Having closely watched congressional developments over the last few weeks, I’ve concluded that one much-discussed Democratic tactic for dealing with Trump 2.0 is probably mistaken, as I explained at New York:
No one is going to rank Mike Johnson among the great arm-twisting Speakers of the House, like Henry Clay, Tom Reed, Sam Rayburn, or even Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, he still resembles Winston Churchill’s description of Clement Atlee as “a modest man with much to be modest about.”
But nonetheless, in the space of two weeks, Johnson has managed to get two huge and highly controversial measures through the closely divided House: a budget resolution that sets the stage for enactment of Donald Trump’s entire legislative agenda in one bill, then an appropriations bill keeping the federal government operating until the end of September while preserving the highly contested power of Trump and his agents to cut and spend wherever they like.
Despite all the talk of divisions between the hard-core fiscal extremists of the House Freedom Caucus and swing-district “moderate” Republicans, Johnson lost just one member — the anti-spending fanatic and lone wolf Thomas Massie of Kentucky — from the ranks of House Republicans on both votes. As a result, he needed not even a whiff of compromise with House Democrats (only one of them, the very Trump-friendly Jared Golden of Maine, voted for one of the measures, the appropriations bill).
Now there are a host of factors that made this impressive achievement possible. The budget-resolution vote was, as Johnson kept pointing out to recalcitrant House Republicans, a blueprint for massive domestic-spending cuts, not the cuts themselves. Its language was general and vague enough to give Republicans plausible deniability. And even more deviously, the appropriations measure was made brief and unspecific in order to give Elon Musk and Russ Vought the maximum leeway to whack spending and personnel to levels far below what the bill provided (J.D. Vance told House Republicans right before the vote that the administration reserved the right to ignore the spending the bill mandated entirely, which pleased the government-hating HFC folk immensely). And most important, on both bills Johnson was able to rely on personal lobbying from key members of the administration, most notably the president himself, who had made it clear any congressional Republican who rebelled might soon be looking down the barrel of a Musk-financed MAGA primary opponent. Without question, much of the credit Johnson is due for pulling off these votes should go to his White House boss, whose wish is his command.
But the lesson Democrats should take from these events is that they cannot just lie in the weeds and expect the congressional GOP to self-destruct owing to its many divisions and rivalries. In a controversial New York Times op-ed last month, Democratic strategist James Carville argued Democrats should “play dead” in order to keep a spotlight on Republican responsibility for the chaos in Washington, D.C., which might soon extend to Congress:
“Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus and rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing and, at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle-class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.”
Now to be clear, Congressional GOP dysfunction could yet break out; House and Senate Republicans have struggled constantly to stay on the same page on budget strategy, the depth of domestic-spending cuts, and the extent of tax cuts. But as the two big votes in the House show, their three superpowers are (1) Trump’s death grip on them all, (2) the willingness of Musk and Vought and Trump himself to take the heat for unpopular policies, and (3) a capacity for lying shamelessly about what they are doing and what it will cost. Yes, ultimately, congressional Republicans will face voters in November 2026. But any fear of these elections is mitigated by the realization that thanks to the landscape of midterm races, probably nothing they can do will save control of the House or forfeit control of the Senate. So Republicans have a lot of incentives to follow Trump in a high-speed smash-and-grab operation that devastates the public sector, awards their billionaire friends with tax cuts, and wherever possible salts the earth to make a revival of good government as difficult as possible. Democrats have few ways to stop this nihilistic locomotive. But they may be fooling themselves if they assume it’s going off the rails without their active involvement.
Democracy is hard. It takes practice. Expecting it to blossom at national parliamentary scale with no minor league farm system was unrealistic.
Before a large political aggregate can successfully decide questions by democratic mechanisms, it has to come to some understanding of what the decidable questions are. It has to reach a broad consensus about how sentiment is divided on those issues (axes of polarization and planes of cleavage) … what opposing coalitions are feasible … where the middle grounds are. Minorities need practice uniting behind the wills of majorities, and majorities need practice refraining from abusing minorities.
National scale is the wrong place to develop these understandings and practice these disciplines, and what emerged was division along convenient, familiar (sectarian) lines of division — which naturally became more polarized as a result.
Iraqi national democracy would have had a better chance if it had been preceded by a cycle or more of limited, local democracy. Town and provincial councils, etc, where the issues are public works and local regulations.
Even monocultural provinces can learn a lot about coalesence and compromise from running their own sewers.
So Bottom Up isn’t off by 180 degrees. 179? Maybe.
There has always been a “shadow” rationale for the U.S. presence in Iraq – a supposedly “hard-headed national security” argument that the region is strategically vital to the U.S. and profoundly unstable and therefore requires an ongoing and substantial U.S. military presence (one that, for religious and political reasons Saudi Arabia could not be asked to play).
From this perspective, all the other rationales for the invasion of Iraq and continuing U.S. presence over the years — Finding WMA’s, rescuing Iraqis from dictatorship, creating a beacon of democracy, preventing chaos, honoring the sacrifice of the troops — are all window dressing.
The real unspoken philosophy is that as a great military power we have the right to enforce stability in areas we consider strategic and we simply will not allow any indigenous insurgents to drive us out.
This is a fairly standard mental framework in the history of 20th century colonialism – it was the underlying attitude behind the French marching through the streets crying “Algeria is French” during the Algerian war of the 50’s and the stuffy British officers drinking to “The Empire” in the decades before World War II.
These days Americans need a more comforting rationale then dreams of imperial glory for occupying foreign countries — but the truth is that pretty much any rationale will do. The gut-level attitude is simply that once America commits to a military presence somewhere it should always “win” and never “give up”. In practice this means mantaining an occupying force on an essentially permanent basis.
Seen in this light, it is not really surprising that the various rationales being tossed around are almost completely incoherent, self-contradictory, and so on. People are not really supposed to believe them as logical arguments, any more then the French in the 50’s actually believed that Algeria was part of France.