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.