This story originally appeared at The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places.
There is such a thing as "politics of distraction." It generally manifests on your television when when one talking head asks another talking head a question that the second person doesn't want to answer, at which point they say well the real issue here is [blah] and trundle off answering a question nobody asked. It's the argumentative equivalent of glitter bombing your foe, and sometimes it is used for good—when the original question is insincere or purely propagandistic, for example—and sometimes for bad, such as when politicians evade acknowledging obvious and provable facts because even speaking them aloud makes them look like heels.
Kick it up a notch to the party or movement level, and it becomes a coordinated strategy. Perhaps nobody in an entire political caucus wants to talk about a brazenly corrupt or cruel thing that they've just done, and perhaps the strategy consultant they all share comes up with a _what if you blame this on lobsters, let's say that "the real issue here" is something about lobsters. And, at that point, political opponents are left either talking about lobsters or asserting that "the real issue here" is not conspiratorial lobsters.
Claiming that the real issue is whatever your questioner isn't talking about is neither good nor bad, since the questioner themselves might be the real issuing you into talking about something stupid to begin with. But if you can still bear to watch television "news" programs, have yourself a little not drinking contest by counting how long the speakers can go without the real issue here-ing the conversation to their preferred frame. On most shows, they won't make it a full minute.
All of that said, there's some idiot camped out near the very center of Democratic strategy circles who has convinced the party that American voters are stupid, the Democratic base is malevolent, and that the party can and should brush off the vast sweep of authoritarian cruelties being inflicted on the country to focus instead on the real issue, which is whatever one thing the strategists have finally cobbled together talking points for. Everything else? Deploying the military to American cities to allegedly "liberate" them from the political opposition? Countless illegal impoundments of congressionally mandated funds? Mass deportations, and extralegal renditions to foreign prisons? White House corruption so vast that it now accounts for the majority of Trump's wealth?
All of that is a distraction, goes the party-issued talking points. Everything is a distraction from everything else, and you're the fool for spreading your alarm around. Like a sucker.
Peter Shamshiri:
We are in the midst of a crisis unprecedented in modern American political history: the President is deploying the military domestically, with the very openly stated purpose not just of quelling civil unrest but violently subjugating his political opponents. It’s a significant authoritarian escalation, and the President has made it clear that he’s going to run the same playbook across the country. But there’s a big lingering question: is it all just a distraction?
Many elected Democrats seem to think so. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claims Trump is “attempting to distract from his many failures.” Senator Ed Markey said he’s trying to distract the public from the budget fight. Senator Alex Padilla said the same thing. So did Rep. Robert Garcia, a California congressman. Even California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is at the forefront of the political fight in Los Angeles, has adopted the “distraction” language.
It’s not limited to politicians, either. Jon Stewart said that the ICE raids that sparked protest in Los Angeles were a distraction from the Elon/Trump feud. Which is interesting, because just a few days prior several Democrats were arguing that the Elon/Trump feud was itself a distraction.
During previous administrations and times, this might pass as "party discipline." But at some point during the compounding Republican-led crises of authoritarian corruption it went from discipline to evasion to full-on gaslighting, and at this point it appears to be little more than an announcement that no matter what you care about on any given day, you're wrong and need to pipe down.
The latest example: "Republican's cruel crusade against trans kids is all an attempt to divert attention from ripping healthcare away from millions of Americans," Sen. Chuck Schumer posted (and, after the resulting outrage, deleted) on Wednesday.
No. No it isn't. It's not a diversion, it was never a diversion, and calling it a diversion isn't a display of political savvy, it's just lying. The Republican crusade against trans kids is part of a nationwide effort to disappear the other, where the other is anyone that hard-right theocrats and white supremacists deem unworthy of full human rights, and it has been happening for a very long time. It is why school libraries are now battlegrounds, and why "drag queens" are considered by conservative legislatures to be a more pressing danger than school shooters. It is at least eugenics-adjacent, and part of the fascist belief that citizens exist to serve the state, not the other way around, and that therefore citizens deemed in some way medically or psychologically or morally unfit are merely drains on public coffers and ought to be shunned or simply done away with.
And that, in turn, is the impetus for denying food to poor families and healthcare to sick Americans and for the vicious, vicious cruelty that claims brown immigrants do not even deserve trials before being spirited off to foreign prisons.
Calling up the United States military against American citizens is not a distraction. The nullification of congressional budgeting powers is not a distraction. A president selling a memecoin transparently designed to be a vehicle for bribery is not a distraction. An orchestrated strategy of seizing immigrants who dare show up for their own immigration hearings is not a distraction. Whirling tariff policies that seem to have little purpose other than one man's self-aggrandizement are not a distraction. None of it is a distraction, not rampant D.O.G.E. lawbreaking or defiance of court orders or the pardoning and elevation of violent seditionists or the installation of a page-long list of transparently incompetent cranks and corruption-enablers as top government officials.
The notion that deploying the American military in American cities is a distraction, rather than a plain move towards dictatorship, is especially f--king galling. Once you've announced that attacks on democracy itself are merely a diversion from the real fight, bill reconciliation, there's really not much more you can do to show voters that you will not, and cannot, rise to this moment.
We are at an inflection point in our nation's ability to govern itself, and whether or not the would-be opposition party is up to the task, the messaging from the party is that they are not. And it is this seeming contempt for the issues that voters care about—the exact issues that caused the largest mass protests in U.S. history not even a full week ago—that convinces voters that the two parties are not, in fact, consequentially different. It's not true; decades of back-and-forth between Republican-backed deficits and economic chaos and Democratic-backed stability and growth has proven the differences quite thoroughly, at point.
But it feels true to voters who are seeing the footage of masked, paramilitary-geared ICE officers one moment, only to be met with implicit chastisement from Democratic leaders who publicly announce you ought to be more concerned with something else.
No. We can be concerned with all of it. The point is to be concerned about all of it; we have every right to expect our elected leaders to be able to keep track of at least as many national catastrophes as we ourselves have to. Whichever Democratic Party strategy group is behind this omnipresent insistence that the party will stand for Exactly One Thing, at any given moment, and that the party will decide what the One Thing is, and that every American who cares more about something else is doing politics wrong—whichever ass keeps pushing this strategery and relegating Democrats to second-fiddle status behind a sedition-backing adjucated rapist convicted felon crook promising concentration camps needs to be put out to pasture yesterday. If you can't win against that, and your grand party strategy consists of ignoring most of that in order to focus instead on anything else, then perhaps politics is not your strong suit after all.
At this point, I think we would be right to call Democratic leadership's daily assertions about things being "diversions" what it most appears to be: Gaslighting. And I think Democratic leaders have personal reasons, not strategic reasons, for a year of insisting that everything from Donald Trump stealing classified documents to shuttering congressionally mandated agencies to hosting bribecoin events to immigrant renditions to calling up the actual damn military is all twelve-dimensional chess meant to obscure whatever catastrophe happened immediately prior.
I believe, personally, that such language from Democratic leaders is not meant to be a strategy. It is meant to be a distraction from an increasingly narrowed-down and insular party apparatus that cannot respond to events except on glacial time scales, and so is caught flat-footed by each new crisis, unable to respond until carefully tailored top-down focus-grouped swing-voter-catering responses work their way down the strategy pipeline and into their mouths.
Are egg prices soaring, to the point where it's the stuff of jokes on the late night shows and the stuff of countless online memes? Please wait between three days and three weeks for the properly-tailored Official Party Take to arrive, and God help us all if the Marines invade Denver, Colorado in the meantime.
The Democratic Party has long felt compelled to police what its voting base is allowed to be concerned over and what it is not, all of it measured against what either an imaginary swing voter or a very real party megadonor might think of such complaints. During the best of times, it makes the party come off as stuffy, aloof, and hopelessly out of touch, because whatever the top ranks of party leadership don't want to engage on is declared to be "not the real issue here" and voters who believe it might be are kindly and with maximum dignity crapped upon for thinking so.
During the worst of times, though, it comes off as much worse than that. It comes off as ineptness, a failure to meet the moment, or just pompous sloth.
It's been nearly impossible to provoke Democratic leaders into real confrontations over the unprecedented scale of the Trump administration's lawlessness—because it is unprecedented. There is no existing game plan for responding to an authoritarian president willfully ignoring laws with the backing and support of his entire political party. There is no "bipartisanship" to be found here; there are no Senate rules for what happens when a large portion of the body endorses the theories of monarchy.
Of course Democratic leaders are paralyzed. Look how long it took the party machinery to respond to a crisis in egg markets; how long do we imagine it will take the same strategy gurus to respond to a military deployment against U.S. citizens? We can only start the clock; until the time that the party-approved rhetoric comes back down, the preferred response will be that it's a distraction from the real issue. The real issue will be something political leaders have already worked hard on their responses to; those asking for responses to the other thing will be glitter-bombed.
And we see this over and over. Democratic leadership brushes off the legality of sending immigrants to foreign torture prisons, on the belief that maybe sending immigrants to torture prisons might poll well in swing states; in the meantime some rank-and-file Democratic official flies himself down to the torture prison, makes a stink about it, and seizes national attention for doing it.
By all means, lawmakers should be taking to every available stage to urge public condemnation of the Republican bill to gut healthcare coverage, legalize Trumpian corruption, speed up climate change, and destroy a good chunk of American government infrastructure for the sake of cutting taxes, again, on the tawdry collection of American oligarchs who are meant to rule over us all. But explicit fascist acts are not a "distraction" from that, and they are more important, not less.
The reason that Senate leadership keeps insisting that the fascist corruption is a "distraction" is because they have rules laid out for dealing with legislative travesties. There is no similar map for defeating the rest of it. The consultants who for decades have sought to steer the party towards the needs of the mythical swing voter have never once dealt with such a thing, or thought they would need to, and there is no one in the room willing to pipe up with the suggestion that perhaps circumstances have changed and experts on authoritarianism might have a few things worth sharing here.
It is cowardice. The reason Democratic leaders are forever brushing off violations of the Constitution itself as distractions is because they, personally, do not have the skills to address such dangerous things and are unwilling to bring in anyone who does. We can all argue for as long as we want about the effectiveness of Democratic opposition, but on the specific issue of meeting the public where it stands, the party continues to fail. Badly. Horribly.
Scan the footage of the largest protests in United States history. Read the signs. How many of the unprecedented crises alluded to by those signs have been called distractions by the political figures most charged with responding to them? What percentage of those crowds is, according to Democratic strategists, foolish for caring about their issue more than the party-authorized real issues?
It is cowardice. Party strategists are so obsessed with maintaining control over what party voters are allowed to challenge or not allowed to challenge that they have fossilized at their desks, unable to respond to anything that was not already on the spreadsheets. And it is certain, absolutely certain, that if this authoritarian moment is beaten back down it will be those elected officials willing to channel the true, visceral outrage of the public who will do it.
Why would anyone vote to keep an elected official who tells them that nothing they see on the news is the "real" issue? What could possibly look more out of touch than that?
This story originally appeared at The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places.
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