The national Democratic party has been running ads with the aim of goading the MAGA base to vote for Republican primary candidates who are endorsed by Trump and hold extremist views. One such ad was run in Maryland by the Democratic Governors Association (the “DGA”) about mega MAGA Dan Cox, the victorious candidate in the Maryland Republican gubernatorial primary.
The question is whether this tactic is morally justifiable. I recently quoted MLK “…it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.”
Dan Cox is as MAGA as they come and is thought to be unelectable in a Blue state like Maryland. Larry Hogan, the term-limited, popular, outgoing moderate Republican governor had endorsed a moderate Republican who’d served in his administration. Upon Dan Cox’s victory, Hogan immediately refused to endorse him. Further, Hogan was quoted as saying, “I called him [Cox] a QAnon whack job. I don't think he has any business being the nominee and he has no chance to win the [general election] race whatsoever."
Here is the 30 second ad that the DGA ran on behalf of Dan Cox.
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/bJBj/dga-action-meet-dan-cox
If you watch the ad, you’ll see there is no endorsement of Cox. Rather, the ad pushes all the obvious MAGA buttons: Cox’s devotion to Trump, Cox’s full-on buy-in of “stop the steal,” and Cox’s extreme views on abortion and guns. The ad concludes that Cox is too close to Trump and too conservative for Maryland. And the ad makes clear that it was a product of the Democratic national party.
I’m sure it was effective at riling up the Trump base. Whether it also encouraged moderate Republicans to cast a vote opposing Cox is hard to say.
This weekend, the WSJ ran a column by (a furious) Larry Hogan denouncing the Democratic ad tactic. The headline of Hogan’s column1 was “In Maryland, Democrats Traduce Democracy.”
Hogan makes two arguments to support his accusation, one of means and one of intermediate ends. The tactic of manipulating the Maryland Republican voter base was cynical, impure, and inflicted yet another injury to our already ethically damaged politics. The immediate effect of the ad was even worse: nominating a candidate who will now have a greater opportunity to pollute the political landscape with MAGA lies.
As to Hogan’s argument about means, I think Hogan gives both too much and too little credit to the Republicans of his state. Too much credit to think that, prior to the DGA ad, the base wasn’t already thoroughly infected by the MAGA fever. Not enough credit to assume that they are puppets easily manipulated and tricked. I suspect that the Republican primary voters for Cox knew exactly what they were doing and made a calculation that sending a message to moderate Republicans like Hogan (“RINOs,” Republican In Name Only) was more important than winning the election. This makes me question whether the DGA ad was decisive.
As for the effect, it’s a complicated calculus. Assuming that Cox is indeed defeated by an embarrassingly large margin, as most political analysts expect, that would be a useful political repudiation of Trump and MAGA. On the other hand, it is decidedly bad that Cox will be able to continue to spew his political pollution during the general election.
An historical analogy comes to mind. In 1917, during WW1, the Germans arranged for Vladimir Lenin to have safe transport to St. Petersburg, guessing correctly that he would cause great political annoyance to their Russian enemy.
Churchill called the fiery, ruthless Communist Lenin “the most grisly of weapons,” and compared Germany’s insertion of Lenin into Russia like letting loose a “plague bacillus.”
This novel tactic succeeded beyond Germany’s wildest hopes. Lenin and his comrades sparked the Russian Revolution. Soon, Russia withdrew from the war. This enabled Germany to focus its armed forces on the front in France and to take another credible shot at winning the war.
My (admittedly stretched) analogy to 2022 Maryland is flattering to no one. The DGA is Wilhelmine Germany, using Cox, playing the role of a third-rate Lenin, to upset the regime of Hogan and the other moderate Maryland Republicans who represent the status quo of Czarist Russia. Similar to the poor Russian people, the Republican MAGA voter base can be seen as being misled, the former by false promises of a workers’ paradise, the latter by pick-your-favorite MAGA-lie.
Bottom line, is Hogan right? Did the DGA “traduce” democracy?
If the answer is yes, then one would have to believe that many practices of both political parties betray democracy. Gerrymandering is the glaringly obvious bipartisan example; it effectively disenfranchises a tremendous number of voters.
In the current political context what the DGA did seems entirely, and regrettably, consistent. Gerrymandering happens when one party can take advantage of the other party’s political weakness in a particular state. The DGA took advantage of the vulnerability of the Maryland Republican party, inherent in its MAGA base.
But neither the practice of gerrymandering nor tweaking the other party’s most extreme wing sits well with me. I cannot defend the DGA tactic. I believe it does do damage to our democracy. So, I agree with Hogan (although “traduce,”2 used in the headline of his column may be an overly harsh, overwrought word.)
I can’t be selective about endorsing questionable means, just because the specific and ultimate end is something I’m convinced is an absolute blessing.
And now a confession of my bias: I’ve known Wes Moore, the winning Democratic nominee for Maryland governor, very well for quite some time. And knowing Wes as I do, I believe his sincerity, kindness, charisma, energy, and intelligence, with each aspect of his character matched by his wife Dawn, would carry him through to victory in November, regardless of who he faced. More importantly, these traits will make Wes and Dawn a superb Governor and First Lady of Maryland.
Smart column by moderate Republican Hogan. He gets to blast the national Democratic party to his left and Trump/MAGA to his right in one fell swoop.
I suspect a Kafka fan at work as the rare word “traduced” is most famously used in translations of the first sentence of Kafka’s novel “The Trial.” Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
I think it's larger than that. It's not a Maryland phenomenon, but a national one. And the sheer cynicism of such ads is both reflective of and a contributor to our angry and divided body politic. These ads are tribalism at its worst and a further abandonment of the center that absolutely must hold if the flawed but extraordinary republic with which we are blessed is to survive. I'm grateful that people like the Moores, who understand and share my concerns for our country, have emerged from the mire. We need them and we need more like them.