DEMOCRACY AT RISK: THE FOUNDING FATHERS WOULD BE DISAPPOINTED, BUT NOT SURPRISED BY ALLAN C. BROWNFELD———————————————————————————————————————————-The
commemoration of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol has led to
much discussion about the state of American democracy. There are many
reasons to be concerned about the future. In a democracy, the values of
the people are reflected in a nation’s political life. What are the
values of the American society in 2022?A
recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that one in
three Americans believe that violence against the government can
sometimes be justified.
Already, 725 people have been
arrested for crimes associated with the events of Jan. 6, and 165 have
pleaded guilty to federal charges. Investigations of extremists linked
to Jan. 6 are underway in all 56 FBI field offices around the country,
and prosecutions are being prepared by nearly every U.S. attorney’s
office. Justice Department officials say there has never been a dragnet
of this scope—-not against the Mafia, international terrorism or any
other threat.Hyper partisanship is
growing. According to a YouGov survey, 60 per cent of Democrats regard
the opposing party as “a serious threat to the United States.” For
Republicans, the figure approaches seventy per cent. A Pew survey found
that more than half of all Republicans and nearly half of all Democrats
believe their political opponents to be “immoral.”Even
infectious diseases are subject to partisan conflict. In a Marquette
University Law School,poll from November, seventy per cent of Democrats
said they considered Covid a “serious problem” in their state, compared
with only thirty per cent of Republicans. The day after the World
Health Organization declared Omicron a “variant of concern,” Rep. Ronny
Jackson (R-Texas) called the newly detected strain a Democratic trick to
justify absentee voting. He tweeted, “Here comes the MEV—-the Midterm
Election Variant.”This is not the kind
of politics any of us remember. I worked in the U.S. Senate and House
of Representatives for many years. Republicans and Democrats worked
together to promote civil rights, to win the Cold War, and on a variety
of other issues. They did not view themselves as “enemies.” The goal
of Republicans with whom I worked, including future presidents George
H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, was to convince Democrats that the
legislation they were advancing was best for the country. They were busy
forming coalitions with one another. American politics worked. Now, it
does not. Even the results of elections are challenged, although those
who challenge them provide no evidence any court has accepted of voter
fraud. Democracy cannot work if the results of elections are denied.Lilliana
Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist, in “Uncivil
Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” recalls that not very long
ago, the two parties were hard to tell apart, both demographically and
ideologically. In the early nineteen fifties, black voters were split
almost evenly between the parties, and so were whites. The same was
true for men and union members. The parties’ platforms were so similar
that the American Political Science Association issued a plea that
Democrats and Republicans make more of an effort to distinguish
themselves.Now, the two parties have
become radical opposites. One study, based on TiVo data, found that the
twenty television shows most popular among Republicans were completely
different from those favored by Democrats. As a result, Prof. Mason
argues, Americans no longer juggle several, potentially conflicting
identities. Instead, they associate with one, all-encompassing group,
which confers what she calls “mega-identity.”Alan
Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, notes that in
2020, “democracy’s guardrails held.. courts repeatedly rejected false
claims of voter fraud. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad
Raffensberger resisted Donald Trump’s plea to change certified (and
counted) results.” Congress completed the certification of the
Electoral College results. Vice President Mike Pence, a target of the
January 6 mob attacking the Capitol, resisted pressure not to certify
the vote.But Prof.Abramowitz is not
confident that the system will hold firm in the future. He says, “There
is a growing concern that the next time we see an attempt by a defeated
candidate to overturn the results of a fair and free election, it may
have a much greater chance of success because of widespread support from
leaders and voters from the defeated candidate’s party and possibly
even the courts and election officials.”Among
the factors helping to produce today’s hyperpartisanship is the
influence of social media. Chris Bail, a professor of sociology and
public policy at Duke University, argues that use of social media
“pushes people further apart.” A study by researchers inside Facebook
showed that only about a quarter of the news content that Democrats post
on the platform is viewed by Republicans and Vice versa. A study of
Twitter use found similar patterns. Many studies show that when people
confer with others who agree with them, their views become more
extreme. This effect has been called “group polarization,” and there is
concern that the Internet has stimulated excessive polarization
throughout American society. Whatever
the myriad reasons, American democracy is clearly in trouble. The
Founding Fathers would be disappointed, but they would not be surprised.
From the beginning of history, philosophers predicted that democratic
governments would deteriorate and decay. Plato, Aristotle, and more
recently, De Toqueville , Lord Bryce and Macaulay, argued that people
would give away their freedom voluntarily for what they perceived as
greater security. Macaulay, looking to America, declared, “Either some
Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reigns of government with a strong
hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by
barbarians…as the Roman Empire was…with this difference—-that your Huns
and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your
institutions.”John Adams observed
that, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders
itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.”Our
democracy has lasted for more than two hundred years, making it the
oldest form of government in today’s world. But it is now in serious
trouble, and the world is taking notice. In November, the International
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a watchdog group,
added the U.S. to its list of “backsliding democracies.” It declared
that, “A historic turning point came in 2020-2021 when former President
Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in
the United States. Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related
disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process.”
Freedom House made a similar assessment.Conservative
journalist Jonah Goldberg, author of the best-selling book “Liberal
Fascism,” which argues that fascist movements were left-wing in
origin—-now laments that the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 has
elements that he would consider similar in nature. He writes: “I
believed that conservatism was too committed to the Constitution…to the
rule of law, to tolerate the use of extralegal violence and mob
intimidation. I no longer have faith in the right’s commitment to
those dogmas.”With so many
understanding the threat now being faced by our democracy, let us hope
that the steps necessary to preserve and strengthen it will proceed with
the haste necessary for success.