No room for complacency about the fundamentals of America’s basic democracy

There were numerous solemn assertions in advance of this week’s mid-term US elections, such as that by president Biden, warning US voters “can’t take democracy for granted anymore”.

Despite the Republicans making fewer gains than expected, it remains to be seen if the party will continue down the Trumpian path.

There is still the possibility that the battle cry “stop the steal” will continue its malign presence; it could well be used again in advance of the next presidential election and, if the Republicans were to lose that election, whether it is with Trump or a younger version of him as the candidate, used to deny the result’s validity.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post estimated that at least 159 election-denying Republicans had won their races.

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Those worried about the fundamentals of American democracy can hardly relax.

Just before the elections, a number of Harvard political scientists discussed their views of the contemporary crisis; one of them, Erica Chenoweth, suggested “the extremists among the GOP’s [Republican Party] constituency are either going to be emboldened or enraged, and both of those are terrible outcomes, potentially, for our democracy”.

There was consensus amongst the academics that their democracy is facing its greatest crisis in 150 years.

The notion of American democracy in crisis is nothing new. Almost 50 years ago in Princeton University, a conference under the banner the Changing Face of American Democracy included a debate between the historian and Kennedy liberal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the editor of The National Review, William F. Buckley.

Schlesinger argued that for all the frustrations and torment of American society, “I doubt whether, so far as the sense of effectiveness in democracy is concerned, we are worse off today than we were a hundred years ago”.

Buckley, however, decried the increasing power of federal government: “to the extent that we continue to permit the drainage of power from social to centralized political situations, we are diminishing the scope within which the individual can operate . . . the state is the historical enemy of all well-disposed, decent, and industrious men”.

Those claims were made in 1963 before America could be considered a truly representative democracy; Black Americans in the South had to wait for the 1965 Voting Rights Act for racial discrimination in voting to be outlawed. The act finally enforced the 15th Amendment and marked the first time the nation could call itself a truly representative democracy.

But the difficulties of the following decade suggested America was anything but united and by the time of its bicentennial in 1976 was dealing with what historian Eric Hobsbawm described as “the depth of the subjective traumas of defeat, impotence and public ignominy which had lacerated the political establishment”.

Despite a Republican wave that was less than anticipated, the ingredients that make up the current threat are even more troubling, including the reality that the threat of violence, or actual violence are now seen as part of the political process.

Last year, Reuters identified more than 100 threats of death or violence made against US election workers and officials: “The response so far: only four known arrests and no convictions”.

This is combined with gerrymandering of state legislature districts and federal courts unprepared to defend voting rights and access, despite clear evidence of laws making voting harder for voters of colour, subverting the purpose of the Voting Rights Act.

One of the supreme court’s dissenting members, Justice Elena Kagan has argued: “What is tragic here is that the court has (yet again) rewritten – in order to weaken – a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness and protects against its basest impulses”.

That court also seems intent on slashing the role of agencies, oversight and expertise which will have major consequences in vital areas such as combatting climate change. Social media is also playing its role in subverting civility by facilitating bilious attacks and the summoning of the mob.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have long drawn attention to a form of quasi-authoritarianism entrenched via largely normal electoral structures.

“Competitive authoritarianism”, as they label it, “is not only thriving but inching westwards . . . the Trump administration borrowed the “deep state” discourse that autocrats in Hungary and Turkey used to justify purges and the packing of the courts and other key state institutions.”

In 2018, historian Jon Meacham published his book The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels, arguing that, historically, strong leadership and civic activism had overcome “hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent” to “lift us to higher ground”.

It is difficult to be confident this pattern will be sustained; Meacham’s book title is a play on the words used by Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address in 1861 when he spoke to a divided nation about “the better angels of our nature”. But his words did not prevent civil war.