Attacks On Democracy

Democracy At Risk

When people say that the arc of history bends towards justice, what they really mean is that whether justice prevails depends on whether people can defend themselves against injustice. Their doing so requires political power, and political power means access to the ballot box.

That’s why opponents of voting rights and democracy always fight so hard. In the past, powerful elites have sought to restrict the right to vote in order to protect their privileged access to power. Today they are doing the same, seeking to retain power that they see slipping from their hands because of a society increasingly committed to equality.
The successful struggles in our nation’s history to extend and protect the right to vote are foundational. For from the beginning, the United States fell short of being a democracy. The Constitution did not guarantee the voting rights of all American citizens. Instead decisions about who would be allowed to vote were left to the states. It took political struggles on the part of ordinary people to extend the right to vote. They sought to defend themselves from the injustice that being denied the vote involved.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, pressure to extend the vote beyond men who were property owners finally achieved the enfranchisement of men who were not slaves. Years later, it took a bloody Civil War to enable those men who had been enslaved to vote. The continued disenfranchisement of women continued for more than another half century. And only after pitched battles, hunger strikes and jail, did women win suffrage. Even then however, full enfranchisement for all Americans remained elusive. For example, it was not until 1948 that Native Americans attained the unfettered right to vote.
A glaring example of the power of anti-democratic forces to reverse voting victories was the attack Southern Black male enfranchisement after Reconstruction. During Reconstruction, the adoption of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870 had added almost 500,000 Black male voters to the rolls. But within a generation, state level Jim Crow laws resulted in an almost complete purge of those voters. And when after 1920 women were enfranchised nationally, these same Jim Crows laws prevented Black women as well as men from exercising their right to vote. The injustice inflicted on Black people, and on American democracy itself, is incalculable. It ultimately took the power of a massive civil rights movement to begin to reverse the damage, and that only after the movement succeeded in demanding the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964.
This is the framework in which to understand the more recent attacks on institutions of American democracy. With the election in 2016 of Donald Trump, renewed attacks by him, his followers and the elites who fund and enable his authoritarian agenda have eroded the right to vote. In fact, they have used many of the techniques used in the South. As in the South, Trumpism is an explicit attempt to purge the voting rolls by making registering and voting more difficult, by corrupting election administrations, and by falsifying the counting and certifying of votes. Indeed, Trumpist allies have already succeeded in installing partisan election officials at every level of government who are committed to undermining the voting rights of millions.

Trump and his allies are also using social media and attacks on the mainstream press to further undermine trust in elections, propagating the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Undergirding all of this is that, as was seen in the January 2021 Capitol insurrection, Trumpists do not hesitate to use violence against anyone who stands in their way.
These and other efforts by today’s anti-democratic forces are designed to bias the electorate by depriving American citizens of their right to representative government. And they are acting on a national scale. Trump and the party he now dominates have demonstrated that they do not believe in democracy. They reject playing by the post-election rules that have always ensured smooth government transitions of power in the United States. The Trumpist goal is comprehensive – it seeks enough disenfranchisement to reverse what they most fear: losing elections because an increasing majority of Americans agree with and value the changes that, since the 1960s, have bent the arc of history towards justice.

Those changes include, but are not limited to, the expansion of the civil and legal rights, and the empowerment of members of previously marginalized groups. The desire of growing numbers of Americans to live in a diverse and egalitarian society reflects a changing society as well. And the increasingly popular demands, especially from young people, for action to address problems such as climate change, gun violence, police practices, public health, and economic inequality are yet more evidence of change. All of this is inconsistent with the authoritarian agenda of Donald Trump and his followers.
By undermining democracy and the institutions constructed to protect it, Trump and his allies subvert the will of the majority of the American people. They believe that their hold on power – once achieved in this way – will ensure their ability to rig elections and rule the country long into the future.