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.”