Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
We are used to thinking of politics in dualities — left-right, liberal-conservative, Republican-Democrat.
Lately, another duality has become more important than any of those: pro-democracy and anti-democracy.
From the vantage point of Vermont it might not seem so apparent. The long New England tradition of town meeting and local self-government makes it seem as if democracy is a given. How could anyone be against democracy?
But emerging revelations about the presidency of Donald Trump show what anti-democracy politics looks like. For 70 years struggling democracies could usually count on the support of the United States (with the caveat that Cold War politics too often led to U.S. support for military dictators). Thus, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been U.S. policy to bolster democratic Ukraine. And since the Iraq War, it has been U.S. policy to support democracy among the Kurds in Syria and Iraq.
Now Trump has put the United States on the side of dictators and against democracy. “All roads lead to Putin,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Trump at their recent White House confrontation. And it’s understandable why she would say that. Trump’s machinations in Ukraine have been favorable to Ukraine’s enemy, Russia — both by holding up military aid needed to fight Russia, and by trying to shift blame for 2016 election interference from Russia to Ukraine. In Syria, Trump betrayed our allies, the Kurds, who have been a beacon of pro-democracy progress, in favor of the Turkish strongman Erdogan. The withdrawal of U.S. forces has allowed Russia to fill the vacuum in Syria.
These foreign policy disasters are only the most immediate and obvious examples of anti-democratic policies loosed upon the world. Closer to home, all the most virulent anti-democracy partisans have taken heart from Trump.
In certain pockets within the United States it’s hard to fully grasp the anti-democratic views that predominate elsewhere. Vermont is one of those pockets.
Of course, no region is perfectly homogenous. Conservative voters in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom tended to favor Donald Trump even in a year when most Vermonters voted for Hillary Clinton. Liberal San Francisco and the district of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are only a two-hour drive away from Tulare, California, and the district of arch-conservative Trump defender Devin Nunes.
But beyond Vermont’s borders America’s conservative character is all too visible. Extreme deference to corporate interests has allowed predatory businesses to poison and rob the American people with a relatively free hand. The pollution of drinking water in Bennington is a slim chapter in the story of what the chemical industry has done in West Virginia and elsewhere. It raises the question: Why are conservatives so timorous about protecting the people from the oil and chemical industries?
Tobacco companies notoriously poison millions of people every year. Opioids, recklessly dispensed, have killed hundreds of thousands. As soon as vaping technology was developed, corporations leaped in to hook kids on nicotine. And yet the conservative bias of the government means that regulators have to be pushed and shoved into actually exerting themselves in the cause of protecting the people.
But American conservatism goes deeper than economics. A recent book, “Shadowlands” by Anthony McCann, about the armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, exposed in brilliant detail the delusional thinking of the band of anti-government activists who held the federal government at bay for weeks until they were finally arrested. Their views were characterized by an extreme individualism that allowed them to claim that they as individuals constituted “the people.” Their misreading of the Constitution led them to believe that federal ownership of land was illegitimate, and that they were justified in trying to seize the land from the government. They had come from Nevada, Idaho and elsewhere to defend the interests of local ranchers, even though the Oregon communities surrounding the refuge — ranchers and native Americans, in particular — wanted no part of their movement. In fact, ranchers and environmentalists in the region had established a productive working relationship with the federal government, involving collaboration among competing interests, to work out their differences over land use. The out-of-state activists may have wanted to free local people from the heavy hand of government, but it turned out the people and government were working well together.
The Harney County standoff occurred in an atmosphere of increased militancy among right-wing groups that have been emboldened by the language of President Trump. Armed militias are proliferating, taking inspiration from Trump’s anti-immigration racism and his kind words about neo-Nazis.
It is important to view white supremacy not only as an ideology of noxious racism, but as antithetical to democracy. It subjects racial minorities to second-class status, and it also warps the democratic system by which Americans govern themselves. It lays waste to democratic values. Throughout our history people have hatched ideologies to justify abhorrent behavior toward African-Americans, native Americans, Latin Americans and immigrants. Democracy exists in America because people have been willing to engage in a continuing struggle against the anti-democratic forces that deny equal rights to some and serve the wealthy at the expense of others.
The Republican Party, reshaped in the image of Donald Trump, has elevated the most virulent, anti-democratic strands of conservatism, including voter suppression, subservience to corporations, white supremacy and hostility to civil liberties. Liberals and moderates have been waiting for moderate, pro-democracy Republicans to rise up in rebellion, but as in post-Reconstruction America, anti-democratic forces have achieved a tight grip on power.
It is not fair to equate authentic conservatism with gangsterism and criminality, but to the extent that conservatism is willing to compromise civil liberties and the rule of law, it opens the door to unscrupulous amoral actors who threaten democracy. The impeachment inquiry is just beginning to delve into the gangsterism surrounding Trump’s actions in Ukraine.
Those who recoil from having a gangster in the White House are fighting back. Thus, two of Vermont’s leading political figures, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Phil Scott, are in the same boat. Sanders, the socialist/Democratic candidate for president, and Scott, the moderate Republican governor, are both in the pro-democracy faction. Scott, who seems to loathe Trump at a visceral level, is one of the few Republicans to voice support for the impeachment inquiry.
As the impeachment battle heats up, it is important for the pro-democracy side to remember an important distinction drawn by environmental activist Bill McKibben. For years, he has said, he thought he was in an argument about climate change. Then he realized he was actually in a fight.
Pro-democracy Americans are in a fight, and they may get the feeling sometimes that they are at a disadvantage because their beliefs mean they must restrict themselves to democratic means in the fight against authoritarianism. Anti-democracy Americans have fewer scruples. They have shown they are willing to use anti-democratic methods, such as voter suppression and foreign interference.
The pro-democracy side of the fight is full of anxiety as election year approaches, wondering whether a progressive, such as Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, or a moderate, such as Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar, would be best positioned to defeat Trump next year. The result from 2016 makes optimism an ill-advised indulgence, and the fear of Trump’s re-election and the need to defeat anti-democracy forces in the U.S. and abroad ought to be motivators like few others in our history. When democracy is at risk, narrow partisan differences stop seeming so important.