Republicans have long puffed out their chests believing that the U-S of A is superior to those countries. “Socialist” places such as Denmark or Sweden. Former Eastern Bloc places such as Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. What those places share and what Republicans hope to replicate here is minority rule.
David Frum likely was not the first to predict that “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That was January 2018. The conservative long march toward minority rule continues apace. Unlike Roosevelt University political scientist David Faris (“It’s Time to Fight Dirty”), Frum does not think Democrats are complacent about the danger” because Biden’s approval ratings are good.” Their challenge is what to do about it.
Frum writes today in The Atlantic that the problem for Democrats in stopping that slide is the very diversity they celebrate. The Trumpified Republican Party is now a narrow block (or bloc, if you will) dedicated to stopping anything Democrats want. “A disparate majority loosely committed to diverging goals,” Frum writes, “will have difficulty imposing its will on a cohesive minority strongly committed to a singular goal.”
True, that. So what’s a Democrat to do? Frum sees a few options with differing risk/reward calculations:
The first path is for congressional leaders to rewrite the reform bills fast to please pro-Biden moderates and Black incumbents—and then to cram the modified bills through the House and Senate. That would require cajoling and appeasing pro-filibuster Senate Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, which in turn implies disappointing activist Democrats outside Congress.
Failing that, the second approach requires Democrats to engage in a radical rethinking of their reaction to voter suppression in Republican states. Remember, they still have some federal laws on their side. The U.S. Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, but it did not kill it. The Obama administration’s Justice Department won voting-rights cases in North Carolina before the 2016 election. Taking decisive action to fill the 80-odd federal judicial vacancies with pro-voting judges followed by turbocharging enforcement efforts at the Department of Justice may seem only second-best compared with new legislation. But if new legislation cannot be enacted, then second-best will have to do.
And maybe executive and judicial action need not be so second-best as all that. Federal civil-rights action can deter states even before its final adjudication. Republican state politicians may be ruthless in their pursuit of partisan advantage, but they are not the only power centers in their states. As the battle over voting rights in Georgia demonstrated, business interests can be mobilized against overt racial discrimination.
Public stands Cisco Systems, Coca Cola, Delta Airlines, and Major League Baseball took against the GOP putsch in Georgia did not stop the election suppression legislation, but may have “altered the incentives of business elites in other states contemplating a Georgia path.”
During the Obama-era health care debates, progressives wanting universal health care or at least a public option sneered at centrists such as Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina who were prepared to compromise with Republicans to get “half a loaf.” Frum’s suggestion that pissing off Democratic activists by postponing their wish list until Democrats have passed legislation to save democracy may not be betrayal so much as triage. Sometimes bad choices are the only ones available. That’s not betrayal, that’s life.
But Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema need to wake up and smell the authoritarianism. The insitution they wish to preserve won’t be helped if their blindness helps Republicans in completing their project to demolish the republic.