The crisis of US democracy is no longer something, as it was for much of the 2016-2018 period, that is written and discussed primarily by radical activists and left wing academics. It is now something of a consensus among observers that the crisis is grave and shows no signs of abating. However, the phrase democratic crisis misrepresents what is occurring in the US in some key ways. Democracy is not imperiled by circumstance or exogenous factors, but by one political party

Accordingly, the efforts to save US democracy is not a broad endeavor that all Americans support. It is more accurate to describe the US as stuck in a struggle between those supporting democracy and those seeking to transform the country into an authoritarian regime led by the disgraced former president. This struggle is a deeply partisan one. While it may be difficult for journalists and pundits, reared on both sidesism and false equivalencies, to accept, it is the fundamental reality that defines American politics-and if you don’t recognize that you cannot accurately diagnose the problem or begin to resolve it.

This means that we are not going to strengthen American democracy simply by making institutional changes like expanding the Supreme Court, changing voting laws, abolishing the filibuster, investigating the previous administration or fixing redistricting. First, all these fixes require either support from some Republicans in congress or the state legislatures or unified Democratic support in congress. However, during the last year Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have made it very clear that they cannot be depended upon to support these efforts to strengthen democracy. In other words, while it may be comforting to discuss these kinds of solutions, none are likely to happen anytime soon.

Second, and probably more importantly, US democracy is no longer in a place where technical solutions will solve what is a deeply political problem. American political institutions are flawed and need to be modernized and democratized, but as long as one of the major parties remains contemptuous of democracy, committed to making it more difficult for some people to vote and loyal to Donald Trump, technical solutions will never be enough and will be almost impossible to implement. For example, although ensuring voting rights is critically important, even if that occurs in time for the 2024 election, supporters of Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee in 2024, will claim fraud if he loses and likely engage in tactics like those of late 2020 culminating in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Similarly, as long as the GOP is the governing party in many states, the crisis of democracy and the strength of the authoritarian movement will grow a the local and state level.

An inconvenient truth about democracy in the US is that it can only be strengthened and brought back from the current precipice by drubbing the Republican Party in several elections, but that is extremely unlikely. In fact, most observers expect the GOP to win the 2022 midterms and to be very competitive in the 2024 presidential election, led by Donald Trump. If the Republicans win the next two elections, a possibility but not at all a certainty, the US will move significantly further down the road to authoritarianism. However, narrow Democratic victories, like what happened in the 2020 election will not be enough to combat authoritarianism because democracy needs more than just a small majority of the people to support it.

The hard work that advocates of democracy face in the US is not arriving at clever technical solutions to ameliorate the damaging undemocratic structures that permeate the American system of government, nor is it simply assuring that the Democratic Party wins future elections. Both of those, ultimately, are necessary, but neither is sufficient. The biggest challenge is to persuade a significant proportion of those who now support the authoritarian movement that is almost entirely indistinguishable from the Republican Party that democracy is a better solution. If the GOP is recaptured by conservatives who believe, generally, in the idea of democracy, or if it is defeated enough that fewer than about 30% of the American people support it, democracy will have a chance in the US. However, if neither of those unlikely events come to pass, the crisis will endure for a while.

The US now finds itself in the difficult and unenviable position of having a two-party system where the major difference between the parties is not ideology, vision or approach to governance, but democracy itself. In this situation, every election, regardless of the context, is about democracy. Unfortunately, many voters do not see it that way and the media has refused to use this frame for our current politics. The core dilemma facing voters is that, for example, there is ample reason to be disappointed at Joe Biden’s handling of inflation, the pandemic or the crisis of Covid testing in the US. In a democracy, those are normal reasons to vote against the incumbent party, but those are in no way acceptable reasons to jettison democracy in favor of the angry authoritarianism of the MAGA cult.

Photo: cc/Elvert Barnes

Lincoln Mitchell