*** 9/3/25 - Ed Kilgore - Democrats Can’t Afford to Ignore Trump’s Creeping Fascism + MAGA Redefines Who America ‘Belongs To’...................
Buzz Sawyer
Democrats Can’t Afford to Ignore Trump’s Creeping Fascism
One chronic vice in politics is failing to learn lessons from electoral defeats out of stubborn attachment to priors. But it’s also possible to overlearn lessons, too. That may be happening to Democrats right now, as Ron Brownstein observes at CNN:
As President Donald Trump openly contemplates sending military forces into more American cities, the leading congressional Democrats almost invariably describe his actions as an attempt to create a “distraction” from something else — whether that’s the cost of living, the massive Medicaid cuts he signed into law, or the controversy around the Jeffrey Epstein files.
That reflex captures the overwhelming preference of top DC Democrats to frame the 2026 election on familiar partisan grounds, particularly the charge that Trump has failed in his core 2024 promise to bring down the cost of living for average families. It also reflects their hesitation about contesting Trump’s actions relating to immigration and crime.
The preponderance of evidence suggests that Democratic efforts to depict Donald Trump as a “threat to democracy” in the 2024 election did not move that many voters. What persuadable voters did seem to care about was the cost of living, which they perceived as having been vastly more affordable during Trump’s first term. And Trump also benefited from “issue advantages” over Kamala Harris on immigration and crime/law and order.
Unsurprisingly, many Democrats have been allergic to “threat to democracy” messaging ever since the 2024 election and have also shied away from much talk about immigration or crime on the hoary theory that you shouldn’t “play on enemy turf.” While waiting for Trump’s tariffs to produce the inflation that they rightly regard as a potential disaster for the 47th president, they have typically tried to identify a few narrowly material but broadly shared concerns associated with Trump’s agenda and have mostly settled on the Medicaid cuts that helped finance the high-end tax cuts in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Aside from the fear that swing voters are fine with dictatorship if it delivers cheap groceries and gasoline and are bored with hearing about Trump’s own criminal lawlessness, Democratic monomania about “kitchen-table issues” is also reinforced by the ancient prejudice of progressive “populists” in favor of pocketbook issues at the expense of cultural matters or “insider” institutional concerns they tend to dismiss as distractions from the real politics of class struggle. So there’s a double temptation for Democrats to downplay angst over Trump’s power grabs as “distractions” from the arguments that turn public opinion and win elections.
But there’s a big problem with this tunnel vision: Trump no longer represents a prospective “threat to democracy” who might fail to follow through on his thuggish authoritarian rhetoric, just as he often did during his amateurish first term. Depending on how you view his trajectory, he poses at the very least an imminent danger to democracy and is arguably in the process of converting America into an authoritarian regime. Nearly every step he has taken since last November, from building an administration stuffed with MAGA shock troops, to relentless, almost hourly claims of new presidential turf, to unprecedented assaults on private businesses and universities, to the rapid development of a national police force, shows that something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary — formally still a democracy, but under rigid one-party control — is Trump’s goal. So dismissing creeping fascism as a distraction from Medicaid cuts or the Epstein files is rightly infuriating to many Democratic activists. This approach implicitly legitimizes Trump’s lawlessness as relatively unimportant. When rank-and-file Democrats demand their congressional representatives show more “fight” against Trump, they aren’t asking for more frequent or louder protests about the distributional effects of the One Big Beautiful Act. They are alarmed more fundamentally about what’s happening to their country under a proto-fascist regime whose leader treats all opponents as traitors to be jailed, sued, deported, gerrymandered, or physically intimidated.
As Brownstein points out, it’s no accident that the non-congressional Democrats most focused on the fight against Trump’s authoritarianism are becoming rapidly more popular with the rank-and-file:
[J.B.] Pritzker has been unsparing in denouncing Trump as a “wannabe dictator,” as he put in a fiery news conference last week decrying the president’s threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Surrounded by local business, religious and civic leaders, Pritzker struck a conspicuously more urgent tone than the party’s Congressional leadership. “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm,” Pritzker insisted, before describing the prospect of troops on Chicago streets as “unprecedented, unwarranted, illegal, unconstitutional, un-American.”
[Gavin] Newsom has attracted even more attention among Democrats by resisting Trump actions he’s portrayed as a threat to democracy through over three dozen lawsuits; speeches; mocking social media posts; and his ballot initiative to offset the Texas Republican gerrymander.
This isn’t to say that the GOP’s chronic assaults on the material interests of Americans, or its alignment with oligarchs, doesn’t matter, but it’s precisely what history tells us you can expect from any right-wing authoritarian movement in the kind of power Republicans now enjoy. Trump is forever declaring emergencies to justify his endless expansion of his own power. It’s time for Democrats to recognize the real emergency that threatens to make economics almost irrelevant.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/democrats-cant-afford-to-ignore-trumps-creeping-fascism.html
MAGA Redefines Who America ‘Belongs To’
Last year Missouri senator Josh Hawley gave the keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference, that great rhetorical playground for MAGA ideologues. His main theme was that Christian nationalism is the animating idea of America and, for that matter, of Western civilization. That intellectual and moral heritage, he argued heatedly, is under sustained attack by the left, which aims at “deliverance from tradition, from family, from biological sex — and of course, from God,” and also by the libertarian right, with its devotion to “Rand or Mill or Milton Friedman.”
But it’s Hawley’s junior Missouri colleague Eric Schmitt who is lighting up the 2025 NatCon conference. And in his pithy remarks, Schmitt went several steps beyond Hawley in defining a distinctive American conservatism for the MAGA era. It is not about Christianity or any other idea. It’s about America as a blood-and-soil homeland for the pioneers and warriors whose ideals grew from their lived experience of conquest and constant self-improvement and their descendants. Schmitt said:
If you imposed a carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution on Kazakhstan tomorrow, Kazakhstan wouldn’t magically become America. Because Kazakhstan isn’t filled with Americans. It’s filled with Kazakhstanis!
What makes America exceptional isn’t just that we committed ourselves to the principles of self-government. It’s that we, as a people, were actually capable of living them.
In Schmitt’s version of national conservatism, the American people were perpetually betrayed by politicians of both the left and the right until Donald Trump appeared on the scene to wage war on the country’s treasonous elites:
[Trump’s] movement is the revolt of the real American nation. It’s a pitchfork revolution, driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country. …
They were the Americans whose factories were gutted in the name of “free trade,” whose sons were sent to die in wars that served no American interest, whose neighborhoods were transformed beyond recognition by immigration. …
And yet, in spite of it all, they stubbornly refused to forget who they were. They were, as Barack Obama sneered, the “bitter clingers” — who still held to their guns, their religion, and their memory of a country that once belonged to them.
These Americans had come to realize that their true adversary did not live in the faraway sands of some foreign nation but in the halls of their own government.
Schmitt didn’t come right out and say that literal, physical liquidation of the “true adversary” is in order. But lurking beneath his stark rhetoric was the contention that constitutional limits on Trump’s powers or undue deference to abstractions like “liberty” may put the cart before the horse. The Founding Fathers’ ideas serve the people who built the nation (who were white Europeans). Schmitt said:
The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls — all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.”
They believed they were forging a nation — a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us.
America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.
If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true.
America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real — unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind.
It’s telling that the senator went on to praise his own immigrant ancestors from Germany and gave a shout-out to J.D. Vance’s Scotch Irish forebears, even as he demonized more recent immigrants as agents of national disintegration.
The nod to Vance was entirely appropriate, since the veep is another blood-and-soil nationalist who has most conspicuously (e.g., in his 2024 vice-presidential acceptance speech) popularized the idea that America is not an idea but a homeland for a particular people, or volk, to apply the obvious if inflammatory term from 20th-century nationalism. In a recent address at the MAGA flagship Claremont Institute, Vance added a twist to the familiar Trumpian attacks on immigrants and the “communist” elites who welcome them while criticizing New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani:
The person who wishes to lead our largest city had, according to media reports, never once publicly mentioned America’s Independence Day in earnest. But when he did so this year, this is what he said:
“America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.”
There is no gratitude here. No sense of owing something to this land and the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation in the world.
Treating America as an ongoing unfinished ideal, you see, is an insult to the people whose blood conquered the soil. So it’s no wonder the Trump administration wants to wipe out any recognition of past American misdeeds, most particularly the murder and dispossession of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, as if we owe everything to those who killed and owned enslaved people and should not tolerate any criticism from “interlopers” like Mamdani or the people who vote for him. As Schmitt said at NatCon: “The people who built our country were not villains. They were heroes. We can no longer apologize for who we are.” And apparently, we need no longer avoid their sins, or admit that’s what they are.
As my colleague Sarah Jones noted in writing about Vance’s Claremont speech, the current MAGA preoccupation with whitewashing history is as much about the immediate future it is building as about the past:
No one carves cities out of the forest now, and manufacturing jobs are not returning under Vance and his boss, either, but neither fact matters to the vice-president or his allies. People need to fill the jobs our expanding police state might create. Manifest Destiny was less a specific policy than a justification for a violent national expansion that sought new territory as it enforced a social, economic, and racial hierarchy. Even now, the world Vance wants to build cannot exist without conformity and control.
The new MAGA frontier is on city streets where National Guard units patrol and masked ICE agents prowl. And there will be no quarter — or Christian mercy — for those who stand in the way of “American greatness” like Native Americans did. The warnings are now coming fast and strong.