January 6 and the Hypocrisy of "Democracy"

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                 Communist East Germany officially entitled itself the German Democratic Republic. The dictatorship of North Vietnam was named the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And the Trump insurrectionists of January 6, 2021 executed their violence against Congress in the guise of protecting democracy.

                Democracy—that alluring concept, that aspiration, that illusion—is still a moral ideal, even among autocrats and would-be oppressors who wear it as an empty label. In the United States, moreover, the Constitution remains gospel, cited even by those who would shred its principles as fiercely as many religious zealots corrupt their holy texts.

                If the United States has a state religion, the late historian Robert Kelley used to say, it is constitutional democracy. That remains so. The very threats to constitutional democracy are being made in its name. The radical right mob that invaded the Capitol, seeking to keep Donald Trump in power, did not reject democracy; they fought for it, or so they believed, having accepted Trump’s lie that he had won the election. “Stop the Steal” became their mantra. They did not reject the Constitution; they claimed to defend it, even while attempting to sweep its provisions aside.

                The Republican Party, now a conduit for radical-right fantasies and dreams, pretends to bolster democracy while becoming the most formidable anti-democratic force in the United States. Instead of sobering the party, the January 6 assault emboldened Republican-controlled state legislatures to enact onerous restrictions on voting and—more menacing—disempower local officials who administer elections honestly. Election officials, facing death threats, leave their jobs, opening the field to the miscreants. “Election integrity,” the Republicans’ rationale, means the opposite. It sets the stage for elections that would be truly stolen.

                When words come to mean the opposite of themselves, when noble ideas are twisted into tools of their own demise, a society dives into a whirlpool. It is sucked down not just by legal mechanisms or institutional processes. Those are mere cover for the deeper currents of distrust and alienation, of humiliation and an angry sense of helplessness. Those, in turn, nourish a vulnerability to demagogues—not only Trump but Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other propagandists—and a susceptibility to outlandish tales of malevolent conspiracy. Even if Trump disappeared tomorrow, those currents would still course through much of America.

                They thrive on a paucity of knowledge, an absence cultivated by inadequate schooling or, worse, the silencing of truth. In Russia today, the crimes of the Gulag prison camps under Stalin are again being whitewashed; in America today, the crimes of slavery and racism are being softened or ignored in Republican-dominated school districts. The civil virtues of constitutional rights are inadequately taught; the mechanisms of democratic government are rarely learned thoroughly.

                Nor does basic scientific understanding prevail. A selfish mutant of constitutional liberty—individualism over all--suffocates the common good. Science is overwhelmed by suspicion and distrust of government, of expertise, of inconvenient advice. Public health professionals devoted to saving lives fear for their own lives and flee from their positions—or are fired by Republican myth-makers.

                In short, by both the reactions to democracy and the reactions to the pandemic, large numbers of Americans—not all, to be sure—have been revealed as poorly educated in history, government, and science. The failure of schooling is a hallmark of a declining civilization.

People under stress have a natural aversion to the mess of democracy and its cacophony of competing opinions. They often search for a single story to animate and explain. That happens in war. It  happens in a pandemic. It has happened amid rapid change, now among working class whites who fear the country’s expanding pluralisms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation. It has happened since the economic hardship of the 2008 Great Recession, when Americans who thought of themselves as solidly middle class tumbled into debt and joblessness. Ironically, many did not vote against the Republicans who caused their hardships by deregulating, enabling financial institutions to gamble loosely with good people’s money.

Vilification of the “other” is now so pervasive that Americans cannot talk to one another across the lines of disagreement. Not only do the barriers separate the right and the left, conservatives from progressives, but also honeycomb the more intimate political landscapes.

On the right, for condemning Trump and the insurrection, Representative Liz Cheney is denounced and rejected by other “conservatives.” What is it that they wish to conserve? On the left, even outside of Congress, self-righteous dogmatism often stifles communication among folks whose  agreement on broad reforms cannot seem to overcome lesser differences on racial injustice and brutal policing. We seem to need enemies within.

Democracy cannot survive with its citizens hunkered down behind their walls of hurt and outrage. It cannot survive in a media firestorm of lies, demonization, and disconnection from reality. It won’t be rescued by any demise of Donald Trump. If the people want another demagogue with the dexterity to touch their nerves of grievance, they will get one.

The United States has never had a perfectly democratic political system, as we all know. It enhances rural power in the Senate and via the Electoral College, which has the advantage of protecting a minority constituency—but at the price of blocking majority rule. It can be changed only by constitutional amendment, which would require more rural states to agree.

Suffrage has never been universal. The country was founded on an economy relying on bondage. Enslaved Black people had no vote, white indentured servants had no vote, women of all colors had no vote. The Civil War’s corrective, codified in constitutional amendments, was soon eroded by anti-Black laws championed in the South as the virtuous embodiment of state’s rights: poll taxes, absurd “literacy tests,” harassment, and the like. By and large, prisoners still have no vote, and they are disproportionately Black.

 The opponents of true democracy never rest. Both parties gerrymander districts to their advantage. Republicans are especially assiduous in disenfranchising Blacks and other likely Democratic voters.  They curtail mail-in ballots and drop boxes, switch polling places around, discount provisional ballots cast at the wrong place, purge voter rolls, bar ex-felons from voting, spread disinformation that unpaid fines or child support will be collected at the polls, and on and on. Many of their anti-democratic actions have been made possible by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s emasculation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which used to require Justice Department pre-clearance of changes in states in counties with a record of racial discrimination.

The beautiful idea of one citizen one vote, culminating in that election-day moment of complete equality, has not been a feature of American democracy. Let’s be honest. It is a wish, a dream, a myth, a goal. A worthy goal, but not one likely to be achieved by calling political violence and hatred “democracy.” Cheapening the vocabulary used to communicate impairs communication.   

The United States has too many citizens who do not care enough about democracy in its truest form, do not accept its creative disorder, or do not want it if it means that they cannot always win. They are being armed from an arsenal of resentments. January 6, 2021 was just the beginning.