Our democracy may be threatened

But it's up to us to keep it strong

I’ve been watching Democrats fighting amongst themselves and Republicans marching in party lockstep for well over 50 years now.  The latest circular firing squad Democrats have formed is the constant lamentation about how “fragile” our democracy is.  You hear it from friends on Facebook, you read it in frantic private messages dispatched in the middle of the night, you see it in cris de Coeur op eds in the major newspapers, and you’ve even heard me join in the chorus. Right now as I write this, Senators from the Democratic Party are getting up on the floor of that august body and giving January 6 anniversary speeches that sound more like cries for help from a helpless soul lost in a forest than calls for solidarity and courage in the face of a determined, recalcitrant opposition.

I’m sick and tired of this defeatism, and I’m swearing it off.  Democrats are playing right into the hands of the party that wants to replace them in the House, Senate, and White House.  That our democratic institutions are fragile is exactly what the Republican Party wants you to think.  It’s the kind of handwringing and pearl-clutching snowflake crap Republicans are always accusing the Democrats of, and it’s got to stop.

Democracy isn’t just a word, it’s work.  It’s politics.  It’s toiling in the fields of electoral strife.  It’s getting out there and organizing and mobilizing and energizing voters.  It’s turning out for elections.  It’s voting and winning and governing.  It’s voting and losing and coming back and running again.

We need to remember that our democracy isn’t fragile because we’ve got its back.  Our belief in democracy is what makes it strong.  But when our belief slips, democracy gets a little weaker.  It’s happened before.  I remember the presidential election of 1972 when the Democratic Party was so depressed and angry about the war in Vietnam and the authoritarian machinations of the Nixon administration that we lost 49 of 50 states.  A book called “The Emerging Republican Majority” had been published after Nixon’s first victory in 1968 to show how Republicans could use the so-called “Southern strategy” in the Deep South and Sunbelt states to dominate American political life for generations.  If you were a Democrat, the American political system sure looked fragile in those moments.

Then Nixon was driven from office and Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976.  Republicans came back with Ronald Reagan and won in 1980 and 1984.  George Bush Sr. won again for the Republicans in 1988, but Bill Clinton won in 1992 and 1996.  It’s difficult to remember how truly depressing it was to lose to the likes of Bush Jr. in 2000, and even after four years of the disastrous war in Iraq to lose again in 2004.  But a Senator from Illinois named Barack Obama beat McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012.  We were flabbergasted when Donald Trump beat expectations and won in 2016 and sent us spiraling into four years of incompetence, scandals, deaths and impeachment, but a compromise candidate, a man who had seemingly been running for president for most of his life, Joe Biden, beat him in 2020.

How does this thumbnail history of our country’s recent political life suddenly result in fragility?  I can hear the answer:  this time it’s different – they’re passing anti-democratic voter suppression laws, they’ve got a right-wing out of control Supreme Court, there is the mania and madness of the MAGA base, every impulse Donald Trump has is authoritarian if not fascist, they attempted a violent coup on 1/6 and almost succeeded in overturning the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. 

What we’ve seen with the rise of Trump and Trumpism isn’t politics as usual, but it’s politics just the same, and it’s Republican politics through and through.  Every time I delude myself into thinking that what the current Republican Party is doing is something new, I remember back almost 50 years to a piece I wrote in the Village Voice called “Pud and Oop vs. Fat.”  It was a story about a local election in a county in Southern Illinois.  “Pud” Williams was running for the county board of supervisers against “Fat” Ziegler, the Republican candidate.  “Oop” Gardner was Pud’s defacto campaign manager.  The big worry among Democrats, as I recall, was that the Republicans would lie, they’d cheat, they’d steal, they’d buy votes… in short, they’d do anything to win.  

It was what you would call a knock-down-drag-out fight, that campaign.  Pud was a farmer, and during the campaign he was putting in his crops, so a good deal of his campaign was run from the seat of his tractor.  His friend Oop Gardner would get a call from someone or hear a rumor and get in his car and drive out to the field Pud was plowing, and Pud would stop his tractor and they would confer, and Oop would go back to the phone and call some people and Pud would return to plowing his fields. 

Pud won his race, but in that part of Illinois, political control in the counties and little towns swung back and forth like a metronome, the two parties were so closely matched.  The point I’m making is that struggles between the two parties to win political offices and problems of honesty and accuracy of elections are nothing new.  Doing anything to get an edge in those elections in Southern Illinois was a given.  I don’t recall anyone complaining that the democratic system was imperiled or fragile because one party was willing to buy votes or cheat during the counting of ballots.  The job was to beat them, no matter how crooked were the tactics they used.

I’ll give you that having the leader of one of the political parties refusing to concede the loss of the election and fomenting violence and advocating openly for corrupt and illegal tactics to win political battles is indeed something new.  But lockstep obedience and adherence to that party’s leader is not new.  Republicans have been different from Democrats in that way for decades if not longer.  Following party dictums, adhering to party discipline, parroting party talking points – all of it is standard Republican behavior.  What may be new is its totality and how absolute is the hold Trump has on Republicans right down to local party leaders and office holders.  The idea that one of our major political parties has slid into authoritarianism is real, and it’s becoming more true every day.  That Trump openly admires dictators like Putin and Orban and would like to transform our political system to be more like theirs is truly frightening.  

Republicans might take back the House, they might gain control of the Senate this year, and we know they will fight dirty to take back the White House in 2024.  But we’ve lost and regained control of political bodies and offices before.  If they’re going to fight dirty, we have to fight harder.  The problem Republicans have in this century is the same one they have had for more than 50 years:  there are more of us than there are of them.  It’s their eternal weakness.  

This country and its citizens have real and profound problems.  With the onslaught of COVID, we’ve gotten a close-up look at what happens when Republicans are faced with a profound problem that responds only to collective solutions.  The pandemic isn’t going to turn red states blue overnight.  Neither is climate change as it burns, floods, and blows its way through state after state.

The problem with our democracy isn’t that it’s fragile but that it’s hard.  It makes change slow and incremental.  What was it that Winston Churchill said?  “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” 

The great strength of our democracy is the pride we take in it.  Nobody has been able to take it away from us yet, and nobody ever will so long as I’m around to have a say so.