Once we lose the democracy, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever get it back
It’s as though Jan. 6, 2021 didn’t happen. Men weren’t climbing the walls of the U.S. Capitol Building to prevent Joe Biden from officially becoming president. There was no crowd breaking windows and banging doors open. No cops were being beaten into an inch of their lives by a mob of people wielding American flags on poles. The chants about murdering then-Vice President Mike Pence on the front lawn, the attempt to track down Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the Confederate flag hoisted inside those chambers, the Capitol police officer leading a mob away from vulnerable elected officials and their staffs, we must have dreamt it all.
Because there’s a growing sense that though Americans claim to love democracy, love to brag how great and grand our democracy is, there may not be enough of us willing to prioritize saving it above short-term political gains that might be reversed in two years anyway. The good news: More than 70 percent of Americans clearly see the growing risks to our democracy. The bad news: Only 7 percent view it as the most important issue facing the country. It’s like instead of putting out a fire beginning to engulf your living room, you focus on saving the big screen TV to see if the Carolina Panthers might upset Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
This is largely a GOP problem, though not solely theirs. About a third of independents and even a small segment of the Democratic Party is willing to consider voting for anti-democratic candidates. But it’s Republicans who have grown the most anti-democratic as the U.S. has diversified. In the Reagan era, top Republican candidates could easily win by attracting mostly white voters. That has since changed. And despite the structural advantages they have because of the Electoral College, housing patterns and a conservative Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act, they’ve turned to doubting the results of any election they don’t win. More than 370 Republican candidates have cast doubt on the 2020 election results, including nearly two dozen in North Carolina and South Carolina. Many of them are likely to win in November.
It’s why conservative Republican stalwarts such as Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Rep. Tom Rice of the 7th Congressional District in South Carolina won’t be in Congress next year. Cheney has consistently and prominently exposed the Big Lie about the election supposedly being stolen from then-President Donald Trump in 2020, while Rice voted to impeach Trump for his role in sparking the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection. No matter how many times they voted with Republicans and helped them sell all sorts of conservative policies and positions throughout their careers – something they did well north of 90 percent of the time – it wasn’t enough to save their political careers, because prioritizing preserving democracy is less important to the GOP than regaining power.
In Florida, people who were given the greenlight to vote are being arrested by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Office of Election Crimes and Security, harkening back to voting rights abuses of the Jim Crow era. In Louisiana, Republicans are trying to narrow the definition of “black” to dilute African-American voting power. And Republicans across the country have proposed or implemented hundreds of new laws based on the Big Lie that there was widespread voter fraud in 2020, even though there wasn’t.
Inflation and crime, top issues for most voters this election cycle, are important. They will ebb and flow no matter who wins in November. But once we lose the democracy itself, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever get it back.
This story was originally published October 20, 2022 at 1:38 PM.