'Our democracy is deeply imperiled': how democratic norms are under threat ahead of the US election
Last month Barack Obama returned to the political stage to deliver a speech about the future of the nation. He did it standing in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia against the backdrop of a facsimile of the US constitution, which was drafted and signed in that city.
This was not the Obama of old, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, firing rhetorical retorts about hope and change that the world came to know on the campaign trail in 2008. This was a more restrained, somber Obama who barely raised his voice and looked sternly into the camera.
He talked about how the president of the United States should be “the custodian of this democracy”, and how he had hoped Donald Trump would “discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care, but he never did”.
He went on to warn that democratic institutions in America were “threatened like never before”. Addressing weary voters tempted not to bother in November’s presidential poll, he told them that Trump and those “who enable him” were “counting on your cynicism … they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote doesn’t matter”.
Then he delivered a coup de grâce: “That’s how a democracy withers, until it’s no democracy at all.”
Barack Obama would say that, wouldn’t he? His speech was a keynote at the Democratic national convention, delivered in support of his friend and former vice-president, Joe Biden.
But you don’t have to listen to Obama to hear alarm bells ringing over the health of American democracy. Set the party politicians and their partisan screeds to one side, and you can still pick up ominous forebodings that grow louder by the day.
Leading figures in the non-partisan world of democracy reform and civil rights are articulating exactly the same concern. Is the backbone of American democracy strong enough to resist the triple blast of pandemic, the Black Lives Matter reckoning with police brutality and racial injustice, and an incumbent president hellbent on holding on to power whatever the cost?
“This is a perfect storm in this country,” said Vanita Gupta, who heads the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights coalition. “We can’t take American democracy for granted, as for a long time we did.”
Then Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, used a word not usually associated with America. “Things are happening on our watch that are clear signs of authoritarianism,” she said, “and we have to push back.”
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School kids around the world are taught that the United States is the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. It may not have been perfect – how could it have been when enslaved people were excluded and women only got the vote 100 years ago last month? – but it was there, bolstered by its legendary checks and balances, standing proud both as a clarion call to government by “We the people” and as an admonition to petty dictators everywhere.
But with 55 days to go before election day, the sense is building that this cycle has veered way beyond the normal imperfections and incompetency of US elections. Deep cracks are being prised open in the core institutions and structures of democracy itself that raise the question: is the edifice revered for more than 200 years quite as solid and robust as assumed?
The Guardian spoke to the principals of five major US organizations that are at the heart of the movement to protect and improve US democracy and civil rights. Though each came from distinct starting points – from racial justice to electoral reform and the fight against economic inequality – they have all arrived at the same disturbing end point: profound anxiety about the state of the nation.
“Our democracy is deeply imperiled,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, the go-to authority on all things electoral. “We have relied on democratic norms and expectations for years that now turn out to be very weak in the face of somebody with an authoritarian bent.” That word “authoritarian” again. “A set of actors in the Trump administration and the Republican party have made it very clear that their intention is to hold on to political power at the expense of democratic institutions,” said Sabeel Rahman, president of the thinktank Demos.
Take two of the central pillars of American representative government: the twin concepts that there will be a presidential election every four years and that there will always be a peaceful transfer of power from one president and party to the next. Trump has already trashed both.
In July, the US president used Covid-19 as an excuse to float the idea of postponing the election – something that none of his predecessors ever did no matter how severe their respective crises: not during the civil war, not in the thick of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, not in the second world war. In this case, Trump’s intervention was startling but ultimately powerless – he has no more ability to delay the election than to convert the White House into a Trump hotel.
But when it comes to the peaceful transfer of power, his capacity for troublemaking on 4 November, the day after the election, is considerable. Trump was asked by the Fox anchor Chris Wallace whether he would honor the timeworn principle that the loser concedes, and replied: “No, I have to see. I’m not going to just say yes, I’m not going to say no.”
That was no idle threat. Given the vagaries of the pandemic, there is likely to be a surge in ballots cast by mail that could take days to count, giving Trump potentially weeks before a final result is known to create havoc.
The Republican party has amassed a $20m war chest to spend on litigation in what has the potential to be a toxic post-election period. Trump has also commandeered the support of the US attorney general, William Barr.
In normal times, the justice department (DoJ) which Barr leads would be looked to as one of the hallowed checks and balances safeguarding democracy. But as was seen during the Mueller inquiry into Russian links with the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential race, Barr has shown himself willing to cross the line in defending the president above the constitution.
Testifying before Congress this summer Barr pointedly declined to give assurances that he will keep the DoJ out of any contested election count in November.
“It sounds outlandish to say that in an American election one party would refuse to admit the legitimacy of the result, but that’s very much where we are and all the rhetoric right now is about creating the atmospherics that would enable that kind of power grab on 4 November,” Rahman said.
In Waldman’s view, pondering whether Trump will accept the result of the election is asking the wrong question. “We are falling into his royalist mindset if we think that matters. What matters is whether the rest of us accept the results.”
But Trump has that down too. Over the past several months he has relentlessly sought to undermine the credibility of the presidential poll, calling it the “greatest rigged election in history”.
Trump claims that US elections are riddled by fraud which allows Democrats to steal victory. The accusation has become a favorite of Republicans in recent years, despite having been conclusively debunked.
As Waldman, an authority on the subject, put it: “In the US in 2020, widespread claims of voter fraud are not a charge, they are a lie. Voter fraud is vanishing rare, as every study has shown over and over again.”
Trump, with Barr’s avid backing, has reserved his bitterest scorn for voting by mail, a form of democratic participation that has been used routinely by one in four Americans – of all political persuasions – entirely uneventfully. Until this year there was no significant public anxiety about this most anodyne of practices, yet look at what the polls say now.
A recent Opinium Research poll for the Guardian found almost three out of four Trump voters are worried about fraud in mail-in voting. More telling still is that more than a third of those who intend to vote for Biden share those misgivings.
Trump’s precise intentions in whipping up this storm are uncertain, but whatever the motivation his efforts are working. As we enter the final stretch of the election, almost half of Americans are wavering over the very bedrock of US democracy – confidence that the ballot will be fair.
“Distrust is being stoked and weaponized,” Rahman said, “and a huge chunk of the country has been primed to disbelieve the legitimacy of the