The Same Strategy

A few thoughts on Los Angeles. By Luke Pickrell

On Monday, the Trump administration threatened to arrest California Governor Gavin Newsom. “He’s a nice guy,” said Trump, but he’s doing “such a bad job.” Former ICE director Tom Homan said that Newsom would be detained if he “crossed the line,” while reminding everyone that it’s a felony to “impede law enforcement doing their job,” and that the cops get to define “impede.”

This wasn’t exactly an empty threat. The Justice Department has charged David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California, with “conspiracy to impede an officer,” a felony that carries a maximum six-year sentence. Huerta’s “crime” — for which he was knocked to the ground and confined for days — was sitting on a sidewalk and blocking a gate while protesting an immigration raid at a work site in Los Angeles.

Newsom shot back at Trump and Homan: “He’s a tough guy. Why doesn’t he do that? He knows where to find me,” he challenged. “That kind of bloviating is exhausting. So, Tom, arrest me. Let's go." On Tuesday, Newsom cautioned that the nation faces a “perilous moment,” warning that “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”

Meanwhile, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta is suing the Trump Administration for its deployment of the National Guard. “They rely on a law… which requires a rebellion, which there is not; an invasion, which there is not; or the inability for the federal government to execute the laws with the ‘regular forces,’ which doesn’t exist, either,” explained Bonta. “So, none of the required elements of the law are there to trigger the use of the authority to deploy the National Guard.” Bonta made it clear that California possesses all the resources and determination needed to suppress protesters and uphold the status quo without federal assistance.

Sending troops to Los Angeles is undeniably heavy-handed, and one of many moves that clash with established political decorum. By comparison, the Democrats appear like restrained and rational lovers of democracy.

But appearances deceive. Democrats feed on political theater just as much as Republicans. Newsom is laying the groundwork for a presidential run, and framing himself as democracy’s last line of defense against Trump is a tried-and-true strategy— even if it doesn’t always work.

If what’s happening in Los Angeles really is “What Autocracy Looks Like,” then it’s necessary to remember how the Constitution brought us here. “The belief that the US Constitution can protect against despotism has always been an illusion,” contends Ziyad Motala, “because elite privilege and authoritarianism are part of [its] DNA.” In her Washington Post review of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority, Mary Jo Murphy concludes, “Trump and the steamrolling far right didn’t get to where they are despite our revered Constitution. They got there because of it.” And Stephen Pimpare reminds us that the Electoral College — a “weird system that values land over people” — gave us Trump the first time around.

The Democrats shouldn’t be forgotten.

First, despite their opposition to Trump’s tactics, the Party elite — including Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and Rob Bonta — are loyal to the Constitution and hostile to democracy. In turn, the Constitution blocks popular legislation and creates an environment of frustration and disillusionment necessary for authoritarianism to develop and then thrive. As many people have argued, faith in the framers’ creation is entirely misplaced.

Second, Trump’s efforts to expand executive power didn’t emerge from nowhere. As former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith explains, Trump has built on the “excesses of recent presidencies.” There’s George Washington’s “use of the Constitution’s broad yet undefined ‘executive power,’” Nixon’s tariffs, George W. Bush’s “untouchable national security authority,” Obama’s assassination of a US citizen, and Biden’s widespread pardons. Trump might be especially brazen and aggressive, but he’s not an aberration.

All of this to say that current events don’t change our strategy. Repression always breeds resistance. However, the only way to firmly secure our rights is through establishing a political system governed by majority rule. We need the power that can only come through a new constitution built around a unicameral legislature elected through universal and equal suffrage.

I don’t doubt things are as bad as they seem. But precisely because they’re so bad, a mass movement for democracy is our only hope.