Democracy: Is it in real danger?

Democrats are sinking into despair, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. One year later, it’s becoming increasingly clear that “dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve.” Next November, voters are likely to deliver the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate “to a party that largely treats the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes.” The GOP is using extreme gerrymandering to stack the deck against Democrats in state after state. Trumpaligned Republicans are also laying the groundwork for stealing future elections by purging local officials who stood firm against the Big Lie and “replacing them with apparatchiks.” Meanwhile, the GOP increasingly “winks at the violent intimidation of its political enemies.” It’s no wonder that many dispirited progressives are turning off the news and withdrawing—but that’s a terrible mistake. If Republicans take the White House in 2024, “it’s hard to imagine them ever consenting to the peaceful transfer of power again.”

That may be a real possibility, said Brianna Navarre in USNews.com. In its annual report on global democracy, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance for the first time listed the U.S. as a “backsliding” democracy like Hungary and India, noting “runaway polarization,” efforts to suppress voter participation, and an “increasing tendency to contest credible election results.” Nonsense, said David Harsanyi in NationalReview.com. The authors cite rollbacks to “voting rights” as an “authoritarian issue,” without noting that every European nation has stricter voting requirements—including voter ID—than the most stringent red state. And didn’t Democrats spend four years attacking Trump’s legitimacy with “conspiratorial rumors and disinformation about stolen elections”?

Democrats better start acting like they’re fighting for the republic’s future, said Wajahat Ali in The DailyBeast.com. Please, no more naive nonsense from “centrists promoting platitudes about bipartisanship.” The Republican Party “of Reagan and Romney is long dead,” said political scientist Brian Klaas in The Washington Post. Having studied the rise of authoritarianism around the world, I’ve seen that parties taken over by autocratic demagogues like Trump reverse course only when they suffer “a crushing electoral defeat.” But the GOP is likely to be rewarded for its rightward lurch in 2022. The battle for the GOP’s soul is over. “Trumpian authoritarians have won.”