Indivisibles,

We’re as furious as you are about the sham impeachment trial in the
Senate. As luck would have it, we were scheduled to send you the first
Leah/Ezra newsletter of 2020 today, which gave us a chance to collect our
thoughts.

As a reminder, we send these monthly newsletters to give you a sense of
what we’re seeing and thinking about for the Indivisible movement, and to
get your input. As always, feel free to reach out to us directly on
twitter - [ [link removed] ]@ezralevin & [ [link removed] ]@leahgreenb. Let’s get into it.

What the sham impeachment trial tells us about our democracy

The events of the last week are devastating. They’re also totally
unsurprising. We knew heading into the Senate trial that the odds of
conviction - or even just hearing from witnesses! - were grim. Republicans
weren’t interested in the truth. They were interested in covering up the
truth to save their own political hides. And that’s what they’ve been
doing.

What this trial demonstrates is a clear and terrible truth: the threat to
our democracy is much, much bigger than just Donald Trump. If Trump were
just an aberration, then there would have been bipartisan outrage at the
revelation of his crimes. That didn’t happen. Republican politicians have
rallied around him at every step of the way.

That shouldn’t be a surprise. We’ve seen the warning signs for a long
time. We saw Mitch McConnell stonewall President Obama’s Supreme Court
nominee, Merrick Garland. We saw McConnell on the Senate floor early last
year, declaring that [ [link removed] ]voting rights were “socialism” and a “power grab.”
We saw House Republicans [ [link removed] ]work in lockstep to oppose all election
security legislation. We saw Republicans rely on voter suppression
nationwide in 2018 - most devastatingly, in Georgia, where Republican
Secretary of State Jack Kemp secured his own election to the Governorship
by kicking hundreds of thousands of voters, largely voters of color, off
the rolls.

The modern Republican party has decided that it can’t stay in power if it
plays by the rules. So they’re rigging the rules to win.

Does that sound radical? Don’t just take it from us. Evan McMullin, a
former senior Republican congressional staffer who now leads [ [link removed] ]Stand Up
Republic, is someone we disagree with on most social and economic issues.
But McMullin never threw his lot in with Trump - not in the 2016 primary,
not after Trump clinched the nomination, and not after Trump became
President. McMullin has a unique perspective about what’s going on right
now - and it goes far beyond Trump. Here’s what he said this week:

[ [link removed] ]A screenshot of a tweet: @EvanMcMullin Republican leaders in Congress
believe—and privately say—that they fear the country is quickly changing
in ways that may soon deprive them of power, and that they must use the
power they have now to delay it as long as possible, even by harming the
Republic if necessary.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: a healthy democratic society
would have rejected Donald Trump, the same way a healthy body fights off a
virus. What this week confirms is that our democracy is very, very ill.

What we’re reading

Before the vote on witnesses this week, we read Jill Lepore’s piece in the
New Yorker, [ [link removed] ]The Last Time Democracy Almost Died. Lepore covers the last
world-wide crisis in democracy in the 1930s. Mussolini and Hitler were
rising, young democracies were crumbling, and America was confronting its
own crisis of confidence in our democratic institutions - at a time when
inequality was soaring and large swaths of the population (read Black and
brown folks) were disenfranchised. At the time, lectures, articles and
books on the demise of democracy were everywhere.

Today, lectures, articles and books on the crisis of democracy are
everywhere again. [ [link removed] ]We published the Indivisible book in November on the
potential future of American democracy. We’re far from alone. Back in
2018, we read [ [link removed] ]How Democracies Die (guess what it’s about) and [ [link removed] ]One
Person, No Vote on the long history of disenfranchising brown and black
Americans. Six months before our book came out, Astra Taylor published
[ [link removed] ]Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone, a
philosophical exploration on the meaning of democracy. In November, Stacey
Abrams - the rightful Governor of Georgia - issued a stirring [ [link removed] ]call for
the Democratic candidates to focus on structural democracy reform. Last
month Lee Drutman published [ [link removed] ]Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, on the
dire need for major structural reforms. Last week Ezra Klein’s book
[ [link removed] ]Why We're Polarized, covered many of the themes we wrote about, and
endorsed many of the same reforms. And next month Dan Pfeiffer publishes
[ [link removed] ]Un-Trumping America, which we got an advanced copy of and you’ll want
to read if you liked our book. 

We -- all of us in the Indivisible movement -- are debating the future of
democracy in a time of crisis. But this isn’t just an intellectual debate.
If there’s one paragraph we’d like to highlight from Lepore’s piece, it’s
this:

[16]A block quote from a book that reads -The endless train of academics
were also called upon to contribute to the nation’s growing number of
periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic, arguing that at no time since the
rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged
as they are today, ran a series on The Future of Democracy, featuring
pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. Do you think that
political democracy is now on the wane? the editors asked each writer. The
series lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took
issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. I call this kind
of question meteorological, he grumbled. It is like asking, Do you think
that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella? The
trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external
forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. We need
solely to make up our own minds and to act. Don’t ask whether you need an
umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.

Indivisibles aren’t just complaining about the raging political storms.
We’re going outside to stop the rain. We’ve been working to stop the rain,
with some success, for years now.

How all this connects to defeating Trump

Political storms are raging. It’s up to us to stop the rain.

As we see it, this means a couple simple things. We have to defeat Trump.
We have to take the Senate.(1) And we have to ensure that the next
President and Congress are an affirmatively pro-democracy President and
Congress. 

That’s why we’ve spent this election season asking the candidates what
they’re going to do to save American democracy. Soon after we published
the Indivisible book last year, we released the [ [link removed] ]Indivisible Scorecard
for the presidential primary. [ [link removed] ]As we wrote in a Medium post last month,
this was a long, in-depth process. After launching the [ [link removed] ]Indivisible
Pledge (which every major candidate has signed!), we started talking with
Indivisible groups about how best to engage in the primary. At the
national gathering last summer, the idea we landed on was the candidate
Scorecard - a tool Indivisibles could use to evaluate and push the
candidates.

The Scorecard places special emphasis on democracy. What are the
candidates' plans for reforming American democracy? How clearly do they
see the problems facing us? How bold are their solutions? How high on
their priority list are these reforms?

The candidates differ in both their positions and whether they’ll commit
to prioritize democracy reform as president. Senator Warren scores highest
both overall and in this category of the Scorecard (see [ [link removed] ]detailed
metrics for all candidates here), with the most expansive vision for
democracy, and a commitment to prioritize it as president. A focus on
structural democracy reform is a natural fit with her campaign’s emphasis
on corruption. Unsurprisingly, she’s spent her time at the impeachment
trial drawing the same connections -- including this great moment when she
put Chief Justice John Roberts on the spot:

[ [link removed] ]A paused video image of John Roberts sitting in the Senate chambers

Mayor Buttigieg comes in second on democracy reform, with both a good
platform and a commitment to move first on it. Other candidates scored
further down, but still respectably. Senator Klobuchar has a less
expansive vision for democracy reform, but she’s committed to making it
her top priority. Senator Sanders and Tom Steyer both have more expansive
visions, but have prioritized other issues ahead of democracy (health care
and climate, respectively). 

The lowest scoring candidate on this metric is Vice President Biden. When
asked in a recent New York Times interview which of the big democracy
reforms proposed by other candidates he supported, he gave a simple direct
response: “[ [link removed] ]None.” We’d like to be able to tell you more about Vice
President Biden’s views on democracy reform, but we can’t, because he was
also the only major candidate to decline to respond to Indivisible’s
questionnaire at all. 

As best we can tell from Biden’s public comments, he has a pretty simple
analysis: the problem is Trump. Once we get rid of him, all will go back
to normal. Just a couple weeks ago, Vice President Biden predicted that
[ [link removed] ]Mitch McConnell would become “mildly cooperative” once Trump is gone.
All due respect, but there’s not a mildly cooperative bone in Mitch’s
body.

Now, we are ALL IN to beat Trump (remember the [ [link removed] ]Indivisible Pledge).
Beating Trump and winning the Senate is absolutely crucial to saving
democracy ([ [link removed] ]read about our plan to take back the Senate here!). But if
we’ve learned nothing else from the events of the past few days, we hope
that we’ve learned that the major problems facing our democracy go beyond
Trump. Saving our democracy will require making the kind of structural
reforms that will prevent the next Trump. 

Voting in the presidential primary kicks off tomorrow in Iowa. As you’re
evaluating candidates for your own vote, we hope you’ll ask them where
they stand on this crucial issue of democracy.

As always, we want to hear your thoughts on all of this - because debating
democracy is a key part of saving democracy. Rather than use a webform
like we’ve done before, instead we want to simplify things a bit: you can
just reply directly to this email, and we’ll spend some time this month
reading through your replies. If you could, share with us a little about
your Indivisible group, where you are, and how you’re working to stop the
rain.

In solidarity, 

Ezra & Leah

Co-Executive Directors, Indivisible

 

(1) We’ll spend the rest of this email talking about our plan to save
democracy, but if you’re interested, you can also read about the
[ [link removed] ]Payback Project, our plan to take back the Senate, and about
[ [link removed] ]Organizing Together 2020, a coalition we’ve joined focusing on winning
the presidential general election, to learn more about the
electoral-focused parts of this work.

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