Democracy and its discontents

The always-interesting Eric Levitz has a grim new essay on the future of American politics and society.

Levitz two central points are:

(1) For structural reasons our political system is becoming increasingly anti-democratic, in ways that increasingly disadvantage progressives. For instance he notes that, in tandem with the well-known fact that Republicans have managed to win even a plurality of the votes in just one of the last seven presidential elections, it’s been 40 years since Republican senators represented a majority of the American electorate, even though the GOP has controlled the Senate for the majority of this period. This is going to continue to get worse, as the urban-rural divide becomes more pronounced and more polarized.

(2) As rightly infuriating as (1) is to progressives, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that democracy is one value among many, and that if the shoe were on the other foot progressives would likely resist actual democracy just as much as the American right wing currently does — and for good reasons:

To be sure, most progressives pair their calls for social-democratic policies with advocacy for structural reforms aimed at making America’s political institutions more responsive to popular majorities. And there is no question that institutional reform would make it more difficult for the conservative movement to win power while coddling its extremists. But eliminating the partisan bias of the Senate would require adding upwards of seven new, Democratic-leaning U.S. states. It is difficult to imagine Joe Biden and Joe Manchin signing off on such a policy and much less that the conservative movement would accommodate such a powerful validation of its paranoid fears without mounting massive (armed) resistance.

And such resistance would be somewhat understandable. I don’t think conservatives are entirely wrong to think that the Democratic Party’s proposals for democracy expansion are rooted in motives roughly as partisan as those that drive the GOP to restrict the franchise. Which is to say: If progressives did not believe that democratizing America’s electoral institutions would redound to their movement’s benefit, I don’t think we would make that objective a priority. Where majoritarianism and progressive values come into conflict — as they once did on the issues of integration, reproductive autonomy, and LGBT rights — progressives have generally been happy to have the judiciary remove those questions from the realm of democratic contestation.

The fact that Donald Trump’s GOP lacks a strong democratic mandate is highly contingent. Had America diversified at a slightly slower rate over the past half-century, the white majority that supports our president would still constitute a national majority. If, in such a context, the ideal of popular sovereignty — and the objective of disempowering a racist, kleptocratic, fatally incompetent personality cult — came into conflict, would progressives really value the democratic will over protecting the undocumented? If there was evidence that curtailing early voting by just a few days would make Trump less likely to win reelection, would progressives condone such a measure? If not, why not? Why should maximizing the expression of a “popular will” (shaped, as it is, by the corporate media’s hateful propaganda) take precedence over preventing an incompetent demagogue from getting people killed?

These questions are moot. But I think such thought experiments help to make both the conservative movement’s burgeoning authoritarianism, and our republic’s broader crisis, more intelligible: When competing parties subscribe to antithetical conceptions of national identity and good governance, they will only share a mutual commitment to democratic principles for as long as they both consider those principles compatible with long-term ideological victory.

And in America’s system of divided powers, we don’t just need both parties to remain committed to the most minimal of democratic principles — such as honoring the results of elections. Rather, we need them to facilitate responsible, effective governance, even when doing so will potentially redound to the political benefit of the opposition party’s president. This is an extraordinary requirement. And it’s one that has broken our constitutional framework in most of the countries that have adopted it.

The RNC makes it clear that our Republic could suffer the same fate. Biden’s prophecy of bipartisanship’s messianic return is not the answer to the problem the American right now poses. But what that answer looks like — or, more precisely, how progressives can build a movement powerful enough to implement the answers that work on paper — is hard to see.

I think this is right: Reactionary plutocracy does not somehow become in any way more defensible if 50% of the populace supports it rather than 42%. While it’s understandably enraging to progressives that America’s reactionary plutocrats have managed to successfully pursue their goal of canceling post-New Deal America without even garnering the electoral support of a majority of Americans, the more basic problem is, as Levitz says, that fundamentally incompatible visions of the social good are always going to see democracy as ultimately a tool for pursuing one vision and destroying the other. If that tool provides no realistic long-term prospect for success, it will be discarded, as the Republicans have so clearly discarded it now.

But, as he also says, the real problem is deeper: it’s that the Republican vision for America — which Donald Trump has merely embodied rather than caused — is genuinely, profoundly, and irrevocably incompatible with Joe Biden’s, let alone with that of Democrats from the party’s progressive wing. Whether Biden himself understands this remains an open question.