In a recent piece, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin argues that President Joe Biden’s appeal to voters as a defender of democracy is necessary but insufficient. Alongside this positive message, she counsels, he should also tell the American people “that MAGA Republicans bring violence, disorder, chaos and gridlock.” This one-two punch approach feels spot on to me, but beneath this basic approach are layers of practical and philosophical questions that are worth mulling over.
Regarding the pro-democracy argument, Rubin makes the provocative but essential point that a lot of people simply don’t know what democracy really means, or how it benefits them. To run with this a bit — I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people understand intellectually that we live in a democracy, but feel that they don’t have much say in how decisions are made, or that democracy actually delivers for either themselves or for the American majority. Perhaps they blame this on politicians who have a bias towards serving their big donors, or out of disagreement with the idea that what government does is actually what most people support.
This raises the troubling possibility that when Joe Biden defends democracy either too abstractly or in a way that fulsomely embraces a political system that many millions see as corrupt or unresponsive, he undercuts what, superficially speaking, should be an uncontroversial point for most people and a rallying cry for the majority. Biden’s defense of our status quo democracy is all the more striking when we can see all around us the manifold ways in which American democracy isn’t very democratic at all, from the over-representation of smaller, rural states in the Senate (so that the roughly 39 million citizens of California are represented by the same number of senators as the 575,000 citizens of Wyoming) to states like Wisconsin and North Carolina where a bare majority of GOP voters have allowed Republican politicians to re-write state laws to place the party in near-permanent power and influence. The premier example of the U.S. not operating as a democracy is the fact that the electoral college delivered the presidency to Donald Trump in 2016, despite his loss to Hilary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes nationwide (and it nearly did the same for Trump in 2020, despite Joe Biden receiving in excess of 7 million more votes).
Admitting the ways in which U.S. democracy falls short isn’t the same as saying that democracy is bad, but is actually how democracy in general should operate — always self-interrogating and self-correcting. As much as Biden should be praised for laying down baseline principles in his series of pro-democracy speeches, what’s been missing from his talk and from his legislative priorities is the prioritization of ideas and laws that would truly strengthen U.S. democracy, both against its domestic enemies and in a way that bolsters its responsiveness and accountability to the American people.
This can’t possibly be for lack of available ideas. In the first two years of the Biden administration, congressional Democrats drafted bills that would have implemented concrete pro-democracy improvements like severely restricting gerrymandering and ensuring Americans’ ability to vote and have those votes counted. While it is true that a lack of Democratic unity and GOP opposition stymied this legislation, what is also true is that there was never any reason for Joe Biden to fall quiet on these substantive improvements to our elections and our government. And beyond ideas that Democrats have already considered implementing via legislation, political scientists and others around the country have a bounty of suggestions and solutions (as just one example, check out this piece by Danielle Allen and the amazing series of related columns she has penned recently).
The lack of prioritization of pro-democracy measures that would bring more responsiveness and accountability to American government makes even less sense when we widen the aperture and take in the authoritarian spectacle of the Trump-dominated GOP — a party that is actively seeking to restrict voting rights, and which to large degree supports a presidential candidate who attempted a coup against the United States and is actively considering plans to essentially implement a violent dictatorship should he return to power. Whatever else you might say about it, the GOP is chock full of creative ideas aimed at making U.S. democracy, and the lives of ordinary Americans, far worse. The ideas are certainly not good, but there is a dark energy in their promulgation that is not equally matched by the pro-democracy legislative priorities of either the Biden administration or the Democratic Party.
This imbalance only grows more striking and inexplicable the more you contemplate it. One defense of the Democrats is that they don’t have the ability to pass any democracy-strengthening measures at the national level, so that any energy put into this would be a waste of time. Yet, given the GOP’s increasingly authoritarian direction, the decision not to even talk about ideas like banning gerrymanders, or reforming the Supreme Court so that it more accurately reflects the consent of the majority, has abandoned the field to the forces of authoritarianism at precisely the worst possible time. As the GOP continues to rip away its mask of moderation with the selection of a far-right Christian nationalist Speaker of the House, and conducts a kibuki presidential primary in which the inevitable winner has pledged a term in office based on retribution, violence, and the evisceration of American democracy, Democrats need to be talking a lot more about democratic strengthening and renewal.
This is where we can see that Republican authoritarianism might yet exist in a paradoxically healthy synergy with concerted efforts to improve American democracy. At its core, the far-right movement represented by the GOP’s accelerating extremism represents an enraged American minority bent on maintaining traditional (but increasingly discredited) hierarchies of power, as keen observers like political scientists Thomas Zimmer and Lilliana Mason have described. They don’t have the backing of an American majority, and so have every incentive to achieve power for a radical minority — a dream of power that is arguably only possible because of the many undemocratic features of American government.
But these very forces of reaction should in turn provoke a counter-reaction from the democratic majority that’s in the process of having its power robbed and its values undermined — a counter-reaction not in the sense of something that will just naturally occur as part of the orderly unfurling of history, but that derives from millions of Americans registering the challenge before us and realizing that more democracy, not less, is the best way forward.
The embrace of a pro-democracy agenda is tightly bound to a vision of a more egalitarian and just America. Just as the MAGA movement opposes and subverts democracy because it’s an impediment to implementing a set of retrograde values, the anti-MAGA American majority believes in a range of values that are far more progressive and egalitarian, held as they are by a much more diverse assemblage of citizens than the overwhelmingly white and Christian Republican base. It is the difference between a party that believes the government should force children to say Christian prayers in school, and a party that believes that every American should be able to choose and practice their own religion (or no religion at all).
A concerted push to advocate for a democratized American political system would supercharge a sense of possibility, accountability, and agency that would form a decisive contrast with the darker side of the MAGA agenda that Rubin mentions in her column — the fact “that MAGA Republicans bring violence, disorder, chaos and gridlock.” The deployment of fear to motivate people to the polls can be a cynical and destructive tactic, such as when the fear is based on hatred of vulnerable groups like African-Americans or gays. But when based in actual threats of violence posed by an opponent, as is the case when naming the threat posed by MAGA candidates, it is an essential step in alerting the public to political reality. And when coupled with a positive alternative — a pro-democracy agenda — it might prove decisive in mobilizing Americans to the side of freedom and democracy.