Losing Our Democracy - Part 3

In this series of posts, I am arguing that, although the process has been gradual, our country has stepped over a line separating democracy from authoritarianism, and our analyses and actions must recognize our new reality.  In the first post, we looked at the anti-democratic elements baked into our Constitution that have threatened us from the beginning:

• most importantly, slavery and racism but also
• how senators were selected;
• how the members of the Electoral College were selected;
• the failure to limit the influence of political parties, which has contributed to today’s partisanship;
• the failure to limit the power of the “imperial presidency” and others.

Only some of these have been even partially rectified in our history.

In the second post we looked at the changes in our politics over the last thirty years that have explicitly challenged democracy and prepared the way for President Trump’s assault on democratic norms and structures:

• The rise of corporate power in the late 1970s;
• the increasing partisanship in the mid-1990s;
• the failure of the Supreme Court to limit gerrymandering and voter suppression;
• Mitch McConnell’s refusal to allow the Senate to consider President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court; and others.

In this post, I’d like to summarize and make my argument that we have been pushed over a red line into autocracy.  I’ve reviewed many of these forces briefly in the previous two posts; the others I’ve explored in more detail in posts stretching back to the beginning of this blog.

These are some of the most important factors.

Constitutional Safeguards:

My greatest concern is that, for all practical purposes, the Republican Party has successfully destroyed one of the most important constitutional safeguards against the presidential arrogation of power.  According to the principles of the Balance of Powers, Congress has the responsibility to keep the president in check.  The Republican Party has refused this responsibility and allowed the President free reign in attacking the democracy, despite the fact that many in the party are privately aghast at Trump’s behavior.

The Supreme Court also has the obligation to control an unruly president.  The evidence of the Court’s fulfillment of that responsibility has been mixed:

• On the positive side, the Court has favored democratic values by prohibiting the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 census. 
• But the Court has also ruled that federal courts cannot block extreme gerrymandering, a clear a violation of one of democracy’s foundational principles: one-person-one-vote.  (Similarly, gerrymandering influences the Electoral College, which has changed the results in both the 2000 and 2016 of the presidential elections.) 
• The Constitution is explicit that Congress controls the national purse strings; nevertheless, the Supreme Court has allowed the President to use military funds to build the wall between Mexico and Texas without congressional approval. 
• The Court has also ruled in favor of most of Trump’s immigration bans, even those that pertain to almost exclusively Muslim countries, despite our obligation not to discriminate on the basis of religion.

Partisanship

Current partisanship in our country, mostly dividing along lines of race and class, is extraordinary.  It ensures that people vote mostly along party lines rather than along specific issues of concern to them.  One of the most important sequelae is the tendency of party members to consider people from the other party not as political opponents but as existential enemies.

This partisanship is an element of a further loss of an already minimal trust in government and in democracy in general.  Significant portions of our population no longer believe that democracy is the best form of government, although it’s not clear what they would choose otherwise.  Democracy is difficult enough, and without significant majority support, the country becomes vulnerable to demagogues and autocrats.

Propaganda

The development of Fox News as a national propaganda organ for the president (unique in American history) ensures that vast swaths of the American population have little access to objective information on national issues of importance.  Fox’s stoking the fires of partisanship has also had a profoundly deleterious impact on our democracy.

Lying and Obstruction of Justice

According to the Washington Post, the President had made 12,019 false or misleading claims as of August 5, 2019.  This does not seem to have hurt his support, most probably due to the partisanship and propaganda mentioned above, but it is nevertheless astonishing.  To some extent, all politicians stretch the truth or even lie; but this President is clearly in a class by himself.  A democracy depends on its people making decisions about the country’s course.  When truth is so warped, that capacity is profoundly impaired.
 
According to the president,

• Voter fraud prevented his popular election in 2016. 
• The judiciary is prejudiced against him. 
• Science is unreliable and global climate change is a hoax (although he has backed off from this last claim recently).
• Immigrants are “invaders and killers“ as well as the source of job loss for “true American.”
• The Mueller report has no evidence of his obstruction of justice.
• His political opponents are treasonous, if not evil.
• Foreign autocrats are more reliable than his own intelligence services.

Despite the Mueller report’s detailed documentation of Trump’s obstruction of justice, there have been no significant consequences for him.  The Mueller report documented over ten findings of obstruction, yet the president denied not only the charges but also the obvious fact that the charges were contained in the report.  His lying about such a provable fact has been remarkably effective.  Even if the House of Representatives succeeds in bringing articles of impeachment, the Republican-controlled Senate is unlikely to remove him from office.  While there have been many protestations that “no one is above the law,” that hasn’t yet seemed to apply to the President.

The foregoing is more than just a catalog of the President’s sins; it is about the long-term impact on our democracy.  Most of these factors and consequences are not going away regardless of the 2020 elections.  Fox News is not going away.  The balance of the Supreme Court will probably not change for a generation.  Trust in democracy will not return … at least anytime soon.  Perhaps most importantly, in a country riven by deep partisanship, political norms—acceptable political behavior; bipartisan, functional government; agreement about the nature of truth; the balance of powers—will take a long time to be restored, and we may not have that time.  We have not faced such dangerous realities since the Civil War.

Recent history teaches us that many of the world’s former democracies became autocracies legally and gradually.  There was no obvious tipping point.  They may still even have what appear to be free elections.  The media may not be controlled but only influenced by government.  The courts may seem independent but have been packed with government supporters. 

Although the red line may be extraordinarily blurry, we have stepped into a new political reality.  There is certainly no guarantee that the United States can survive as a free democracy.  Absent strong democratic resistance, we are in trouble.   

What does resistance look like?

Losing Democracy – Part 2

In these three posts, I am making the argument that America has stepped over the line that separates democracy from autocracy and/or fascism.  No democracy is perfect, and many of these issues have been present from the beginning.  In the last post, I looked at some of the non-democratic features baked into our Constitution that have always pushed us away from democracy: the selection of senators (both at our founding and now), the Electoral College, the failure to limit executive power, and so forth. 

In this post I’d like to examine some of the modern changes before the Trump presidency that paved the way for President Trump and his attacks on our form of government.

Corporate lobbying

In 1971, future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the Chamber of Commerce.  Concerned that business had lost too much power during the liberal Lyndon Johnson years, Powell suggested that corporate lobbying should be organized to support business-in-general rather than individual lobbying by multiple, often-competing industries.  By 1976, the Chamber had become that organization.  Previously, in the mid-1970s,

nearly half of Senate incumbents’ campaign funds came from labor PACs. [Due to the combined power of corporate lobbying] … [a] decade later, the share was below one-fifth.

Impact was immediate.  For instance, prior to Democrat Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, a number of liberal bills (eg labor law reform and health care reform) passed easily through Congress but were then vetoed by Republican President Gerald Ford.  With Carter’s election Democrats expected quick passage of these bills into law.  But, due to corporate support of many Democratic freshmen lawmakers and Carter’s tepid response, these bills could not even make it through Congress.

The Democrats were quick to catch on and cash in on corporate support.  Since that time, very few bills have passed through Congress without the support of business and the elites*.  In fact, even when majorities of private citizens favor any bill that business and the elite oppose, the chances of that bill becoming law are minuscule.

Even majorities of non-elite citizens (“the 99%”) have almost no independent political power, an extraordinary development. Making things worse, corporate power was even further increased with the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.  The impact on democracy should be obvious. 

Newt Gingrich and Political Polarization

Few politicians have had greater impact on today’s political polarization than former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.  In 1994, Gingrich initiated a “scorched-earth” political tactic that included demonization of political opponents, obstruction of government functioning by use of government shutdowns (or threats thereof), frequent filibusters, and the use of hardball politics to subvert the democratic process.

Gingrich’s policies eventually resulted in the complete separation of the two parties into partisan, constantly warring camps.  Previously, there had been some Republicans more liberal than some conservative Democrats and vice-versa.  Members of Congress had friendships across party lines, and coalitions comprising both Democrats and Republicans were common.  All that has disappeared.  The result is a relatively non-functioning Congress that has deeply alienated the American public, maiming government’s capacity to govern and spurring further public alienation that has severely weakened our politics.

Others

I have previously mentioned a number of other changes prior to the Trump presidency that have weakened our democracy and prepared the way for the President’s attacks.  It might, however, be instructive to list these in one place.

• For the first time in our history, we have in Fox News a national news source that is essentially a propaganda arm of the Trump administration, leaving the country without agreed-upon facts.  Informed debate is difficult to find.
• The Supreme Court has ruled political gerrymandering constitutional, rendering the principle of one-person-one-vote meaningless and greatly increasing the chances of Republican control of the House of Representatives.
• Voter suppression, practiced exclusively by the Republican Party, is a powerful tool that also makes a mockery of one-person-one-vote.  While the Supreme Court has invalidated some of these unconstitutional practices, many others have survived legal challenges.  In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, making constitutional the purging of voter rolls, which disproportionately affects minorities and the poor
• Executive orders, while used most by President Obama, have become standard practice for a president.
• Since 1979, the wages of the working and middle classes have been stagnant while the incomes of the wealthy have more than doubled, creating a deep inequality that has laid the ground for the populism that Trump rode to the presidency
• In probably the most egregious use of hardball politics, in 2016 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to consider President Obama’s nomination, Merrick Garland, for the Supreme Court.  The resultant conservative majority on the court will continue to skew court decisions for decades.  This past March, for instance, a 5-4 conservative-majority decision allowed the federal government to detain non-citizens who had committed even minor crimes years previously. an unlikely decision had Garland been on the court.

Even before the Trump presidency, each of these attacks pushed us further away from democracy, preparing the way for the President’s further moves.  In the next post we’ll look at what President Trump has built upon the structure he inherited.

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* Elites: a small group of powerful people (“the 1%”) who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a society.