Veteran journalist Albert Hunt typed up a commentary for The Hill that sums up the sorry state of our democracy in about 800 words. But it’s other people’s words that do the work.
“Not too long ago,” Hunt begins, “anyone who seriously worried about the future of democracy would have been written off as a fringe figure or paranoiac.”
Not just our democracy, but others’. In Eastern Europe, Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, and other places see authoritarianism rising, Hunt notes.
Just decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I’d add. The end of the Cold War was thought a victory for democracy and international stability. That was then. Before the Sept. 11 attacks. Before the Great Recession. Before Americans elected a black man president and, in a backlash to that, an unstable, racist, white-nationalist con man who even now plots to overturn his election loss from November 2020.
Hunt adds the United States to the list above:
Alarmingly, democracy also is under genuine assault in the United States. This grows out of Donald Trump‘s massive attempts to overturn last November’s election outcome. This is based on his claim that he actually won the election. That has been conclusively rejected in every court test and every state recount, including those crafted by Republicans.
Yet it has become sine qua non among many major Republican politicians and most of the party’s rank and file. Egged on by Trump, they are determined to do something about it wherever they control the election machinery: throw out votes they deem flawed and/or replace local election officials. Georgia and more than a dozen other Republican-led states have moved this year to more partisan oversight of elections.
Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, law school warns that the assault on the integrity of elections — specifically the belief they are “rigged” or unfair — “is the greatest political threat this country faces.”
Looking around the globe, Tony Blair says, “if several years ago someone raised the possibility of democracy declining, I would have replied, ‘For God’s sake, don’t worry, it’ll sort itself out.’” Now, he said on the Politics WarRoom podcast, “When people say to me ‘I think Western Democracy could be seriously disrupted and undermined,’ I’m no longer dismissive.”
In America, there is no more sober-minded historian than [Michael] Beschloss. He told me, pointedly, “American democracy is facing the most dangerous threats from within since the time of the Civil War.”
Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz, in an essay in Liberties Journal, writes of the “unsettling similarities” between the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol to overturn the presidential election and the events leading to the Southern secession causing the Civil War. He writes, “The secessionists committed treason by repudiating the democratic Union; but the Trump Republicans committed something akin to treason by repudiating democracy itself.”
Earlier, more than 100 scholars of the American political system signed a statement that “our entire democracy is at risk” unless Congress thwarts these anti-democratic measures. A month ago, Robert Kagan, a leading neo-conservative, wrote that due to Trump’s contempt for the democratic process, there’s “a reasonable chance over the next three or four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the county into red and blue enclaves.”
This isn’t just speculation.
Trump, his co-conspirators, and the Republican Party have repudiated democracy itself.
They plotted a coup, set up a war room (several, actually) and planned rallies intended to prevent certification of election results by Congress. They pressured state officials to ignore or overturn election results. They pressured the Department of Justice (unsuccessfully) to declare the election results corrupt. The Jan. 6 rallies they planned ended in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters that led to multiple deaths and assaults resulting in injuries to nearly 150 police officers.
Even out of office, Trump’s continues to foment unrest and spread lies that the election was stolen. He retains a cult-leader’s hold both on his party and, if nothing approaching a majority, a significant percent of the electorate. With a string of election suppression measures passed in Republican-controlled states since the election, Trump loyalists (or is it royalists?) are positioning themselves for the ascension of Trump the Second.
There are apologists who say Republican voter suppression efforts are simply efforts to revert to pre-COVID election rules and that voters usually overcome these impediments. Even some Biden advisers have said the key is just to out-organize the Republicans.
You can’t overcome obstacles or out-organize if those in charge subvert the efforts. In the next close race in Georgia, the state legislators could legally decide to award the state’s presidential electors to their guy — Trump or someone like him — despite the results.
The success of the Trump phony fraud claims is seen in Ann Selzer’s Grinnell College national poll last week. More than three-quarters of Trump supporters say American democracy is under a major threat.
They are right but for the wrong reasons.
They have met the enemy and he is them.
Hunt’s focus on Trump misses a key fact. Trump is not the source of peril to our democracy. He is its expression. Trump embodies the anti-democratic sentiments of the American right that swelled like a boil for years, only to burst on Jan. 6. Only the pressures behind Trumpism have not subsided.
The Sept. 11 attacks were a gut-kick to American exceptionalism still extant after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After decades of wage stagnation, the Great Recession threw millions of Americans overboard and, as they floundered, they watched the financial elite cruise by in their yachts. The election of Barack Obama signaled a sea change in American politics that told Trumpists-to-be that they and people like them were no longer at the top of the political pyramid, or they would not be there for much longer. Thus was born the Koch-funded T-party, the “taxed enough already” movement that was never about taxes. Trump saw his opening and took it.
Trump’s deep insecurities allowed him to tap into the social and economic insecurities of his overwhelmingly white supporters. Any democracy without them firmly and permanently in charge is not worth having, their patriotic affectations notwithstanding. Democracy is in peril because for them it was always disposable. A flag-hugging strong man will do.