John Lamparski/NurPhoto via AP
Pro-Trump demonstrators march toward the Supreme Court, November 14, 2020, in Washington.
The big story in America is about the fragility of our democracy.
There’s nothing new about our country’s structural shortfalls when it comes to truly democratic rule. The filibuster, the ability of legislatures to gerrymander districts, the Electoral College, and our primordial gerrymander—the Senate—all stand athwart any notion of majority rule. (In his post-presidential years, even James Madison, the Constitution’s primary author, began to complain about the inherently anti-democratic nature of the Senate.) And first-past-the-post elections don’t reflect public preferences as well as proportional representation does.
To these structural deficiencies, we need to add those anti-democratic practices that parties and other powerful groups have been able to get away with, voter suppression first and foremost.
In today’s America, each of these structural and practical obstacles to majority rule are exercised and championed by the Republican Party. When Republicans frequently commanded a majority of the electorate, such as during the 1980s, they contented themselves with suppressing minority rights—a necessity for a party that had repositioned itself as the champion of the white South and the anti-Black North. Now that they clearly don’t command a majority, having lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections (including the current one by nearly six million votes), they’ve declared war on majority rule, while still maintaining their opposition to minority rights, so long as those minorities vote heavily Democratic.
And all this anti-majoritarian bias precedes the ascent of Donald Trump. But Trump has taken it to new depths since November 3. He’s fostered a Big Lie of Goebbels-esque dimensions, claiming that the posted election results are fraudulent, notwithstanding the Republicans’ inability to document any fraud. (The Giuliani press conference alleging a conspiracy that stretches all the way to the deceased Hugo Chavez—inexplicably, the culpability of Joseph Stalin escaped their notice—was Goebbels on steroids.) That more than half of Republicans believe this crap comes as no surprise; fabrication and falsification have been Trump’s daily fare for decades, and the far-right media that now dominate and shape Republicans’ beliefs have been practicing these dark arts since well before the Trump presidency, too.
In the past several days, an ever-more-desperate Trump has been trying to overturn the election by pressuring Republican officials both low and high to refuse to certify the results, in theory opening the door for Republican legislatures in the swing states Biden carried to appoint their own electors. Even if those certifications were withheld, those legislatures would still have to violate a host of laws to ratify their own electors rather than those chosen by their states’ voters, and every indication is they don’t feel comfortable undertaking that. Were this ever to reach the Supreme Court, the Trumpified justices would destroy the Court’s credibility for a good century or two if they upheld this theft. That doesn’t mean such a ruling would be entirely outside the realm of possibility, of course.
Until Trump began laying the groundwork for this attempt to overturn the election, the assaults on American democracy have been experienced by most of our compatriots much as the proverbial frog experiences the water being heated to a slow boil. Some of our system of government is anti-democratic to begin with, and for those largely white Americans whose votes haven’t been historically suppressed, the gerrymandering and the striking of names from the voter rolls haven’t really drawn much notice.
But the past few months, and even more the past week, have been different. What Trump and his rabid or complaisant or fearful allies in office and in the media are doing amounts to a frontal assault on the most basic tenet of democracy: that elections are what determines who holds power. That the manner in which Trump’s hapless team is attempting this feat is embarrassing at best and laugh-out-loud insane at worst is really beside the point.
What we’re going through, assuming we avoid what would amount to a seizure of power, should be one helluva teachable moment. I suspect support for ditching the Electoral College in favor of a straight-up popular vote for president has never been higher. I suspect public awareness of the shortcomings of our democracy is somewhat less fuzzy than it was even a week ago. Those of us who support such radical doctrines as majority rule need to use this moment to make clear that Trump and his followers’ attempted seizure of power is not only just that, but also the tip of a humongous iceberg that’s threatened American democracy at least since 1787, if not 1619.
We’ve not really been here before, though two not-quite antecedents come to mind. In 1876, the actual results of the presidential voting were nullified by a compromise between the two parties, enabling the Republicans to hold the White House by virtue of their agreement with the Democrats that they’d pull all federal troops out of the South and turn a blind eye to the horrific violence whites would inflict on Blacks there in order to end Black voting.
The other flagrant negation of a presidential election came in 1860, when the white South simply seceded rather than be subject to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. In terms of cleaving the nation in two, the actions of Trump & Co. come closer to this than they do to 1876. This is Sumter redux, the firing on the flag, the shredding of the nation, the second time as farce but nonetheless also deeply tragic in its own sense. Like the Confederacy, this week’s assault likely won’t prevail, but the larger, less frontal attack on democracy is still hard-wired into America’s DNA.
