If Democrats want people to be alarmed, they have to sound the alarm – or we do

Last Thursday was one of those days when the alarm bells around democracy were ringing so loud that few could hear them.

That was the day when, for some reason, we finally found out that just before Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the United States and just after Donald Trump sent a mob to lynch his vice president and prevent that inauguration from happening, the family of Samuel Alito flew a flag upside down indicating that he supported Trump’s coup attempt.

Yet, startlingly, this wasn’t even the most alarming day for democracy this spring. 

And I’m not referencing anything Donald Trump has said or promised, including repeatedly lamenting that his supporters haven’t been able to overrun the New York City courtroom where he’s standing facing a trial for 34 counts of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree. Or one of his henchmen echoing Trump’s most glaring statement of stochastic terrorism from 2020.

The day we should have known how deep, wide, and long the peril our democracy faces truly is was April 25th.

That was when at least a third of the Supreme Court seemed to buy the argument that Donald Trump as president could drone strike his opponent as president without facing any legal consequences. And even if the majority of the court doesn’t explicitly adopt that position, the purposeful delays this Court majority has crafted over granting “cert,” likely with the fourth and deciding vote of Samuel Alito, have effectively granted Donald Trump the ability to pursue a second coup before facing any real consequences from the first. 

Given what we know about Samuel Alito and at least four Republican-appointed men on the Supreme Court, this was bound to happen, regardless of any action the Department of Justice pursued after January 6th.

One, me, might think that the response to last Thursday and April 25th would be resounding. Business leaders, editorial boards, and pop stars would scream, “No coups! No kings!” Alito would be forced to issue a statement that makes more sense than “Of course, this happened, a neighbor was mean to Mr. Trump, and thus my wife so we had to do something!”

We’ve gotten almost none of that. The New York Times broke the story, but we’re not getting any of the feverish news alerts we did over a Black university president bungling some footnotes 25 years ago. Maybe the Sunday Shows will bring this up, but they’ll get back to wondering why it’s terrible that America has a record stock market and record-low layoffs soon enough.

And there’s a simple reason the alarm won’t sound. Alarm bells don’t ring on their own.

Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch figured that out forty years ago, which is why they created Fox News as a constant alarm bell screaming, “LOOK OUT, HORNY OLD WHITE MEN! OTHER PEOPLE WANT RIGHTS!”

In my ideal world, every Democrat would have responded to the Alito revelation and the April 25th hearing with a similar statement. They would have said, “Samuel Alito and any member of the Supreme Court who believes that a Republican president is a king should resign, or the court should be expanded to make their monarchial passions irrelevant.”

This isn’t going to happen.

Structurally, there are many reasons why Democrats don’t like sounding alarms or even acknowledging that they’re ringing, except in the subject lines of fundraising emails. I could write 10,000 words on the dynamics that put the left at a disadvantage in America, and few on the left would agree with my formulation because that’s one of the reasons why Democrats don’t sound alarms.

And let me grant that Joe Biden did sound the alarm in 2022 in a perfectly timed speech in Philadelphia. His State of the Union, his best moment of 2024 so far, spoke to that same warning. And he will certainly again. Likely, an array of Democratic Party Avengers will join him around the Democratic Party Convention. 

But will that message break through over what is likely to be a contentious convention surrounded by protests, especially since we now know for a fact that there is a concerted effort by monied forcest to violently repress these protests, which is likely an attempt to draw more negative attention to them as a way of undermining any policy change in Gaza? 

Who knows? That’s the problem with strategic alarm bells. There’s so much potential madness between today and Election Day that the only sound prediction is that sure predictions are useless. And attempting to shift the strategy of the entire Democratic Party probably won’t happen, even with an exceptionally well-crafted blog post.

That’s why we at earlyworm have decided to focus on the doable.

We know that as daunting as the risks for democracy are, the opportunities are clear. Democrats can flip Arizona. Democrats can break the Republican lock on Wisconsin’s legislature, which has been enforced by gerrymandering for over a decade. We can reverse the anti-democratic tide in North Carolina, where Donald Trump barely won in 2020.

We have a tool that allows us to be the blaring alarm bells we wish to see in the world. It’s called Giving Circles through The States Project. We’re doing one to try to Flip Arizona, and we invite you to join us or start your own. Giving Circles are the best way to make it clear to those we can influence the most that we're alarmed, motivated, and focused.

 And, of course, the people who’ve already figured out that this is the tool to try to fight back against the massive forces aligned against democracy, as CNN reported this week:

That dominance of women in the States Project’s giving circles — they are 82% of leaders and 75% of donors — is revealing when and how women choose to make political donations. And it reflects the heightened salience with which liberal-leaning voters, particularly women, are seeing state races, especially after Donald Trump’s presidency and the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

When it comes to traditional campaign contributions, women still lag behind men. Women were about 45% of donors to state House and Senate general election campaigns between 2019 and 2022, according to research from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University (CAWP). Their representation is even lower as a percentage when looking at the total contributions to state House and Senate races; about 30% came from women, demonstrating how they often give in smaller amounts compared with men.

By contrast, 72% of the money raised through the States Project’s giving circles between 2020 and 2023 came from women.

Making fundraising more social, easier, and relevant for those who can do it is the secret weapon that could save democracy. Women are doing that, so we’re trying to follow in their wake.

This sounds like an oddly soppy way to end what is truly meant to be a strident call to action. But I hope what I’m trying to say is clear. 

We have to be the alarm bells we wish to hear. And we must be sounding as the vast majority of voters who haven’t truly begun to contemplate this election begin to tune in. And you probably already get that because you’re an earlyworm. But we will keep reminding people what we can do about this. Because that’s what people need to know as soon they realize that the alarm is not ringing at them but for them.