To an extent not seen before in our country, the threat of becoming a minority is causing whites to accept nondemocratic means of preserving their status and power. Many whites, who see themselves as besieged and under the threat of losing their majority status, have become willing to accept nondemocratic means for preserving the status quo. To stem the erosion of their privileged status, white Christian Americans have begun to embrace undemocratic practices previously unthinkable.
While the country has long accepted such undemocratic institutions as the senate and the electoral college — in large part because they reinforce white rule by giving undue power and influence to largely white rural states — a recognition that changing national demographics will ultimately threaten those protections of white dominance began to take hold around the time of the 2010 census when it was widely publicized that whites would by 2050 become less than 50 percent of the population. In 2010, state legislatures in mainly Republican states began aggressive partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression campaigns in a mostly successful effort to reduce the influence of nonwhite voters — those who will soon make up the majority in this country, and who generally vote for Democratic Party candidates. The success of these efforts can be seen in the electoral outcomes of the years since 2010: Even though there are far more Democrats than Republicans in the U.S., Donald Trump became president in 2016, Republicans control the senate, and for much of the last decade controlled the house as well. And there are a number of states, like North Carolina and Wisconsin, where Democrats outnumber Republicans but, through gerrymandering and voter suppression, Republicans hold a majority in both houses of the state legislature.
What most immediately interests me is to what extent citizens of the United States will tolerate — or even encourage — other more extreme nondemocratic steps taken by President Trump to remain in office following the November 2020 presidential election. Without, what I think, is enough widespread publicity, a number of political scientists, including Matthew Graham at Yale and Larry Bartels at Vanderbilt, have spent the last few years studying whether whites prioritize their status and power or democratic norms. Would they sacrifice the latter to preserve the former? All of these studies found the same thing: A majority of Republicans would.
Most Republican voters value “keeping America’s power structure white” more than they value democracy. The key trait identified among Republicans which correlated with anti-democratic sentiment was “a voter’s level of concern about the political and cultural power of nonwhites in the United States.” This ethnic antagonism is the best predictor of a Republican’s indifference to democratic norms. It was also the strongest predictor of a voter’s support for Donald Trump in 2016.
Not all American citizens have the principled approach to democracy that we have long taken for granted. When their social group or position is perceived to be threatened, people become more vulnerable to authoritarian leaders who promise protection even at the expense of institutional democracy.
Polarization and negative partisanship contribute to a growing perception among citizens that the opposing party threatens the nation and their way of life. These perceptions open the door to undemocratic behavior by an incumbent and his supports to stay in power.
Matthew Grant’s study published this year shows that when voters are forced to make a choice between partisan loyalty and standing on principle, the great majority opted for partisan loyalty. If gerrymandering, voter suppression, and other nondemocratic methods are perceived by voters as necessary to keep society as it is, they are predisposed to support the legitimization of nondemocratic efforts to protect the status quo.
The unanswered question which interests me is to what extent Americans will accept any nondemocratic steps Donald Trump may take after the November 3 election to hang on to the White House and power. He will, of course, lose the popular vote just as he did in 2016. If it appears he is likely to also lose the vote of the electoral college, what steps will he and his supporters take between election day and the convening of the electoral college to insure he remains in office, and to what extent will the American public tolerate these steps?
