DEMOCRACY WON 2022. CAN IT KEEP WINNING?
WASHINGTON — We have become so accustomed to bad news, crisis and dysfunction that it’s hard to accept the ways in which 2022 was a surprisingly good year for democracy, innovative government action and even a degree of social peace.
Can we build on the good news in 2023? Yes, but it will take a lot of creative work because Washington will soon become much more of a partisan battlefield and because the global forces working against democratic advances will try to recoup their losses.
Accepting that things have improved is almost never fashionable. It’s bad for page views and it carries the whiff of complacency.
But supporters of democratic governments and societies will never right the world’s wrongs without confidence that democracy itself can work — and unless a majority of citizens sees evidence that this is true. In 2022, the evidence began accumulating.
The failure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the courageous rallying of the Ukrainian people and the remarkable unity of the world’s democracies in standing against aggression is the most obvious sign that the democratic distemper of recent years is abating.
The relative success of democracies in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic contrasts with a regime-challenging failure in China. This, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic misadventure, has quieted talk that authoritarian governments are inevitably more “efficient” and “effective” in solving problems.
In the United States, the congressional session that just ended was remarkably productive. Major investments in infrastructure, clean energy and technology showed that our government has the capacity to think ahead, not just react to political pressures and short-term problems.
Finally, the skeptics who said that campaigning on democracy in the midterm elections was a foolish strategy for Democrats were proved wrong. The GOP’s red wave failed to materialize for many reasons — Supreme Court overreach, especially on abortion, was a factor, and the actual achievements of a Democratic president and Congress counted, too. But democracy mattered. The Republican candidates rejected by voters tended to be the most extreme, the ones especially committed to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and those least ready for office.
Still, Republicans won their narrow House majority, and this will make governing during the next two years much tougher. You can’t have bipartisan legislation unless the party controlling the levers of congressional power brings it to a vote.
The new House GOP majority, well to the right of the mainstream, has little interest in any legislation Democrats could vote for. It would much prefer to use debt ceiling and government shutdown threats to try to force deep budget cuts while passing a pile of symbolic, one-party culture war bills.
President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats must try to govern anyway. By offering a realistic legislative program in areas of popular concern — among them health care, housing and help to parents raising children — they could challenge House Republicans to join them or offer serious alternatives.
There should be no compromising in the battle for U.S. democracy and voting rights. The broad middle of the American electorate sent a clear message that there is no rational reason to make voting harder, let alone wage a running battle against honest election administrators. Republicans should be pressed to choose: Trumpism or democracy?
The democracies must keep faith with Ukraine while understanding at home that freely elected governments are always on probation. Delivering for the common good is the only way to keep democracy on a roll.