The biggest pot stirrer is the tfg (I won’t dignify him with capitalization). Unbidden to our TV screens, but forced upon us apparently by the economic exigencies of the mass media, we watch tfg make kings out of primary paupers and regale his loyal captive audience with two-hour guided tours of his deranged mind. We observe him grifting his personality cult supporters out of their hard-earned minimum wages, as he runs his entirely predictable parallel presidency out of Mar-a-Logo (no typo). The inevitable question is begged: Will he run again?
I say without a doubt, YES. Some of my politically engaged friends counter with an emphatic, NO.
But whether tfg runs may not be the most relevant question, and tfg may not even be the most serious problem facing American democracy today.
What seems to me to be the most serious problem is the voter suppression legislation coursing through Republican state legislatures that permits those legislatures to ignore vote totals favoring the Democratic candidate in the event the legislators claim to sniff a whiff of possible fraud—regardless of proof—and declare the Republican candidate the winner. In the case of that legislation, it really doesn’t matter what Republican runs. What matters is can a Democrat win.
And that brings us to the more relevant question: Will the GOP steal the 2024 election? Here is how Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, authors of How Democracies Die, analyze and answer that question in The Atlantic:
The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election.
For elections to be democratic, all adult citizens must be equally able to cast a ballot and have that vote count. Using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of this principle is strikingly easy. Election officials can legally throw out large numbers of ballots on the basis of the most minor technicalities (e.g., the oval on the ballot is not entirely penciled in, or the mail-in ballot form contains a typo or spelling mistake). Large-scale ballot disqualification accords with the letter of the law, but it is inherently antidemocratic, for it denies suffrage to many voters. Crucially, if hardball criteria are applied unevenly, such that many ballots are disqualified in one party’s stronghold but not in other areas, they can turn an election.
The 2020 election was, in effect, a dress rehearsal for what might lie ahead. All evidence suggests that if the 2024 election is close, the Republicans will deploy constitutional hardball to challenge or overturn the results in various battleground states. Recent history and public-opinion polling tell us that the Republican activist base will enthusiastically support—indeed, demand—such tactics. The new state election laws will make that easier. Democratic strongholds in Republican-led swing states will be especially vulnerable. And if disputed state-level elections throw the election into the House of Representatives, a Republican-led House [which most pundits predict as a foregone conclusion to the 2022 midterms] would likely hand the presidency to the Republican candidate (no matter who actually won the election).
The authors say that, because of its anti-democratic survivalist tactics, the de-radicalization of the Republican Party is the central task for the next decade. But 2024 happens well before 2031. How to deal with that? This is where I agree with the analysis of Ziblatt and Levitsky but part ways with the viability of their proposed solutions.
Their analysis is that countermajoritarian institutions skew electoral competitions in favor of electoral minorities:
We believe that the U.S. Constitution, in its current form, is enabling the radicalization of the Republican Party and exacerbating America’s democratic crisis. The Constitution’s key countermajoritarian features, such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, have long been biased toward sparsely populated territories. But given that Democrats are increasingly the party of densely populated areas and Republicans dominate less populated areas, this long-standing rural bias now allows the Republican Party to win the presidency, control Congress, and pack the Supreme Court without winning electoral majorities.
I agree. But their solution—federal legislation to protect voting rights and constitutional amendments to eliminate the rural vs. urban bias that tilts toward minority rule, all before 2024--seems like an intellectual cop-out to me (annotations and emphasis added):
Following the example of other democracies, we must expand access to the ballot [both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act appear to be DOA in the current Senate], reform our electoral system to ensure that majorities win elections [this would require a constitutional amendment to change how Senators are allocated], and weaken or eliminate antiquated institutions such as the filibuster [also apparently DOA in the current Senate] so that majorities can actually govern.
Serious constitutional reform may seem like a daunting task, but Americans have refounded our democracy before. After the Civil War and during the Progressive era and the civil-rights movement, political leaders, under pressure from organized citizens, remade our democracy. Always unfinished, our Constitution requires continuous updating.
I couldn’t agree more with the need for a constitutional update, but I just don’t see an amendment before the 2024 election on the horizon, not unless Democrats win 2/3 of Congressional seats and control 3/4 of state legislatures after the 2022 elections. I really don’t see that happening. So, if there is no constitutional reform, which there won’t be, and if Republicans steal the election in 2024, which there is every indication they will—“legally”—that leaves pressure from organized citizens. And at that point, the most relevant question becomes: How will American voters react? That depends on how much they believe in majority rule and how hard (if at all) they are willing to fight for it and against grand larceny.
Stand by. To paraphrase tfg’s December 19, 2020, tweet, “November 2024. Be there, will be wild!”
Keep it real! And wear your damn mask!
Marilyn
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