Your freedoms depend on it
Virginians in the lead up to the American Revolution, wrote Edmund Morgan, “may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.” Meaning they were slavemasters.
Freedom and subjugation are bound together deep in the American psyche, Jamelle Bouie observes. And woven into our founding documents:
This duality is present in our federal Constitution, which proclaims republican liberty at the same time that it has enabled the brutal subjugation of entire peoples within the United States. The Constitution both inspired the democratic vistas of radical antislavery politicians and backstopped the antebellum dream of a transcontinental slave empire.
Move a little closer to the present and you can see clearly how American democracy and American autocracy have existed side by side, with the latter just another feature of our political order. If we date the beginning of Jim Crow to the 1890s — when white Southern politicians began to mandate racial separation and when the Supreme Court affirmed it — then close to three generations of American elites lived with and largely accepted the existence of a political system that made a mockery of American ideals of self-government and the rule of law.
Bouie’s point is that it takes only a small shift in perspective to go from viewing the nation through a democratic lens to an authoritarian one. For most of our history, he cautions:
… America’s democratic institutions and procedures and ideals existed alongside forms of exclusion, domination and authoritarianism. Although we’ve taken real strides toward making this a less hierarchical country, with a more representative government, there is no iron law of history that says that progress will continue unabated or that the authoritarian tradition in American politics won’t reassert itself.
Just as white Christians reconciled their “love thy neighbor” faith with enforcing Jim Crow — through lynching, if necessary — Americans, when it suits them, possess a demonstrated knack for rationalizing autocracy with their belief that this is a “free” country. Thus do violent Jan. 6 insurrectionists who fought police for hours perceive themselves patriots who “back the blue,” who excuse lawbreaking by members of their political tribe, and who accuse Democrats of “defunding” the police while they themselves advocate abolishing the FBI.
Americans elide the contradictions. There is no reason to believe elites as in control as those Virginia colonists will not once again, Bouie cautions, “accommodate themselves to the absence of democracy for many of their fellow Americans.”
With the demise of the Voting Rights Act, Roe and other Civil Rights era expansions of freedoms to a wider array of citizens, we are witnessing that shift in real time.
Bouie concludes:
As we look to a November in which a number of vocal election deniers are poised to win powerful positions in key swing states, I think that the great degree to which authoritarianism is tied up in the American experience — and the extent to which we’ve been trained not to see it, in accordance with our national myths and sense of exceptionalism — makes it difficult for many Americans to really believe that democracy as we know it could be in serious danger.
In other words, too many Americans still think it can’t happen here, when the truth is that it already has and may well again.
Here is a taste of what that looks like.
Across the aisle, they might say “Wake up, Uhmerca!” I’ll just say, please, please, go vote.
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