Just as the Republican Party is united around an anti-democratic myth that the 2020 election was stolen from them, too many Democratic politicos are possessed by a related fable: that the Trumpist attempt to undermine and overthrow American democracy ended with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. What these Democrats fail to grasp, both at their own peril and to the grave danger of the United States, is that the insurrection has continued through the present day, changing form and expanding its goals from throwing out the 2020 results to undermining the possibility of free and fair elections in 2022 and beyond. The goal remains the same: the overthrow of America’s democratic form of government by ensuring that the Republican Party maintains power.
The mass Republican refusal to acknowledge that Joe Biden was fairly elected president is the public justification for the ongoing insurrection, which is being conducted by means of state-level efforts across the land to restrict the voting rights of Democratic-leaning voters, empower state officials to overrule local election authorities, and authorize state legislatures to reject the will of the majority. By passing laws to maximize Republicans’ ability to game future election results in the party’s favor, the GOP continues the insurrectionary attack on American democracy by pseudo-democratic means. What armed Trumpists were not able to gain by force at the Capitol on January 6, GOP politicians now aim to accomplish by dismantling democracy, state by state, before the 2022 midterms.
Thinking in terms of an ongoing insurrection helps counter more fragmentary and misleading coverage that holds that the salient fact of the Republican Party is how thoroughly it has become a cult of Trump. When the GOP attempts to rig future elections based on its embrace of Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, the adherence to Trump is hardly the whole story. The assault on democracy, not the impulse to parrot Trump’s lies or the desire to keep him as the leader of the GOP, is of overriding importance. And as central as Donald Trump has been to providing the Republican Party with an inspirational leader who mobilizes the base, GOP lies about election integrity and a party-wide dedication to suppressing Democratic votes long pre-date his presidency. As this Vox article recounts:
After Republicans won a series of statehouse elections in 2010, they spent the next few years falsely claiming that voter fraud was a serious threat in order to pass voter ID laws that were nakedly designed to suppress the vote among Democratic-leaning minority groups. Research has found that, even prior to Trump, this convinced Republicans that voter fraud was a real problem when it’s exceptionally rare.
These earlier campaigns laid the intellectual groundwork for 2020. Republicans were already primed to believe elected Democrats were somehow illegitimate and to believe in widespread fraud in the American electoral system. Trump’s innovation — claiming that an entire presidential election result was fraudulent — was pushing on an open door.
This long-term GOP project to undermine democracy for partisan ends helps contextualize why Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election were so smoothly transformed into the ongoing Republican insurrection. While Trump may be a singularly malevolent political actor, his anti-democratic behavior was on a continuum with decades of anti-democratic animus in his party at large. The Republican Party’s collective decision to line up behind an authoritarian strongman should be seen as the logical end point of its previous efforts to undermine free and fair elections, just as the party’s war on democracy has flowed inexorably from the party’s increasing identity as America’s party of white supremacism, as white Americans compose a shrinking share of the electorate and fear a loss of power and status. As the party has concluded that it can no longer muster nationwide majority support, its commitment to democracy has fallen away, unveiling a GOP and a broader anti-democratic movement that poses the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.
But if the Grand Old Party’s transformation into the Party of Insurrection is the prime political fact of our time, the Democrats’ lackadaisical response is a close second. A dizzying imbalance now exists between the two parties. Even as Republicans move to cement permanent legislative control in states like Michigan, to gain permanent control of the House via gerrymandering and voter suppression, and to lay the groundwork for refusing to accept a Democratic presidential victory in 2024, Democrats have so far been unable or unwilling to pass national legislation that would not just blunt but roll back the GOP’s attack on democracy. Instead, they are hamstrung by a few senators still obsessed with preserving the filibuster, who in doing so ensure that that the Senate is unable to carry out the will of the majority, not to mention the most basic defense of American democracy itself.
But the partisan imbalance goes deeper than Democrats’ apparent lack of urgency in pushing through laws that would preserve free and fair elections, and that would prevent the Democrats from passing into electoral oblivion, even as their political opponents are intent on transforming the U.S. into a one-party state. Even after the armed insurrection of January 6, and the GOP’s assertion that Joe Biden and the Democrats effectively staged a coup to gain power in 2020, the Democrats apparently remain fully committed to treating the Republicans as worthy partners, legitimate and good-faith participants in our democratic political system. In doing so, the Democrats provide valuable cover and legitimacy for Republicans to move forward their insurrectionary movement that, if it is successful in imposing voter restrictions and deepened gerrymandering in enough states, could make it impossible for Democrats to ever again win the presidency, win the House or Senate, or win power in multiple states across the union.
The imbalance can also be seen in the two parties’ attitudes towards their base voters and the American public more generally. The GOP has made explicit that its highest priority is not to help the economy recover, or defeat the coronavirus pandemic, but to impose voting restrictions targeting Democratic-leaning votes in as many states as possible. In making this a priority, they have placed promotion of the Big Lie about the 2020 election at the center of their voters’ consciousness. By insisting that Joe Biden gained power by effectively staging a coup against the nation, the GOP is working not just to motivate but to radicalize its base against democracy itself, and to persuade its voters to treat the Biden administration and elected Democrats not as political opponents but as an occupying army. Claims of a stolen election thus transform politics from a struggle between political adversaries into a life-and-death struggle against political enemies.
In contrast, the Democrats are making no analogous efforts to energize their base or to persuade Americans about the importance of defending democracy against those would take it apart. As Brian Beutler argues, the Biden administration and Democratic legislators appear to have made a decision that the way to beat the GOP is to ensure the economy has recovered in time for the 2022 midterms and for the 2024 election, rather than pursuing no-holds-barred investigations of Trump administration corruption that could also taint the broader GOP. But Beutler’s point applies equally well to the Democrats’ refusal to prioritize defense of democracy relative to economic recovery. Not only does this strategy gamble everything on the health of the economy, it ignores the basic fact that the GOP is trying to rig the 2022 elections so that it doesn’t matter how many people vote for Democrats! This is actually a case where the Democrats could learn from the GOP: the public is more likely to think an issue is important is you actually ACT like it’s important. Even as the GOP is fomenting its base into opposition to democracy, the Democrats are failing to rally the American public in democracy’s defense.
Apart from the slow-roll treatment being given to essential pro-democracy legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to recognize the political stakes has been telegraphed by the party’s increasingly bizarre insistence on a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. As observers like Josh Marshall have noted, it simply doesn’t make any sense for the party involved in the insurrection to be allowed to investigate itself. This is a glaring instance of the Democrats concerning themselves with appearances of bipartisanship when the quest for such appearances threatens to give cover for actual insurrectionary acts against the United States.
Democratic leaders also collectively seem not to understand that whether or not violence is considered an acceptable element of American politics is the dividing line between whether we live in a democracy or in an authoritarian state. If one party is able to use violence, or the threat of violence, to get its way politically, and that party pays no price, then its opposition will eventually be swept aside through injury, death, and intimidation. This fact stands apart from the GOP’s campaign to rig elections via voter suppression and gerrymandering — yet the fact that GOP is so insistent on shielding Trump and his co-conspirators from the consequences of January 6 attests to the party’s comfort with violence as a tool for maintaining power against the will of the majority. And so alongside the passage of anti-democratic voting laws, the ongoing GOP insurrection, with its basic assertion that elections that put Democrats in office are no longer to be considered valid, also inevitably takes up the cudgels used in the January 6 attack, employing the threat of violence to intimidate Democrats. This strategy runs from tolerating threatening behavior by Republican members of Congress against their colleagues, to making common cause with actual armed vigilantes, as has happened in states like Michigan and Oregon, to mobilizing and activating far-right terrorists by false claims of a Democratic coup. The Republican Party believes that the fight against democracy necessarily involves the ability to inflict bodily harm on democracy’s defenders.
As I noted above, the events of January 6 were the climax of months of non-violent efforts by Trump and other Republicans to subvert and steal the 2020 election. Yet the former president’s resort to violence to achieve what he could not accomplish by cheating was a turn against democracy, and a violation of his oath of office, so profound as to leave no room for ambiguity. Now that the GOP has taken up the myth of a stolen election — the same myth that motivated an armed insurrection among Trump loyalists — as central to its identity, it’s more important than ever to highlight the violence that such lies spurred, and how it was the logical recourse of a president committed to maintaining power against the will of the electorate. Even if the GOP had not been complicit in the events of January 6 when they happened, its ongoing propagation of Trump’s lies makes it complicit now — as does the party’s refusal to hold the former president accountable for his actions by means of a congressional investigation. Democrats need to view a January 6 inquiry as a completely legitimate and necessary tool to paint the GOP as the insurrectionist party it has become. Most Americans understand violence is outside the bounds of American democracy, and the Democrats need to press this point with every resource at their disposal, even as they also fight back against the legislative insurrection being waged in dozens of statehouses.
This gets us to a point that I find singularly frustrating: the very willingness to make war on democracy, and defend violence, that makes the GOP such a threat today, are also sources of profound vulnerability for the party — if, that is, the Democrats are willing to highlight these basic points. The GOP’s incoherent arguments against participating in a January 6 commission — which boil down to fear of what the commission might find about GOP complicity — provides yet more fuel for pressing on with such a commission and proving right the GOP’s sense of its own vulnerability. And in passing laws that obviously target minority Americans and that defend the right of terrorists to mow down BLM protestors by crashing cars into them, and by coming up with an infinite number of excuses for not holding to account the president who instigated our nation’s first coup attempt, the GOP evinces a white supremacist, authoritarian theory of governance that is repugnant to a clear majority of Americans. In particular, the GOP’s willingness to embrace an American apartheid that restricts the political rights and power of minority Americans even as those Americans constitute a larger and larger share of the population with each passing year, means that the party has set itself on a course where it must either succeed in its destruction of democracy, or be destroyed by an electorate repelled by its racism and authoritarianism.