Note: This was an old draft post that was last worked on way back in June, 2021.
I've got a lot of those.
I'm publishing it now, unfinished, as it still is applicable, and there's no reason to keep it in cold storage. Shoot, I thought I'd posted this one.
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I suspect when future historians go back and tell the story of how the early 21st Century US ceased being a real democracy. . . or overcame its troubles to become a more perfect one, the good analysis will be a lot like what I set out here. I.e, not focused solely on the election of 2020 and the insurrection of 2021, but of the history of democracy in the country in general, with a particular focus on the late 1960s until now, the era where democracy really became disrespected and ignored in the country.
This all started when I was typing out the latest brilliant Zeitgeist installment, and had set out this historical analogy, which isn't unique to me I'd note.
A Caveat
On a Trump focus, a large party of academics has signed on to a letter warning that the GOP's current status in regard to Trump is exactly that which Liz Cheney has warned of, and that the Republican Party cannot be trusted any longer to act democratically.
Even in 2018 that would have been regarded as silly hyperbole but it isn't now. Even one serious Republican figure who regards this as overblown wouldn't reject the warning completely. And added to that Michael Flynn was actually cheered by a group of Republicans for suggesting a military coup.
A coup of that type isn't going to happen, as Trump is no longer really favored by members of the military for one thing and their institutional culture will not allow for it. But its clear that there was a surprising amount of Republican sympathy for legal maneuvering and there still is. The warning is that "when" the Republicans get back in power, they'll do the same to attempt to keep power.
It's easy to dismiss that but there is a surprising amount of remaining belief in the stories Trump told about the election being stolen and now he's even circulating the fantasy that he's going to be "reinstated" to office.
There are really some historical lessons that should be kept in mind here.
One I've reminded readers of here before. The failure to prosecute Richard Nixon set us up for things like this and should be forever regretted.
And so might the failure, so far, to prosecute Donald Trump for sedition.
That's a bold statement, but advances into autocracy and authoritarianism aren't giant leaps, but smaller steps. Germany didn't just vote for the Nazis and the disaster of the Third Reich commenced. Not by a long shot.
Rather, German conservatives couldn't stomach the societal developments, which included real hardcore left wing threats, brought about by the collapse of Imperial Germany in 1918. That brought about support for extrajudicial killings that occurred in 1919 and 1920. Those killers killed Germans in the name of defending Germany, which really meant that they felt that their definition of Germany, and not somebody else's, was the only one that counted. The Kapp Putsch was attempted and failed and then the Beer Hall Putsch followed and failed as well, with light punishment being the only thing meted out. If, we have to wonder, Weimar Germany had imprisoned the prime movers of the Beer Hall Putsch to the full extent of the law, would the Third Reich have arisen? Probably not.
That's an extreme example, of course, but its sort of what Cheney is warning us about, and now academics, and its what Republicans really want them to shut up about, in the hopes that Trump just goes away. The scary thing is that there are now some rank and file street level Republicans who don't think that left wing Americans are real Americans.
Which brings us back to this. There are more voters in Dayton Ohio than in all of Wyoming. The leadership of the state GOP, in listening principally to itself, really ought to think about that.
But in thinking about it, it occurred to me that the analysis, while not incorrect, was deeply lacking something. Something vaguely referenced in our introductorily paragraph and something we've dealt with here before.
So the question is, how did we get here, and who is to blame?
Set out in greater detail, how did we get to the place where one political party (representing, we should note, less than 25% of American voters), has a sizable body (but probably less than half of its rank and file), who no longer hold democracy as a central tenant of their political faith, and are comfortable with extralegal means of attempting to hold power and dictate results?
Turns out, in thinking about it, that' s been the case for at least forty years, and it isn't presently one party.
It's both of them.
And that the biggest single political problem the country faces today.
A history of troubled democracy
If you read contemporary press reports, you'll get the impression that it's "never" been the case that one of the two major political parties has been an opponent of democracy. This simply isn't true.
Of course, if you read the latest revisionist history of things, particularly the woke element, you'll get the idea that the United States was founded as an autocratic slavocracy built on the backs of oppressed people.
That really isn't true either.
But we do have to deal with something here and acknowledge it and start there. And that is that the Democratic Party, the world's oldest political party, and the one that stands for the preservation of American democracy right now than any other major party, didn't start off that way. Indeed, in a lot of ways, indeed scary ways, the Democrats in the South prior to 1980, which isn't long ago, most closely resembled the GOP we see now. That same party, prior to 1865, was the proponent of the concept that an entire native born group of people, African Americans, had no rights really whatsoever. After the Civil War it continued to be a dedicated adherent of that position, something it gave up only with a titanic struggle that finally came to an end in the 1970s. You can find plenty of examples of Southern Democrats outright declaring that blacks had no right to vote, and lots of dedicated efforts to keep them from doing just that.
So saying we've never been here before. . . well that's just flat out wrong. It's even wrong if you take the view that what we mean by this that there's never been a party that had that position nationwide. They did, at least up until 1865, and really after that.
That sets the historical framework for what we're discussing, and experiencing today, but not in the way that people want to grasp it.
The leftwing rejection of democracy
If you read a columnists rendition of this today, from a conventional columnists or one in the center or left of center, in other words, what you'd next read is that the Reagan Southern of 1980 changed all of that, freed the Democratic Party from Southern racism and converted it into the modern fully democratic (small d) party of today. That's not true, however.
The election of 1980 did pretty much end the Southern Democrats, but that process had been on for awhile, and bizareely, applying the dred law of unintended consequences, it formed the root of what's going on today in a way that simply wasn't initiailly predictable.
It was the Democratic Party which ironically did more to end southern institutional racism than any other party. The Republicans had been solidly for civil rights their entire existance, but after the compromise in the 1870s, their support was largely symbolic as very few people in the South ran as Republicans and those who did have no hope of success. Indeed, the entire South, politically, resembled Wyoming today. It had one party, pretty much, and members of the minority party tended to be ethnically identifiable. In other words, southern Republicans, for decades, were black. Most blacks, after awhile, simply didn't bother to register to vote at all for that matter, as Southern Democratic legislatures had put too many roadblocks in their way to doing that.
Sound familiar?
Effectively, therefore, the South was a one party series of thirteen states after the Civil War that was hostile to minority voting and which had a structure rigged to prevent it. We cannot say that the southern states weren't democratic, but democracy in the South was extremely flawed.
Democrats were comfortable with this until New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt ascended to the Oval Office in 1932. Roosevelt depended on the southern vote, but as he wasn't a southerner, and was a liberal, he was hostile to racism. He also had opportunities that other Presidents had not, as he could depend on the southern vote while at the same time knowing that it was never threatened due to the Great Depression.
Roosevelt did not, as has often been noted, strike heavily at institutiaonl racism in an overwhelming way. But he did more than he's generally been given credit for. If nothing else, he created an atmosphere of equality that was very much part of the New Deal era. Southern Democrats couldn't be comfortable with Roosevelt in that regard, and for that matter were pretty much generally uncomfortable with him.
It was Truman, however, who was a Missouri Democrat and whose early political career had a slight association with the Klu Klux Klan via support from the Prendergast Machine who really started the blows. Truman integrated the military, or more properly reintegrated it, with executive orders starting in 1948. He struck blows at school segregation as well. This laid the groundwork for Republcian Dwight Eisenhower to advance what Truman had started. While we don't think of Eisenhower as a Civil Rights crusader, in fact he was strong in his advancement of civil rights during his tenure. John F. Kennedy picked up where Eisenhower had left off and then Lynden Johnson, another southerner fully dedicated his efforts to the cause. Between 1948 and 1968, a mere twenty years, a series of three Democratic administrations and one Republican ones had overthrown the white Democratic autocracy in the South and brought full democracy to the region for the first time.
Democratic use of the courts were a central facet of this effort. While dramatic things like executive orders and sending in the military tend to be what is recalled most readily in a visual age, it was due to the courts that the civil right bulwark was really established. Courts in this largely Democratic era picked up litigation that had been passed in the wake of hte Civil War and used it aggressively for the first time in a centruy. Seperate but equal, for example, disappeared. Prohibitions on interracial marriage evaporated. The Courts embraced Reconstruction statutes in the way they'd been meant but which had alwayas been fully ignored.
So everything was fixed, right?
Well, regarding instituaionla racism, that's largely true. But something else had occured.
Governing through the courts
The Democrats, and the Republicans for htat matter, had not been able to break southern white autocracy through force of law or even force of arms. It took the courts to do it. Without hte courts, voting rights acts, civil rights acts, and executive orders would have meant nothing and all such measures would hve been at best temporary. But in the use of hte courts, which was fully necessary, the seeds of a new authoritarianism were planted.
The Supreme Court's decisions on civil rights in this era, in regard to race, were fully correct. Indeed, the remarkable thing about them isn't their reviolutionary nature, they weren't revolutionary, but the degree to which prior expressions of hte Supmre Court had simply ignored the law. Had courts in the 1870s through the 1930s applied the law, much of what was achieved in the 1960s would have been achieved decades earlier and American history would read much differently.
The problem was, however, that in order to achieve this goal, administrations increasingly came to appoint jurists who could be reliably predicated to hold legal and political liberal views. And, without reaslizing it, that meant that jurists were being appointed who not only would apply the law in the area of civil rights, but who were fully willing to invent new rights to rework the world as they thought it should be.
The far American left had dreams of doing just htat which dated back at least to the 1920s. Never in the mainstream, the very leftward edge of the Democratic Party had flirted with much more leftwing concepts back that far, and had experimented with them in the 1930s and 1940s. Not really committed to democracy, individuals in that camp believed, much as Marxists did, in the New Man theory of social engineering. People could be constructed, even if only by force, into something they imagined to be better than they were. In doing that, much of the conservative concept of the nature of human kind was simply rejected.
The evolution in the legal world was remarkable. Starting off in the Truman era, the Court struck down racial restrictive housing restrictions in 1948, a remarkably early decision that was fully correct. In 1954 the court struck down segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education. In Loving v. Virginia the Court held that racial restrictions in marriage laws were unconstitutional, something that was pretty obvious, actually, following Brown.
The first signs, however, that a fundamental shift towards judicial rule had occured came with 1965's Griswald v. Connecticut. In taht case the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that prohibited the sale of pharmacuetical birth control base don a concept of Constituionally protected privacy. Criticis of the decision have said that hte Court simply made the right to privcay up, but a solid reading of the Constitution would suggest that such a right really is implied and assumed in it.
But what isn't implied and assumed is that such a right extends so far that as long ad pharmaceuticals deal with sex, they're protected by it. That was a wholly new, extra constitutional, and insupportable reading of the Constitution. No such right exists and everyone knew it. The Supreme Court simply created it as the majority felt that such a right should exist.
From Grisald it was a hosrt trip to 1973's Roe v. Wade in which teh Supreme Court once again made a completley legally unsupportable decision based on a supposed right to privace that went so far that it denied the right of one of hte two parents increating a child and allowed the killing of the same based on a scientifically unsupportable trimester system. Really learned left wing legal scholars today acknowledge that Roe is deeply flawed, but what it did was to fully cement in the concetp that hte Court had an absolute free hand in simply making hte law up. With Roe the Court effectively declared itself to be Plato's body of wise elders, the real rulers of the country. The last major act of this type was the Court's decision in Obergefell which overturned millenia of thought on the anture of marriage simply because Justice Kennedy and his followers thought that's the way the world ought to be. That it was a radical redefinition of an ancient human instution didn't matter to a body that thought itself wiser than teh sum total of human history.
So, starting in 1973, the Democratic Party in particular fully adopted judicial rule, abaonding democratic rule. Democracy was okay for more minor matters, but for serious ones, the courts were the ruling bodies.
Contempt of democracy breeds contempt of democracy
In a democracy there are winners and losers, but in the end, the people are to blame for the loss. This isn't the case in an autocracy.
As early as the mid 1960s there were people who were really worried about what seemed to be a trend of the Court supplanting democracy at the state level with judicial wisdom. Griswald was a warning that the Court had slipped off hte rails and some commentators at the time knew it. 1973's Roe was realized as a complete subversion of democracy, but it sparked a highly democratic response to it. That response was fought, all along, tooth and nail by the Democratic Party in the Courts, knowing that it couldn't be fought in legislatures.
And that framed the contest from 1973 to 2016. Democrats openly warred in the Courts, with liberals and progressives freely making resort to them and being open about it. Courts were promoted as the organs of progressive advancment. If the people wouldn't come along on their own, they'd be forced to against tehir will.
Much of what the Court did from 1973 to 2016 was indeed against the will of the people and while it appears that public sentiment has changed, Obergefell was the last straw for many conservatives. With Obergefell there was no longer any pretending that social issues could really be reliably subject to legislation, or so it was thought. Ironically, as conservatives recognized the danger that anti democratic jurists posed, they'd been working inside since 1980 to find reliable judicial conservatives. That process took decades, but it finally started to pay off by the time that Bush II was President. New decisions on the 2nd Amendment, for example, demonstrated that the tide was turning. Obergefll however demonstrated that it hadn't fully turned.
That it hadn't fully turned is something that caused populists to beleive that it hadn't turned at all. Dealt with in other various threads, populists in both parties had, by 2016, grown completley disgusted with both. Much of htat had to do with both parties completley ignoring their concerns, but some of it had to do with a culture of contempt for democracy.
So let's take a trip to Germany, from 1919 to 1939.
Eh?
Yes, for the historical analogy, and its there.
When Germany came out of the Great War in 1918 it came out a functioning but shakey democracy. It only took, however, fourteen years for the wheels to come off. What happened?
Well, what happened is that the German far left and the German far right didn't believe in democracy. They both conceived of their polar opposites as opponents that had to be crushed if the "German nation" was to survive, which meant that over time they increasingly came to view the opposite not as their fellow countrymen but as invading aliens. By 1932 one of those parties, the Nazi Party, had succeeded in wrapping itself in the German flag and defining nearly everyone else as an attacking alien. The German Communist Party, the KDP, held a similar view about the right wing. The democratic middle became smaller and smaller and fell.
Taht's not a perfect analogy, but it is an analogy. The American hard left started viewing the rest of the country as dupes who had to be dragged into a benighted future in the second half of the first half of the 20th Century. By the 1960s it was fully committed to dragging the entire country there against its will, and against its wishes, and in numerous ways against its culture. Legislation that wrecked the employment of blue collar workers, a contempt for the hard hat class, and the ramming of court decisions down the throats of people who found them offensive to their deepest believes were all acceptable and frankly are still regarded by the left in that way.
The attacked group, which makes up the populist segment of the country, knew that htey were under attack and found refuge in a series of political heroes, with Ronald Reagan being the most prominent, but they were also disappointed by at least all of the post Reagan ones who really didn't hold the same views that they did. George Bush I and II, for example, may have been fully honorable men, and indeed they were, but they aren't people that populists can really admire and they didn't really address the conscerns of that demographic. Indeed, they may ahve operated in at least some ways against it.
Then came Donald Trump.
IIIII
Trump is anti democratic and a demogoge. He believes, more than anything else, in himself, and defines the country as himself. He shares in that sense some of the same features as mid 20th Century demagogues and might be rightly compared to Mussolini or Castro. If you want to be kind, perhaps you can compare him to DeGaulle, except that DeGaulle was extremely intelligent and, as it turned out, a surprising democrat.
Trump has told his supporters, effectively, the same thing about Democrats that Hitler told his supporters about Communists, or Castro told the Cubans about right wing Cubans, or so on. They're hte enemy. And political rhetoric that's been hurled about by both sides for the last decade has supported that concept. Moreoever, in a lot of ways, the progressives of hte left have shown themselves to be dedicated enemies to things that many populists and conservatives, and the two are not hte same, do value. Progressives have shown themselves to be the enemies of religion, blue collar employment, biology and even traditional culture in numerous ways and through numerous examples. When Trump declared that "you are going to lose your country" on the date of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the statement wasn't an idle one and its not completley without merit. Democratic progerssives, if they were left unchecked, would in fact have abortion on demand, open borders and an institutional detestation of western culture. Most of what they're accused of being for, by their opponents, tehy are for. And they're nto really for democracy themselves, as one of the things they depend on is a restoration of judicial rule.
Looked at that way, Trump can be compared to figures like Napoleon and Franco. That is people who come to symbolize the "real" country or even, ironically enough, "liberty, equality and fraternity", while crushing it. Viewed in a them v. us way, his supporters naturally can regard their opponents as illigitimate in an exostential way as, looked at that wya, their views are an attack on the nation and they are undeserving of success.
The first principal of democracy is democracy
And hence the problem.
We've crossed over a threshold we've been climbing since at least 1973. The Juanuary 6, 2021 insurrection was a fundamental change in something that's been going on since that time, and earlier. With judicial rule there was, at the same time, at least a measure of democratic rule and enough democracy that most people could still pretend they were a supporter of functioning democracy. Pundits could pretend that the US was functioning as a democracy as well, and in reality, for the most part, save for really huge issues, it was. Attempting a coup remained unthinkable, and it should have.
If we cannot get back to at least January 5, 2021, and soon, the danger this poses is huge. Prior to this fall's election the first principal of democracy, that is itself, still applied, if imperfectly. Everyone acknoweldged that you didn't really hate yoru political opponent and, no matter what they thought of your views, and you of theirs, you were all Americans in the end. If you lost an election, you lost, and worked towards the next.
Now that's been not only challenged, its been rejected, and rejected by one of the two major political parties.
Where this goes is anyones guess. Elizabeth Cheney, however, is clearly correct. Trump's Republcian Party is a threat to democracy, and if Cheney's GOP can't be restored, we're headed for some scary rapids. Indeed, it it can't be restored, we're in for either an era of mid 20th Century failed state type democracy, or a full return of judicial rule.
Neither of which is a good thing.
And the irony of it all is that Trump's administration actually brought about the end of judicial rule at last.
Trump allowed Mitch McConnell to complete his great project, the restoration of functioning Supreme Court. Through Trump, McConnell, an actual conservative, was able to place jurists on the court who didn't see the law through their won political or social goals as a means to achieve them. This was only secured by McConnell at the bitter end of Trump's administration, and but for Trump's childish assault on the election, it would be his legacy.
That legacy now stands in real jeopardy, at an existential level, as at the very moment that a Supreme Court has come into power which will actually allow for state and national legislatures to decide thins for themselves, on a democratic basis, one political party has decided that it openly doesn't believe in that any more, and would rather rule by decree. In the meantime, the other party, which hasn't really believed in that since the mid 1970s, stands to gain in power as it seeks to overturn the McConnell Supreme Court through its own appointments due to the GOP's collapse as a democratic institution.
What's the way out of her?
Restoring democratic behavior.
Whatever it is, it won't be easy.
Democratic behavior is a democratic habit. DeToqueville observed that the single most notable feature of the American political cultures was a democratic habit. We've always had that, even if we've been working on assulting it for forty or more years now.
