The Fragility of American Democracy

January 6, 2021 will be a day of infamy in the annals of American democracy.  After four years of telling Americans not to believe in facts, not to trust anyone but him, and never accept electoral defeat as fair, Donald Trump unleashed his supporters so that they would march on to the Capitol, invade it and desecrate it in the name of fantastical, and yes, fascistic beliefs.

In such moments, emotions run high and the desire for immediate relief finds an easy outlet in naming Trump the villain and arguing that these events were to be expected given his behavior all along.  That he is the principal instigator is undeniable.  But there are millions of Americans that have been stuck to his egregious, untrue and cruel utterances.  Trump found fertile ground on which he sowed his seeds of hate and resentment of others, and he also found a constitutional order and electoral process that were ripe for abuse.   It is timely, therefore, to reflect on the fragility of American democracy and what it means for its future.

The foremost challenge to the application of democracy (the rule of people or demos) is who is accepted and trusted as member of the demos.  From the emergence of democracy in the Greek city-state, admission to the demos was restricted and incomplete.  This democratic deficit continued in the Roman Republic and later in the modern reappearance of democratic institutions in England and continental Europe.  So, the first point I wish to make is that America, as a multiracial and multi-ethnic country, has experienced severe political convulsion each time its demos expanded due to immigration or voting rights laws. 

To understand the last four years and the insurrection episode of this week, we need to understand the history of American democracy in its true record and not its idealized narrative.  It is a history of tortuous and painful expansion of its demos.  A history with periods during which the dominant fraction of its demos has been unwilling to trust the other side with a role in the public affairs of the Republic.  This became very clear in this last presidential election.

The American democracy was launched with representational deficits of its own, since neither slaves or women were admitted to the American demos.  The first crisis of democratic governance came after a civil war that abolished slavery and freedmen were granted voting rights.  The transition to this, more inclusive, demos came, however, to an effective end in the South with the collapse of the Reconstruction effort in the 1880s.  What followed was a long period of vote suppression and compromised citizenship rights for Black Americans.  Fear of sharing political rights with less desirable migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe also triggered the immigration law of 1924.

The next political realignment and backlash to a renewed affirmation of voting rights came with the adoption of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965.  Southerners punished the Democratic party for sponsoring these Acts and turned to the Republicans.  It is not a secret the notorious Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon was based on racial fearmongering.  Its most outspoken early champion was George Wallace, Alabama Governor and presidential candidate.  The 1965 immigration law that opened up immigration to Latin American and Third World countries would further strain nativist attitudes regarding the composition of demos which would flare up many years later.  Systematic efforts to suppress the vote of undesirable voter blocks are the manifestation of the systemic resentment toward an expanded demos.

By the time Donald Trump appeared in the political stage, covert and overt resentment to the gains of minorities of color and immigrants was already at play.  Trump’s opening gesture to white conservatives was the denunciation of Latino immigrants as criminals and free riders of welfare benefits, soon followed by bans on the immigration of Muslims.  (However, whites from Norway were very welcome.)  Economic and social backsliding may be the visible catalysts of white alignment with Trump, but resistance to sharing political rights and control with people deemed inadmissible to the pro-white American demos are better suspects.  The specter of an impending minority status for whites versus all other demographic groups together does not provide relief to the existential anxiety of white nationalist voters either. 

The second weak point of American democracy is its constitutional order and the electoral process.  The Framers of the Constitution lived in an era that was steep in Greek and Roman classicism and the admiration of virtue in public life.*  Their idea of a politician was that of a person of honor who placed the public good ahead of his/her own.  Since however, the Framers were not hopeless idealists, they inserted a heavy battery of checks and balances, lest a branch of the government, most crucially the President, developed authoritarian urges.  This constitutional order presupposes, however, that public figures have the integrity and the courage to exercise the checks and balances granted to their office.  What if, though, these guardrails collapse under the weight of intimidation and abuse of authority as practiced by a President like Donald Trump. 

The presidential electoral process also involves multi-stage checks and balances.  Between the point the people vote and the winning candidate assumes the presidency, the process provides a role to many actors and confirmation rituals: election boards to validate the election results: state legislatures to certify the electoral votes; and Congress to certify each state’s certification under the watchful eye of the Vice-President.

Along this road to final conclusion of the electoral process, there are ample opportunities for law suits and court rulings, election board challenges, state legislature shenanigans, and finally congressional malfeasance.  Under the right combination of majorities (think of a Republican majority in the present House) Congress can void the electoral votes, and choose its own candidate even if he/she lost the election.  Whether or not most of these challenges and irregularities are subject to the review of superior courts, the fact remains that a determined and malevolent presidential candidate has the opportunity to mount one challenge after another until the final decision has been sullied enough to cast doubt on the electoral outcome.  And that’s exactly what Donald Trump and his enablers did.  

The Trump presidency has exposed the weaknesses of the American democracy in more and scarier ways than any other before.  Apart from reinforcing the integrity of the electoral process, not an easy project in itself, the most consequential need for all of us is to master the public virtue the Framers expected in order to restore commitment and trust in the idea of an inclusive demos, free of fear and resentment of the other.

In less than two weeks, America will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  What better then than to invoke his summoning words as to what an all-inclusive America should look?  

“And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.  I have a dream today!  …

America should let no one, not above all someone like Trump, to take this dream away.

* In his book First Principles, Thomas Ricks reports that the word virtue can be found several thousand times in the writers of the founding fathers, more even than the word freedom.