With the first season of Foundation ready for streaming, psychohistorian Hari Seldon and The Mule are on my mind. During the Donald Trump administration, I likened His Would-be-Highness to The Mule, the mutant who appears on scene to disrupt Seldon’s plan to save the galaxy:
But in Foundation and Empire, a mutant known as the Mule begins conquering the planets of the Foundation. Selden’s mathematics could not predict the appearance of a single individual capable of disrupting his plan. Wikipedia describes the Mule as a “mentallic,” having the ability to “change the emotions of others, a power he used to first instill fear in the inhabitants of his conquered planets, then to make his enemies devoutly loyal to him.”
The challenge of our present Seldon Crisis is to somehow prevent our terrestrial Mule and his devoted, strapped followers from sending the United States (and Earth itself?) into a new dark age.
“Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act. But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching,” according to more than 150 top scholars of U.S. democracy in a new push to temporarily suspend the Senate filibuster and pass voting rights protections on a simple majority vote.
Democrats with no votes to spare in a 50-50 Senate already have their hands full trying to pass Biden’s Build Back Better human infrastructure plan with two rogue Democrats holding up the works. The filibuster rule the same two hold dear means it will take 60 votes for Democrats to pass the compromise Freedom to Vote Act over a Republican silent filibuster. At the very least, they must suspend the rule in this case.
If Democrats cannot pass the bill before the next election to thwart state laws passed in the wake of Trump’s Big Lie, the United States of America is in deep shit, say the scholars in more polite terms:
- “The partisan politicization of what has long been trustworthy, non-partisan administration of elections represents a clear and present threat to the future of electoral democracy in the United States.”
- Doing nothing would undermine free and fair elections and “likely result in an extended period of minority rule, which a majority of the country would reject as undemocratic and illegitimate,” the letter says.
We face this situation because a post-Civil War Congress failed to enshrine voting rights in 1890, say scholars in their letter:
Each branch of government has a role to play in protecting free and fair elections, but Congress’s responsibility looms largest. After the Civil War, when the path of American democracy was highly uncertain, Congress built the foundations of our modern democracy by passing two constitutional amendments and five pieces of legislation to protect the right of African Americans to vote. All were passed on party-line votes. But in 1890, the Senate failed to break a filibuster on a sixth piece of legislation: the Federal Elections Bill (also known as the Lodge Bill), which would have pushed back against voting rights violations in the South. The upshot of that critical vote was that southern states, in the absence of any federal supervision, were allowed to pursue the wholesale disenfranchisement of African Americans for the next 75 years. By a tiny margin in one branch of Congress, American democracy took a giant leap backwards.
(Note: At the time it was the Democratic Party that opposed voting rights. How times have changed.)
Reading between the lines, what the scholars suggest is that, should Congress fail once again to overcome this crisis of democracy, this extended period of minority rule would be Jim Crow 2.0. Except this one could extend far beyond the former Confederate states and perhaps for a second 75 years. That is, should the country survive in recognizable form that long.