The veteran journalist’s Crossing the Rubicon comes after a historic election where Democrats took over state legislatures across the US
Mark Danner’s new book, Crossing the Rubicon, collects his writing on politics for the New York Review of Books over the quarter-century since Bush v Gore in 2000. It arrives in the aftermath of another momentous election, the midterms tsunami that swamped Donald Trump and his Republican party and will give Democrats control of Congress next year.
From January, battle will commence between Congress and a lame duck president. Democrats have two years to hold the president accountable and build a case to take back the White House and to address damage done by the depredations of Elon Musk and Doge, by budget chief Russell Vought, and by other destructive forces.
But Danner doesn’t think rebuilding should be the aim.
“There are systemic difficulties, some of which need [constitutional] amendments, so the path is very difficult,” he said. “Many could be solved legislatively, if there was the political will to do it. But the system is kind of a mess, and Trump showed that … he had an incredible ability to sniff out opportunistically these kinds of holes in the system.
“The emergency power problem [by which Trump has claimed freedom to operate without Congress, by declaring emergencies] can be fixed legislatively. Democrats can do that, depending on whether they want to get rid of the Senate filibuster [the 60-vote threshold for most major legislation], of course.
“But that’s a systemic problem. There’s also a political problem, which is much larger, which is that I think there’s an overwhelming conviction of unfairness about the system, and that is being expressed repeatedly with populist eruptions. And Trump’s is only the biggest. Before that was the Tea Party in 2010, and then there’s last week’s result, which is populist without a doubt.
“And the question is, how can you stop shifting back and forth between battling populisms, which have a real strain of nihilism at least on the right? How do you get out of that cycle? I think there are political answers. I don’t know whether the Democrats will choose them. It’s anybody’s guess. They have a very old leadership. I don’t have a lot of confidence in Chuck Schumer as a person of vision.”
Schumer, a 75-year-old New Yorker, seems certain he’ll be re-elected Senate majority leader, despite doubts among progressives elected in the midterms wave, Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota, prominent.
Danner said: “The predicate of the populism goes back at least to Reagan, where you had the beginning of his tax program and so on, the beginning of the upward shift of income. But it also was exacerbated by Clinton, and people remember that. If you go to Trump rallies … God, the hatred for Hillary was amazing, and the recognition that [Bill] Clinton had sold a lot of jobs to China was very significant too. And then you get to 2008, and I think Obama’s lost opportunity to do something after that election, when he essentially hired the entire Democratic economic team that deregulated the financial system that had just collapsed.”
Among Democrats’ incoming class, Danner is particularly impressed by James Talarico, the young Texas state legislator who beat Trumpist Ken Paxton to become the first Democratic senator elected in Texas since 1988.
“I think political solutions, they’re not magical, but they lie outside the policy discussion now,” Danner said. “Maybe not for James Talarico, but within Washington. And I think if they regard it as a restoration, it’s going to be missing the moment, and we’re going to be having a conversation like this again in two years, four years, six years, because the populist moment is still with us, and there’s a very good reason for it.”
Crossing the Rubicon is a collection of journalism, but if journalism is the first draft of history, perhaps collections of journalism good enough to reprint are the first edition. Danner has reported on home soil and abroad, notably in Afghanistan and Iraq. In his introduction to his new collection, he depicts the rightwing supreme court as the “800-pound gorilla” looming over the contested election of 2000, eventually reaching out to swat the Democrat and place the Republican in power.
George W Bush’s ascent to the White House after losing the popular vote is the original sin of a book subtitled The Betrayal of American Democracy. The greatest sin is January 6, when Trump sent his supporters to attack Congress. Danner marched with them, his searing reporting including an exchange with a rioter who alluded to Julius Caesar’s fateful decision to cross the Rubicon River and march on Rome. Danner’s cover shows gallows outside the Capitol.
Which all means it’s hard to read Crossing the Rubicon without seeing Trump as the real 800-pound gorilla of early 2000s America, watching and waiting through 9/11, the “war on terror”, Hurricane Katrina, the great recession, and the Tea Party, before reaching out to grab the White House, the constitution as Fay Wray.
“Is it fair to view him as an 800-pound gorilla?” Danner asked. “The book is weird in that it’s a collection of pieces that I’ve done nothing to alter because once you start altering things, that way madness lies. So each of those pieces was written without the knowledge of what would come after, to make an obvious point.
“Trump does embody what seemed to me to be the broader lessons of the era. One has to do with the system … which he is genius at showing the weakness of, and that goes for the larger questions like the indirect voting system we have” – the electoral college, which allowed Trump to win the White House in 2016 with nearly 3m fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, worse than Bush v Gore – “and it goes to smaller questions like emergency powers”.
Trump, through his first term and particularly in his second, has blown apart features of government and law long assumed sacrosanct, now seen to have been mere norms.
“Congress was completely supine and let him do it,” Danner said. “That’s one systemic difficulty. The other one has to do with race. I think it is no accident that Trump followed Barack Obama. I think if you want to look at the era as a 25-year slice of time, it is under the shadow of the Voting Rights Act, which was dismantled [by the supreme court] at its end. That the country was never a multinational democracy until 1965, and what you saw from the period from 1965 on was the country trying to cope with that idea. And that’s why the idea of Keisha Lance Bottoms, the idea of what happened in Mississippi, strikes me as the most significant of the outcomes from yesterday.”
Danner is speaking the day after Georgia made Bottoms the first Black female governor of any state, while voters in Mississippi damn near made Scott Colom their first Black senator since Reconstruction in a race that remains uncalled but leans towards the Democrat. Aftershocks of Republicans’ electoral “shellacking” resound. As Black leaders have risen – Florida, the only bright spot for Trumpism, will have its first Black governor, Byron Donalds – so traditionally white-dominated states like Kansas, Iowa and Texas have elected Democrats to statewide office, near-unthinkable in the period of Danner’s book.
Danner said: “Trump, I think of in political terms as an embodiment of the reaction to the development of a multinational democracy. You know, his politics of immigration was brilliant. That’s him. He did that. I’m not saying nobody else contributed … but the idea that you can embody a politics of grievance in the immigration issue and have it be a kind of stalking horse for the race issue is Trump.
“So I think if you want to think of him as the 800-pound gorilla, it’s because he embodies those two things. A system that is falling apart in various ways, things were never fixed, and this political attempt to bring everybody into the system, which is being born by one party. That’s bad. The idea that one party is the Black party. It’s no accident that Trump says Keisha Lance Bottoms is a ‘low IQ individual’. His name for Black people is ‘low IQ individual’. He’s a racist, and I think we should face that about him.”
Crossing the Rubicon is out in the US on 10 November
