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Last night's "Letter from an American" really put our existential fight for democracy over autocracy in historical context. I consider it a must-read. Here's the link:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-26-2021/
Never has it been clearer than it is today that America can never be a true democracy, because the U.S. Constitution prevents that.
It starts with the U.S. Senate, which gives two votes to every state regardless of population. Public policy scholars Michael Ettlinger and Jordan Hensley figure that in the current Senate, “41 Republican senators representing as few as 75 million people can block most legislation from even coming to a vote — thwarting the will of a group of Democratic and Republican senators representing as many as 270 million Americans.”
The Constitution did not arise from a consensus of like-minded founding fathers. Rather it was a compromise between the highly populated northern states, which wanted a democratically represented Senate, and the lesser populated southern states, which wanted equal power in the Senate. We are stuck with that situation because amending the Constitution itself takes a 2/3rds vote in both houses of Congress then ratification by three quarters of the states — something entirely unlikely for such a change.
We’re lucky that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims in 1964 that the 14th Amendment’s principle of equal protection required state legislatures to be based on one person-one vote. Prior to then, for example, Los Angeles County’s 6 million residents had the same representation in the California Senate as did the 400 people of Alpine County. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the majority opinion which has led to the practice of reapportioning both chambers of state legislatures based on population. Unfortunately, the Court could not make the same ruling for the U.S. Senate, in which Wyoming has the same representation as the states of California and New York.
This anti-democratic distribution of political power wasn’t so bad when men and women of goodwill were elected to the U.S. Senate, but today we have such conscious and conscientious ill-will practiced primarily by the right wing representatives of the less populated states against the interests of the bigger states, that it’s totally disheartening.
Is this how the “American Experiment” ends? Is this how democracy dies in our country? It’s hard to see any solution to what is essentially a structural flaw in our governance.
Meanwhile, back at the state level, gerrymandering has made it possible by ill-intentioned, power-hungry Republicans to solidify their control of state legislatures, such that in Texas, for example, the majority of the population can vote for Democratic candidates, but the majority of candidates elected in the same election are Republicans.
Michael Scherer of the Washington Post calculated that the Michigan legislature has a Republican majority although Democrats have won a majority of the popular vote there for a decade. In North Carolina in 2018, Democrats won 51% of the popular vote but got only 45% of the seats.
Not satisfied with the domination they created through gerrymandering, Republican-dominated legislatures in Georgia, Texas, and Florida, and other states with majority Democratic populations have worked aggressively to restrict voting rights. More than a dozen Republican-controlled states have enacted more than 30 new laws to suppress votes among heavily Democratic populations. They get away with it for one reason — because they can, pure and simple. In those states which have fraudulently created Republican control of their legislatures, the legislatures themselves manage the decennial reapportionment, guaranteeing continued gerrymandering and continued anti-democratic government.
It has been said that “the arc of history bends toward justice,” but it clearly bends against democratic rule. Sad but true.
Those of us who saw Donald Trump for who he was must surely be amazed that his landslide defeat in the November election did not end his hold on the Republican Party that my parents, and maybe yours, loved and respected.
I certainly thought that I did not need to keep writing and paying to publish this column, but, as the headline states, the problem lingers on.
As Fareed Zakaria said on his Sunday program following Joe Biden’s European trip, “America is perceived once more as a constructive force in the world, with an astonishing rebound in its approval ratings across the globe…. But,” he continued, “the story is not entirely positive. One aspect of American power remains substantially diminished: its role as a beacon of democracy…. 57% of people said the U.S. is no longer the model for democracy it used to be…. The decay of American democracy is real.”
That decay can be laid at the feet of one person: Donald Trump. But the horde of his enablers cannot be overlooked, starting with Fox News and the Republican leadership in the U.S. Congress. Their collective grip on the thinking and actions of Trump loyalists is astounding and appalling. Is it not completely understandable that a president who never in his entire 4 years in office had an approval rating over 50% lost an election to a man who has yet to have an approval rating under 50%?
Yet, because Donald Trump refuses to accept that he lost the election which was certified by Republican-controlled states across the nation, the Big Lie lives on.
One has to wonder about the intelligence and patriotism of those who continue to stand behind this sad, egomaniacal man who drove into his followers’ minds from long before the election that the only way he could lose the election was if it was stolen from him.
I remember one pundit saying soon after Trump’s loss that the worst case scenario would be for Trump to run again in 2024 and lose, then maintaining that he was cheated again.
The next election, however, is not presidential. It is the mid-term election of 2022 when all Republican representatives and 20 Republican senators will face the voters. One can only hope, as I do, that the party’s blatant voter suppression will only further motivate the suppressed to turn out in record numbers and make those elected officials pay for their blind allegiance to a discredited president.
My father was a lifelong Republican and also a man of great integrity who would be appalled that any Republican would support a pathological liar like Donald Trump, much less repeat his lies as the truth — i.e., to lie him or herself. Yet that is what we see up and down the ranks of Republican elected officials who see support of Trump as key to something more important than country to them — their re-election.
Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, is a naturalized American citizen. I’ve found naturalized citizens to be some of the greatest patriots, harking back to a hero of mine, Danish immigrant Jacob Riis, the municipal reformer and journalist who wrote How the Other Half Lives in 1890. Yet, Rupert Murdoch allows his network to become a dishonest echo chamber for Donald Trump, further empowering and emboldening “Cult 45.”
I feel compassion for the Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6th and had their lives and futures disrupted or destroyed out of their misplaced loyalty. They are the true victims of Donald Trump, more than you and I. They were willing to put their lives on the line, believing as they did that the election was stolen and that Communists were taking over the country. Who among us would put our lives on the line like that?
But they were misled and continue to be misled by one man, who could save our country from a continuing downward spiral if he would do what every losing presidential candidate has done in the past: concede.
