Attitudes toward the Parties in the Midst of a Rolling Coup

From time to time one encounters commentary from ordinary people to the effect that both major parties – or members of both of them – have behaved in ways that bring discredit upon themselves and alienate people who are not members of the “tribe.” It is not my intention to address that proposition directly. Instead, let’s talk about the very most important political divide in America today.

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I wrote on this theme in my very first edition of Decency and Sense (“Meeting the Authoritarian Challenge,” April 2023). After mentioning Fox News’s then-recent $787 million settlement of the Dominion lawsuit and the then-recent resignation of acclaimed Tarrant County, Texas elections chief Heider Garcia, I wrote of the broad, united front to defeat this authoritarian challenge:

These events were among the most recent developments for an authoritarian movement that has gained substantial strength following the 2020 presidential election. The Fox News-facilitated campaign of lies that immediately followed the election fueled the attempts of the defeated president and his supporters first to overturn the outcome and then to manipulate state and local election processes and authorities to succeed “legally” in 2024 where they ultimately failed on January 6, 2021. This authoritarian movement also threatens election officials and workers like Heider Garcia as well as legislators and other elected officials who uphold their oaths of office responsibly and with integrity.

In response to such activity, in October 2021, The New Republic and The Bulwark simultaneously published an Open Letter in Defense of Democracy. The authors – Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey Isaac, and William Kristol – identified themselves and the letter’s 48 cosigners as “writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things.” While among them “[s]ome identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither,” they were united in their concern that “liberal democracy itself is in serious danger.” Toward its conclusion, the letter urged “all responsible citizens who care about democracy – public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens – to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.”

January 6 Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin expressed the same sentiment in an interview he gave in the summer of 2022 amid hearings of the January 6 Committee. Referring to his colleague, the Committee’s Republican vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney, Raskin said, “I told Liz I can’t wait to [go] back to disagreeing with her about everything. But right now, we are in a constitutional emergency, and we are all constitutional first responders.”

I have returned to this theme many times since April 2023 and had written about it on Facebook many times before then. I most recently wrote of this in depth in an essay this past March (“Let’s Have a More Thoughtful Conversation about ‘Sides’”). Below are the concluding two paragraphs, which followed one in which I had again shared Jamie Raskin’s exchange with Liz Cheney:

Our constitutional emergency is graver now than it was four years ago. The inability of so many to recognize this is deeply disappointing and disturbing to me. It does not, however, engender ill will or hard feelings. I can only continuously increase my efforts to reach who I can and accept with serenity that some are simply unreachable.

Toward its conclusion, the Open Letter urged “all responsible citizens who care about democracy – public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens – to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.” The urgent work continues.

One of the most important principles in human relations is that one ought not generalize on the basis of labels. It matters not whether someone has attributed the label to another or whether a person has self-proclaimed it. We each have agency. A label does not necessarily define a person. The most important consideration when seeking to understand a person is to view that person’s actions.

Or inactions.

And so we come to the two major parties, and those who associate themselves with the parties.

Many people act in rude and judgmental and unpleasant ways. The anecdotal actions of some individuals no more define a party than do the actions of a party’s leading figures at different levels of our national life define every person who is affiliated with that party. Parties are voluntary associations. Members are under no obligation to do anything in service to the party. And a person who lives in an open primary state like Colorado and who is not interested in doing anything for which party membership is necessary (such as seek the party’s nomination for public office or serve as an officer of the party) does well to remain unaffiliated and enjoy the freedom to participate not only in general elections but in either party’s primary elections as well. It’s all good.

I return, though, to the enormous threat that the Republican party as an institution presents to “the survival and success of liberty in our very own country.” Read my essay “To a Candid World” from May 2025 and “You Gotta Sing Loud” from October 2025. See also “Of All Political Leanings and None at All” from February 2025, in which I extolled a civic leader in Colorado who was a formidable figure in Republican politics until the 2016 Republican presidential nomination prompted him to disaffiliate. I explained my motivation for that essay in the following paragraph:

Why do I go on at such length about John Brackney? Simply because to me it is so very vital to champion Republicans and conservatives who, like him, stand up for their principles and values against the authoritarianism that is blooming in the Republican Party and in this second administration of the person who, as Brackney alluded, played the leading role in nearly “ruining the greatest experiment in self-rule in the history of the human race.”

The assault on the American experiment took place not only on January 6 but in the coup plotting and execution in the months leading up to that horrific date (see my January 2025 essay “A Final Report on the President-Elect’s Criminal Attempt to Overturn the Result of the 2020 Election”). It has been proceeding again at a furious pace since Inauguration Day 2025. For grim highlights, see the essay that Robert Reich published on June 11, “Warning: Trump’s Rolling Coup Is Already Underway.” The two paragraphs below summarize the content (emphasis in original):

Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter roles, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents. These are among the many individual actions and plans of the “rolling coup” which is currently underway.

Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.

Please read the entire essay.

I return to a key passage in the October 2021 “Open Letter in Defense of Democracy”:

We are writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things.

Some of us are Democrats and others Republicans. Some identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither. We have disagreed in the past, and we hope to be able to disagree, productively, for years to come. Because we believe in the pluralism that is at the heart of democracy.

But right now we agree on a fundamental point: We need to join together to defend liberal democracy.

Because liberal democracy itself is in serious danger. Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse. All of these are now in serious danger.

The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism. Unimpeded by Trump’s defeat in 2020 and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power.

Not every person who is affiliated with the Republican party or even who identifies as MAGA – be they private citizen or public officeholder – is an authoritarian. However, it is a terrifying fact to accept and address that overwhelmingly those who are so affiliated, and especially those who identify as MAGA, are blind to the authoritarianism, complicit in it (consider especially Sen. Susan Collins), or in active enthusiastic support.

All who are dissatisfied with the non-authoritarian major party would do well to keep this crucial context in mind. More importantly, all of us ought to lean in harder to recognize and confront the authoritarians’ dire threat to the republic.