Politicians won’t defeat fascism, you will
Free society, the crux of real democracy, is collapsing
Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.
I’m out of town for a family event this weekend, but I want to see all of your photos and videos from the No Kings protests tomorrow. I’ve opened up the chat threads function for anybody to launch or reply to a thread, so please share everything!
While I’m away, I’m also putting the finishing touches on a few reported pieces that I’ll start rolling out in the next few days.
In the meantime, tonight I’ve got a piece on this week’s chaos, the money buying the NYC mayoral election, and a look at the split Democratic response to Israel’s attack on Iran.
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😵 It’s here: We hear it constantly, from big speeches and cable news warnings to fundraising appeals from perpetually concerned politicians: we’re in danger of losing our democracy. At some point, it becomes noise, part of the empty din of politics, a warning that stretches on across an endless horizon without ever being realized.
But what if we’re already there?
I’ve written over the years, including earlier this week, about the reluctance among the mainstream media and most powerful liberals to acknowledge the fact that we have descended into a kind of autocracy. Maybe they’re afraid to admit that it’s actually possible after lifetimes of stability and really meaning it when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance; maybe it’s a question of being married to rigid definitions and the safety of semantics.
Or maybe they need some singular event in which an official declaration of war on the American people is made from the White House as the tanks roll through Washington, Marines occupy liberal cities, innocent citizens are thrown into prison, and opposition elected officials are manhandled and arrested…
Even the most passive frog in that pot of boiling water should have felt the heat this week. A member of Congress was indicted for trying to inspect a detention center in her district. A US Senator was tackled to the ground and handcuffed for asking the Secretary of Homeland Security a question at a press conference about the military of Los Angeles. A Marine detained a citizen on US soil, explicitly breaking the law. Raids continue across the country and have gotten so severe that immigrants are not showing up to work and afraid to even go shopping for groceries. And the orders coming from the White House amount to “arrest more people and ask questions later.”
The idea that we exist in a democracy because we still have elections on the calendar is deeply delusional. Free society, the crux of real democracy, is collapsing, and we know that Republicans are trying to disqualify as many voters and rig as many elections as possible. What’s more, the go-to remedies for Democrats — lawsuits and bureaucracy — are no longer working.
There are no norms or laws that cannot be broken, with permission of the state. Yesterday, an appeals court slapped a temporary restraining order on another judge’s order to return control of the California National Guard to the state, delaying what should be the most slam dunk decision possible. I shudder to consider the force that protestors will experience tomorrow, especially at the DC military parade.
I don’t know how much longer this situation can continue before something snaps. I’ve mused about American balkanization, and it would come with a million complications, not the least of which is Trump’s control of the military, which he could ostensibly command to trample over entire cities and states without worrying about consequences. But we’ve reached the point that some sort of schism is being publicly entertained by Democrats not known for their radical politics; a few days ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom raised the possibility of a federal tax boycott, which follows a formal proposal to do just that in New York.
This is still an uphill battle, because Democratic leaders continue to provide empty responses like Chuck Schumer’s demand for an explanation to what happened to Sen. Padilla, which seemed pretty self-explanatory. It’s rhetorical outrage designed to pass the buck — “someone else should inform me about the obvious!” is half-assed rhetoric that stands in for action.
And this is why the ongoing protests, and the No Kings demonstrations, are so important. Without them, there would be zero opposition. When regular citizens push the envelope and demand more, it leads to oversteps by an undisciplined administration, which slowly forces Democratic officials to get more proactive and aggressive in their own pushback. It was just a few weeks ago that Gavin Newsom was hosting the worst right-wing scumbags on his podcast, trying to appeal to the nativists, and now he’s giving primetime addresses slamming Trump on immigration enforcement and threatening to cut off money to the federal government.
I’m going to spend the next few weeks researching and interviewing experts on what states could do to operate more independently and avoid the wrath of the federal government. I’m not arguing for some dissolution of the union, but I do think it’s worth exploring which political and economic levers could be used to push back on and even partially decouple from the autocrat attempting to implement martial law in the United States. Plus, given how much more blue states contribute in taxes and business, I believe doing it right could create leverage to help people in every single state, no matter its political bent. It’s clear that Democratic state leaders are going to be slow to realize or exercise their power; I intend on finding out just what they can do and what the impacts might be.
💸 Follow the money: Here’s a behind-the-scenes anecdote that should give you a pretty good understanding of just how warped the NYC mayoral election has become and who runs politics in this city.
I reported, wrote, and produced (with essential help from the crack team at Sludge), about the huge amount of real estate interest money that has poured into the NYC mayoral election — and more specifically, the huge amount of real estate money that has flown into the Super PAC backing disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It took a few weeks to put together, and the day after we finally shot the piece, the landlord lobby donated $2.5 million to the campaign… at least until yesterday, when former Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Cuomo and dropped a $5 million check to help the governor.
Plenty of billionaires have donated heavily to Cuomo, but most pertinently for the housing-starved capital of skyrocketing rents, real estate interests have been showering more money on the old pervert than anybody else — it’s up to at least $6 million, with more likely to be disclosed after the election — while spending almost nothing on every other candidate combined.
Andrew Cuomo, as brutal and conniving a politician as they come, still inspires a lot of fear in people, and his comeback has been backed by a lot of New York lawmakers who called for his resignation just four years ago. Paired with universal name recognition, the rolling endorsements, including from many of the political heavyweight unions in the city, helped create a sense that his victory was inevitable, which can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
But all the endorsements and surrenders also painted a false impression of the strength of his support from voters; his Outer Borough base prioritizes sure things and establishment candidates, but Cuomo is far more of a stranger — he hadn’t lived in NYC for 30 years before running for mayor! — than someone like Eric Adams, who was a borough president and well-known police captain. He’s appeared at plenty of Black churches, but has engaged few other groups (beyond his endless pandering to Orthodox Jewish communities).
Today’s cross-endorsement between Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the top challenger, and Comptroller Brad Lander, who sits in third, further isolates Cuomo just as his negatives pile up.
The massive influx of money to his Super PAC is the wildcard here. Early voting begins tomorrow and runs through the end of the month, and my guess is that the excitement around Mamdani, as well his ground game, will mean that he dominates the early returns. For Cuomo, all that money will go toward a metric ton of TV ads aimed at beating up Mamdani and scaring the older base into running to the polls. My role as a journalist (I washed my hands of any direct involvement in the race a while ago) is to remind people where the money to produce and purchase all those ads came from, and why the billionaires, mega-developers, and landlords are so desperate for him to win.
🤤 Unholy Divide: Israel’s unilateral decision to bomb Iran on Thursday night has elicited two very different kinds of responses from Democratic lawmakers. As you could predict, the progressive faction has condemned the attacks, but they’re now being joined by some much more mainstream Democrats. Here’s what Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said in his official statement:
On the other hand, here’s what Connecticut’s other Democratic senator, Richard Blumenthal, had to say about the attacks:
They really couldn’t be more different. Murphy delivers a scathing rebuke to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu for his inflaming regional tensions and trying to stoke a new catastrophic war, while Blumenthal justify the attacks on Tehran and hits the “Israel has a right to defend itself” button, invoking an increasingly hollow and cynical refrain that continues to accompany excuses for the genocide in Gaza.
This isn’t just me talking: American voter support for Israel’s homicidal government has reached record lows over the past few months, even among Republicans.
The new Quinnipiac poll, released on Wednesday, found that 52% of respondents disapprove of Donald Trump’s handling of Israel’s conflict with Hamas (which is generous framing at this point of the mass murder spree). A March poll by Pew found that 53% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, and that’s only going to grow as the brutality continues and the US gets drawn further into providing support for yet another war.
Yet Blumenthal’s statement was similar to that of many other Democrats — Rep. Dan Goldman was downright giddy — because so much of the party is stuck in old paradigms and married to dying politics. As a Jewish person, Israel firing unprovoked attacks and committing genocide does not help me or provide me any sense of security; if anything, these attacks only put Jews around the world in the crosshairs. Continuing to support a madman like Netanyahu with tired, borderline-meaningless cliches will come back to bite Democrats sooner rather than later — yet another reason that primaries and younger leaders are desperately needed.
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What happened to Jessica Ramos?