'A Crisis Coming': The Twin Threats to American Democracy
by David Leonhardt
The United States has experienced deep political turmoil several times before over the past century. The Great Depression caused Americans to doubt the countrys economic system. World War II and the Cold War presented threats from global totalitarian movements. The 1960s and 70s were marred by assassinations, riots, a losing war and a disgraced president. These earlier periods were each more alarming in some ways than anything that has happened in the United States recently. Yet during each of those previous times of tumult, the basic dynamics of American democracy held firm. Candidates who won the most votes were able to take power and attempt to address the countrys problems. The current period is different. As a result, the United States today finds itself in a situation with little historical precedent. American democracy is facing two distinct threats, which together represent the most serious challenge to the countrys governing ideals in decades.
The first threat is acute: a growing movement inside one of the countrys two major parties the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election. The violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, meant to prevent the certification of President Bidens election, was the clearest manifestation of this movement, but it has continued since then. Hundreds of elected Republican officials around the country falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Some of them are running for statewide offices that would oversee future elections, potentially putting them in position to overturn an election in 2024 or beyond. There is the possibility, for the first time in American history, that a legitimately elected president will not be able to take office, said Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies democracy.
The second threat to democracy is chronic but also growing: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion. The run of recent Supreme Court decisions both sweeping and, according to polls, unpopular highlight this disconnect. Although the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees seems poised to shape American politics for years, if not decades. And the court is only one of the means through which policy outcomes are becoming less closely tied to the popular will.
Two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote. Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills, partly because of the increasing use of the filibuster. Even the House, intended as the branch of the government that most reflects the popular will, does not always do so, because of the way districts are drawn. We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world, said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and a co-author of the book How Democracies Die, with Daniel Ziblatt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/us/american-democracy-threats.html
Irish_Dem
(46,918 posts)We have been losing our democracy for decades.
Celerity
(43,316 posts)dalton99a
(81,451 posts)lees1975
(3,845 posts)though they scream and flap their lips about it like they're locked in a cage.
But what the right proposes, and the path down which they are headed, is tyrannical, and makes decisions of conscience illegal. There's a difference between what should be illegal, because it interferes with another person's rights, and the definition of morality, which is where the line should be drawn around individual rights. I may not approve of your morals, but as long as the law protects my rights and my life and property, as well as that of others, I'm not affected by anyone else's moral choices.
If enforcing personal moral views requires the force of the law, then there must not be much substance or reason for them.