Rough days for democracy
It’s in for a bruising as U.S. trudges toward 2024
Joe Biden was 52 minutes into his marathon news conference last Wednesday, on the oneyear anniversary of his presidency, when he was asked whether he thought the United States is more unified now than it was when he took office.
The answer ought to be “No.” By any reckoning, 2021 was a disaster, a frightening portend of what seems to lie ahead as the country moves through its midterm elections this fall, then on to the presidential primaries in the early months of 2024, the nominating conventions that summer and in November 2024, the election itself. Each stage of the process will have implications, perhaps nasty ones, for Canada.
The storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year was unprecedented in North American history, a violent attempt to block the transfer of power to the legal winner of a legitimate election — a ragtag attempt at a coup, inspired and encouraged by a defeated incumbent.
Donald Trump refused to fade away. In multiple courts and public rallies, he peddled his fraudulent claim that Biden had stolen the 2020 election; as he did so, he tightened his grip on his party so successfully that today 70 per cent of Republicans tell pollsters they believe Trump truly won that election.
The ex-president has cowed Republicans in both houses of Congress who fear for their seats if they displease him. Although Republicans have often stood with the Democrats on similar laws in the past, not one GOP senator could be persuaded to support Biden’s voting rights legislation last week — not after Trump had denounced it. “Republicans will never be elected again if that happens, if that passes,” he told Fox News.
Back at the news conference, Biden was not going to concede that his land was less unified. He did what he often does when he is uncomfortable with an answer he is giving — he interrupted himself and let his mind stray. His mental meandering at minute 52 was interesting.
“Look, I still contend that unless you can reach consensus in a democracy, you cannot sustain the democracy.”
Then this: “I believe we’re going through one of those inflection points in history that occurs every several generations or even more than that … Can we maintain the democratic institutions that we have … to be able to generate democratic consensus of how to proceed? It’s going to be hard.”
Are we at an inflection point of history? I think he’s right. And if he is also right about the need for consensus to sustain democracy, then we — Americans and Canadians, too — are at a dangerous inflection point. Trump and his ilk thrive on the disintegration of consensus on such basic democratic principles as truth and decency.
Without those principles, conspiracy theories spread like wildfire.
Vote suppression becomes commonplace. Electoral districts are gerrymandered. Antivaxxers and anti-abortionists disrupt election gatherings. Where a protester occasionally threw a rotten tomato at a prime minister, crowds now throw stones at him. Will rocks be next?
Washington’s political barometer forecasts that Trump will run for president and, as he sees it, vindication in 2024. If he is unavailable — by virtue being in jail? — he would hand off to an acolyte, the leading one at present being Ron DeSantis, the hard-right, anti-COVID-mask governor of Florida.
Either way, democracy will be in for another bruising and the pain will be felt in Canada, too.