The Texas Lawsuit and the Age of Dreampolitik
The
separation of political reality from political fantasy stills exists — for now.
By Ross Douthat
Opinion
Columnist
- Dec. 12, 2020, 2:29 p.m. ET
When it comes to Donald Trump’s efforts
to claim victory in the 2020 presidential election, there are two Republican
Parties. One G.O.P. has behaved entirely normally, certifying elections,
rejecting frivolous claims and conspiratorial lawsuits, declining to indulge
the conceit that state legislatures might substitute their votes for the
electoral outcome.
The other G.O.P. is acting like a bunch
of saboteurs: insisting that the election was stolen, implying that the normal
party’s officials are potentially complicit and championing all manner of
outlandish claims and strategies — culminating in the lawsuit led by the
attorney general of Texas that sought to have the Supreme Court essentially
nullify the election results in the major swing states.
What separates these two parties is not
necessarily ideology or partisanship or even loyalty to Donald Trump. (Nobody
had Brian Kemp and Bill Barr, both prominent members of the first group, pegged
as NeverTrumpers.) It’s all about power and responsibility: The Republicans
behaving normally are the ones who have actual political and legal roles in the
electoral process and its judicial aftermath, from secretaries of state and
governors in states like Georgia and Arizona to Trump’s judicial appointees.
The Republicans behaving radically are doing so in the knowledge — or at least
the strong assumption — that their behavior is performative, an act of
storytelling rather than lawmaking, a posture rather than a political act.
This postelection
division of the Republican Party extends and deepens an important trend in
American politics: The cultivation of a kind of “dreampolitik” (to steal a word
from Joan Didion), a politics of partisan fantasy that so far manages to
coexist with normal politics, feeding gridlock and stalemate and sometimes
protest but not yet the kind of crisis anticipated by references to Weimar
Germany and our Civil War.
The cultivation is a bipartisan affair.
When conservatives defend their fight to overturn the election as an answer to
the way Democrats reacted to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, they are correct
in the sense that most of their arguments and proposed tactics have antecedents
on the liberal side. The attempts to scrutinize swing-state data for anomalies
that prove the fix was in recapitulate similar attempts by early #Resistance pioneers.
The state-legislature fantasy is an answer to the “Hamilton elector” fantasy,
in which faithless electors were going to deny Trump the White House. The
widespread Republican belief in voter fraud is akin to the widespread
Democratic belief that Russian hacking changed vote totals.
The difference, though, is that the
right’s fantasy has been embraced from the start by a Republican president
(Hillary Clinton was a follower rather than a leader in calling
Trump “illegitimate”), and it has penetrated much faster and further
into the apparatus of Republican politics. In January 2017, only a handful of
Democratic backbenchers objected to Congress’s certification of Trump’s
election. But you can find the name of the House minority leader, Kevin
McCarthy, on a brief supporting the ridiculous Texas lawsuit.
That brief did not persuade the Supreme
Court, Biden will be president, and the Republicans who signed up for the
fantasy have been protected from their folly, once again, by Republicans with
actual responsibility — in this most recent case, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney
Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts.
But it’s reasonable to wonder how long
this can go on — whether dreampolitik and realpolitik can continue permanently
on separate tracks, brushing up against each other from time to time without a
serious collision, or whether eventually the dreamworld narratives will force a
crisis in the real one.
One possibility,
which I explored in my recent book, is
that political fantasy can actually be a substitute for radical action in the
real world. There are ways in which the internet, especially, seems to contain and redirect the same extremism it
nurtures — pushing it into memes and hashtags and social-media wars rather than
actual revolutions, giving us Diamond and Silk tweeting about
a military coup rather than the thing itself.
In this theory, certain kinds of
partisan fantasy might actually be stabilizing forces, letting people satisfy
their ideological urges by participating in a story in which their side is
always on the verge of some great victory, in which Trump is about to be
exposed as a Manchurian candidate or removed by the 25th Amendment (I
participated in that one), or alternatively in which Trump is about
to order mass arrests of all the pedophile elites or get the Supreme Court to
put him back in office for another four years. Or, for the apocalyptically
inclined, a fantasy in which your political enemies are poised to do something
unbelievably terrible — like all the right-wing militia violence that liberals
expected on Election Day — that would vindicate all your fears and makes you
happy in your hatred.
Crucially, as in certain famous cults,
the failure of these prophecies doesn’t undo the story. It just requires more
elaboration and adaptation, more creative fantasizing — and meanwhile the gears
of normal politics grind on, choked with sand but still turning steadily enough.
I am certain this analysis fits the
career of Trump himself, who has conjured wild fantasies among his friends and
enemies alike, but who clearly doesn’t have the capacity to bring the real
world into alignment with his own reality-television imagination, to suborn the
custodians of institutional legitimacy — whether the military or the Supreme
Court or his own attorney general and the governor of Georgia. And while Trump
may get one more great performance in 2024, I’m not sure that any plausible successor
will be able to achieve his mind-meld with the right’s dreampolitik — in which
case this postelection fight might be a unique convergence between reality and
fantasy, rather than a foretaste of the two collapsing disastrously into each
other.
On the other hand, we saw over the
summer how amid the unique combination of pandemic, lockdown and Trump’s
provoking presidency, the fantasy politics of the left could slip free of the
dreamworlds of academia and online activism, contributing to violence and purges
in the real world — from the streets of the Twin Cities to the board of the
Poetry Foundation. Police abolition and apologias for rioting belonged to the
realm of ideological fantasy politics until they didn’t, and if certain
left-wing impulses have gone back to being fantastic in the months since, the
memory of May and June remains.
The Texas lawsuit didn’t torch any city
blocks, but all those congressional signatures on the amicus brief did make it
feel like something more than just another meme. The crucial question it raises
is whether people can be fed on fantasies forever — or whether once enough
politicians have endorsed dreampolitik, the pressure to make the dream into
reality will inexorably build.
The last month of
2020 won’t resolve that question. But we can look forward, in the next decade
if not sooner, to discovering whether my confidence in the separation of
political fantasy and political reality was the greatest fantasy of all.
