More Pritzker, Less Newsom

We’ve been waiting for the Democrats since the inauguration, when we received “just wait” instructions from James Carville, a player-coach who got a base hit 33 years ago. We have been told, hold on, the latest Trump crime is a distraction from the last one, which was itself a distraction. We have read sternly worded letters, sent by bottle, via the Atlantic, to the land of Who Cares. Tired of waiting, some people jumped the gun and started running toward California Gov. “What If Gordon Gekko Was From the Bay Area?” Then, this week, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker did the thing we’ve been waiting for: He said that Donald Trump was lying and breaking the law. He didn’t say he had a point or beg to meet him halfway; he told him no.

Addressing the media on Wednesday, Pritzker rejected Trump’s looming National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement invasion of Illinois. “When did we become a country where it’s OK for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything, especially something we don’t want?” he asked. And he went on to ask the question that should have freed a self-shackled media: “Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question: Once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?” 

That Pritzker’s resolve did not immediately work is not his fault. Fortifications rarely collapse after one shot, and if we spent eight months waiting on nothing, we have time to wait on the right thing. For now, the lesson is clear: In a world of Schumers and Jeffrieses, in a world of Newsoms even, be like The Great Khan.

That penultimate name might come as a surprise to Democrats yearning for someone to do anything. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has internalized the lesson of fascism that the appearance of doing something is often the public opinion equivalent of actually doing something, and his vow to break Democrats’ long-term commitment to insulating Republicans from the consequences of their own actions — by gerrymandering California to counterbalance Republican gerrymandering of Texas — is welcome and overdue.

But, much to the dismay of the real folks among his online base of support — and there’s no other way to put this than to describe a chunk of that support as, uh, automated — the praise due Newsom equally describes where he comes up short. His online trolling of Trump is spot on, and it surely must enrage the wet, old, sundowning fraud. But while faithful mimicry makes a good shitpost, it’s dogshit policy. Especially so if the parody is always on point while the rest of your message appears intermittent or negotiable.

First, poison isn’t its own antidote, so America doesn’t need more Trumpese in the monitors. Second, if your goal is to sound like “Trump, but with a ‘nuh-uh’ added,” that leaves everything you believe in — Newsom’s nemesis — out in the rain. Third, neither the winning nor the civically healthy message for defeating Trump is, “I sound just like him!” You can’t translate it to actual governance, for one, which is the thing you’re selling. What can Newsom do with the gag other than spend four years telling us what Trump would be doing, like an electoral version of that Modern Seinfeld Twitter account posting, “George breaks up with his girlfriend rather than say ‘bae.’ Jerry has a sociopath’s reaction to a cronut.”

Last and most importantly: Mimicry doesn’t write its own story, set its own terms or frame its own debates. An echo never precedes its speaker. The opponent’s speech and identity still take pride of place, and a parody that follows the form of its target is a message that never offers an independent advocacy of its own position. On his best day, the millennial Gavin Newsom hired to post for him still sounds like yesterday, and the best he can finish is second place in a format that’s like listening to one half of a phone call.

It wouldn’t be much of a problem if it weren’t already Newsom’s biggest problem. At a time when Democrats are crying out for a Democratic leader who doesn’t seem ashamed or afraid of either word in that title, Newsom’s been platforming Nazis and Trump fellow travelers on his podcast, conceding their premises and getting trucked by stuff that should have been covered by the staff briefing handed to him on the way to the studio. Inexcusably, he’s used that time to signal an openness to hiving off the civil rights of a part of the Democratic coalition to defeat an ideology about hiving off the civil rights of demonized outgroups. And the next time you spill ketchup on your shirt, try getting it out with a jar of marinara. Toxic reactionary centrism with a layer of meme slapped on it is still toxic reactionary centrism, and ceding power to your enemy “ironically” is just surrender in Impact font.

It’s been refreshing then, these last seven months, to see JB Pritzker acting like a man who takes his own side in an argument and at least some of the time clearly thinks you’re an asshole for having your own. And it was especially refreshing Wednesday to witness Pritzker assign the media both the permission and the task of interrogating the limits and goals of facially mendacious militarized autocracy. Not that it worked in a strictly media sense. Hours after a governor from Illinois accused the president of the United States of lying, demonstrated that he was lying and correctly cited that he was preparing an unconstitutional use of force against American citizens — a story about something that sounds an awful lot like potentially a civil war and certainly like a reverse image of the Civil Rights Movement — you could still find no trace of it on the home pages of CNN, the New York Times or the Washington Post.

He is only one person. While the threat of losing on TV or being effectively countered seems to have scared Trump into shifting everyone’s attention to New Orleans, Pritzker must still break through a habit of mind belonging to both most of the media and the Democratic Party. Namely, that you can somehow meaningfully effect changes to reality with a message that resembles a lie chasing a truth in a doomed loop: that the Republican Party’s abuses have fundamentally violated American democracy and destabilized conventional governance, and at the same time there exists a suite of untrammeled reigning norms, which we should sooner blind or chain ourselves to defend than question whether it has a meaningful relationship to reality anymore at all. The establishment mindset has been calcifying for 40 years in a warm bath of Reagan-era bromides; no matter how much acid you pour into the discourse, it’s going to take a while to dissolve.

Still, it’s good to see Pritzker unashamed to refute Donald Trump’s case with statistics and humanity and to represent his values and what should be his party’s. It was good to see him on Wednesday highlighting the solidarity of Chicago’s community groups and describing how it is communities and not their occupiers who protect their citizens. And it was good to again see him unafraid to make a positive case for his own position, and assume the role of leadership that conservatives arrogate to themselves by default: That he has a responsibility to protect his people, and he will not shrink from naming the threat, even if it’s the president of the United States. 

Changing decades of habits among Democrats and the media will take repetition. The default frame of mind says that conservatives set the daily topics of the national debate, and no idea becomes grown-up enough to talk about until a Republican thinks he invented it. The process will accelerate the more Democratic voices sound like the Great Khan, from street level to Capitol Hill, and mercifully he seems to realize this.

While Pritzker is smart enough to know that neither the media nor the Democratic leadership has any current inclination to come to his aid, what he is telling them in addresses like this is, “You have permission.” You can express these ideas in public. You can use taboo truthful words and slip them past self-censorship in quotation marks. You have the right to decide that this is the most important thing to think about today, because there is a second half of the dialogue you have been assuming and dismissing, a real world of real people confronting real threats with the sinews of real community — not a think tank menagerie of Sim Real Americans and Sim Cultural Marxists witlessly bumping into each other and trading outraged fill-in-the-blank “!” replies forever.

He spoke to that second half of the dialogue in his address too. Pritzker told the citizens of Chicago to take heart, to know “authoritarians thrive on your silence” and asking them — as some ICE meathead whose psych exam lights up like a Christmas tree barrels down a street where children play this weekend — to bear witness and “be loud for America.” Voices like theirs, after all, will drive America’s second reconstruction, whenever the tools become available. For now we can hope that their voices and Pritzker’s and others are enough — from the green room, to the donor call, to the charity gala and the ideas festival — to finally make the real world come true. With any luck, with enough time left to save it.