Where We Stand 4 — Political Violence

In this Where We Stand series, I am examining democracy and its wounds, many of them with a long American history, many of them intensified during the Donald Trump Administration.  This post is about violence that is designed explicitly to influence values and politics.

American political violence is hardly new: One has only to think of the Ku Klux Klan, anti-union violence of the early 20th century, or 400 years of state-sanctioned violence against African Americans.  The years before the Civil War saw more than 70 incidents of violence between lawmakers on the floors of Congress.  But after anti-war protests and the police response, violence again went mostly underground.  But the acceptability of political violence is growing again.  As I wrote in the introduction to this series,  

Openly carried assault weapons are legal and frequently visible, militia [come into the open], threats of violence against political “enemies” are not unusual.  Then-candidate Trump suggested violence against protesters at campaign rallies.   A peaceful demonstration across from the White House was violently suppressed.  Our political language is ever-more violent.  Incredibly, some members of Congress fear violence from their congressional colleagues.  With such violence comes fear, and fear inhibits democracy.

 Unfortunately, American political violence exists within the larger American culture of violence: guns on the streets; far-right white-supremacist groups and (to a lesser degree) far-left groups espousing violence; openly carried military assault weapons; and so on.  It is not surprising that this culture spills over into politics.  Even before the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the sight of armed militia at marches and protests had become common.  In April of last year, a handful of people in camouflage armed with semiautomatic rifles stood in the Michigan Senate Gallery as the lawmakers went about their work.  Heavily armed with assault rifles, a group “guarded” the door to the office of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in protest of the governor’s Covid-mask requirement.

Heavily armed protesters outside Michigan governor’s office

 The pictures still stun me. Take a moment to consider those images of assault weapons in the political context.  What have we become when people armed with those weapons are a normalized part of our politics?

They call themselves “peacekeepers,” but legitimate peacekeepers are sent to areas already engaged in violence to keep the violent combatants apart.  These “peacemakers,” however, are combatants themselves and they enter into peaceful protests, intentionally threatening violence.

It is not surprising, then, that even legislators have begun to carry guns in the Capitol (and clandestinely, into the congressional chambers).

The state of national politics has resulted in near-complete partisan divide on any disputed issue.  Worse, these battles are accompanied by accusations of “bad-faith”.  The other side is not just wrong but un-American, a threat to our way of life that must be opposed at any price … including threats of violence and, increasingly, violence itself.

Unless we manage to de-escalate the wider culture of violence, the only solution to the problem of political violence is gradually to turn down the temperature in our politics.  This is certainly most difficult and, as the Civil War demonstrated, not always possible where core values are threatened.  But it is not impossible: Previous times of extremism and political violence have eventually resolved … usually, however, requiring years.  

As the Republican Party retreats into ever-more extremist positions (see my last post), there is a possibility that the conservative point of view will, with time, find expression in a new, less extreme, party (or repurposing of the current Republican Party) comprising conservative Democrats, independents, business interests, and at least some libertarians.  The major challenge, then, may simply be to hold the country and our politics together long enough, a difficult but not impossible task.

The "boring" first months of the Biden Administration may be a beginning.

The Beginning of the End for the Republican Party?

David Hilfiker

Predicting American politics is a fool’s game, especially given the uncertainty that clouds the future of the Republican Party.  Nevertheless, I have been fascinated to watch Republican leaders make decision after decision that could hardly be better calculated to destroy their party.  Jumping on the “Big Lie” of a 2020 election as riven with fraud and “irregularities” seemed perhaps politically imperative when Donald Trump was still president, guaranteed to hammer anyone who crossed him.  The last stand by the majority of GOP congressional lawmakers on January 6 trying to overturn the results of the presidential election— even after the insurrection had left blood on the walls of Congress — will perhaps not hurt the standing of Republican candidates’ in large swaths of the party, but counting on moderate Republican voters to forget such egregiously unconstitutional moves seems unwise at best and, at worst, suicidal.  

A series of unforced errors since then may signal the ultimate incapacity of the Republicans to recover and remain a national party.  Caught between the advancing wildfire of the Trumpists and the dwindling firebreak of Republican moderates, there may be no way out.  Consider these decisions.

Opposing immensely popular legislation

Since its initial proposal, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan with its $1400 per-person stimulus checks had the overwhelming support of American voters, including over half of Republicans.  Given that strong public endorsement; the certainty of the bill’s eventual passage in a Democratic Congress; the public’s strong, on-going desire for an end to the partisan bickering; and Biden’s repeated invitations to the GOP to join him in crafting the bill, complete Republican intransigence cannot but hurt the party.  McConnell and his fellow Republican lawmakers now appear poised to make the same mistake with the equally popular $2 trillion infrastructure bill and perhaps the nascent voting-rights bill, too.  

Supporting voter suppression

Over 350 voting restriction bills have now been proposed (and some cases passed) in forty-seven states (almost all by Republican legislators) across the country.  In the absence of any significant voter fraud in the 2020 election, these bills — to restrict voter registration, cut down on absentee ballots, remove drop-in ballot boxes, increase voter ID requirements, even (in Georgia) make it illegal to pass out food and water to people waiting in line to vote — can only be interpreted as attempts at voter suppression.

As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin writes:

The fight nationwide is not about Georgia, or whether limiting each county to a single drop box is justifiable. It is about a party determined to invalidate the last election and to suppress votes against them. One party believes in making it as easy as possible for everyone to vote despite hurdles such as physical disability, age, job requirements, no broadband Internet or lack of a driver’s license; the other party thinks disenfranchisement, often aimed at minorities, is a legitimate partisan weapon.

Threatening their own donors

In a bizarre little misadventure,

[t]he National Republican Congressional Committee threatened donors that it will tell former president Donald Trump that they are defectors if they opt out of giving recurring monthly funds to the campaign arm for the House GOP.

The threat is unlikely to survive the attendant publicity, but it does give some indication of the extremes to which the party is willing to go.

Alienating corporate sponsors

Coca-Cola, Major League Baseball (MLB), Delta Airlines and others with important ties to Georgia and (traditionally) to the Republican Party have strongly condemned the Georgia voter suppression laws; MLB even pulled its all-star game from Atlanta.  In response, Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the corporate opposition “stupid” and tweeted: “My warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics.”  Perhaps recognizing the irony, he added “I’m not talking about political contributions.”  To the extent the Republican Party alienates its corporate sponsors, it loses a major source of reliable funding.

The corporate response is much more likely an expression of the profit motive than an indication of changing conscience.  Given the rapidly changing American demographic — more people of color, more immigrants, more urban voters — corporate executives know which way the wind is blowing.  Getting on the demographic train is a rational business decision against which McConnell doesn't have much leverage.

A reasonable response?

At first blush it may appear that the Republican leadership’s response — whatever their personal thoughts about the right-wing extremism now dominating the party — is necessary political maneuvering.  After all, according to polls, large majorities of Republicans still

• believe that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and that Trump actually won it,
• believe the Jan 6 insurrection was either non-violent or was caused by antifa “members” (sic) posing as Trump supporters,
• support Trump and consider him the leader of the Republican Party.
  

Without the support of these Trumpists, the thinking undoubtedly goes, there is no Republican Party.  The current strategy is designed to hold on to this intensely loyal group, which, as in 2016 and 2020, will form the core of the party.

The problem, of course, is that the party cannot win nationally without adding moderate Republicans and independents to its core.  As the party strays into more and more extremist rhetoric, however, it inevitably pushes those moderates away.  After the Jan 6 insurrection, there was still a chance that the leadership would recognize their folly and begin to rebuild the party on the basis of traditional conservative issues.  McConnell’s aggressive speech calling Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection gave hope that the party would move back to its moderate stance. But, as the above indicates, that wasn’t really an option: Without maintaining the Trump base, the party was lost, at least in the short run.

So, they have no way out.  The party leadership has committed itself to radical, right-wing extremism.  It can’t move forward or back.  

Neither the polls nor any other technique, of course, can give us a reliable, accurate picture of who we are as a people, and certainly not whom we will become.  Most likely is a Democratic resurgence.  One can’t rule out the possibility — however unlikely — that the United States has passed beyond the pale and will ride the Republican elephant directly into fascism.  Either way, one has to wonder whether this is the beginning of the end of the Republican party as we have known it.

Against Voter Suppression: The For the People Act

 David Hilfiker

In response to the voter suppression we examined in the last post, Democrats in the House of Representatives have passed and sent to the Senate the For the People Act.  In addition to two articles addressing voter suppression, the wide-ranging bill contains sections concerning voter security; campaign financing and transparency; a constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens United decision; DC statehood; presidential, congressional and Supreme Court ethics; and presidential and vice-presidential tax-return transparency.  A Brennan Center report here examines the entire act in detail.

While the bill would certainly face legal challenges if it became law, there is a section of the act that justifies its own constitutionality by noting that the Supreme Court has affirmed that the Constitution gives Congress the power to protect the right to vote and regulate federal elections.

I’ll examine here the first two titles of the For the People Act that aim primarily to increase voter participation, in many cases, by prohibiting state or federal laws suppressing the vote.  

Much of the following is taken from the Brennan Center for Justice’s Annotated Guide to the act.

VOTER REGISTRATION — Some states have made voter registration difficult, especially for those without easy transportation.  The most common issue is that people have to register ahead of time, making two trips necessary.  

• The bill would mandate all states provide online registration.  Forty states already do, significantly increasing voter participation, especially during the pandemic. 
  
• Another provision mandates automatic registration for federal elections whenever a citizen provides appropriate information to the government via other avenues, for example, a driver’s license application, school ID, or application for government benefits.
• Traditionally voters have had to register before election day, sometimes far in advance, creating an unnecessary obstacle to voting.  This provision mandates that states allow same-day voter registration.
  

LIMITS ON PURGING VOTER ROLLS

• States regularly purge their voter rolls to remove those who have moved.  They usually do this by cross-checking databases, a process subject to high rates of error, especially if too few details are included to differentiate one voter from another.  The bill would require that a voter’s full name, date of birth, and the last four digits of their social security number be identical before purging.  
• The bill prohibits states from sending mail to a voter’s address on file and purging the voter just because the letter is returned undelivered.
• Any voter purged must be notified six months in advance and given the opportunity to challenge the decision.
  

PRESERVING AND PROTECTING VOTING RIGHTS

• States must restore voting rights to felons as soon as they have completed their time of incarceration and notify them of their restored rights.
• The bill prohibits the practice of targeting groups of voters with misinformation that is intended to interfere with voting — including the time, place, or manner of elections; public endorsements; and the rules governing eligibility and registration.
• The For the People Act commits Congress to restoring important provisions of the 1965 Voter Rights Act (VRA), perhaps the most important civil rights legislation in our history.  The vaunted success of the VRA was due in large part to the requirement that states and localities with histories of discriminatory voting practices secure federal government approval prior to making any changes in their voting rules.  Unfortunately, in 2013 the Supreme Court disabled this requirement, ruling it wasn’t necessary any more.  Immediately undercutting that rationale, many of the states that had previously required pre-clearance, began to pass a flurry of voter suppression laws. While the For the People Act wouldn’t in itself restore what’s left of the VRA, it does commit Congress to doing so.
• The bill would commit Congress to making findings of fact and conclusions of the law to secure voting rights for Native Americans and residents of US territories, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands.
• While the Supreme Court has forbidden racial gerrymandering, it has, so far, permitted partisan gerrymandering, which has allowed states to create sometimes grotesquely shaped voting districts that give one party the ability to win a number of congressional seats disproportionate to their share of the population.  The bill would prevent partisan gerrymandering by mandating state-wide, independent commissions to draw congressional districts using uniform rules.
• The Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as living in the communities in which their prison is located, which entitles those communities to a larger share of legislative seats and government resources.  The For the People Act would require the Census Bureau to use the last residence before incarceration, giving those areas (often with a higher concentration of poverty) more political power.
  

While most provisions in the first two articles that concern voter suppression should seem uncontroversial to anyone who wishes to expand American voter participation (and recognizes that there is no voter fraud in the US), it has drawn no support from the Republican side of Congress.  This is not surprising since Republican-led voter suppression keeps millions of mostly Democrats disenfranchised.  Republicans claim that the bill is partisan since it will strengthen the Democrats and weaken the Republicans, which is certainly true.  Unfortunately, Republican hegemony depends at this time in our history on unconstitutional voter suppression.  The vote for the bill as written will divide the Senate along strictly partisan lines.

Titles III – XII contain myriad other proposals that will give reasonable excuses to those who object to it.  The ACLU, for instance, claims that provisions regulating campaign financing “dark money” tread on free speech.  So it might be reasonable to separate out the voting rights provisions from the rest of the bill and have a clean, up-or-down decision on whether democracy includes all of us.  

Current Senate filibuster rules require sixty votes for any non-budget matter, eg combatting voter suppression.  With the filibuster still in place, the bill will, therefore, require at least ten Republican votes, which is not going to happen.  

This brings up the question of removing the filibuster, which, interestingly enough, requires only a majority, so the Democrats could remove it without any Republican support.

Two Democrats, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, however, have pledged to keep the filibuster.  Whether one thinks doing away with the filibuster would be a good idea or not, without Manchin and Sinema’s votes, the For the People Act isn’t going anywhere.

I’m no longer surprised that the Republican Party can commandeer the votes of “senators of conscience” — like Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Ben Sasse — to support voter suppression, but it does give us another marker for the depths to which the Party has fallen.

It's unlikely there will be a single Republican vote for the bill, which — along with the hundreds of mostly Republican states’ voter-suppression laws — reveals the Republican platform: to suppress the vote of as many Democratic voters as possible.

Where We Stand 3 — Voter Suppression

 David Hilfiker

Unable to win majorities in national elections and unwilling to change its policies to attract more voters in a country where demographics challenge its future, the Republican Party has turned to voter suppression as a primary tool for maintaining power.  When voter suppression determines political power, however, the United States is no longer a democracy.  When the Supreme Court refuses to move against voter suppression decisively and when the population is apathetic and uncertain of the value of a democracy, it is not at all clear how we can restore what has been lost.  

Americans tend to believe that wide-spread voter suppression died with Jim Crow.  In fact, it’s just become more subtle and in all of its manifestations remains a profoundly anti-democratic, usually racist, institution.  

Republican voter suppression has been much in the mainstream press recently, and I have written about it extensively (here, here, here, and other places).  I don’t want to be redundant in this post, but some points should be emphasized.  As is well known by now, there is no voter fraud in the United States except for the Republican effort to thwart the will of the majority.  Nevertheless, after four years of right-wing haranguing about “voter fraud,” a third of Americans (and two thirds of Republicans) cling to the belief that President Biden’s victory was not legitimate.  The Republican rationale now: to restore confidence in the electoral process … that they have themselves intentionally undermined.

Since the beginning of the year, Republican lawmakers, have introduced over 250 bills in 43 states* to limit  voter participation.  The Brennan Center for Justice reports the impact of some of these laws. 

1. Restrictions on Mail-In Voting: In  2020, vote-by-mail was responsible for a large increase in voter participation.  The following state, Republican-initiated bills would:

• limit vote-by-mail to those who can give a valid reason, eg members of the military,
• make it harder to obtain the mail-in ballot forms,
• increase barriers to returning a mail-in ballot, or
• require ballots to be mailed unnecessarily far in advance of the election.

2.  Stricter Voter ID laws for in-person voting by:

• requiring picture IDs (in more states),
  
• reducing the kinds of ID that are acceptable, eg prohibiting student IDs or out-of-state drivers’ licenses, or
• requiring proof of citizenship.
  

3. Slashing Voter Registration Opportunities:

• Not allowing mail-in registration,
• prohibiting same-day registration, and
• prohibiting online registration.

4. More Aggressive Voter Purging Practices — Using methods directly targeting the poor, persons of color, immigrants, the young and those who vote irregularly, states have purged voter rolls of people who have supposedly died, moved away or are no longer eligible to vote.  This is often-flawed process can incorrectly and permanently purge a person from the voter lists, often without even communicating the action to the purged voter.

The Supreme Court has, for the most part, been missing in action, allowing most voter-ID laws, most voter purges, and most instances of gerrymandering.  In 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County vs Holder effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had required nine states and other smaller jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression to seek pre-clearance for changes to its voting regulations.  According to the Brennan Center for Justice,

[w]ithin 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced that it would implement a strict photo ID law. Two other states, Mississippi and Alabama, also began to enforce photo ID laws that had previously been barred because of federal preclearance.

Since then, these states have introduced “hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote.”

OTHER FORMS OF VOTER SUPPRESSION

• Disenfranchisement: Felon disenfranchisement is a straightforward attempt by states to limit or outright prohibit voting by felons, often regardless of whether they have served their sentences.  Over the past several years, there has been a flurry of legislation and pending bills about felony disenfranchisement, some relaxing the restrictions, some tightening them.
• Gerrymandering: We don’t usually think of gerrymandering as a form of voter suppression.  In redrawing voting districts so that one group receives fewer representatives than they otherwise would, however, gerrymandering effectively violates the voting rights of that group.  

The Supreme Court has ruled that gerrymandering on the basis of race is unconstitutional.  However, it has also ruled that partisan gerrymandering is constitutional, even if the results violate the Constitution.  This bizarre, self-contradictory decision (5 - 4 along strict conservative/liberal lines) is extraordinary.  Since today’s Supreme Court is even more conservative (6-3), it seems likely to give states even more leeway to suppress the vote.

AND STILL MORE TINKERING WITH THE VOTE

Other measures go well beyond the above, including:

• tweaking Electoral College and judicial election rules for the benefit of Republicans,
• clamping down on citizen-led ballot initiatives, and
• outlawing private donations that provide resources for administering elections, which were crucial to the smooth November 2020 vote.

WHERE WE STAND

The practice of one-person-one-vote — sacred to our American values — now stands shredded and continually under even greater threat.  Not since Jim Crow have we seen such violation of our constitutional principles of equality before the law.  We have not arrived here by accident (here and here).  We watch as the leaders of the Republican Party progressively dismantle our democracy.

The Democrat House has passed HR1 into law and submitted an identical bill (S1) to the Senate that would significantly reverse the process.  Although many of its provisions have wide popular support, it is unlikely to pass the Senate where 60 votes will be required (unless the filibuster is removed).  

I will review HR1/S1 in the next post.

_____________

* Conversely there have been 541 bills introduced to enhance voter participation.  These are qualitatively different from the restrictive laws, however, since they are only attempting to restore what has already been restricted.  The most representative democracy would be one in which 100% of voters participated.  The enhancement bills are simply attempts to move in that direction.

Where We Stand 2 — The Republican Party

 What Shall We Do with the Republican Party – Part 2

David Hilfiker

On January 6, 2021, while the reverberations from the Capitol insurrection were still bouncing off the walls, 70% of the Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the certification of the 2021 presidential election results, part of a months-long unsuccessful effort to overturn the results of the election and re-elect Donald Trump president.  As I began to document in this previous post, this is neither the first nor will it be the last attempt by the Republican Party to subvert our Constitution.  The damage inflicted on our democracy will take years, perhaps decades, to heal.

Does the Republican Party have a place in the American liberal democracy*?  

Last March, I argued that it did not.  Since then much has happened that supports the argument.  Numerous pundits, for instance, Zaheed Fakaria, have come to the same conclusion.  In this post I will not repeat the reasons for condemning the Republicans that I made back then but expand them and add new ones.

If we are going to consider the future of our democracy, we must understand the Republican Party and what has happened to it.

Refusal to Disavow Trump’s Claims to Election Fraud

Since the 2020 presidential election, well over half of the Republicans in Congress have participated in an effort to overturn its results, claiming electoral fraud.  In fact, however, Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security declared that the election “was the most secure in American history.” There is no evidence for fraud.

Most Republicans initially defended themselves by saying that they supported Trump’s taking all legal remedies afforded him, which he did, filing over sixty suits claiming illegal voting.  He lost all of them.  Even after offering financial rewards for evidence,

Mr Trump and his allies … failed to prove definitively any case of illegal voting on behalf of their opponent in court — not a single case of an undocumented immigrant casting a ballot, a citizen double voting, nor any credible evidence that legions of the voting dead gave Mr Biden a victory that wasn’t his.

Did Mr Trump have the legal right to file all those suits?  Of course he did.  But did the Republican Party have the moral right to support Trump’s argument.  The election results were incontrovertible within days.  Several courts ruled Trump’s suits were “without merit.”  There were no innocent motives for other Republicans to support his efforts.  The only plausible motives were to discredit the 2020 election, cast doubt on the electoral process itself, or, most likely, simply show fealty to the President for fear of alienating his supporters.  These efforts culminated on January 6 with the Republican refusal to certify the vote, an extreme dereliction of duty.

The Republican attempt was, as all the lawmakers knew it would be, ultimately unsuccessful.  That does not, however, mitigate the seriousness of their action.  Unlike the support for Trump’s previous legal suits, it would have been unconstitutional at that point to overturn the results of the election by decertifying them.  Their effort alone disqualifies the national Republican Party as a legitimate political institution, even without the mounds of other evidence.

Several weeks later in Trump’s impeachment trial, most Republican Senators compounded the sin by not holding him responsible for the insurrection that he clearly incited.

Does It Matter?

There were Republican voices claiming that supporting Trump’s suits didn’t really matter.

Without clear Republican leadership, however, three in four Republican voters did not believe that Joe Biden won the election, even after the insurrection.

As the violent invasion of the Capitol vividly demonstrated, there are real-world consequences to millions of Americans’ belief that Biden is not (or may not be) our legitimate president.  The insurrection is only the most obvious; even more serious is the millions who have lost faith in the electoral process — the lynchpin of democracy.

History of Republican Party Racism

Missing from my original indictment last March was the 50-year history of blatant racism within the Republican Party.  The party was originally formed as an anti-slavery party prior to the Civil War.  It was re-formed, however, in the 1970s around President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” designed to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to their racism.  Democrat Lyndon Johnson had strongly supported the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), both of which passed with a minimum of Southern votes.  (Only one Southern Senator from Texas voted for it.)  Johnson knew his actions would deeply alienate large numbers of southern Democrats, even saying at the time, “There goes the South …”  He was right; the Southern Democrats were ripe for picking.  Nixon and other Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white Southerners' racial grievances in order to gain their support.  The Southern Strategy (see Kevin Phillips The Emerging Republican Majority) is almost certainly the primary force that transformed the South into a Republican bastion.  Since then, Republicans have counted on often-unspoken racism, eg Ronald Reagan’s anti-welfare campaign used only Black images (despite the fact that Blacks were a minority of welfare recipients) or George HW Bush’s notorious Willie Horton ad.  A long and continuing history of voter suppression (see below) and anti-drug laws are other examples.

Trump’s use of racism, then, is not new to the Republican Party, only cruder.  It has no place in a modern American political party.

Voter Suppression

Despite zero-evidence of significant modern individual electoral fraud, the Republican Party has made voter suppression targeting Blacks and minorities, an essential part of its political strategy.  (See my post from June 2019 and the next post in this series.)  According to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, lawmakers in 33 states have crafted more than 165 bills to restrict voting so far this year.  Absent evidence for significant historical or modern voter fraud (despite President Trumps 65+ lawsuits trying to find it in the recent election), the original argument that measures to prevent voter fraud were necessary has largely fizzled.  The new argument is that these laws are necessary to reassure voters that the electoral system is secure, a doubt that has taken root only because of Republican (especially Trump’s) lies.  President Trump acknowledged the real purpose of the attempts at voter suppression when he argued against expanding vote-by-mail provisions: They would mean “you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Refusal to Convict

Despite the overwhelming evidence of then-President Trump’s responsibility for the January 6 insurrection, forty-three Republican senators voted not to convict him of the impeachment charges brought by the House.  Their fig leaf was that it was not constitutional to impeach an ex-president**,  a contention rejected by a bipartisan group of 150 legal scholars.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had it both ways, voting against conviction and then delivering a scorching diatribe accusing Trump of “a disgraceful dereliction of duty ….  [He] was] practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of [January 6]."

Tolerance for Extremists Within the Party

In their book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitzky and Daniel Ziblatt analyze the democratic countries that have fallen into autocracy over the last century (eg Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland).  They have done so not primarily by violent revolution but because the legitimate political parties were unable to control the extremists within until it was too late.  Finland, on the other hand, prevented right-wing takeover by the far-right Lapua parties in the 1930s because the legitimate Finnish conservative parties prevented their take-over before they became too powerful.  Others (eg Belgium and England) did the same.  The United States similarly stopped Father Coughlin and George Wallace.  

But the Republican Party did not act early on against Trump and has clearly been captured by the far right.  It is almost certainly impossible for the moderate Republican lawmakers to re-take control of the Party.  The voices of the few sane Republican lawmakers (eg Romney, Collins, Sasse) have been ignored.  The far right is firmly in control.  It’s too late for rehab.  Dismantling is the only option.

_____________
* The term “liberal democracy” has traditionally been used to refer to governments with freedom of speech, of the press, of religion and so on.  In this context, the term “liberal” refers not to the current “liberal” vs “conservative” political divide but to the 18th and 19th century English philosophical systems based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.  Democracies that do not guarantee these rights are called “illiberal democracies.”
** Trump was no longer president in part because then-Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had delayed bringing the House impeachment papers to the Senate until Trump was no longer president.

Where We Stand 1 – Partisanship

David Hilfiker

This post will deal with current American political partisanship and polarization, the first of six issues I mentioned in my last post.  

Partisanship has become a disabling condition in our American politics.

• We have not had a well-functioning government for many years because “winning” has taken precedence over what’s good for the country.   
• Political affiliation has become more important than the health of the country (eg wearing masks).   
• Half of the Americans in one party are afraid of the other party.  Similar conditions in other countries have frequently led to the failure of democracy.
  

Partisanship Is Not Necessarily Bad

Often lost in our disgust with the polarization, however, is the fact that that political parties and the partisan conflict that follows are healthy and necessary aspects of any democracy; they are its lifeblood:  

• Parties bind disparate citizens together in a common purpose, providing a shared sense of collective energy necessary for a functioning democracy. 
• Competition gives parties incentives to respond to voters. 
• Losing parties keep the winning parties accountable by threatening to take away their supporters.  
• Parties mobilize and engage citizens to win elections, in the process bringing many otherwise apathetic citizens into politics.  

As E.E. Schattschneider observed in 1942, 

“Modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties.” It is unthinkable, because without competing parties, voters lack meaningful choices. Partisan conflict is necessary for democracy, because one-party politics is not democracy. It’s totalitarianism.

At the end of the day, citizens in a functioning democracy understand that there are no permanent winners or losers — just temporary electoral swings.  As the editors of the Washington Post write:

Democracy can work if citizens can view the opposition as patriots such as themselves who happen to disagree, perhaps fervently, about the issues of the day. It cannot work if citizens view one another as enemies … Democracies die when they can no longer distinguish between honest opponents of another ideological kind and toxic enemies who come from far outside all normal values.

Extreme Polarization

Our democracy is, however, under deep threat.  But it is not partisanship in itself that is the problem but rather the degree of polarization.  As we seek to repair our country, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  We must find our way back to a healthy partisanship rather than this deep hostility.   

In the United States, the core problem is that the fundamental disagreement in our politics is now not over policy but over what it means to be an American; it’s over what our nation’s core values are.  When division involves purity and impurity, when it devolves into an unadulterated contest between “us” and “them,” then there can be no bargaining, because there are no negotiable principles, just team loyalties.  “We” are good and pure, while “they” are evil and corrupt. And, of course, you cannot compromise with evil and corruption.  

According to a recent CBS News poll most (almost 60%) of Republicans view Democrats as enemies rather than political opponents.  A little over 40% of Democrats view Republicans as enemies.  The hostility toward the other (not just policy differences with the other) is even encouraging Democrats and Republicans to reside in separate geographic areas creating echo chambers that then reinforce the hostile feeling toward “the other.”  Research indicates that identity (as part of a group) drives polarization more than do policies.

This is the kind of politics that leads to democratic breakdown and violence, and it’s where we appear to be headed, if we are not already there.  

This Is Not New

We should not imagine, however, that this degree of partisanship is new to our country.  According to the Institute of American History:

The presidential election of 1800 was an angry, dirty, crisis-ridden contest that seemed to threaten the nation’s very survival.

The unfolding of this crisis tested the new nation’s durability. Nasty political mud-slinging. Campaign attacks and counterattacks. Personal insults. Outrageous newspaper invective. Dire predictions of warfare and national collapse.

Presidential candidates Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were tied in the Electoral College throwing the election into the House of Representatives where each state had one vote.  That vote was also tied.  It took six days and 36 votes before the only delegate from Delaware switched votes, making Jefferson president.  It wasn’t until twelve years later that the unity inspired by the War of 1812 began a process reconciliation, ultimately ushering in the “Era of Good Feelings.”

Not all periods of partisanship ended so happily, of course.  Certainly, the worst polarization in the nation’s history developed in the mid-19th Century after the Era of Good Feelings degenerated over the issue of slavery.  That, too, was a bitter, ugly time, ultimately precipitating the Civil War.  Regrettably racial animus infects us still.

So, today’s polarization is not new, but its history should not inspire an easy confidence.  Healing will take effort and, undoubtedly, sacrifice and compromise.

Local Non-Partisanship

What might make reconciliation possible is that the most extreme of American partisanship is about national politics.  At least some writers suggest that the country is far less partisan than it seems.  After a several-year-long set of trips around the country, James Fallows writes in the Atlantic, that although people are quite pessimistic about the nation, they are very hopeful about their own town, even in those Rust Belt places that are so negatively described in the national media.  (They are all, as Garrison Keillor might say ironically, above average places to live.)  Civic engagement; civic governance; positive attitudes about the local immigrant community (although worse since Trump); enthusiasm about schools and libraries, and other signs of vibrance are commonplace.  Similarly, in a 2016 Atlantic poll,

only 36 percent of Americans thought the country as a whole was headed in the right direction. But in the same poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, and 85 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their general position in life and their ability to pursue the American dream.

 Even after the US pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, governors of sixteen states plus the territory of Puerto Rico and nearly four hundred mayors announced that they would continue to observe the Paris climate goals.

If the partisans described above were asked about members of the opposite party who live in their town, the animus would be much less.  This might give us a starting place for healing.

This Is Where We Stand and Where We Might Go

We stand in a time of sharp political partisanship and increasing social and geographic polarization.  The 2020 election was far closer than we like to admit.  Despite the huge popular vote victory and the seemingly large Electoral College victory, a swing of only 90,000 votes over three states would have given not only the presidency, but also the House and the Senate to the Republicans.  The election of Joe Biden and his desire to move toward reconciliation are important, but they do not change the underlying hostility and separation.    

In his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a nation facing civil war:  

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

At an intellectual level, many in the country recognize that our democracy is threatened by our current extreme polarization.  These people, however, seem to be able to ignore their partisanship when it comes to local issues.  What matters is what’s best for their community not their party affiliation.  Local communities not only view the national partisanship negatively, but, despite it, they also get stuff done.  Perhaps dispersing more power to localized political and regional institutions might give us an avenue toward less polarization.  Although there are obvious policy differences between the parties, it’s not the issues that separate us; it’s the tribal loyalty.

Without being facile or pollyannish about the chances for ultimate success, is it possible to enlarge our tribe to include all of us?  Is there a way out that does not involve more violence?

 David Hilfiker

So … Where Do We Stand?

David Hilfiker 

The passing of President Donald Trump from the presidency into some form of political limbo is a good time to examine the damage that has been done to our democracy.  The problem has not been just Trump or even mostly Trump.  He’s been a symptom of a much deeper illness.  We’ve been fortunate that our first presidential demagogue has been so incompetent.  Democrats have responsibility for some of the damage.  Republican politicians as a party, however, have done the most harm.  

The election of Joe Biden, as important as it is, will not in itself stop our slide into autocracy.  Rather, we must consider what it will mean to prepare ourselves for a long struggle.  Over the next several posts, I hope to periodically interrupt my regular postings with a series essays entitled “Where We Stand,” an examination of some of what we and President Joe Biden will have to work with as we go forward.  

I intend to look in more detail at the following issues.  I have at one point or another written in this blog about each of them but each deserves a revisit, and, more importantly, an examination of how they interlock to endanger us. 

1. Our country has been left with a brand of ugly partisan politics that makes intelligent debate about critical national issues almost impossible.  Our partisanship has moved beyond politics and now infects many other aspects of our continuing experiment with democracy.  According to a Nielsen survey,   
   

   Nearly 60 percent of Republicans and more than 60 percent of Democrats agree … that the opposing party is a serious threat to the United States and its people.     
   

   Not only can we not agree on what the facts are, we can’t even agree on the concept there is such as a thing as absolute, verifiable truth.  “Alternative fact” is a nonsense concept that nevertheless seems to have acquired a reality of its own.  Well over half of Trump voters believe that Biden lost and is not our legitimate president.   
   
2. The Republican Party has corrupted itself and become a danger to democracy.  With a few important exceptions, the Republican Party (both its congressional leaders and, to a large extent, its base) has aligned itself with Trump and Trumpism, colluding with his ongoing assault on democracy.*  With its increasingly successful voter suppression, attacks on the 2020 presidential election results, refusal to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to reign in a corrupt President, tacit support for far-tight violent groups, and others, the Party has ceased to act within the bounds of politics and must be completely reformed or dismantled.
3. Voter suppression is rampant across the country.  Gerrymandering, voter ID laws, removal of voting booths in minority areas, culling of voter lists, and so on are widespread across the country.  We have made a mockery of one-person-one-vote.  To date, the Supreme Court has not interfered.
4. The acceptability of political violence grows.  America has, since its beginning, been militaristic, but in its current manifestations, its threats to our democracy have grown.  Openly carried assault weapons are legal and frequently visible, militia, threats of violence against political “enemies” are not unusual.  Then-candidate Trump suggested violence against protesters at campaign rallies.**   A peaceful demonstration across from the White House was violently suppressed.  Our political language is ever-more violent.  Incredibly, some members of Congress fear violence from their congressional colleagues.  With such violence comes fear, and fear inhibits democracy.
5. Racism and white supremacy are endemic in the culture.  It is clear that minorities are not full participants in our democracy, which has, in fact, been built upon their oppression, suppression and enslavement.  We cannot hope to be a democracy with the degree of racial injustice that has plagued our country since its inception.
6. Almost half (46%) of Americans indicate a preference for a more authoritarian form of government.  This is not just an objection to our version of democracy, it’s an objection to democracy itself.
   

President Trump has left office.  His explicit attempts to overturn the election were thwarted.  For the time being, the center holds.  President Biden’s inauguration — from Lady Gaga’s “Star Spangled Banner” to Amanda Gorman’s powerful poem, to Biden’s low-key address — acknowledged the precariousness of our democracy yet left us with hope.  It returned the presidency to normalcy.  But can we really recover?  I certainly hope so, but I have serious doubts.  The next two years of the Biden Administration and Democrats’ control of Congress gives us a chance to take a deep breath, evaluate the state of our democracy, and make our plans to preserve it. But our success is contingent upon our willingness to see clearly exactly where we stand.

_____________

* In the last few days Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has offered a ray of hope by denouncing Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and her “loony it's conspiracy theories.”  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, on the other hand refuses to discipline Marjorie Taylor Greene for her belief in those same "loony conspiracy theories.”
** At a campaign rally in 2016, when protesters interrupted, Trump responded, “Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”