The Skywalker window: what Democrats must do to destroy Trump's Death Star
In the year of a presidential election, Democrats hope to make major gains in Georgia, long a Republican stronghold. This week, though, Georgia became the latest US stateto see its elections descend into chaos.
Under the shadow of Covid-19 and the George Floyd protests, absentee ballots failed to arrive, voting machines failed to work, provisional ballots ran out. Voters, many African American, waited hours to vote. Thanks to determined efforts by Republican state officials, many could not do so. Across the country, observers and editorial boards warned of worse to come in November.
In Washington, David Litt felt he was “watching a chapter of my book unfortunately come to life”.
Litt was once a White House speechwriter and his first book, Thanks, Obama, was a memoir of that time. His second title is longer – Democracy in One Book Or Less: How It Works, Why It Doesn’t, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think – and it took approaching three years to write. But with chapters on the Officially and Unofficially Disenfranchised, and the Geography of Gerrymandering, its appearance is strikingly timely.
“It feels weird to say a labor of love is diving into political science and structural democratic reform,” Litt says. “But it is because for me, I kept running into this same problem that I kept seeing happen when I worked in the Obama White House, which was Americans wanted one set of things, and our government kept doing something else.
“That was true on immigration and gun violence and healthcare and economics. It was either way too difficult to make change when we had elected people who were promising change, or it was impossible when government was divided. Government’s either dysfunctional or disastrous.”
Under Donald Trump, it is both. The US has recorded more than 2m cases of Covid-19 and 115,000 deaths. Protests over racism and police brutality have seen the worst civil unrest since 1968. The administration lurches from crisis to crisis.
But Republicans who hold the Senate show a steadier hand, achieving structural change by confirming conservative judges. Reports suggest some Republicans are ready to lose the White House, so long as they keep the Senate.
“It’s a fascinating window into the way that our democracy and our political process have become warped,” Litt says. “Because now if you hold the Senate, and increasingly, all you need to do is hold 41 votes in the Senate [to be able to block legislation] … if you’re in the party that believes the government shouldn’t do anything, you can pretty much run the country with 41 senators.”
“Republicans are also counting on the courts which they have packed to do their legislating for them. So they can sit back and watch Trump’s judges continue to enact Trump’s agenda, even if he leaves office.”
Despite all this, Litt says his book should not be a depressing read. He offers ways to fix governmental ills that stymie all Americans and does so with a breezy and accessible wit. He was Barack Obama’s chief joke writer for four White House Correspondents Dinners, was head writer for Funny or Die and cites Bill Bryson as a literary inspiration.
The result is a hugely readable guide to, among other things, Gunning
Bedford and the “Great Compromise” of 1787, which made the Senate the dead weight on democracy it remains; the problem of lobbying; and the rise of the activist judiciary.
‘If you make that shot, everything changes’
Litt left the White House early in 2016 but started writing the following year, after Trump took the White House despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots. The 45th president now trails Joe Biden in most polls but will fight hard for re-election. He could achieve it via the electoral college, another anachronism Litt anatomises with ease. On both sides of the divide, the stakes are dizzyingly high.
“I finished the last edits on the book roughly six months ago,” Litt says, “in a completely different world.”
Six months ago, indeed, Trump had not been impeached, Covid-19 had not ravaged the world, George Floyd was wholly unknown.
There are still five months to go until the election.
With a shudder, Litt continues: “If, God forbid, there’s a supreme court vacancy in the next few months, that looks like a Skywalker window for Republicans where suddenly they could swoop in and make an enormous change very quickly, again without a popular mandate. The will of the people would be completely disregarded.”
The “Skywalker window” seems to be Litt’s own coinage – his “wife is a huge Star Wars geek, so if it was part of the canon she would have disallowed it” – and it is threaded throughout his book. He’s happy to explain.
“The truth,” Litt says, “is that today, change in America more often looks like the end of episode four of Star Wars where Luke Skywalker, he’s got a few seconds and there’s the tiny little opening in the Death Star and his odds are low. But if you make that shot, everything changes in an instant.”
Trump’s win in 2016 was one such moment, a vastly unlikely triumph which led to an overhaul of the judiciary, a bonfire of financial and environmental regulations, a brutal reshaping of America’s role in the world.
Litt sat down to write, he says, thinking that “whenever [Democrats] get our Skywalker window … it’s going to close really fast.”
It’s not impossible to imagine two years, 2021 to 2023, of a Democratic White House, Senate and House, perhaps a supreme court tilted back, a little, to the center.
“So how do we make the most of it? What do we do so that we can act quickly and decisively and fundamentally change the nature of politics in America so that it’s fair again, so that our democracy is representative again?”
On the page, Litt lists what he thinks Democrats need to do: voting rights reform, statehood (and thus two senators each) for Washington DC and Puerto Rico, a restoration of judicial neutrality.
But his Star Wars analogy only strengthens when one remembers that in May, Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, proudly tweeted that he had built an electoral “Death Star” and would soon “press fire”. Most saw the irony: that in the Star Wars universe, the Death Star chiefly exists to be destroyed. So, naturally, did Litt.
“Most Americans do not watch Star Wars and think of the Empire as the heroes,” he says, with a laugh. “But unfortunately, the small bit of Americans who do, happen to be in charge. I don’t think that’s an accident.
“The Mitch McConnell version of democracy makes it very easy for that group of Americans to run the country and for the rest of us to have a much harder time being heard.”
McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, is the villain of Litt’s book, the architect of much damaging change: Emperor Palpatine, if you will, to Donald Trump’s Darth Vader. Just as Luke Skywalker resisted the call of the dark side, Litt thinks Democrats should resist the temptation to behave like McConnell themselves.
“I would say that it’s time to fight hard,” he says, “but it’s time to fight fair. That’s what I keep coming back to in the book, this idea that I don’t want to see a world where Democrats win every election automatically. I don’t think you need a Democratic Mitch McConnell to out-Mitch McConnell the one on the Republican side.
“What I think we need is a commitment to fairness so that when the American people make up their minds, their democracy responds.”
In the first instance, to return to the alarming scenes in Atlanta and Athens, Augusta and Savannah, that will mean both getting out the vote and ensuring votes can safely be cast. If that can be achieved, Litt says, America will be better come what may.
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, if everyone could vote, Democrats would win.’ Maybe that’s true in the short term, but I think if everyone could vote, Republicans would change.”