November 29, 2018
As an American who is concerned about the future of democracy in our country, I am relieved that the Democrats took control of the US House of Representatives and made significant gains at the state and local level.
Despite the progress it represents, this election does not mean democracy and rule of law are no longer in danger. The extremely close elections in Georgia and Florida do not bode well for democracy. Voter suppression efforts in these states disenfranchised certain classes of citizens and reduced turnout. But voter suppression worked in these states – the Republicans won by a small margin. But they must be running scared after such close calls, despite their best efforts to game the system. Watch out in 2020! We will likely see Republicans engage in even more extreme tactics to ensure they win. Voter suppression is only one way to undermine democracy. There are other, perhaps more insidious tactics, such as spreading disinformation and lies, scaring people into voting a certain way or not voting at all.
These tactics are nothing new. Karl Rove, President Bush’s political mastermind is famous for allegedly saying his dream was to create a permanent Republican majority in the United States. According to Paul Abrams in a 2007 Huffington Post article, his real ambitions might have been slightly more modest. “There are no permanent majorities in American politics,” he once told Tim Russert. “They last for about 20 or 30 or 40 or, in the case of the Roosevelt coalition, 50 or 60 years, and then they disappear.” But he certainly worked towards a durable conservative bloc that would dominate national elections decades into the future. He advocated tactics such as voter suppression amongst likely Democratic voters and scare tactics to rile up conservatives to make sure they voted.
Despite his aggressive tactics, I don’t think Karl Rove was out to destroy our democracy and the norms and laws that allow it to function. He just wanted to win and didn’t mind a little cheating to get there. I wish I could say that about the leaders of today’s Republican party. They aren’t just out to win, they are out to destroy the opposition. For example, blatant lies and conspiracies targeting Democrats promoted by Infowars, Breitbart, and Fox News are the main source of news for significant numbers of conservatives and these stories often sway others who feel victimized by minorities, immigrants and a “global elite”.
Perhaps more worrisome, they are making strides in taking over the judicial branch. In 2014 the conservative-majority Supreme Court overturned the 1965 voting rights act, which paved the way for eight of the fifteen states covered by the act to pass extreme measures to suppress the votes of citizens who were likely to vote for Democrats. Thanks to Mitch McConnel’s refusal to even allow a hearing for President Obama’s supreme court nominee, Donald Trump and the Republican senate were able to ramrod two supreme court justices, one of whom, Brett Kavanaugh, seems highly partisan and is widely mistrusted. This severely undermines the judicial branch and gives the president more control over it.
A long term one-party majority is never good for democracy, no matter which party.
With this last election, we may have gained a little breathing room, two years to strengthen our democratic processes before 2020. But ‘we the people’ will have to get past the noise, the disinformation, and concentrate on ensuring voter rights and convincing people their vote matters.
Democracy requires vigilance, citizen engagement, and belief in the process. In Shallow State, one of the reasons democracy and rule of law break down is that citizens are bombarded with so much disinformation and alternative facts, they no longer know who to trust. They lose faith in the very institutions that were established to protect their rights. We can and must do everything we can to prevent this from happening.