These Democrats Seem To Understand The Situation

I’ve done the math, I’ve run the numbers, and I’ve determined dooming levels are far too high. Not because things are fine – or even in same universe as fine – but because dooming is no strategy at all. 

Back in December I promised Bad Faith Times would offer a reprieve from dooming – so hot right now on Bluesky, where seemingly everyone has determined we are cooked. Vacuuming up all the doom and suffering on your timeline isn’t going to change anything except your poor brain chemistry. It feels like taking on the world’s myriad horrors is a way of bearing witness – and maybe it is, to an extent – but the human brain can only take so much doom. 

I’ve tested the limits of doom absorption and can report it is not productive or worthwhile. I am first and foremost a scientist. 

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There’s an overwhelming sense right now – perpetuated in part by your third favorite BFT writer – that we should be huddled and fearful and quiet in the face of the administration’s monstrously unconstitutional assault on the nation. Elon Musk’s ongoing coup and Trump’s explicitly fascist daily pronouncements have generated the kind of fear that finds its way into every crevice of society. I regularly see posts from otherwise levelheaded folks – sober political analysts, many of them – who are now certain that the US will never again have another free election, that the military will be deployed against Americans anywhere they gather in protest, and that Robert Kennedy Jr. will have the power and capacity to carry out his broken-brain plan to create camps for people who take depression medication. 

This is fear talking.

Long Way From A Fire

Elon Musk has helped focus the anger of anti-fascist Americans

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

I don’t mean to dismiss those fretting about a future in which constitutional limitations have been blown to fucking pieces. Things can and will get bad, considering the world’s richest man is acting as (unelected) president of the United States with an army of digital termites eating away at the nation’s infrastructure. We have not even begun to feel the long-term effects of the DOGE menace.

We can’t let fear corrode our thoughts and actions though. It’s what they want, as a reminder. They’re desperate for our fearful consent, and love nothing more than to see us cowering before a movement losing support by the hour in its attempt to reshape the United States. It’s always much easier to imagine a dystopian future than it is a bright one in which bad actors no longer have their bloody hands on the levers of power. Blame that on your ancient ancestors developing anxiety to keep them alive. 

A Time For Aggressiveness 

While most elected Democrats remain utterly useless in the face of the all-out authoritarian power grab we face today, there are some who have rejected the fear and doomerism that has come to define those opposed to the deconstruction of self governance in the United States. Not every Democrat is Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer, toothless leaders whose anti-fascist strategy boils down to pointing out that tomatoes are expensive. I’ve read a lot over the past couple years about fascist resistance and I haven’t seen much about the Tomato Strategy. 

Maybe Schumer and Jeffries are ant-fascist thought leaders and we just don’t know it yet. Or maybe they aren’t. It’s hard to say. 

The Price of Grapes And A Space For Political Opportunity

You would do well to remind yourself that nothing is permanent in politics.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Ed Martin, a January 6 insurrectionist and the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. who has worked tirelessly in defense of Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers, on Thursday launched an investigation into one of the only vocal, attention-getting congressional Democrats, Robert Garcia, who took to cable news last week and accurately labeled Musk a “dick.” 

Garcia, who also used standard language about “fighting” his political opposition, is now being investigated in bad faith by a man who has been clear about his role: To silence all elected opposition who so much as question the slow-rolling coup that is finally being noticed by everyday folks. Martin’s justification for investigating Garcia – that the congressman is a threat to President Musk – is some of the worst faith you’ll ever find in D.C. politics. 

“The fact that the Trump DOJ now wants to silence members of Congress because we’re actually willing to take on Elon Musk is quite dangerous,” Garcia said. “It’s incredibly disturbing. But we’re not going to be silenced. We’ve got to push back. This is a moment for us to be really tough and aggressive.” 

First of all: Fuck yeah. Secondly, it’s this kind of feistiness that not only fires up and emboldens likeminded folks who might otherwise be intimidated by this authoritarian onslaught, but puts a finger in the chest of the bully and says, hey man, fuck you, come and get me. It’s a luxury Garcia enjoys because of his public profile and his access to legal defense against the bully (Martin) enthusiastically wielding his power to try to silence those being harshly critical of President Musk. 

It’s a textbook example of how competitive authoritarianism works. Such regimes – and yes, we are one now – fall short of democracy and full-scale authoritarianism. We now lie somewhere in between. 

“Rather than openly violating democratic rules,” Harvard researchers Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way wrote way back in 2002, incumbents in a competitive authoritarian regime “are more likely to use bribery, co-optation, and more subtle forms of persecution, such as the use of tax authorities, compliant judiciaries, and other state agencies to ‘legally’ harass, persecute, or extort cooperative behavior from critics.”

There are real elections in competitive authoritarianism, and there is opposition in halls of power. But the anti-democracy forces don’t hesitate to use the various repressive tools of government to urge opponents to shut the fuck up when they get too rowdy, or when the public takes their side in huge numbers. That’s what we’re seeing today with Martin going after Garcia. There is no fairness in our new, deeply twisted system of government. 

“In competitive authoritarian regimes … violations of [democratic] criteria are both frequent enough and serious enough to create an uneven playing field between government and opposition. Although elections are regularly held and are generally free of massive fraud, incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results. Journalists, opposition politicians, and other government critics may be spied on, threatened, harassed, or arrested. Members of the opposition may be jailed, exiled, or—less frequently—even assaulted or murdered. Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.”

Trump isn’t the first president to toy with competitive authoritarianism. Republican presidents throughout the modern era have played footsie with the undemocratic system, including Dick Nixon, who deployed the IRS as a weapon against his critics and opponents in the Democratic Party. Ronald Reagan fucked around with the apolitical civil service, a hallmark of competitive authoritarianism. These suppressed desires to kneecap American democracy have metastasized into something far more destructive in the Trump era. The game of footsie is over. These guys are fucking like porn stars. 

‘This Is Why You Fight These Cowards’

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the few congressional Democrats who was not programmed with learned helplessness, seems to understand our competitive authoritarian moment better than anyone in power. This is in part because of her age – unlike many leading Dems, she has used the internet – and because she’s smart and brave. 

Ocasio-Cortez over the past couple weeks has made a sport of antagonizing concentration camp filler Tom Homan. As with so many men on the right, there seems to be a psycho-sexual element to Homan’s obsession with AOC. The man will not stop booking cable news segments to threaten her with legal consequences for perfectly legal actions even while other high-profile Democratic governors level equally incendiary criticisms of Homan in speeches and in the press. His focus, for whatever reason, remains on Ocasio-Cortez. 

Bonus: Is America on the Path to Authoritarianism?

Podcast Episode · The Foreign Affairs Interview · 02/21/2025 · 45m

Apple Podcasts

AOC has held a series of webinars informing immigrants of their rights should Homan and his deportation forces storm their communities and indiscriminately arrest and deport anyone who looks like an immigrant, whatever that might mean to you. Homan knows it’s legal to tell people about their rights in the face of government persecution. Even so, he made a series of cable appearances in which he claimed to be working with the Trump Justice Department to determine whether AOC had “crossed a line" while calling her stupid and naive.

Homan wasn’t saying this because he believed the congresswoman had in fact crossed a legal line, but because he sought to intimidate her and her constituents into acquiescing to the regime’s illegal deportation machinery. The authoritarianism has never been more competitive. 

Ocasio-Cortez, to her credit, wasn’t having any of Homan’s shit. 

“The Trump administration understands that it does not have absolute power and that it must rely on creating a false illusion of power to create a chilling effect to get everyday people to respond to fear, comply in advance, and censor their own free speech,” AOC said, seeming to understand the tools and goals of competitive authoritarianism. “Ultimately, in clear scenarios such as these, the best way to handle paper tigers is to call their bluff.”

I would imagine Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of other young congressional Democrats grasp what an effective opposition will look like in the next few years. It will be less about posting tomato prices on social media platforms and more about using those platforms to stand up to the right-wing bullies who believe politics is over now that they are in charge. They could hardly be more wrong.

I can only hope that AOC, Garcia, and other outspoken Democrats like Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and House Representative Jasmine Crockett ("Come through boo") are ready to exploit the potential faultiness in a competitive authoritarian government. This is part of the playbook in defeating fascist regimes: Putting them in possible positions. As Harvard's Way and Levitsky wrote:

The coexistence of democratic rules and autocratic methods aimed at keeping incumbents in power creates an inherent source of instability. The presence of elections, legislatures, courts, and an independent media creates periodic opportunities for challenges by opposition forces. Such challenges create a serious dilemma for autocratic incumbents. On the one hand, repressing them is costly, largely because the challenges tend to be both formally legal and widely perceived (domestically and internationally) as legitimate. On the other hand, incumbents could lose power if they let democratic challenges run their course. Periods of serious democratic contestation thus bring out the contradictions inherent in competitive authoritarianism, forcing autocratic incumbents to choose between egregiously violating democratic rules, at the cost of international isolation and domestic conflict, and allowing the challenge to proceed, at the cost of possible defeat.

The American public – me very much included – is going to need examples of real resistance against the awful people using government power to erode our democratic republic. Seeing AOC and Garcia and a few others publicly tell administration officials to go fuck themselves is critically important to diluting fear building and maintaining widespread pushback against those who want nothing more than to edge away from the competitive version of authoritarianism to the full-blown kind.

Replace doomerism with fearlessness and you have the formula for democratization, a process we so desperately require.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social