The erosion of our democracy and slide toward authoritarianism was never funny. Now it is less funny (Washington Post):
The United States for the first time was added to a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report released Monday by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy 2021 report said.
The study, which analyzed trends from 2020 to 2021, found that more than a quarter of the world’s population now lives in democratically backsliding countries, which International IDEA defines as nations seeing a gradual decline in the quality of their democracy.
“The world is becoming more authoritarian as nondemocratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a ‘new normal’ of covid-19 restrictions,” the report found. “The number [of countries] moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving toward democracy.”
What to do? First, Joe Biden needs an enemy, writes Molly Jong-Fast at The Atlantic, citing political consultants and history:
“As of now the White House does not have good story tellers. Good stories need villains,” he texted me. The Democratic pollster Jefrey Pollock made a similar point, telling me, “Every good campaign needs a villain.” Pollock believes that “the president and his team understand the enemy piece,” noting that “the president has zeroed in on the corporate greed of the oil and gas companies who are trying to raise their prices for nothing more than profit.” Perhaps Biden’s wising up. If he wants to win reelection, however, he needs to shed his nice-guy persona.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the most popular presidents, dealt with numerous crises during his presidency, but he always had a foil. At first, it was the wealthy. In 1936, Roosevelt told the Democratic National Convention, “For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt went on to win 523 electoral votes, the third-biggest victory since the election of 1820, and that was several years into the Great Depression. Americans weren’t exactly living it up, but they didn’t blame the president for their troubles.
Ronald Reagan pitted his supporters against the government itself, announcing in the first line of his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This was ingenious because it allowed Reagan to avoid taking responsibility for just about everything; if his administration messed up, he could just nod along, as if to say I told you so. He went on to cut numerous social programs, including welfare for working mothers and federal mental-health funding.
Counter-majoritarian aspects of our system are “like a boa constrictor squeezing the life out of popular democracy,” Michelle Goldberg told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “If you fight for this democracy, it can be saved” needs to be the Democrats’ message if they expect to energize their base.
With the U.S. among the backslider democracies, business as usual, playing nice won’t cut it.
Republicans tell stories. Democrats cite facts and figures. In that contest, better stories always win. Those stories have heroes. To be a hero, the protagonist must defeat villains:
How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? And they’re all the same movie. So why do people keep going? Because so many Americans themselves feel like underdogs. We want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. We want to feel the thrill up our spines and in the tops of our heads when Bill Conti’s trumpet fanfare introduces the training sequence. We want to hear that. Wait for it. Cheer for it. Pay for it. Over and over and over.
For Rocky to be the good guy, Clubber Lang has to be the villain. For Biden to be a hero, someone else has to be the villain or the story won’t connect with people.
Jonathan Alter told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Tuesday night that Democrats “want their president to be a fighter.” Biden is too busy trying to be a healer to be a fighter. “Democrats have forgotten politics is a contact sport.”