THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: NO, DEMOCRATS AREN'T ASKING FOR IT

I had some hope when I started to read this New York Times Magazine symposium on democracy in America. After Steven Levitsky (co-author of How Democracies Die) and Sarah Longwell (executive director of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project and publisher of The Bulwark) assert that America's democracy crisis is a product of the rise of Donald Trump, Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sets them straight:

I think that it’s really important for us not to begin with Trump. I have repeatedly described Trump as an accelerant. But he was able to accelerate something that already existed. One of the issues that I’ve been most frustrated by is the failure of so many of those who really study democracy, and who see themselves as people who are committed to democracy and democratic ideals, to see the signs that were quite apparent long before Trump came into office. Things like voter suppression against Black voters, or police officers killing unarmed Black people with impunity, were treated as a race issue and not a democracy issue, when if we saw them in any other country, we would recognize them as indicators of something being wrong with a democracy.

Ifill adds:

Our democracy was in terrible trouble when we had a Black president and a Black attorney general.... I remember at the time being in a meeting with President Obama and saying: “Let me explain to you what is happening in Texas. Let me explain to you what’s happening in Alabama.” After the Supreme Court [in 2013] decided the Shelby County v. Holder case, which removed the preclearance provision, a critical provision from the Voting Rights Act, there was this wave of voter-suppression laws that were happening around the country with very explicit statements from Republican leaders of those states, saying, “We’re free and clear now.”

I would add that Republicans were attacking democracy long before the Shelby County case. In 2007, the Bush administration fired U.S. attorneys who wouldn't pursue cases involving (nonexistent) voter fraud. In the run-up to the 2010 census, Republicans sought to increase their advantage in state legislatures in order to engage in partisan gerrymandering. Their success has now made it next to impossible for Democrats to win legislative majorities in many purple states, and has led to grotesque gerrymandering of congressional districts.

But the Times forum had barely touched on pre-Trump Republican efforts to undermine democracy when a couple of Republican voices returned the discussion to conventional wisdom's safe space: Both sides are to blame. Benjamin Ginsberg -- a defender of the 2020 election but, yes, he was one of the GOP's Florida recount lawyers -- criticizes provisions of Democratic voting rights legislation that he says were "designed to gain [Democrats] partisan advantage." And then there's this, from Sarah Longwell, which I need to quote at length:

But I don’t want to let Democrats off the hook entirely here. You know, when I started doing the focus groups, I would ask G.O.P. voters who really didn’t like Trump why they voted for him. And the No. 1 answer you would get was: “I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted against Hillary Clinton.” A lot of that is the longstanding hatred Republicans have for the Clintons and probably a bit of sexism as well. But there is also a reaction to a Democratic Party that is moving left and has a more difficult time appealing to swing voters. It is increasing negative polarization: I hate their side more than I like my side. And the cultural-war stuff is so much of it now. Whether it’s critical race theory, defund the police or the fight over using pronouns, Democrats often sound like aliens to many voters — including Black and Latino voters. Republicans have been increasing their support among minorities, because often these groups are more culturally conservative in ways that wedge them off from the current Democratic Party.

The end of this is the usual critique of the Democrats -- normal people hate them because they've become so woke -- but how does Longwell get to this argument? Via distaste for Hillary Clinton, one of the leading lights in the movement of the Democratic Party away from progressivism starting in the 1990s. If you hate Democrats because they're too far to the left and you also hate Hillary Clinton, then maybe your objections aren't ideological at all. And if you're a pro-democracy, anti-Trump Republican and you elide wokeness and Hillary, maybe you took more sips of the GOP Kool-Aid than you realize.

And what is Longwell saying here? That Democratic policies are so extreme you almost can't blame Republicans for rejecting democracy altogether? Do Democrats get to respond this way to Republican extremism? The Republican Party believes we should do nothing about climate change, or should make it worse ("Drill, baby, drill!"); the Republican Party believes we should do nothing about gun massacres, or make them more likely ("Come and take it"); the Republican Party believes we should do nothing about rising inequality, or we should increase it (every Republican tax bill); the Republican Party thinks cops are never wrong (unless they attack conservatives); and now the Republican Party is making a final push to destroy democracy itself. Have Democrats responded to all this by trying to take the vote away from Republicans? No, we haven't. So what's Republicans' excuse for trying to take it away from Democrats? Pronouns?

Steven Levitsky says:

I think what’s needed in the short term to preserve democracy, to get through the worst of this storm, is a much broader coalition than we’ve put together to date. Something on the lines of true fusion tickets that really brings in Republicans — maybe not a lot of the electorate, but enough to assure that the Trumpist party loses....

And that means something that we have not seen enough of in the last couple of decades, which is real political sacrifice. It means that lifelong Republicans have to work to elect Democrats. And it means the progressives have to set aside a slew of policy issues that they care deeply about so that the ticket is comfortable to right-wing politicians.

But progressives set aside issues that they deeply care about all the time. Who was the last genuine progressive on a Democratic ticket? The nominees and running mates are invariably left-centrists.

And it's never enough. We reject Jesse Jackson in the 1980s or Bernie Sanders in the last two election cycles and Republicans still describe our presidents and members of Congress as commies and radicals. We can't win. And if Democrats have to become Mitt Romney/Liz Cheney Republicans in order to be deemed worthy of the vote, then that won't be democracy at all -- we'll all just be Republicans, which is the same outcome the overt opponents of democracy want.