The Undemocratic Party

Today, the main enemy of democracy in the United States is not Russia, China, Iran or ISIS; it is the Republican Party. That’s a bold statement, one that I can prove.

Gaming the system has increasingly become the only choice for the GOP, including their surreal current effort to defend President Donald Trump against the Constitution and despite a mountain of evidence.

Necessity is the mother of invention, according to the cliché. In this case, the cliché speaks a truth. Necessity is the reason that Republicans have decided that the best way—perhaps the only way—for the GOP to remain a viable political party is through various forms of chicanery.

When you govern for a dwindling base—the well-off, white people, Southerners, native-born citizens, rural voters, the victims of deindustrialization in the Midwest—your best hope is to do an end run around democracy. Rather than develop a political program and message with broad appeal, Republicans have chosen the narrow path of selection and suppression. Selection: Identifying rock-hard Trump voters and crafting the rhetoric for them. Suppression: Using scientific statistical methods to zero in on anti-Trump voters and do everything possible to prevent or discourage them from voting, by any means necessary.

The foul means to suppress the votes of inconvenient people include removing polling places from college campuses because young, educated people are not fans of Trump. When it comes to black college students in places like Prairie View A&M University in Texas, suppressing their votes is crucial, and Republicans in that state were right on it.

Whether it is by moving the polling places miles from campus, requiring IDs that poor people and minorities may not possess, or making felons who have regained the right to vote to pay way more than they can afford to actually exercise the franchise, Republicans are all about the undemocratic business of keeping the “wrong” kind of people from voting.

Failing that, the next best thing is to cut and slice the electoral map to reduce the weight of “certain” people’s vote. It is called gerrymandering and, while in the past both parties have practiced it, the GOP has made it into a fine art.

This perspective puts the anti-immigration crusade in a new light. It’s the other side of the coin of voter suppression. For Republicans, the best way of preventing people of color from voting against them is to keep them from coming here.

The Republican Party is undemocratic for a more profound reason. Consider this: In two of that last three presidential elections won by a Republican, the Democratic candidate won more actual votes. Al Gore won 543,000 more votes than George W. Bush in 2000 but Bush won the office thanks to the Electoral College. It was the first time the loser in the popular vote won the presidency for nearly 120 years dating back to the election of Benjamin Harrison in 1881.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by almost three million votes, more than five times the Gore margin. The undemocratic potential of the Electoral College, unrealized for more than a century, not only surfaced but became a growing factor in American politics, systematically favoring the Republicans.

The Electoral College, an institution established by the Founders as a check on democracy, an unproven system in 1789 that the Framers were afraid would devolve into mob rule. In a world ruled by monarchs, this was a reasonable concern, especially since at the time the mass of people rarely had even a grammar school education.

But there was another less savory reason for the establishment of the Electoral College and many other checks on democracy. The signers of the Constitution were all white men who owned property, including human beings construed as property, an elite resembling an aristocracy without the nobiliary titles and the pomp and ceremony. They established institutions consistent with the interests of people of their class and status. They were afraid the property lacking majority would form a “combination,” that is, that they would band together and demand a share of the wealth.

Putting all these things together, what is clear is that Republican power today is dependent on the most undemocratic procedures and the least democratic and most archaic aspects of the U.S. political system, from gerrymandering to the Electoral College, to the Senate in which the least populated states are radically overrepresented and finally to the Supreme Court whose members once named serve for life like kings and who have increasingly been nominated and confirmed less for judicial wisdom than for right-wing ideological commitment.

This leaves open the question of why after twelve decades suddenly the popular vote and the Electoral College have begun to diverge ever more widely. The question merits an analysis of its own beyond the scope of this column, but I will venture a few ideas.

The narrative that Republicans sell, that the Democratic Party has veered wildly to the left, is false. The most progressive faction of the Democratic Party has moved moderately left, roughly half of the way toward the social democratic European parties. The other faction of the party, roughly the Biden and Bloomberg camps, have scarcely moved left.

Second, simple observation as well as a study reported in the New York Times shows that it’s the Republican Party that has moved as a bloc toward the ideological extreme, specifically far to the right of the mainstream European conservative parties such as the Tories in Great Britain and the Christian Democrats in Germany. As usual, you can take what the Republicans assert, invert the sign, and come up with the truth.

The foregoing analysis suggests that the Republican Party has become unmoored from democracy because of its extremism. It is difficult to form a governing consensus from way out in right field. There is almost no intersection between the two parties, formerly an arena for compromise. That’s why unlike during the Nixon impeachment, whose offenses were far less egregious than Trump’s, there were enough fair-minded Republicans that realized that Nixon had to be removed from office. There are no Republicans like that now.

Donald Trump has raised the specter of a civil war if he is removed from office. The ultimate question then is: As the Republican electorate shrinks with demographic change and generational succession, how far will the Republicans transgress against democracy to retain power?

On this day, after I finish this piece, Donald Trump will be impeached. Whatever the unpredictable political implications, I celebrate the fact that this monstrous man and terrible president will carry around the stigma of evil for the rest of his life and for all of history.