AlterNet
Yesterday, I talked about how the No Kings rally exposed the regime’s weakness. Donald Trump wants the common folk of America to surrender in advance, just like their betters did. But when more than 7 million said hell no, what did he do? Well, let’s just say it was profane.
In today’s edition, I want to talk about another kind of weakness that it revealed. Instead of the president and the Republicans, however, the No Kings rally exposed the weakness of certain centrist Democrats.
How so? First remember what centrism is. These days, it’s the capacity for a Democrat in a competitive district to accept as true the premise of the lies told about Democratic Party by Trump and the Republicans.
For instance, when it became conventional wisdom, as a result of all this lying, that Vice President Kamala Harris was defeated because she pushed too hard for trans rights, centrist Democrats accepted that as true, though it was false, in order to seem moderate by comparison.
This is what Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts aimed for when he invoked transgender girls in sports. Harris lost, he said, because his party spent “too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest … I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Centrists do this in order to portray themselves to independent voters as honest brokers whose primary concerns are above partisan politics. In reality, however, it’s conflict-avoidance. They don’t want to take the risk of fighting Republicans. So they fight their own side instead. They make the demands of advocates and reformers – known cynically as “the groups” – seem radical or impractical or beyond “what’s really important to the American people.” The result? Nothing changes.
What I’m describing is the normal for Democrats like Seth Moulton. They believe that it earns them credibility and public trust. But norms can’t endure in the face of an ongoing constitutional crisis. The Trump regime isn’t just violating the rights of one or two marginal groups. It is violating the rights of all Americans, triggering a national reckoning that fueled the biggest one-day demonstration in American history.
More than anything else, No Kings was a necessary reaffirmation of bedrock democratic principles, because so few elites, including centrist Democrats, have been willing to affirm them. And if centrists choose to smear more than 7 million people the way they have smeared “the groups,” they risk discrediting themselves completely.
It may not be clear yet that centrism is fictional, but it will be.
In the case of Seth Moulton, perhaps sooner than he thinks.
Moulton is set to primary US Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. While he’s acting like trans rights are negotiable, Markey isn’t playing. At the No Kings rally in Boston, which drew 100,000 demonstrators, he declared trans rights to be human rights and the people there roared.
When Moulton got up to speak, they booed.
That was a bright line, according to Evan Urquhart. After writing extensively for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and others, he set up Assigned Media in 2022 to report on transgender news. Evan was in Boston.
“The Democratic rank-and-file is disgusted by Trumpism,” he told me in the interview below. “They don't want to see Democrats who compromise and meet Trumpism halfway. They want to see fighters.”
In a thread prior to the No Kings rally, you shared some wisdom about how to balance the evils facing the trans community with the joys found within it. You seemed to be addressing the old problem with hope: too much makes you naive, too little makes you nihilist.
I've noticed that informed Americans in general, and especially trans people, are crying out for ways to push through the despair at seeing our country's rule of law collapse. Ideals that we may have thought were universal and unassailable, such as human rights or the worth and dignity of every person, are suddenly very much up for grabs.
It is, as you say, naive to imagine that good is simply going to triumph here. We've blown past most of the guard rails that were supposed to protect us, and no one is more keenly aware of that than trans people. The federal government officially defines us as not even existing, and they've hinted that they want to go further to define us as terrorists.
My thread is about finding ways to live with the reality that we are losing our rights and there's no clear floor, no knowing how much we will lose before this insanity ends, while also contributing to efforts to find that floor and begin pushing that floor back up again.
Ed Markey was at the No Kings rally in Boston. He said: "Here in Massachusetts we stand for what is right. We stand with trans people because trans rights are human rights.” That's in contrast to Seth Moulton, his primary challenger, who seems to think trans rights are negotiable. You were there. How are you feeling today?
Ever since November, when we learned Trump would be president, I've known that the trans community would be in a uniquely vulnerable position, because Trump's closing argument against Kamala Harris was that she was too trans-supportive.
Never mind that Harris didn't say one word in support of trans rights during her campaign. The conventional wisdom was always going to be that Democrats were punished for being too trans supportive.
So the struggle for my community has been participating in a movement for democracy led by Democrats who aren’t sure they want our community with them – or want to blame us for all their troubles.
Senator Markey is a longstanding supporter of trans rights, and his primary challenger is Representative Moulton, who was one of the early Democrats distancing himself from the trans community.
And what I think we're seeing, and saw so decisively with Markey being cheered in Boston for standing up for trans rights and Moulton being booed by that same crowd, is that the Democratic rank-and-file is disgusted by Trumpism. They don't want to see Democrats who compromise and meet Trumpism halfway. They want to see fighters.
Trans people are great fighters. Our activists are out there, unbowed, defiant in the face of all of this scapegoating and oppression, and I think that fighting spirit is resonating with many Americans.
In your thread, you hint at the importance of federalism – the decentralization of federal power and the sovereignty of the states – in protecting trans and human rights. You suggest that there could be a "soft secession with blue state protections growing more meaningful as federal power fades." Talk about that more please.
I think that the No Kings rallies showed that Americans are not willing to go quietly into dictatorship. Unfortunately, there are a lot of deep structural problems in the American system that Republicans are determined to exploit. The Supreme Court has become a partisan rubberstamp on the most lawless actions by the president. The government is currently shut down and House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn't even seem like he's trying to find a solution, to the point where you almost start to suspect Republicans would rather us not even have a legislative branch and just vest all power in the executive.
These are headwinds that national Democrats might be able to overcome with a strong enough midterms and a strong enough Democratic president in 2028, but even if a lot of things broke that way, it does not feel assured. So, what's the alternative?
If Trump is too weak and unpopular to turn all of America into a dictatorship, but Democrats are unable to restore constitutional governance, we could see a much stronger federalism, with blue states increasingly ignoring the federal government. It's a sad picture in a lot of ways, but trans people have got to be practical, and practically speaking, I'd rather live in a strong Massachusetts that can protect me, perhaps even a Massachusetts that has strong regional alliances with other New England states, than be forced out of the country.
You remind me of something I came back to often: that the crisis probably can't be overcome through elections alone, but through political change that starts with individual hearts and minds.
I think we do have deeply moral people and movements, but those movements are increasingly detached from any institutional power.
When I think about the concern people have about the fate of the Palestinian people, people halfway around the world that we've been indoctrinated to hate and look down on, I see a deep belief in the principle that where a child is born shouldn't determine whether they're able to grow up safely.
When this deep care and concern for others is treated as radical, idealistic, naive and impractical, what happens at first is that no action is taken to protect the children in harm’s way, but in the end the leaders and institutions who worked so hard to distance themselves from these movements wind up delegitimizing themselves.
In journalism, we're seeing this with the deepest values of our profession. Journalists are expected to hold powerful people accountable without fear or favor, and bring audiences the truth even when it might be risky or unpopular. That’s being treated in the same way, as naive, childish and something no one believes any more, in a time when news organizations have been defanged by billionaires.
And what happens at first is that you see a loss of hard-hitting, honest reporting, but what I think happens next is that those institutions lose their legitimacy, and independent reporters who are willing to carry the mantle of those deep values rush into the vacuum.
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