Open Thread

This in today from Brian Beutler:

The New Radicals
Democrats need to be the uncompromising ones now.
Brian Beutler
Sep 30

Over the past year and a half I’ve warned promiscuously about the dangers of “funding Donald Trump’s government.” I’ve taken to referring to bipartisan spending bills, which have passed with Democrats casting decisive votes, as “enabling” legislation.

This language is provocative. It is meant to be provocative, in part because I want Democrats to think about their place in history right now. If democracy collapses or America becomes a pariah state, Republicans will be to blame, but people will ask, what did the rest of the society do to try and stop them?

But I also mean every word of it. I use all of that language advisedly. I understand that playing constitutional hardball can cause collateral damage. The Democratic Party has been pathologically averse to conflict with Republicans throughout the Trump era. But when, for instance, they tapped out of a government shutdown fight that they were winning, fear and neurosis weren’t the only factors. They were genuinely upset on behalf of federal workers, who were going without pay. They are bleeding-heart liberals in the earnest sense of the term. It’s Republicans who don’t give a shit about those people, which is why, until Trump came along, it was always Republicans who’d refuse to fund the government under Democratic presidents, and it was always Democrats inveighing against their tactics.

But Republicans weren’t just shutting down the government because they’re callous and sadistic (though they are both, and increasingly so). It was because they’d been radicalized against the government they were expected to fund.

I think the basis of their radicalization was completely insane. All radicalisms aren’t created equal. The Republican Party’s fanaticism makes it unique in the democratic world, even among far-right parties. But I do think it was genuine.

This piece is about two things: First, it’s about why constitutional hardball makes sense from the perspective of radicals. Second, a decade into the this era of rising Republican fascism and the corruption of the American state, it’s about why it’s time for the worm to turn—for Democrats to become the more radical of the two parties. And, in their case, for good reasons.

We wouldn’t be where we are if Republicans hadn’t radicalized against American democracy before Donald Trump took over their party.

This story begins over 90 years ago, with the enactment of New Deal. An alliance of wealthy interests and bigoted, paranoid right-wing fanatics, hated how Franklin Roosevelt had transformed the country. Together, from the jump, they plotted its destruction.

But in part because its earliest incarnations excluded black citizens, the new social compact was broadly popular. The nascent “conservative movement” was badly outnumbered.

As more and more kinds of people began benefiting from the welfare state, though, opposition to it grew and intensified. Whole political philosophies were developed or coopted to backstop and brand what was at bottom raw revanchism. This was not “conservatism” as most people used the term, and thus it remained a fringe formation for decades. But it began to metastasize.

Barry Goldwater helped consolidate it within the Republican Party. At first, it was just one faction. A minority partner. But over time its ranks swelled. In 1994, it became the GOP’s largest faction, and the whole party began behaving in more radical ways—mostly toward the end of undoing the New Deal. The modern era of lengthy government shutdowns and routine legislative hostage taking begins with Newt Gingrich. Under him, Republicans institutionalized “starve the beast”—the party’s strategic, lockstep opposition to tax increases—in order to create the fiscal pressure required to crush Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Now, again, this is a crazy basis for reactionary politics. But if you are a prelapsarian weirdo who thinks American values were only truly and constitutionally expressed when the country was economically and racially segregated, and a small group of connected elites controlled the government—well, you probably find the post-war settlement pretty troubling. The leading legal lights of the movement would write about “restoring the lost Constitution,” and the “Constitution in exile.”

And if that’s what you’ve convinced yourself has happened—or if that’s what you at least claim to believe—radicalism makes perfect sense. As Goldwater said, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

When people with that mindset took over the GOP, we were doomed to a lengthy, turbulent period of destabilizing attacks on modernity, and, eventually, democracy.

Together we can turn the tables on the democracy-hating reactionaries who’ve brought the country to the brink of ruin. But we need to link arms. And we need to convince Democrats to see things our way.

Unfortunately, Republicans lacked popular support for both their methods and their objectives.

When they’d shut down the government to take people’s health care away, the public would get mad at them and they had to back down. But they kept doing stuff like that, often in spite of themselves. Sometimes things just got out of hand. They couldn’t get their way holding the whole country hostage, but they could maybe force Democrats to blink by acting like feral animals. Republican leaders exploited this ambiguity routinely during the Obama years. Our members are crazy! They’ve taken over! They’ll do real damage unless you appease them. In 2011, that approach paid off handsomely. Between threatening to shut down the government and threatening to send the country into credit default, Republicans pocketed enormous, one-sided concessions from President Obama and congressional Democrats. A couple years later, when Obama refused to defund his signature health care law, they stumbled into a pointless shutdown more or less in spite of themselves.

Eventually Obama got wise. He refused in principle to negotiate with a gun to his head, and Republicans basically dropped the extortion tactic. But you can see why a president who takes the public’s wellbeing seriously might be inclined to placate the radicals.

Donald Trump does not take the public’s wellbeing seriously. He is unlikely to be head-faked into better behavior. But his abettors in Congress might bend to intense and growing public pressure to force him into line with the rule of law. My view in the second Trump presidency is that there is a now real and politically viable basis for radical action in America. By Democrats.


The term “enabling legislation” is meant to evoke Hitler’s transformation into a dictator. Not because I think Trump is Adolf Hitler (though he is capable of evil on that scale), but because the delegation of power Democrats have accepted is analogous to how Hitler consolidated his.

Trump has been breaking the law—including the budget law—on a daily basis, and in many ways, since his second presidency began. Providing Republicans the votes they need to help Trump get away with these abuses amounts to capitulation: You’re in charge, you can keep doing this stuff. Maybe in principle we’d like to stop you, but we’re not going to try. We’re going to resign ourselves to giving up our power.

Predictably, with each new grant of authority, Trump has grown more lawless. He has shuttered duly enacted federal agencies. His deportation regime combines Gestapo and Stasi tactics. He defies court orders. He steals appropriations earmarked for states that voted against him, then raids the fisc to build himself monuments and run propaganda advertisements on television. He launched a war against Iran. He trades stocks based on inside information, and sells the inside information to Wall Street. He’s pocketed billions of dollars in less than two years. Congress has abided it all; the courts have abided most of it.

When I write that Democrats shouldn’t fund Trump’s government until the law-breaking ends, I use the term “Trump’s government” not in the nature of partisan spin, but because, under Trump, the government is rogue. The Constitution is in exile.


And so 15 years later my view is that Democrats should conduct themselves a bit like Republicans did in Obama’s first term.

Not exactly like Republicans, not to spurious or non-germane ends. But with the same kind of radical fervor, on behalf of values the public supports.

The biggest difference is that Obama was not an aspiring dictator, and there was no sense in which funding the government was funding his government, or enabling his lawlessness. To non-ideologues, Republicans seemed in thrall to a quixotic fervor. The public may have wanted them to break the Democratic lock on power, and even attempt to do unwise things, like cut deficits in aftermath of a deep recession. They didn’t want them to behave like saboteurs.

In 2011, they mugged Obama with a bunch of random policy demands in exchange for their votes to fund the government. The goal was to make his presidency a slog, pick his pocket, as much as to vindicate any deeply held principles.

I don’t believe Democrats should do this. I don’t believe they should deny their votes for appropriations in exchange for, e.g., restoring abortion rights or settling long-run health-policy debates.

But they should refuse to fund illegal activity—the war in Iran, routine due-process violations, violations of the Hatch Act. And they should certainly refuse to strike any budget deal with Trump so long as he means to violate it—by unilaterally defunding agencies, withholding disaster relief and federal grants to blue states, or any other means.

If Trump wants to insist on the right to make unilateral war, and spend tax dollars on campaign aids, and otherwise govern like a king, such that he will veto a budget that requires him to faithfully execute the laws, let him shut down his own government.

Democrats should enumerate these kinds of conditions if and when they win the election, and they should enter negotiations acting like they mean it. No unconditional funds. No long-term budgets that make if impossible to enforce compliance for months and months at a time.

This should be their posture because it is righteous. It’s also very likely that—in contrast to 2011 and 2013, when the public rejected Republican constitutional hardball—Americans will side with Democrats. They know that what’s happening is wrong. When Democrats shut down the government last year, demanding an extension of expiring health-insurance subsidies, the public supported them and blamed Republicans for the shutdown. Will voters suddenly decide they’re okay with the Iran war if Democrats insist on defunding it?

It would also be good practice for the fights of the post-Trump era.

Much as Trump pretends to support Social Security and Medicare, he and Republicans have done grievous damage to public finance. The fiscal pressure on those programs is suddenly quite severe, and we should count on Republicans to re-embrace “starve the beast” tactics once Trump is gone. If Democrats are radicalized as they should be, they will insist on easing the pressure exclusively with new taxes on wealthy Americans and big corporations—the only real winners in the Trump regime.

Or, Democrats can maintain their current paper-tiger posture. Trump will smell weakness. He’ll refuse to concede anything—at least anything enforceable. He’ll get funding for his lawless regime, while rejecting all oversight requests out of hand. Democrats will have surrendered their recourse, and the grassroots rebellion against the party establishment will continue.