Is Democratic Leadership Missing in Action as Trump Tightens His Grip?

Democrats have a long and illustrious history of strong leadership: FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton, Obama. Where is this generation’s leader?

So much for American democracy and the concept that “no man is above the law.”

There is no law and not a word in the Constitution that requires Attorney General Merrick Garland to order Jack Smith to drop charges against Trump.

It’s merely a policy written in a letter by Richard Nixon’s corrupt Justice Department (whose director, Attorney General John Mitchell, went to prison for his corruption) when Nixon was being investigated…and doubled down on by Bill Clinton’s Justice Department when Clinton was being investigated for lying under oath.

It has no force of law. It’s merely policy. Written by an agency lawyer who was never elected by anybody to anything.

Merrick Garland — Republican Senator Orrin Hatch’s suggestion to Obama for SCOTUS — could have easily ignored it, and you know that if the shoe was on the other foot a Republican president would have done just that. Joe Biden would be in confinement right now.

As the Supreme Court wrote in the 1978 case Butz v. Economou:

“No man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it.”

That our nation’s highest “officer of the law” Garland is forcing Smith to allow a convicted and multiple-grand-jury-indicted criminal to go free because he gamed the system through an election is, itself, a crime. It’s a clear violation of the foundational principle of Anglo-American justice and politics, the Magna Carta, first signed into law by King John on the plain at Runnymede in 1215: That no man is above the law.

As Merrick Garland and his Department of Justice “obey in advance,” America is in crisis and Democratic leadership seems completely absent.

Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies on social media and in the checkbooks of billionaires. And, as we saw vividly in this month’s election, it dies when democracy’s sworn advocates fail to show up to fight for it.

And right now democracy’s advocates among America’s political class are shockingly quiet. Or they’re going on TV to pathetically claim that ending prosecutions against Trump means “the system has worked.”

That has to stop.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa — the first journalist to win the prize since 1935 when it was awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, then a prisoner in a German concentration camp — makes this point over and over in her brilliant new book How To Stand Up To A Dictator.  

The Philippine journalist writes that the war against democracy in her own country was fought “on two fronts: President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.” Noting that in 2016 “most of Donald Trump’s Facebook likes came from outside the United States and one in every twenty-seven Trump followers was from the Philippines,” she writes:

“[T]he absence of rule of law in the virtual world is devastating. We live in only one reality, and the breakdown of the rule of law globally was ignited by the lack of a democratic vision for the internet in the twenty-first century. Impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances.”

We saw the same thing here in the United States over the past year. Billionaire Elon Musk turned Xitter into a massive rightwing echo chamber, allegedly spreading lies and Russian propaganda in service of Trump’s election and his own rise to political power.

Several hundred other rightwing billionaires poured a tsunami of cash into the world’s first $20 billion election (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court), saturating the airwaves with the message that Kamala Harris only cared about trans people in jail, while “Donald Trump cares about you!”

Not only did the Harris campaign fail to respond before the election — just like the Dukakis campaign failed to respond to Bush Sr.’s vicious, racist Willie Horton ads — but for almost four years both President Biden and Vice President Harris have been almost completely absent from the American media scene.

Biden, practicing the “normal” politics of the pre-social-media era, relied on the occasional speech or signing ceremony and the nation’s legacy media to carry the message of all the extraordinary — and they were extraordinary — accomplishments of his administration.

Thus, as a result of his and his advisors’ failure to exploit the media, 59 percent of Americans (and 88 percent of Republicans) falsely believed the Fox “News” lies that America was in a recession and inflation was still out-of-control as they went to the polls.

And, as history vividly shows, when there’s a recession during a presidential election the party in power almost always loses.

What this election taught us is that reality is no longer important in this social media-controlled world: perception is. And the GOP controlled the economic perception all year with their relentless appearances in media and on social media.

As incompetent as the Biden/Harris administration was on bragging on their economy, Trump and his billionaire supporters had a massive success in their effort to gaslight Americans about both Biden’s and the Trump-presidency’s economy.

While Trump’s economy had never been as good as, for example, Obama’s (and was far behind Biden’s), fully 69 percent of voters who pulled the lever for Trump this year falsely believed the economy during his presidency was better than either of those two Democratic presidents.

How did Trump pull this off?

He and his social media army (many from outside the US pretending to be Americans) hit the ’net and the airwaves literally every day of the week bragging about how well things were doing, even during the depths of the pandemic and the recession it provoked.

Fox “News” and 1,500 rightwing radio stations provided the chorus, along with rightwing newspapers owned by the Murdoch family from Australia, and hundreds of rightwing “news” websites funded by petro- and other billionaires.

While Biden spent almost 4 years only occasionally talking with the press, during Trump’s four years he did a mini-press-conference (often on his way to playing golf) virtually every single day. All the billionaire oligarchs and social media trolls had to do was amplify that message (which they did, as CBS’ CEO Les Moonves bragged), and it became widely believed.

While Biden and Harris did a marvelous job of getting meaningful legislation that aided working people through Congress and into law, neither ever did even a fraction of the self-promotion that Trump has proven is so necessary to build media narratives in this short-attention-span news era.

Biden and Harris apparently think that leadership means getting things done; how quaint is that almost childlike belief that it’s still the 1970s! Trump knows that in this era of social and electronic media, of newsletters and podcasts, repetition and outrage that triggers social media algorithms are the name of the game of leadership.

Trump’s mantra could easily be: “You’re not a leader if you’re not seen in the media daily.” And it appears that, in our modern era, he’s right.

Biden and Harris thought the media would stand up for democracy; the editor of The New York Times argued instead that advocating for democracy was “partisan” and he “won’t do it.” Leadership, even in the media, the Times would apparently argue doesn’t involve defending Jeffersonian principles of democracy.

By that definition, the Democratic Party is currently — and has been since 2015 — without leadership.

Think about it. Who stands up daily for Democratic priorities? Who hits the media several times a week to accuse Republicans and their billionaire owners of class warfare and theft from the middle class? Who’s all over social media fighting the good fight?

Was it DNC Chair Jaime Harrison? President Biden? Vice President Harris? Sadly, No.

Outside of Harris’ carefully-scripted campaign events, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) were far more visible in the media than any of them.

And so when AOC reached out to voters in her district who voted both for her and Trump and asked them why, the answers she got validated Trump’s “speak out bluntly and often” approach to leadership in the 21st century:

— “It’s real simple… Trump and you care for the working class.”
— ”Trump is going to get us the money and lets men have a voice. You’re brilliant and have amazing passion!”
— “I feel like Trump and you are both real.”
— “You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways.”

Meanwhile, Trump not only built his own social media site, but with Elon’s and Saudi Arabia’s help his followers and the overall right wing and Nazi movements took over a substantial presence on Twitter. Trump’s name has appeared in headlines on virtually every major social, online, and legacy media outlet virtually every single day for the past nine years.

Another part of the Democrats’ problem is that there isn’t one single message; the party ranges from solid progressives to sellout “problem solvers” eager to suck up to corporate donors to those pandering to (or afraid of) AIPAC and Netanyahu.

In addition, the Overton window embraced by mainstream media has shifted hard to the right, largely the result of billions invested over the past 40 years in think-tanks and media silos.  

But none of that should excuse the Biden administration and the DNC for having ignored the media all these years.

And what has happened to our champion, Kamala Harris? She seems to have vanished during her family vacation in Hawaii. That’s not leadership during a time of crisis, and if Trump’s plans for his presidency aren’t a crisis then the word has lost its meaning.

Democrats have a long and illustrious history of strong, visible leadership: FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton, Obama. Where is this generation’s??

If Trump is successful in going after “the enemy within,” the window for Democratic activism may close soon, much as it once did in Argentina, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, the Philippines, Egypt, Russia, Turkey, and every other democracy once taken over by strongman authoritarians.

Where is our clear leader? Our Donald Trump? The Democratic Party needs to get its media act together right away.

Define its message. Identify unambiguously the “enemies” of American democracy and call them out daily. Fully embrace the American working class. Declare class warfare. Express outrage, offer opposing policies, and point out GOP hypocrisy. Stop “obeying in advance.”

And they must do it now, before it’s too late. There’s still time…but it won’t last long…

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