Efforts by the Republican Party to bring an end to the limited democracy that we enjoy in the United States began in earnest in 2010. The combination of the Obama presidency, the Tea Party movement, and the conclusion of the 2010 census that whites would become a minority in just a few decades, set off a Republican panic that led the party to take the initial steps to bring an end to democracy in this country, and usher in an era of Republican authoritarianism.
In parallel during the last decade, powerful corporate and wealth interests began to exert even greater influence over policy and the laws and budgets produced by Congress. In a democracy, you would expect those in government to be influenced by and respond to the needs and wishes of the voters who put them in office. But by the middle of the last decade that was no longer the case. In a 2014 study of how our government functions, the political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern) concluded that the federal government responded only to money. They wrote: “If policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”
Two years later, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee wrote that “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can threaten that.” No one in the Republican Party has ever taken issue with this anti-democratic view.
Republicans are now actively following this view to its logical conclusion and reducing the number of Americans who can vote. Adam Serwer has written recently that “Mr. Trump’s main innovation was showing Republicans how much they could get away with. . . . Republicans have responded with zeal . . . targeting constituencies they identify either with Democrats or with the rapid cultural change that conservatives hope to arrest. The most damaging to democracy, however, are the election laws designed to insulate Republican power from a diverse American majority. The Republican Party’s reigning ideology has become a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but also worthy of celebration.”
Anti-democracy views have become mainstreamed since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. On Fox News, hosts warn that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world.” In National Review, columnists justify disenfranchisement of liberal constituencies on the grounds that “it would be better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people.” The Claremont Institute published a paper warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Denying the vote to this “more than half” is therefore justified.
The U.S. government responds only to the wishes of the wealthy making it an oligarchy, not a democracy. But the Republican Party now is openly justifying the destruction of what remains of our democracy, and taking the steps required to end it. The Democratic Party is doing what it always does in defense of our democracy — nothing.
