The world is worried about us
This weekend, American skies will be aflame with fireworks celebrating our legacy of freedom and democracy, even as Republican legislature after Republican legislature constricts the franchise and national Republicans have filibustered the expansive For The People Act. It will be a strange spectacle.
It is hard to view your own country objectively. There is too much cant and myth, too many stories and rituals. So over the past week, I’ve been asking foreign scholars of democracy how the fights over the American political system look to them. These conversations have been, for the most part, grim.
“I’m positive that American democracy is not what Americans think it is,” David Altman, a political scientist in Chile, told me. “There is a cognitive dissonance between what American citizens believe their institutions are and what they actually are.”
“The thing that makes me really worried is how similar what’s going on in the U.S. looks to a series of countries in the world where democracy has really taken a big toll and, in many cases, died,” Staffan Lindberg, a Swedish political scientist who directs the Varieties of Democracy Institute, said. “I’m talking about countries like Hungary under Orban, Turkey in the early days of Erdogan’s rule, Modi in India, and I can go down the line.”
Perhaps perversely, I was cheered by Lindberg ’s list. America defies those examples in a consequential, and often ignored, way. In most cases of democratic collapse, a dominant party deploys its power and popularity to tighten its control. But there is more possibility in America than that. Democrats have a slim governing majority, at least nationally, and they are not fighting for the status quo. Even Sen. Joe Manchin’s compromise proposal — to ban partisan gerrymandering, pass automatic voter registration, ensure 15 days of early voting, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and make Election Day a holiday, to name just a few provisions — would be a striking expansion of American democracy, bigger by far than anything passed since the 1960s.
Liberal pundits like, well, me, often focus on the risk of backsliding. And that is real. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that between early January and mid-may, at least 14 states enacted 22 laws that restrict access to the vote, putting the U.S. “on track to far exceed its most recent period of significant voter suppression.” A separate report by three voting rights groups tallied up 24 laws enacted in 14 states this year that will allow state legislatures to “politicize, criminalize and interfere in election
With a simple change to the filibuster, Congress could pass legislation that would do more to better America’s electoral institutions than anything since the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
administration.”
But the reverse is also true: The Brennan Center found at least 28 bills expanding voter access were signed in 14 states. The story of this era isn’t regression, but polarization. “We are becoming a two-tiered society when it comes to voting,” Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” told me on a recent episode of my podcast, “where it’s really easy to vote in some places, namely bluer places. And it’s really hard or getting harder to vote if you live in a red state.”
One thing foreign observers see clearly is that multiethnic democracy in America is a flower rooting in thin soil. We sometimes brag that we are the world’s oldest democracy, and that is true enough in a technical sense. But if you use a more modern definition of democracy, one that includes voting rights for women and minorities as a prerequisite, then we are one of the world’s younger democracies.
“For me, as a democracy scholar, it’s ridiculous to say America is the oldest democracy in the world,” Lindberg said. “The U.S. did not become a democracy until at least after the civil rights movement in the ’60s. In that sense, it’s kind of a new democracy, like Portugal or Spain.”
This is evident in our institutions. A society that valued democracy and political participation would not design the system we have. “For instance, the Electoral College,” Altman said. “From my perspective, this is a neolithic institution. It surprises every scholar of democracy worldwide.” Or the scheduling of American elections. “Why do you vote on Tuesday?” Altman asked me. “You don’t give people space to vote. You have to ask your employer to have the time to go out and vote. It’s weird.” Then there’s the role of money. “It looks much more like a plutocratic regime of democracy,” he told me.
From this perspective, the Republican Party’s ongoing efforts to silence certain voters and politicize electoral administration are not aberrations from a glittering past of fair and competitive contests. They are reversions to our mean. And that makes them all the likelier to succeed.
“Younger democracies tend to be weaker,” Lindberg said. “It’s much more common that young democracies fail than older ones. If America became so bad that it could no longer be considered a democracy, it would be a return to America’s historical norm: Some liberal rights for some people, but not to the extent that it is a true democracy.”
This is less a fight over the idea of democracy than over who gets to participate in it, and how their participation is weighted. “This isn’t about how people are electing their government,” Ivan Krastev, a political scientist who is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria, told me. “Everything is about what kind of people the government wants to elect — who you’ll give citizenship, who you’ll give the vote to, who you’ll try to exclude from voting.”
Krastev’s theory, drawing on both European and American history, is that democratic states often have two kinds of majorities. One is the historical majority of the nation-state. In Europe, those majorities tend to be ethnic. In America, it’s bound more tightly by race and religion. But then there’s the more literal definition of a democratic majority: the coalition of voters that can come together to win elections. Unlike the historical majority, the electoral majority can, and does, change every few years.
Often, those two converge. The electoral majority reflects the historical majority. But in America, they increasingly conflict. “It used to seem these majorities were in harmony, but now it’s about how much the electoral majorities can change the permanent majority,” he told me. During the Yugoslav wars, Krastev said, there was a famous saying: “Why should I be in a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?”
At times, this is startlingly explicit, as when Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, said, “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority.” To Krastev, though, Vos’ comment simply makes the subtext of the moment into text. “The major power of the political community is the power to include and exclude,” he said. “Who decides who you are going to exclude?”
I do not want to be blasé about the Republican Party’s assault on elections. It is a fearful thing to watch one of America’s two political parties develop the view that democracy itself is its problem, and an agenda with which to try to neuter the threat. I’ve described this as “the doom loop for democracy”: a party that wins power while losing votes will use the power it still holds to undermine the voters and the elections that threaten its future.
But that is not the only possible outcome here. It has been a cheering development to watch more and more Democrats realize that they actually need to fight for democracy. And with a simple change to the filibuster, they could pass legislation that would do more to better America’s electoral institutions than anything since the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
In that way, Republicans perceive the threat correctly: A country that is far closer to being truly democratic, where the unpopularity of their ideas would expose them to punishing electoral consequences. A country worthy of the stories we tell about it.