Chait: Hillary Clinton Is Running Not Just As the Democrat But As the Candidate of Democracy Itself
By Jonathan Chait
Since the start of the Reagan era, American politics has revolved around a war over the role of government in the economy. The Republican Party is set apart from major conservative parties across the world in its intensely ideological rejection of the state. And, despite his past rhetorical inconsistency, Donald Trump has faithfully adopted those positions. Yet that war has been largely absent not only from the rhetoric in Cleveland, which revolved around nationalism and identity, but in Philadelphia, too. The Democratic speakers have almost entirely ignored Trump’s proposals to deregulate carbon pollution and the finance industry, lavish tax cuts on the very rich, and snatch health insurance from 20 million people. This is not because Democrats lack the confidence in their ability to win an election centered on these issues. (They did it in 2012.) It is because they have chosen to reframe the election as a contest over the much larger question of the sanctity of American democracy.
President Obama put a point on this message in his speech Wednesday night. He referred obliquely to the extraordinary stakes in the election when he lumped the Republican nominee in with authoritarian enemies — “anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues.” Later in the address, he put a finer point on it: “It’s not just a choice between parties or policies, the usual debates between left and right. This is a more fundamental choice — about who we are as a people, and whether we stay true to this great American experiment in self-government.”
Amazingly, even as Democrats painted Trump as an authoritarian menace, he continued to confirm the point on the ground. Weeks earlier, Trump’s campaign had banned the Washington Post, whose coverage it found objectionable, from campaign events. The ban had only symbolic meaning, though. It merely prevented reporters from working within the official media area. They could still attend speeches, just as any other person, and cover it from within the crowd. (The far more disturbing threat of retribution was Trump’s vow to retaliate against the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, through tax and regulatory policy.) But yesterday, the Trump campaign extended its ban from the symbolic to the real by preventing Post reporter Jose DelReal from entering a public speech by Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, Mike Pence. Private security first told DelReal he could not enter the rally with his laptop and phone. DelReal asked if other attendees were allowed to bring phones and was told, “Not if they work for the Washington Post.” DelReal placed the items in his car, returned, was patted down by security, and then still told he could not enter. Later, Pence’s staffers insisted it had all been a mistake, blaming overzealous local staffers. This sort of iterative, inconsistent, and even chaotic sequence of events fits a common pattern of how political authoritarians break down rules and norms.
This morning, Trump confirmed the impression of his authoritarianism yet again, in an interview with Fox News. Vladimir Putin, he offered, is “a better leader than Obama because Obama’s not a leader. He’s certainly doing a better job than Obama is.”
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