One of the biggest challenges I’ve had in the last nine months and especially since the summer is how to convey both the very brittle, thin nature of Trump’s power and also the scale of the threat his government poses. Jamelle Bouie captured a key dimension of this in a weekend column in the Times: if you wanted to drive the country into literal disunion it’s hard to imagine what you’d do differently than what he is doing right now. He is both rhetorically and (with increasing intensity) literally unleashing the U.S. military on the strongest bastions of opposition to his government (basically blue cities in blue states). He is also canceling more and more of the funding the federal government gives to those states, despite the fact that it is disproportionately funded by taxes from those states. This is definitionally fairly close to warlordism, a broken state in which the leader holds on to power — if not legitimacy — by hoarding state resources for loyalists and depriving opponents of any of them.
I have a deep ideological commitment to the American union. And beyond ideology, red and blue states are largely a fiction. The big red and blue states have huge minorities of the other “side” within their borders. Still, governance on these terms is illegitimate and unsustainable. The only recourse is a much more aggressive use of the sovereign powers of the states than state governments are currently doing.
Along those lines, I wanted to share a few thoughts about California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
There’s a sort of dance I see among commentators reacting to Newsom’s various engagements with Donald Trump. Praise his fight but don’t praise it too much because then one gets looped into whatever list of things this or that group doesn’t like that Newsom has done in the past, gets branded as a Newsom advocate, gets involuntarily associated what what I guess is best labeled as Newsom’s politician’s “slickness.” I realized I was giving too much weight to these things, even as I told myself I wasn’t. As I said a couple months ago, what we want right now is a contest among potential 2028 presidential candidates to demonstrate both their willingness and their ability to fight President Trump’s autocracy. Right now, Newsom is the guy on that front. It’s not just fight or even mainly fight. He gets how to use power. They’re not the same thing. The first is a necessary condition for the second. But plenty of people get plenty feral but are either unwilling or unable to leverage power effectively.
Last week Trump’s zombie Department of Education sent out a letter to nine elite universities proposing a “compact” by which universities would receive preferential treatment in exchange for, in essence, signing onto the MAGA higher education culture war. Many decried this. Newsom said that any California university that agreed to those terms would lose all support from the state government. USC is the only California University that was included on the first list of schools.
By definition, the federal government is always going to be a bigger deal than the state government. But in a high tax/high service state like California, the latter is not nothing. Far from it. And this gets to a much more general point. MAGA is wielding state (in the sense of the federal state) power to attack its foes and reward its friends. But the opposition supports civic government, which is to say disinterested government. So they don’t want to play favorites. That creates a double advantage for the authoritarians. Do what they say or you’ll get hurt. If they lose power, there’s no downside since the other guys won’t punish you for cooperating with them. Countless ideas we’ve discussed together over the last nine months go to the same point: imposing costs on cooperating with dismantling the American Republic. That’s what the DOJ-in-exile idea is/was about. That’s what all sorts of uses of state power is about.
You might say, Well, doesn’t this require the civic democrats either to become hypocrites or betray their own ideals? I don’t think so. There’s a tension, certainly. But there’s nothing wrong or inconsistent with imposing costs or demanding accountability from those who work to destroy the American Republic or constitutional system itself. Indeed, if you look back at the most critical conflicts the United States has been involved in — I would focus on the Civil War and World War II — the central question is whether civic democracies are strong enough to defend and vindicate their governments and the values embedded with them. A democratic ideal too weak to defend or perpetuate itself isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Some small postscripts. A lot of what I’ve said here about Newsom applies to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as well. Newsom is out there on his own at this point. But I don’t want to give the impression I’m not recognizing the important role Pritzker is playing as well. The other point is what we discussed in the spring. States and the executive officials within states have a unique role right now. They have sovereign executive power in subordinate but independent sovereignties. That is hugely, hugely important. We can and should be dumping on opposition legislators at the federal level for their various shortcomings. But on both sides of the equation, it is important to recognize that state elected officials for the moment have the power to act in robust ways, to create facts on the ground that must be reacted to in ways Democratic members of Congress do not.