Republicans are not a force of nature. They are not guided entirely by an animal libido or the herrenvolk spirit of the Real Americans. They are not a force which can only be reacted around. The Republican party is a sprawling network of formal and informal party organizations, affinity groups, think tanks, donor networks, activists, and rank-and-file members, which collectively work to develop and implement political strategies and tactics to achieve their desired ends. Does that seem too basic to say?
Republicans have been quite successful in undermining the power blocs of the Democratic party, and the Democratic party seems to have little response. The wellspring from which Democratic power flows includes unions, environmentalist organizations, and civil rights organizations, all of which Republicans routinely attack and undermine with success. This is fundamental to understanding the Republican attacks against transgender people.
As right-wing extremists, Republicans oppose the individual liberty to control one’s own body, but the attacks on transgender people also give Republicans vectors by which to attack Democratic power; Republicans use their attacks on transgender people to undermine science, to attack healthcare, to attack the right of all women to participate in society as equals, to undermine civil rights groups, to undermine the right to privacy for all Americans, and more.
The Republican obsession with transgender people should not be understood as strictly a matter of individual bigotry, but also as part of the strategy of a politically sophisticated and highly capable network making calculated decisions about how to achieve their goals and implement their vision of the world. To this end, Democratic affiliates cannot beat the Republican attacks against Democratic power by appeasing Republicans. Trying to surrender on the fates of transgender people will not stop the attacks, it will only embolden them; every capitulation that a Democratic actor views as an attempt to compromise is actually the Republicans seizing territory and reducing Democratic power. Each time Democratic actors submit to the Republican advance, that Democratic actor is playing into the erosion of their own coalition and power. There is no point at which Democrats can neutralize the political usefulness of anti-transgender politics for the Republicans through concessions, because each act of appeasement benefits the Republicans.
In thinking about the future of American democracy in general and for transgender people in particular, it is tempting to think primarily of what protections might be passed into law, or which politicians might speak on our behalf. Missing from the conversation are the considerations around how politicians and other electoral political actors might go on the offensive. We do not need to embrace authoritarianism or to empower Democratic politicians to pursue illiberal powers in order to achieve this, nor is any of this an argument advocating for violence. It is an argument for broadening our targets for political resistance with the same creativity and strategic zeal the Republicans have used to target communities and institutions that they associate with the left.
Securing our democracy and rights are necessary, and securing them also means uprooting the structures of Republican power. It means seeking to legally and socially destroy the bases of wealth, cultural cache, and political networks of the American right. We must start by recognizing that the American republic has enemies, and those enemies are not simply elected Republicans. To pick just a few examples: car dealers are an incredibly reliable and influential power bloc for Republicans, finance and real estate have become important power blocs for Republicans, the fossil fuel barons remain a cornerstone of the US right, and the patronage of tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel are massively beneficial to the Republicans.
Note that the authoritarian political influence of these segments doesn’t end with giving money to Republicans for election campaigns. The Koch Network facilitates the creation of propaganda, Elon Musk has infamously held a position in government, and SPLC designated hate group Turning Point USA is funded through a who’s who of Republican donors and networks. In order to reduce the authoritarian power of this broader Republican network, it will be necessary to both protect the people that have been targeted by Republicans, and to go on the offensive against the corrupt and power-hungry alliances that Republicans rely on.
While there are too many organizations, activists, media personalities, politicians, and patrons that make up the Republican party network to discuss how to disrupt all of them, a few examples can demonstrate the approach I’m advocating. Policy makers and legislators should be energetic and creative, for example by investigating Chambers of Commerce across the country for ties to far right extremist groups and corporate anti-democracy activists, dragging CEOs and company owners before congress every time the DOJ considers settling an anti-trust action in favor of these corporate malefactors, and doing outreach to antifascist researchers to understand the many ties between the above-ground Republican party and their submerged associations with violent right-wing terrorist groups.
When federal Democrats are in a position to pass laws again, that opportunity must be used to attack the body of Republican power on as many fronts as possible. For example, Democrats could legalize direct-to-consumer car sales across every single state and pair this with robust right-to-repair laws, rendering dealerships less necessary. They could force companies with onerous work-from-office rules to pay large penalties in order to reduce the value of corporate office leases, and pass expansive data privacy laws in order to devalue the big data extraction models of the tech oligarchs.
The Republican affiliates are tied together by how they enrich themselves through extraction and exploitation, and so by focusing on protecting their victims while cutting off their capacity to victimize, this also curtails their ability to reap the benefits of victimizing people and in turn prevents them from using those benefits to boost Republican power.
In 2004, journalist John Marshall coined “bitch-slap politics” to describe how Republicans use brazen political attacks to demonstrate dominance over Democrats when Democratic politicians choose not to fight back with their own strong rhetoric and actions. Democratic strategists and elected officials must reach for new strategies to counter these dominance games. None of this is a revenge tour. It is not about meting out punishment to the friends and allies of the opponents of the Democratic party. It is about a strategic erosion of the bases of power that are destroying the pluralistic republic of the United States.
To end the era of Republican “bitch-slap politics”, the Democratic party must embrace protecting its’ own coalition, both by confronting the attacks of the broad Republican network and by mounting an offensive against that network. A pluralistic and democratic society cannot be protected through appeasement. The Democratic Party must become a reliable partner in the American peoples’ united front against Republican authoritarianism.
Emma Arcadia (she/her) is a labor organizer and practicing anarchist. Across her various identities she likely meets most of the NSPM-7’s guidelines to be a suspect person, but you probably do too.
