We have watched with great concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented…laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections that could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes win elections.
👉Statement of Concern: The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards
Republicans see the wave of demography coming and they are just trying to hold up a wall and keep it from smashing them in. It’s the last bastion of their dominance, and they are doing everything they can.
👉William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
The Republican Party sees politics as a zero-sum game: as the U.S. becomes a majority-minority nation, white voters will constitute a smaller portion of the voting electorate. So in order to win, the party of whites must use every means at its disposal to restrict the voting electorate to “their people.” Because a multiracial democracy is so threatening, Trump supporters will only fight harder in the next election.
👉 Virginia Gray, University of North Carolina political scientist
The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economics empower all have been achieved.
👉 Danielle Allen, from How Democracies Die
The crucial thing to understand about this kind of apocalyptic fantasy [QAnon’s Storm or neo-Nazi’s Day X] is that to people who have adopted militant far-right racial ideologies, a violent overthrow like Day X is not the thing that begins the apocalypse, but the thing that ends it. All of this activism is already in a state of encounter with the end of the world. Immigration, intermarriage and falling birthrates are all leading toward a time when countries like the United States will no longer be majority white. For people in this ideology, that’s already the end of the world. That sense of emergency is really important to understand, because I think without that, the degree of — both the degree of fear and the degree of violence don’t make a lot of sense.
👉 Kathleen Belew, University of Chicago historian, from NYT Accelerationism
If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way. The big lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one.
👉Timothy Snyder, Yale University historian
The modern Republican Party, which, at its elite level, is a coalition of the very wealthy, has incentives to limit the expansion of the electorate with new voters with very different class interests. The G.O.P.’s electoral base, by contrast, is considerably less interested in the Republican economic agenda of top-heavy tax cuts and reductions in government spending. However, their preference with respect to race and partisan identity provide the Republican electoral base with reason to oppose democracy in a diversifying country.
No one stokes the racism, the partisanship, and the fear of the Republican electoral base, who now comprise 60% of registered Republican voters and who support Donald Trump, better than Tucker Carlson, who recently said the Replacement Theory out loud:
In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time you import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.
So, if your vote threatens to cancel mine, then I can’t let you vote. And if your voters outnumber mine—which they do—then I have to gerrymander your voters into a castrated minority. But just to be on the safe side, to make sure any pesky, constitutional challenges are decided in favor of my "state’s rights," I’ll pack the federal district courts with young, conservative jurists pipe-lined to me by the Federalist Society, who will work their way up to the circuit court of appeals over the next 40 years, and for good measure I’ll establish a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court for the next two generations. Problem solved! Minority white rule for the next 25 to 50 years.
Are these anti-democratic measures really going to work, or will the whole system blow in 2022? Or will some unforeseen event or charismatic leader derail this disturbing trend and set a new course, one headed toward the "more perfect union" Americans like to talk about? At the moment, I don't see that event or leader on the horizon, but that's the thing about the unforeseen. It's not there until it is.
Waiting for this unseen democracy savior is much like waiting for Godot, but with tragic undertones. The current state of my anxious anticipation feels like 1968 all over again, except instead of fighting a war far away, we are fighting one at home--a war for the soul of America, as President Biden calls it. I didn’t enjoy coming of age in that era, and I don’t like growing old in this one.
So, I don’t write about these issues very often anymore and I do my best not to dwell on them, because they make me deeply unhappy. But I have a new self-defense, waiting room mechanism. Instead of deja vu-ing 1968, I’ve turned the clock back one more year, to 1967, the Summer of Love and the year of Flower Power. (Truth be told, I was never a hippie, but I do love flowers, whether in or out of my hair.) So rather than report on the progress of the slo-mo American train wreck, I’d rather share closeups of Berlin flowers. Much better for my psyche and probably yours, too.
Marilyn
Incisive and brilliant as always!
ReplyDeleteI don't know about that, but I thank you!
DeleteBeautiful writing Marilyn!
ReplyDelete