If there is one positive thing that has come from the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it is that even mainstream Democrats can no longer look away from how the Republican Party has fought for decades now to secure itself in power against a rising Democratic majority. An understanding that American democracy itself must be revitalized and expanded seems to have a good chance of becoming a central tenet for the party, from expanding the size of the Supreme Court, to federal laws banning gerrymandering and guaranteeing that every American’s vote will be counted, to extending statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, to doing away with the electoral college.
Democrats need to ensure that every American is fully conscious of the shocking facts that the GOP has won the popular vote in only one presidential election since 1992; that the Republican majority in the Senate represents many millions less votes than Democratic senators received; and that presidents who have lost the popular vote will have appointed the conservative majority on the Supreme Court (assuming Trump’s latest pick is confirmed). Making the case that the Republican Party is wrecking American democracy in its effort to hold power despite being increasingly unable to win majority votes nationally and in many states should be central to the Democrats message at all levels of government.
But the case the Democrats must make goes beyond a vital but abstract defense of majority rule. The particular minority that the GOP defends, and the character of the majority it seeks to thwart, are the heart of the story. The Republican Party is fighting to maintain power for white Americans, and to restrict the power of non-white Americans. In plain language, the Republican Party has dedicated itself to maintaining a system of white supremacy in this country. These are the terms of our ongoing conflict, and the Democrats cannot be afraid to describe it as such.
As writers like Jamelle Bouie have described, the Republican Party has tried to invert this reality, by constantly asserting that all their actions come down to trying to protect the will of the voters — such as when they point to their Senate majority and Trump’s presidency as proof they have majority support to appoint a new Supreme Court justice. But of course the GOP majority does not represent a majority of voters, and Trump was elected by the electoral college, not the popular vote. In this respect, alongside anti-democratic, iron-fisted efforts to suppress the Democratic vote, part of the GOP’s strategy has been to run an epic scam against the American majority, brazenly asserting that their ability to win votes in elections they’ve gamed in their favor truly represented the majority. Small wonder that the party cottoned so quickly to the greatest conman of our time after he won the presidency.
Against this GOP strategy of claiming that its hold on power means that the power must be legitimate, the Democrats cannot avoid pressing an argument over broader democratic legitimacy. But as encouraging as it is to see a broader pro-democracy agenda quickly beginning to gain traction, Democrats can’t lose sight of how quickly in turn the GOP’s efforts to maintain power despite the support of a minority of voters has slid not only into open corruption, but into threats of and actual violence. The line between minority rule and outright authoritarianism is turning out not only to be paper thin, but increasingly meaningless.
The fact that President Trump is taking the lead on both the corruption and violence fronts should not blind us to the fact that he does so with apparently unflinching support from the vast majority of Republican elected officials — and Republican voters. And nowhere is this corruption and violence more apparent than in his attacks on the November election. Over the past few days, I have seen more and more commentators wake up to the fact that Donald Trump simply does not intend to abide by the results of the election if they are not in his favor. This realization has come both from good reporting that has ferreted out new details of efforts to hold power no matter the vote, and from the president’s own open pronouncements. On Tuesday, the president refused to answer whether he would assent to a peaceful transfer of power; as bad as this is, Greg Sargent makes the case that the president is already engaging in activities meant to ensure that he holds onto power despite likely adverse election results. Perhaps most critically, the president is doing so by working to discredit the validity of mail-in voting, both as a concept and in individual states where GOP lawyers are working to ensure that a maximal number of likely-Biden ballots are disqualified. The end goal, as Sargent and others have pointed out, is to ensure that the president can claim victory election night if he appears to be ahead, even if all ballots have not yet been counted. Too many have referred to this as Trump’s war on mail-in voting, when it’s simply a war on voting.
Other machinations are already underway as well, including Republican efforts to determine if Republican-held legislatures can vote to award their electoral votes to Trump even if all the ballots have not been counted or Biden is leading in their states. Alongside Trump’s other clear efforts to undermine the election, some observers are starting to refer to these various efforts as a Republican coup that is already in progress.
But even this summary fails to capture the full extent of how greatly the president and the GOP’s efforts to retain power have blurred the line between manipulating the mechanisms of democratic government in bad faith, and operating outside them in illegitimate ways. For years now, the president has encouraged violence against political opponents and the press. Even as right-wing nationalists and racists have been emboldened by his rhetoric, the Department of Homeland Security has sought to play down the threat posed by these extremists — even after they’ve engaged in multiple acts of violence around the country. And after civil rights protests broke out nationwide following the murder of George Floyd, the president deployed federal agents to violently suppress demonstrations, and also encouraged militia types to fight back in the name of law and order. Inciting such violence has been a key part of his election strategy, both to promote a sense of chaos in the streets and to strengthen his image as a strong leader who can turn back the liberal civil rights tide by any means necessary. Now, as the election fast approaches, the president has begun suggesting that Republicans will need to guard against fraud at polling places — another open attempt to intimidate voters through physical force, as we have already seen happen during early voting in Virginia.
So while it is greatly encouraging that the Democrats have finally begun to grasp en masse that they are in a battle with Republicans to defend democracy in this country, and are articulating a grander vision for American democracy, that does not address the immediate danger — which is not a question simply of how to overcome minority rule, but how to overcome a minority party that now resorts to corruption and violence to hold onto power. A long-term strategy to expand democratic rule is necessary, but so is a related, immediate strategy to counter current GOP behavior that without exaggeration can be termed as authoritarian and anti-American.
This is a dangerous and unprecedented situation for all of us, yet there still seems to be inadequate attention paid to how to counter a lawless GOP now as it moves to corrupt and steal the election. I admit upfront that I don’t have any amazing raft of proposals — but then again, I’m not an elected Democrat! But whatever concrete steps the Democrats surely need to take — including, crucially, exerting whatever moral suasion they can on media outlets to do their democratic duty and treat this coup in the making as THE story of the election, as observers like Will Stancil and Amanda Marcotte have contended — their approach must involve describing in plain language to the American people how very radical, and unacceptable, the GOP’s open embrace of not just corruption but violence actually is. On top of this, they need to describe unambiguously that the Republican goal is to maintain an authoritarian system of white supremacy. Republicans will surely try to paint the Democrats as radical, as they talk of expanding the court and other democracy-strengthening policies, but the president’s increasing willingness to speak of made-up plots involving millions of ballots, and to egg on white-supremacist militias and other right-wing wackos to violence against their fellow Americans, all in the name of a deranged vision of white nationalism, must be used as a cudgel to de-legitimize and defeat both Donald Trump and the GOP. If the president can incite violence without consequence, then our politics will fall apart. You cannot have one party that uses violence as a political weapon, and another that is brutalized and even murdered. And this, I believe, is a point that might sway even some substantial number of Republicans to turn against the president.