Democracy is as hard as it is unnatural. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin once said, perhaps aware the results of the political experiment the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had begun were TBD (in less elegant parlance). That imperfect union 233 years later remains imperfect for all its striving on behalf of some and stonewalling by others to keep the privileges of citizenship to themselves.
Zara Anishanslin, an associate professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware, wrote last year that history leaves out who asked the question to which Franklin’s pithy quote was a reply.
Elizabeth Willing Powel was “a pivotal woman of the founding era who has been erased from this story.” Born to a wealthy and politically connected Philadelphia family, she rather than her husband was recognized as the political brains of the family. The anecdote’s omission, Anishanslin believes, contributes to a history largely devoid of woman and “also makes it harder to imagine contemporary women such as Pelosi — or Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — as political leaders.”
Not just women, but nonwhite citizens of of every color, religion, origin, and political opinion remain marginalized to this day. And the poor.
Adam Gopnik wonders how this democratic republic endures at all (at The New Yorker):
America itself has never had a particularly settled commitment to democratic, rational government. At a high point of national prosperity, long before manufacturing fell away or economic anxiety gripped the Middle West—in an era when “silos” referred only to grain or missiles and information came from three sober networks, and when fewer flew over flyover country—a similar set of paranoid beliefs filled American minds and came perilously close to taking power.
Authoritarianism is easy, Gopnik suggests, citing Franklin’s quip. Democracy is hard. It was a time of economic plenty and yet spawned Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and suspicions that Eisenhower and Kennedy were somehow pawns of international Communism. The Deep South and Arizona voted solidly for Barry Goldwater. His humiliating loss launched the conservative movement that a decade and a half later gave the world Ronald Reagan, then George W. Bush, and now Donald J. Trump.
Goldwater’s ghostwriter Brent Bozell found Franco’s post-Fascist Spain an improvement on American decadence, Gopnik continues. Trump and his movement tolerate or even admire the authoritarian regimes of Putin and Orbán.
The interesting question is not what causes autocracy (not to mention the conspiratorial thinking that feeds it) but what has ever suspended it. We constantly create post-hoc explanations for the ascent of the irrational. The Weimar inflation caused the rise of Hitler, we say; the impoverishment of Tsarism caused the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, the inflation was over in Germany long before Hitler rose, and Lenin came to power not in anything that resembled a revolution—which had happened already under the leadership of far more pluralistic politicians—but in a coup d’état by a militant minority. Force of personality, opportunity, sheer accident: these were much more decisive than some neat formula of suffering in, autocracy out.
Donald Trump came to power not because of an overwhelming wave of popular sentiment—he lost his two elections by a cumulative ten million votes—but because of an orphaned electoral system left on our doorstep by an exhausted Constitutional Convention. It’s true that our diagnoses, however dubious as explanations, still point to real maladies. Certainly there are all sorts of reasons for reducing economic inequality. But Trump’s power was not rooted in economic interests, and his approval rating among his followers was the same when things were going well as it is now, when they’re going badly. Then, too, some of the blandest occupants of the Oval Office were lofted there during previous peaks of inequality.
Maintaining inequality for a privileged few was a byproduct of the country’s founding despite aspirations of the founders for something better, in theory if not in practice.
When southern Democrats abandoned a hundred years of Jim Crow and sought to expand the franchise and equal treatment to Black citizens, Republicans took up the cause of revanchism. They have since the New Deal stood athwart democracy, yelling Stop. Their leadership periodically commits Kinsley gaffes, publicly admitting that limiting access to the ballot box is one goal of their politics. Election suppression is by now written into the party’s DNA.
Now with conspiracy theories and their variants spreading as readily as the coronavirus, authoritarian policies enjoy renewed currency. Donald Trump’s paranoia has given Republican election suppression a shot in the arm. He was “the best thing that could ever have happened to them.” Trump may have no proof of election tampering, but lack of proof has never hampered America’s paranoid style. Sixty failed lawsuits are simply fertilizer, growth medium.
The New York Times:
The false notions have lived on in Mr. Trump’s Twitter and Facebook feeds; on the television programming of Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network; and in statehouse hearings where Republican leaders have contemplated more restrictive voting laws based on the rejected allegations.
In Georgia, Republican legislators have already discussed toughening the state’s rules on voting by mail and on voter identification. In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers are considering reversing moves that had made it easier to vote absentee, and their counterparts in Wisconsin are similarly considering tighter restrictions for mail voting, as well as for early voting.
If anything, President Trump has given the movement to limit ballot access new momentum while becoming the singular, charismatic leader it never had.
After declaring outright that high levels of voting are bad for Republicans, he persuaded his base that the election system is rotten with fraud, and to view that fiction as a bedrock party principle. Several recent polls have shown that majorities of Republicans think the election was fraudulent, even as election officials across the country report that it went surprisingly smoothly even in a pandemic, with exceptionally high turnout and no evidence of fraud aside from the usual smattering of lone wolf bad actors or mistakes by well-intentioned voters.
What the Trump years have taught those naive enough to still believe in the aspirations of the founders is that democracy is hard. As Gopnik suggests, “The rule of law, the protection of rights, and the procedures of civil governance are not fixed foundations, shaken by events, but practices and habits, constantly threatened, frequently renewable.”
And at the end of four years of Trump … exhausting. Just not as exhausting as succumbing to the authoritarian alternative.
Update: Misspelled the gentleman’s name throughout! Fixed it. (h/t/ TL)
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