Yes, Stephen Miller wants to ban the Democratic Party

First, the bad news.

Yesterday, many people seemed surprised when Karoline Leavitt gave away the game.

Yes, the Trump regime is absolutely deep into the process of working to criminalize the Democratic Party in the hope of eliminating its only viable electoral opposition.

I've known this for a while because it has been a consistent theme in Marcy Wheeler's recent videos (which are also available as a podcast) that I produce. And if you don't know it, you haven't watched those or Fox News, where Stephen Miller has been making the case that our milquestoast Democratic Party, which couldn't even get our leaders to stop praising Trump's border bill, is a "Domestic Extremist Organization" for months. That would be bad enough, but those efforts have also been paired with executive orders and investigations inspired by Glenn Beck's wettest dreams that aim to make this country a one-party state by making funding anything close to a left-wing cause a crime.

Even if you have no love for the Democratic Party, you have to recognize that its destruction is the end of any serious opposition to MAGA's domination of our country.

Some context.

The excellent "Project 1933" series from the excellent In Bed with the Right podcast has become my security blanket, where I look for signs that we are not experiencing what we're experiencing. And in many ways, the similarities between the fall of the Weimar Republic are astonishing and scary as hell. The disbelief, the way the Nazis trampled civil society with the help of the eager or silent acclamation of the elites, the snowball effect, or how their success and victimhood only drove them to further extremes.

However, I’ve found comfort in the two significant differences: a lack of the abundant street violence that preceded and accompanied the Nazis’ rise and the ability of opposition parties to operate alongside the regime.

The lack of the former depends, in my mind, on the persistence of the latter.

But no one in this regime seems to have a better grasp on how the Nazis succeeded than Stephen Miller. He's the guy behind the escalation of the regime's Secret Police, and his targeting of the Democratic Party's existence signals that he gets what are the two most significant obstacles to dictatorship: relative peace and elections.

I assume no one talks to Trump more than Miller and Leavitt. And Trump seems to have confirmed my worst fears this week when he said: "I want to thank Steven Miller, who's right back in the audience, right there. I'd love to have him…I love watching him on television. I'd love to have him come up and explain his true feelings, but maybe not his truest feelings. That might be going a little bit too far."

Now, the good news.

Because I work with Marcy, I'm briefed on the crucial legal questions behind Miller's most severe escalations: the use of the military in our cities and the invocation of the Insurrection Act. Both hit major roadblocks Thursday in a federal appeals court:

The effort to turn public opposition, specifically organized opposition, into a rebellion that the regime is allowed to crush with military force was explicitly rejected by a three-judge panel that included two Republicans, including a Republican appointee, as Marcy explained:

A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protesters advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well-organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct, of course, exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly.

Everything depends on how the Republicans on the Supreme Court see this same issue, but it's hard to think of a ruling that is more friendly to any fumes of decent "conservative" instincts left in our top court.

This ruling doesn't nullify the executive orders or investigations designed to keep any opposition to Trump out of power. Still, it offers the case we must make: opposition to the regime is constitutional, if not mandated by the Constitution.

Only solidarity.

In this video, Marcy offers what she sees as the essential ingredient of Chicago's limited success so far in holding off a military invasion: Solidarity.

Chicagoans have been in the street as patriots from all across civil society have been out protesting, witnessing, and documenting the case against a regime that's trying to start a war in America.

While our courts are still functioning somewhat, evidence matters. Evidence of regime abuses and evidence of lawful opposition aren't just essential to make the legal case against the regime.

I've hesitated to write about Miller's obvious endgame for a while. That's because I have a certain belief that we're all creating this reality. While we think we're often exposing Trump, we're mostly just spreading his propaganda. However, I haven't seen anyone precisely identify what Miller is really up to here. And I'm sure someone has and can do it better. Yet, we all have the obligation in the moment to speak truths, especially truths we don't hear enough.

Timothy Snyder has made the connection between Miller and Stalinism. And Jonathan Chait explained that "Stephen Miller is Going for Broke."

But I think we need to be explicit. Miller’s goal is a one-party state, and we're closer to that happening than at any time since the party system settled in the 19th century. And he seems to be following a playbook directly from the worst of the 20th century. That he needs to create pretenses that fail basic legal sense speaks to the persistence of our democratic structures. But that persistence is not in any way stable or promised.

It can only be lifted the way Chicago has, with its broad shoulders, through solidarity.

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