a functioning democracy is in place”. It isn’t any more.
As Jane Mayer and many others have documented, most of the money, energy and dirty fighting in American politics has come from the right since the end of the 1960s. One thing that Schneider gets right is that “a conservative backlash” has “defied the New America” and largely defined American politics “for the last 50 years”.
Faris is arguing that unless the progressive majority finally learns to emulate the energy and the fighting style of the Republicans, American democracy could disappear altogether within our own lifetimes. Every one who wants to avoid that catastrophe must read his book.
