Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about “The Odyssey.” Yes, I know that you’re probably tired of reading the many, many takes on the most popular movie in the world right now, but I was fascinated by the moral framework of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation:
Without saying one word about modern politics, Christopher Nolan has rebuked the spirit of the age. His retelling of the “Odyssey” is an admonition: Moral transgressions always carry a consequence.
His version of Odysseus is a haunted man. After 10 years of war and 10 long years of suffering on the journey home, he seems broken. He can be ruthless. He can be vicious. But he is also suffering from a profound moral injury; only confession and penance provide pathways to peace.
One of the most vivid promotional posters for Nolan’s film features the broken, severed head from a statue of Athena and the exact quote I began with: “Defy the Gods.”
Combine that quote and that image, and it looks like an exhortation. Go ahead, Odysseus, defy the gods. Tear down their statues. Break their laws. Based on that alone, you’d expect a movie about a proud man standing up to irrational and capricious divine authority.
But that’s the opposite of what transpires. Yes, the severed head of Athena matters to the story, as does Odysseus’ defiance, but there is nothing good or laudatory about it.
My Saturday round table with my colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle focused on Trump’s new Red Scare. Will calling Democrats communists save the Republican Party from a midterm wipeout? How worried should mainstream Democrats be about the Democratic Socialists of America?
If I’m a Democrat, I’m not necessarily loving the D.S.A. that much, because it will often feel as if the D.S.A. is not so much focused on defeating Republicans as it is focused on defeating establishment Democrats. Which is a very similar dynamic that you saw unfold in the Tea Party side of the Republican Party, where really, if you wanted to get a hard-core Tea Party person agitated, absolutely say the name “Barack Obama.”
They did not like Obama. But I tell you, you would see almost equal anger when you’d use the name Mitch McConnell. And so, when you have these factional fights in a larger, bigger movement — and one faction seems to be concerned primarily with taking control of the movement, more so than essentially defeating the actual political opposition — I think that’s a real issue for Democrats right now.
And the bottom line is, I know the D.S.A. has different factions, and you can’t call them all Marxists. You can’t call them all socialists, truly. But there is some real extremism within the D.S.A. — some real extremism that is, in some cases, very ugly extremism. And so, I think I completely take the point that an actual Red Scare is ludicrous. It is also true that there are actual real extremists, who actually are not all that excited about defeating Republicans compared to destroying the Democratic establishment, and I think that’s a problem.
Finally, my newsletter last week, which outlined a possible MAGA legal argument to steal the midterms, generated an enormous amount of feedback — some of it genuinely alarmed and some of it skeptical.
The best skeptical comment came from Ned Foley at the Election Law Blog. He took issue with my concern that the outgoing House could refuse to seat any incoming members against whom an election contest was filed. That’s not possible, he argues, because the current Congress has no power to determine who is seated in the next Congress.
As a technical legal matter, I agree with Foley, but as I said in my newsletter, I am not arguing that my approach would be legally sound: “Remember 2020 — the point isn’t to be legally sound, but rather to create a legal pretext. MAGA is just as happy to abuse a law as it is to use a law, and a congressional election contest of this kind is extraordinarily vulnerable to abuse.”
The goal, like it was in 2020 and 2021, would be to persuade political actors that they have a legal basis for overturning the election and then dare the courts to stop them. And in this case, the Federal Contested Elections Act can permit a challenge to an election to commence in the old Congress, before the new Congress is sworn in.
We need to prepare for the bad legal arguments with the same rigor that we prepare for the good ones — especially when bad legal arguments could help break our Republic.
