Death Of Our Democracy

January 7th, 2022

The Death Of Our Democracy

I fully intended to get this out yesterday, on the anniversary of the attempted take-over of our long-standing government of we the people, by the people, and for the people. But as so often happens, for me anyway, life got in the way.

There’s been a lot written lately about forces trying to re-imagine our democracy into something that serves only a small minority of the country. I think that when most folks think of the demise of a democracy, they think of guns and tanks. But according to Boston College history scholar Heather Cox Richardson, most modern democracies are forfeited at the ballot box, not the battlefield. “You can see this in Russia, where Vladimir Putin gradually concentrated power into his own hands. You can see it in Brazil, where Jair Bolsanaro, whose approval rating in late August was 23%, claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “either we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” You can see it in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has quite deliberately dismantled liberal democracy and replaced it with what he calls “illiberal democracy.” “

It's happening here. Here in the greatest democracy the world has ever known. Or maybe the greatest democracy that the world HAD ever known. For the first time ever, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, based in Sweden, reports that “The U.S. has fallen victim to ‘authoritarian tendencies’ in recent years with this decline following a larger five-year trend seen globally… The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,".

And according to Freedom House, a decades old organization that monitors the state of freedom and democracy around the world, their annual country-by-country assessment of political and civil rights, the United States continued to experience erosion in democratic practices in 2020. Over the past decade, America’s score dropped from 94 to 83 out of 100, among the steepest falls of any country during this period.

In December former Montana Governor Marc Racicot warned that fidelity is in jeopardy in America, not only in regard to the state and national constitutions, but to the country’s spirit as well. He also said there are serious warning signs that the U.S. Constitution and republic are at risk.

“A people who cannot talk or listen to each other, who do not respect each other, who will not sincerely consider the thoughts of each other, who do not trust each other and who cannot reason with each other, cannot long live in freedom.” Racicot said.

In a recent Washington Post story, “Atlantic magazine — which positions itself as centrist rather than left-leaning — published an entire issue in December devoted to the topic of democracy under threat. The cover headline’s message was hard to miss: “January 6 Was Practice.” The cover story by Barton Gellman began with this chilling paragraph: “Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.” “

And in another story from the Atlantic, “The democratic emergency is already here,” (…according to) Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024, yet urgent action is not happening.”

In November, a hundred and fifty college scholars penned an open letter taking note of the danger that our democracy is in. “We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy writing in support of the Freedom to Vote Act, the most important piece of legislation to defend and strengthen American democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This bill would protect our elections from interference, partisan gerrymandering, dark money, and voter suppression. We urge all members of Congress to pass the bill, if necessary by suspending the Senate filibuster rule and using a simple majority vote. This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy. It is a moment of great peril and risk.”

They warn that attacks on the “Legitimacy of America’s elections and, importantly, the use of this as justification to lay the groundwork to subvert democratic outcomes later, has grown to a crisis point. This represents a clear and present threat to the future of electoral democracy in the United States…the history of other crisis-ridden democracies tells us this threat cannot be wished away. It must be promptly and forthrightly confronted.”

Heather Cox Richardson again: If it seems odd that a group of people who claim to be trying to “Make America Great Again” are taking their cues from Hungary, a central European country of about 10 million people, it is worth noting that they are not simply talking about Critical Race Theory or Texas’s so-called heartbeat bill. We are in a larger struggle over the nature of human governments. And when American thinkers are praising Hungary, they are tapping into a long history of our own.

When the Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they were making a bold declaration about the nature of governments that flew in the face of western tradition and thought. They denied that some individuals were better than others and had an inherent right to rule the rest. Governments, the Founders said, derived legitimacy not from religion, or heritage, but instead were legitimate only to the degree that those who lived under them consented to them. “To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

This was a revolutionary argument. It rejected not just King George III, but all kings, claiming for the people the right to rule themselves. For all its limitations - the Founders could conceive of this idea in part because they excluded from their vision women, Black people, and all people of color - it was an astonishing declaration.

And yet, the idea that all men are created equal and that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed began to fall apart in the late 1820s. Southern Democrats wanted to take control of Indigenous peoples’ lands in the Southeast in order to spread the wildly lucrative system of plantation agriculture. Then, when they had displaced the tribes, they spread across those lands their economic system based on human enslavement.

But because southern leaders were outnumbered by Americans in the North who objected to their economic system, within a decade they were arguing that true democracy meant not that government depended upon the consent of the governed as a whole, but rather that local or state governments could choose how everyone, including enslaved people, women, Indigenous, and Mexican people, would live. And, of course, they limited voting to a few white men, who voted to keep themselves in power. 

In 1860, southern white elites declared the American concept of democracy based in equality, government based in the consent of the people, to be obsolete. They declared they were going to start a new country, based in a hierarchy of gender and race, that they believed reflected God’s will. In a speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America, explained to an audience that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was ​​“an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane “fanatic.” Stephens told listeners: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” 

And there it was! The replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule. We are today in a struggle no less dangerous to our democracy than that of the 1860s, for all that it is fought with Facebook memes and cable television rather than artillery.”

Ok, I can hear what you’re thinking, “Geez Wayne, this is disturbing. But what does any of this have to do with race and racial justice?” The answer is everything. Because all countries in modern times – refer back to the list above - when trying to subvert a democracy by tinkering with free and fair elections, the boogiemen that they use time and again, are the minority inhabitants of the country they are trying to subvert.

Professor Richardson, “The 33 new election laws in 19 states will not fail. They are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a minority will determine our fate.” If minorities are to be used as the boogieman – the ladle that stirs the poisonous stew of hate, fear, and resentment - it’s imperative that those minorities remain with no financial or political power.

In May, 2015, in another first for America, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a scathing report, consisting of 348 recommendations that address myriad human rights violations in the United States.

Republican lawmakers are silent as Republican-dominated legislatures in 19 states have passed 33 laws to make it harder for Black and Brown Americans, as well as others expected to back Democrats, to vote. Some of those states have taken the power to certify official votes away from nonpartisan officials and given it to Republicans. Had these laws been in place in 2020, Trump would almost certainly still be in office.

Robert Pape, a PhD in Political Science, is also a well-credentialed connoisseur of political violence. His team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. Only one meaningful correlation emerged. All other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline.

During the Civil War battles were fought on the outskirts of Washington DC to ensure that the Confederate Flag never flew over the Capitol dome. It was no accident that on January 6th, the Confederate Flag - the flag of hate and of white superiority - flew within the Capitol itself. The best, most sure-fire way to preserve our democracy is to fight for racial equity.