Your right to vote: Use it or lose it
Antidemocratic actions in Republican-led legislatures. Militias gearing up for a second civil war (and staging to go weapons-hot on Jan. 6). Donald Trump echoing the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini. An economy and an ecology that’s left younger Americans with grimmer prospects than their parents’. Is it any wonder many younger Americans lack enthusiasm for a gridlocked politics that has not served them well?
Winston Churchill said (but did not originate the phrasing):
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.
Readers know too well that a sizable faction on the “patriotic” right has abandoned democracy for a dalliance with autocracy if not outright dictatorship. If younger Americans join them, if not in MAGAstan then in apathy, we are, to put it plainly, in deep shit.
Karen Tumulty writes (Washington Post):
Over the past few decades, there has been “a small but steady erosion of support” for the ideal of democracy, not only in the United States but also around the world, says Eric Plutzer, the political scientist who directs the Mood of the Nation Poll for Penn State University’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy.
The latest survey, taken in November 2022 and published in January, found that 78 percent of those surveyed said democracy is “the best political system in all circumstances.” But among the Gen Z cohort, ages 18 to 25, nearly half answered either that it “makes no difference” whether they live under a democracy or a dictatorship (28 percent) or that “dictatorship could be good in certain circumstances” (19 percent). More than a third of millennials, ages 26 to 41, agreed with one of those statements.
Plutzer notes that this comports with polls that have asked similar questions, going back to the 1990s. “Young people have always been less enthusiastic about democracy,” he said. “But the generation gap has really exploded.”
That’s not to say there are no young bright spots: Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Tennessee Democratic state Reps. Justins Jones and Pearson, David Hogg (Leaders We Deserve), and my N.C. state chair Anderson Clayton. But if, as Jay Rosen insists, we must make clear not the odds but the stakes in the next election, we’d best be about making them unmissable.
A Biden campaign official said the president’s team understands that democracy becomes a potent issue only when voters understand it in the context of having their rights taken away, as has already happened with abortion, thanks to the Trump-appointed justices on the Supreme Court.
“It’s an exercise in storytelling,” he told me. “The tragedy about the abortion issue is there really are a lot of sad stories to tell.”
Trump is also telling a story. He could hardly be clearer about what he will try to do, if given the opportunity. Democracy might be looking pretty ragged these days, but Americans should take seriously their responsibility to preserve what’s left of it.
Speaking of seeing your rights taken away, Molly Jong-Fast sees a nightmare unfolding in the wake of the Dobbs decision. She thought it could be bad. It’s worse and unmissable:
For millions of women, it’s more dangerous to be pregnant in post-Roe America, and there have been countless stories of doctors refusing to treat women who are miscarrying in Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Texas, which was recently back in the news under particularly awful circumstances. The plight of Kate Cox, a Dallas-area mother of two, again highlighted the seemingly intentional vagueness of abortion-ban exceptions. Cox would appear to be an ideal candidate for an exception given that her 20-week-old fetus was diagnosed with trisomy 18, a defect which has roughly a 95% fetal death rate. She also already had two C-sections, and having more such surgeries could endanger the mother’s life.
With three overlapping abortion bans in Texas, according to NPR, the procedure “is illegal in the state from the moment pregnancy begins” and doctors can only legally “provide abortions in the state only if a patient is ‘in danger of death or a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.’” While “doctors, hospitals and lawyers have asked for clarity on what ‘serious risk’ of a major bodily function entails,” notes NPR, “the Texas attorney general’s office has held that the language is clear.” Republican attorney general Ken Paxton, the villain of this story (and others), reminded doctors that a lower court ruling saying Cox could have an exception to the draconian law “will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws.”
“Everything we worried about, every worst-case scenario, is happening right before our eyes,” she writes. “For years I was told I was being a Cassandra about the danger to women of a post-Roe America but if anything, the reality is even bleaker than I imagined.”
Let’s do more than hope that reality sinks in with disillusioned younger voters sooner than the start of voting next fall. Let’s let them know. If they vote in numbers that match theirs, they can run this place. If they don’t, this place will run them.
Happy Hollandaise to all y’all!