The preservation of democracy in America seems to have been reduced to just another partisan issue, like wokeness or police conduct. Of the many profoundly dismaying findings in the recent New York Times poll of six swing states, the one that seems most baffling is that on democracy President Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by only 3 points. I can understand why Trump leads Biden on the economy or immigration. But how can we have an almost flat-footed tie on democracy between the former president who has been indicted for attempting to overthrow the will of the voters in the 2020 election and the incumbent who has done his best to uphold the rule of law? Only two years ago, 80 percent of Democrats, and 70 percent of Republicans, said that they considered “the future of democracy in our country” a “very important issue” as they prepared to go to the polls in the Congressional election. Perhaps if you hate Biden enough, the very fact that he’s defending democracy has now brought it into disrepute.
So far as I know, it did not occur to pollsters to ask voters where they ranked democracy among issues until Donald Trump began putting it at risk. Yet other surveys show that in recent years Americans’ faith in our political system has gone into a steep decline. In The People v. Democracy, Harvard political scientist Yascha Mounk cited 2016 polling results that found that while 71 percent of respondents born in the 1930s said that it was “very important” to them to live in a democracy, the number dropped steadily to 29 percent among those born in the 1980s. The fraction of respondents who favored a strongman leader who could dispense with elections rose from a surprising one quarter of all Americans in 1995 to an astounding one-third in 2011. Donald Trump was not the cause but the beneficiary of that rising sentiment; and he has poured fuel on that fire since taking office in 2017.
For many people “democracy” plainly stands less for an actual political system than for “whatever we’ve got going here.” If you entered the job market after the 2008 crash and you’ve since lived a life of ever-diminishing expectations, you’re not going to have a lot of faith in the system. The same is true if you don’t have a college degree and you find yourself working at Walmart instead of a steel plant like your father and your uncles. There are long-term responses to our democratic erosion, and among them is a new post-industrial and “post-neoliberal” regime of good jobs with real security.
For me, and for most of us who look with utter dread upon the increasingly plausible prospect of Trump’s return to power, democracy has a very real meaning. As I wrote in my 2019 book, What Was Liberalism?, the core of liberal democracy is not majoritarianism but the network of laws and norms and institutions that preserve the rights of minorities and protect neutral principles like the rule of law–within, of course, a majoritarian system. For the first time in any of our lives, a sizable number of Americans appears to be willing to dispense with those liberal restraints, at least so long as their candidate gets to rule.
This is the first installment of a newsletter that will ask what we can do to protect our democracy. In future posts I will be writing about long-term solutions to this long-term problem. But if Donald Trump is elected we may never get to the long term; we need to ask what we can do now.
The other day a friend called with an odd suggestion on this front: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, the last few chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff and maybe David Souter, the one living retired Supreme Court Justice, should undertake a nation-wide barnstorming tour in defense of democracy. Maybe, he said, people will listen to them; they have, at least, a moral obligation to fill that breach.
The way you react to this noble, if highly unlikely, proposition will be a good test of your faith in the American people–that is, of the state of your belief in our commitment to democracy. What would happen if we sent these statesmen out to Muncie and Boise, or for that matter the South Bronx, to read from the preamble to the Constitution and tell the folks that we are in real danger of losing our precious democracy? What if we included, say, Oprah Winfrey and Dolly Parton? Would a significant number of Americans who might otherwise regard democracy as just another cant word say, “Gee, that’s a good point”? Is the problem that those people need to be forcibly reminded, or that they just don’t care?
It’s not easy to think of a good analogy. When he returned from negotiating the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, President Woodrow Wilson undertook a whistle-stop tour to persuade Americans to support the League of Nations. That one didn’t end well: Wilson had a complete physical breakdown and the Senate rejected the plan. But the League was a novel idea that struck many people as hopelessly idealistic. The preservation of the principle of limited executive authority, of the orderly transfer of power, of the rule of laws rather than men, is something that we have all been taught to regard as a sacred obligation.
I don’t pretend to know the answer to this thought experiment. No monstrosity has dented the faith of the Trump-lovers. The ranks of both the Biden-haters and those who pronounce a pox on both houses seem to be growing rapidly. Reason says no, but faith–in the untapped reservoirs of patriotism–says yes.
My biography of Hubert Humphrey, True Believer, will be published early next year. One of the most noble and moving acts of Humphrey’s life was the final speech he delivered in his 1968 presidential campaign. The campaign had been a protracted torment; a man once known as The Happy Warrior had been heckled by the left and ridiculed by the right. Never in his lifetime had the nation been so bitterly divided. Yet when he addressed a crowd at the Houston Astrodome, Humphrey said, “I have always believed that the basic decency within this nation would one day enable us to lift the veil from our eyes and see each other for what we are as people–not black or white, not rich or poor, not attending one church or another, but as people, standing equally together free of hate or suspicion.”
Has it become hopelessly naive to believe in our basic decency?
“The preservation of the principle of limited executive authority, of the orderly transfer of power, of the rule of laws rather than men, is something that we have all been taught to regard as a sacred obligation.”
Perhaps the biggest question, which I am sure you will address soon, is whether we have indeed all been taught this.