Democrats Love A Little Despotism, Too
If they want to be the party of democracy and freedom, Democrats need to stop indulging their authoritarian instincts.
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For eight years now Democrats have been denouncing Donald Trump as a would-be authoritarian. And even if the condemnation of Trump frequently escalated into hyperbole about fascism or treason, at least the core of the criticism was correct. Given the chance, Trump would love to have the power of a dictator.
But the problem with this criticism is that it’s coming from a group of people that has exposed themselves to be unprincipled hypocrites. I know that’s harsh, but it’s a harshness well-earned. Because Democrats have been indulging the very same authoritarian instincts that they claim to be fighting.
To start, consider the recent actions of Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. Earlier this week, Evers used his power of the “partial veto” to unilaterally change the meaning of a law passed by the state legislature, effectively circumventing the entire legislative process and ram through his preferred bill by executive fiat.
The original legislative text is in the screenshot below, which would have increased the limit that school districts can raise from property taxes by $325 per pupil per year. But by using his partial veto to cut the red portion of the legislation, Evers chopped up the text to turn “2023-24 and 2024-25" into "2023-2425." If extending a two-year provision to instead last for four entire centuries doesn’t represent a deliberate effort to circumvent the legislative process, then I don’t know what would.
You might imagine that the Democrats and activists who claim to be against authoritarianism would express some hesitation at Evers’ power grab. But you would be wrong. The same people who assailed Trump’s disregard for democratic norms celebrated when Evers abused his power.
Just one example of many: the following tweet, which received over 30,000 likes, was sent by the same person who called Trump “an authoritarian strongman seeking to centralize power and remove any checks and balances that stop him from exercising power.”
Unfortunately, the authoritarian instinct on display in Wisconsin is becoming commonplace within the Democratic Party. If we shift our attention to California’s Gavin Newsom, who is perhaps the nation’s most recognizable Democratic governor, we’ll see a similar willingness to lean into executive power.
Recently, Newsom has tried to cast himself as the chief antagonist of Ron DeSantis, criticizing the Florida governor for his efforts to weaponize government power against his opponents. This criticism is warranted, but what makes it especially galling coming from Newsom is that he has wielded government power in much the same way as his Florida nemesis.
For instance: Newsom attacked DeSantis after he threatened to punish Disney for opposing some of the Florida governor’s political agenda. Newsom said that DeSantis’s retaliation exposed his “semi-authoritarian bent." The only problem? Newsom is just as open to wielding government force against his political opponents. Just a month before criticizing DeSantis, Newsom had punished Walgreens by cutting all of the state’s economic ties with the company after it announced that it would stop dispensing abortion pills in Republican-led states where it was illegal to do so.
This is not the only example of Newsom’s toxic combination of hypocrisy and executive overreach Last year, after Texas passed a law that would let individuals file civil lawsuits against abortion providers, Newsom criticized the effort as a “zest for domination.” But rather than merely criticizing the Texas law, Newsom mimicked it and signed a gun control law that contained the same enforcement mechanism he had called an “assault on liberty and freedom.”
Unfortunately, however, the Democratic instinct to despotism doesn’t stop there. It goes all the way to the top of the party, to President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly tried to stretch the bounds of his authority and erode the separation of powers.
The most recent example is the president’s attempt to unilaterally cancel $380 billion worth of student debt. The reason this is such an affront is that Biden and everyone around him knew this was an overreach of the president’s constitutional authority, and yet Biden went ahead with it anyway. Just two years ago, for example, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.” Even the Department of Education said in a 2021 memo that the executive branch “does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive, on a blanket or mass basis, principal balances of student loans, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.”
But this willingness to sidestep the Constitution is nothing new for Biden. In 2021, he signed a clearly unconstitutional eviction moratorium that even he said was “not likely to pass constitutional muster” — which is just another way to say that he knew it was illegal. The following year, the Supreme Court also struck down Biden’s blatantly unconstitutional vaccine mandate.
Biden’s pattern of purposefully overstepping his authority is concerning. Article I of the Constitution is very clear: the power to pass laws belongs to Congress, not the President. But Biden and Democrats are happy to circumvent that pesky process and toss aside the Constitution so long as it accomplishes some short-term political goal.
I’m not sure what else to call that behavior except flirting with despotism. I’m sure this will earn accusations of “bothsidesism,” even though I will say without hesitation that I consider Republicans a greater threat to American democracy than Democrats. But just because Democrats aren’t quite as bad as Republicans doesn’t make their behavior OK.
In other words, if Democrats want to be considered the defenders of democracy and freedom, they’ll need to start acting like it. Because right now, the party is beginning to walk down the same quasi-authoritarian path that the GOP charted before them.
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Good points
Probably an important clarification that still allows you to make the point you are trying to w/r/t the Evers veto: that section raised the state-imposed limits on what school districts could raise/spend per-pupil. I’ve seen a lot of reporting that it actually just raises spending by that much every year for 400 years, which is very different