Just a quickie today, mainly to pass on Thomas Edsall’s latest opinion piece, which provides an excellent summary of current academic scholarship on the fragile state of American democracy.
I will just point to one poll result that Edsall cites that is unsurprising, but worrying. According to a CNN survey, Republicans, by a margin of 75% to 22%, believe that American democracy is under attack. Only 46% of Democrats believe that, while 48% disagree. As we know, American democracy is indeed under attack, by Republican state legislators across the country who, falsely claiming various offenses against election ingtegrity, are seeking to impede access to the vote and, even more critically, take partisan control of election administration. The dangerous irony here is that an overwhelming majority of Republicans evidently believe in fake threats to democracy while Democrats are relatively unaware of the real ones.
The difference in the views of rank and file Democrats and Republicans reflects differences in leadership. Republican leaders—starting with the ex-POTUS–are lying to their followers, who believe them. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have not yet sounded the alarm. At some point, Democratic leaders, starting with the POTUS, have to tell the country that we are in a fight to save democracy, a fight that we could very well lose. We need to get scared.
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John December 22, 2021 at 1:15 pm
Good post Tony. I’m at a loss as to why Dems in Washington have not made protecting the vote their top priority. They need to take any and all necessary steps to quickly resolve this before it’s too late.
Art Schmidt December 23, 2021 at 1:48 am
Good post, but I don’t agree with Edsall about the threat to democracy.
Sure, it must really gall Republican state legislators that black people in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee get to vote. But they haven’t been able to do much about it except tinker with voting hours and ID cards. If people know the rules in advance, they can follow them.
Changing the rules after an election would be a different story. Maybe some day a legislature will have the nerve to ignore a popular vote and certify Republican electors, but that hasn’t happened yet and except for some county-level wackos isn’t likely to.
Some bigger defects in our democracy are (1) the existence of the Senate, and (2) gerrymandered state legislatures and congressional districts. The first happened in 1787. Any country that aspired to democracy would be on its fourth or fifth constitution by now, but we won’t even amend ours. The second happened in 2009 at the latest, when Republicans, noticing that 2010 was a census year, invested millions in state legislative elections and reapportionment.
Maybe one reason Republicans run around today with their hair on fire is that black people still exercise the right to vote. And one reason Democrats aren’t particularly alarmed about “attacks on democracy” is that the serious ones have been with us for a long time.
tonygreco December 23, 2021 at 9:40 am
“Maybe some day a legislature will have the nerve to ignore a popular vote and certify Republican electors, but that hasn’t happened yet and except for some county-level wackos isn’t likely to.”
It hasn’t happened yet because in 2020 there were Republican election officials with integrity and authority to ensure a fair counting of the vote, but the GOP is doing everything to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Brad Rathensberger will almost surely be out as Georgia Secretary of State, and just to make sure, the state legislature has diluted the SoS’s role in elections. In at least nine other states, GOP legislatures have passed or introduced laws inserting themselves, to one degree or another, in the election process. They probably won’t ignore the popular vote entirely, but if it’s close enough they’ll say there’s fraud and do their best to “find” the votes to make a difference.
You are right, of course, about the longstanding structural and political obstacles to majority rule, but the new threat is in some ways more insidious–not just one of skewing the vote but maybe, under some circumstances, nullifying it.
Donald Campbell December 26, 2021 at 10:35 am
We can add to the list of structural problems the supreme court. I believe the popular vote has been won by democrats in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections, yet justices are chosen by the president and confirmed by the senate which has resulted in a lopsided unrepresentative body.
When combined with the senate, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the electoral college and our nearly impossible to amend constitution there are substantial threats to democracy.
America’s changing demographics have much of the ruling class, including democrats fearful for the future and trying desperately to hang on to their status (power and wealth). Their fraudulent appeals to the disenfranchised white working class, whose real wages have been falling for 50 years, have not fallen on deaf ears. There will certainly be a reckoning and it will be messy, but there is no telling how it play out.