Even if Trump Loses, American Democracy Is Still in Grave Danger
The Republican presidential candidate represents a symptom, not a cause.
Four weeks from today, Americans should know the identity of their next president. If that’s Kamala Harris, those anxious about threats to democracy can exhale.
But they can’t exhale for long. Even a second defeat of Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 election would mark just the beginning of work to safeguard the American experiment, not the end.
“We will be far from out of the woods,” says Ian Bassin, who directs the non-partisan group Protect Democracy. “This is not something that happens in one presidential cycle, two presidential cycles, or even three presidential cycles.”
If the dangers of angry populism were easy to defuse, they wouldn’t afflict democracies in Europe and Latin America as well as the United States. Trump represents a symptom, not a cause. New patterns of global migration, climate change, and technological advances reordering labor markets have roiled politics around the world.
Here, Trump’s Republican Party embodies those who feel most unsettled of all – the shrinking minority of white Christians who have held economic and cultural primacy throughout our history. Their anxieties will only grow as the US keeps marching inexorably toward becoming a majority-minority nation.
‘Ugly Backlash’
Bassin’s first concern is the immediate post-election period and legal challenges in individual battleground states. Those could prove especially volatile if tabulated results match pre-election polls showing an extremely close race.
Democrats have prepared to parry false claims of voter fraud in court, as they did four years ago. But if challenges reach a zealously-conservative Supreme Court, which has already conferred substantial legal immunity on Trump, no one can assume any outcome.
In late 2020, the failure of Trump’s bogus legal challenges only stoked the Jan. 6 insurrection. With ever-more Republicans primed to believe the former president, the potential for civil unrest remains high.
“I think there’s going to be an ugly backlash,” Bassin predicts. “We are unfortunately probably in for a rocky road, even in a Harris transition and a Harris administration.”
A Harris victory would make possible legislative efforts next year to strengthen our democratic infrastructure. Democracy advocates consider new laws critical to preventing Republicans from denying or suppressing the votes of non-whites and young people who jeopardize their ability to win.
“A lot of people thought that electing Biden over Trump the last time was the solution,” recalls Democratic Rep. John Sarbanes of Maryland, a leader in the effort who’s retiring from Congress at year’s end. “We wouldn’t be in this position if that were the case.”
Sarbanes has labored to amass support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would reinvigorate anti-discrimination protections in the similarly-named landmark 1965 law, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would set national standards for voter registration and voting procedures, curb partisan gerrymandering, and overhaul campaign finance. Harris embraces both bills.
But unyielding Republican opposition makes their prospects entirely dependent on Democrats holding the Senate while capturing the House. That’s a long shot.
Nor would passage come easily even if Democrats win the power trifecta. With no chance of overcoming a Senate Republican roadblock under current rules, Senate Democrats would need uniform intra-party support for a rules change to circumvent the filibuster. Just two of 50 Democrats – Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – blocked such a change early in Joe Biden’s presidency.
The ‘Fourth Founding’
Harder still are structural reforms Bassin and Sarbanes consider necessary to vindicate the popular will and ensure that preserving minority rights does not mean minority rule. Those reforms include:
Changing the composition of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s 581,000 residents currently hold the same power as California’s 39 million.
Altering the Electoral College, which twice in a quarter century has handed the White House to popular vote losers.
Implementing election reforms, such as ranked-choice voting or proportional representation, might diminish campaign negativity and temper polarization by elevating moderate voices.
Ending lifetime tenure for justices of the Supreme Court, which in the hands of partisans can overwhelm the checks and balances in our Constitution.
“The story of America has been our long effort to more equitably distribute power in keeping with the ideals and aspirations of our founding documents,” Bassin says. Following on the country’s birth, the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and the late 20th-century civil rights movement, he observes, “The opportunity that’s before us is for a fourth Founding.”
Sarbanes envisions “a multi-decade effort of getting to a democracy that people feel fully invested in,” each iteration of reform paving the way for the next. That prospect alarms Republicans who fear losing power, but Sarbanes insists it could ultimately have the opposite effect.
“This can help repair and restore the Republican Party,” the ninth-term lawmaker argues. Prodding the GOP to compete for a broader swath of the electorate, rather than merely arousing an aggrieved minority and squelching other voices, could reinvigorate healthy partisan competition.
Republican leaders tried to do just that a decade ago. Democrats had stunned them by winning the popular vote for the fifth time in six presidential elections, handing Barack Obama a second term.
The GOP called for stepped-up efforts to attract young, non-white, and women voters. Donald Trump snuffed those efforts out.
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