January 6th will mark one year since the violent insurrection at the US Capitol that sought to disrupt the certification of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. While that is a significant anniversary that we should recognize and reflect upon, it should not be overlooked that 2022 is the sixth year in a row that has begun with American democracy in crisis.

On January 1st of 2017, Barack Obama was still in the White House, but the country had just experienced an election in which the winning candidate had already threatened to restrict freedom of the media and run an overtly racist campaign which included calls for not allowing Muslims into the country, accused Mexican immigrants of being rapists and closed with anti-Semitic tropes that, if translated into Russian would have not looked out of place in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And, speaking of Russia, that candidate-Donald Trump-had benefited from interference from the Kremlin in that 2016 election. That crisis only worsened during the four years that Trump was president, so every January 1st, from 2018-2021, the US greeted New Years Day with a deepening democratic crisis.

Fortunately, the Trump presidency is, for now, something from the past, but despite the significance of Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, American democracy is far from being on stable footing, not least because there remains a real possibility that Trump will get elected again in 2024, or at the very least be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee and drag through the country, once again, through his web of paranoia, conspiracy mongering, bigotry and accusations that the election was stolen from him.

In the runup to the 2020 election, many seemed to think that defeating Donald Trump would restore democracy in the US. That was never going to be true and the last twelve months have made that evident to all but the most pollyannish partisan Democrat. Biden’s first year in office was marked an emerging GOP consensus that the January 6th insurrection was not a big deal, efforts by the Republicans run states to limit the franchise and an aggressive right-wing disinformation campaign around opposition to Covid vaccines. All of this helped further destabilize the US and deepened the crisis of democracy.

In summer of 2015 it may have been possible to think of Trump, and Trumpism, as a phenomena that would quickly disappear. Even during Trump’s presidency, many believed that the Mueller Report, impeachment or electoral defeat would have the same effect. It is now clear that these notions were wrong and that we are six years into a crisis that may be with us for a lot longer than that. The divisions are not only extremely deep, but cannot be resolved easily. Chatter about civil war or breaking the country into smaller parts has gained more traction, but in a country that is so large and complex with polarization only vaguely reinforcing geographical divisions, breakup is unlikely and would be devastating if it occurred.

As 2022 begins Americans must begin to understand that the struggle for American democracy may still be in its early stages. The damage that the Trump era did to the political fabric of the country cannot be easily undone. The Covid crisis, beginning at the tail end of the Trump era, only exacerbated that damage while further exposing and deepening the longstanding problems of wealth inequality and systemic racism. The first year of the Biden administration should be a reminder that the authoritarian movement that Trump still leads is quite strong and is supported by a very large minority of the American people. This is not the kind of crisis that gets resolved by one, two or three election victories by the party of democracy over the party of authoritarianism.

The real work of building American democracy, making it more difficult for future authoritarian movements to succeed and restabilizing the country is much more difficult than winning an election and should not be measured in electoral cycles. At its core, this work requires recognizing not just the threat represented by Trump and an authoritarian GOP, but that the Constitution itself institutionalizes undemocratic structures which, in recent years, have contributed to the rise of authoritarianism.

Crafting a system and building institutions that facilitate democracy in a country as large and diverse as the US is agonizingly difficult, but it can begin with some basics such as national election laws that guarantee the right to the franchise, electoral systems that treat all votes equally and directly confronting the enduring legacy of America’s racist past. None of this is going to be easy, but we are now six years into a crisis of democracy that will continue, at varying paces, to get worse unless we begin this hard work.

Photo: cc/Roan Fourie

Lincoln Mitchell