Fearing the Voters

 

By David K. Shipler 

            A paradox of dictatorship is its vulnerability. The pinnacle of power feels precarious. The people must not be allowed to gather force.

            In full-blown dictatorships, such as China and the Soviet Union, the autocracy is preserved by outright oppression: sham elections, imprisonments, political assassinations. In democracies evolving into autocracies, such as the United States, the methodology is more complex. Alternative power centers—the press, the judiciary, the legislature, the universities—are undermined and tamed, often by twisting legal tools into political weapons.

A key target is the voting process.

So it is that Donald Trump attempts to rule the United States, with the upcoming midterm elections a special project of manipulation and intimidation.

In a term less than half over, he has already grown the executive branch into a semi-dictatorship. Practically alone, he decides how taxes are spent, how wars are fought, how foreign trade is conducted, how allies are treated, what scientific research is pursued, which opponents are prosecuted. He tries to decree what history is taught, what data is collected, what genders exist, what vaccines are administered, what art portrays, whom law firms defend, what vocabulary is banned. Even in the private sector, the noble aspirations of diversity, equity, and inclusion are forbidden under penalty of funding loss and investigation. 

Trump rarely defers to Congress or the courts. He evades both the legislature’s budgets and many rulings by federal district judges. His Republican majority in Congress is cowed, and his Republicans on appeals courts and the Supreme Court usually acquiesce. As a result, in the face of the Trumpists’ zealotry, the Framers’ ingenious mechanism of checks and balances among government’s three branches has sputtered practically to a halt.

And now comes an election. It is a danger point for the fearful at the top. Their totalitarian mindset, which seeks ideological conformity throughout society, risks repudiation. Trump’s aura of power, wielded with mafia-like threats, confronts the curse of obsolescence. A dirty fight is in the offing.

Although bullies like Trump are also cowards, he has surrounded himself with acolytes who worship his authoritarianism, who are ruthless and contemptuous of democratic norms. How American constitutional culture produced such people is a confounding question, but now that they govern, they have tasted blood and are poised to slash the electoral process with every available means. Do not expect retreat from merciless characters who are backed into a corner.

They began immediately in Trump’s second term. His Justice Department dropped ongoing lawsuits challenging restrictive election laws that worked against Black voters. The department’s voting-rights unit was decimated, from about thirty officials to fewer than ten. Security protections against Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hacking and internet deception were downgraded or demolished: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency gutted, the FBI task force to counter foreign influence dismantled, the system of intelligence-sharing with local and state officials on cyber threats terminated.

Trump now seeks to intimidate local election workers by threatening criminal prosecutions if any ineligible voters cast ballots, although hardly any such fraud has been identified. He calls for federal control of elections whose conduct the Constitution explicitly assigns to the states.

Like a massive drone attack, some of his weapons get through while some are repelled by the corroded shield of checks and balances. His executive order requiring proof of citizenship to vote was blocked by a judge, and his attempt to curtail mail-in ballots (used by more Democrats than Republicans) has been stymied in the courts. Nor has he been able to get Congress to pass his proposed law mandating those and other restrictions.

His Justice Department has sued 30 states for personal details on their registered voters; judges have dismissed 26 of the suits, while 16 Republican-led states have complied by providing driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers, and other information on individuals. He wanted the Postal Service to refuse to deliver any ballots in states that did not comply with his data demand, but a preliminary injunction against the draconian step was upheld by the Supreme Court.

Trump’s campaign to sow distrust in elections has continued unabated. Adherents of his lie that he won in 2020 now populate the highest reaches of his administration, from attorneys general Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche to head of the civil rights division Harmeet Dhillon to FBI director Kash Patel. Driven by Trump’s obsession to prove his fantasy of victory, officials slavishly mobilize prosecutorial powers: The FBI seized ballots from 2020 in two Georgia and Arizona jurisdictions. The Justice Department is seeking the names of all 2020 election officials in Fulton County, Georgia. And anyone who wants to be nominated for a federal judgeship must not speak the truth and say that Joe Biden was duly elected.

The purpose is not just to rewrite the past but to lay the groundwork for the future, one that opens the public’s minds to false claims of vote-rigging and election corruption. Barrages of Trumpist lawsuits are inevitable following narrow Republican defeats in House races next month. Both parties are enlisting battalions of lawyers for protracted court cases that will probably rise to a Supreme Court that has been Trump-friendly on most election issues. Close election results tied up in court challenges could delay seating newly-elected Democrats.

            In a nightmare scenario sketched by the conservative former appeals court judge Michael Luttig, “even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3,” he writes in The New Republic. House Speaker Mike Johnson could orchestrate a refusal to seat Democratic members, Luttig warns. He outlines the procedure Johnson might use, noting that the Constitution makes each house “the Judge of the elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” He calls it Trump’s “final unlawful rampage,” which would ultimately be settled by a Supreme Court that has facilitated Trump, granted him broad immunity from prosecution, and permitted most of his swaggering lawlessness.

            This Court has already assaulted the electoral system by neutering the venerable 1965 Voting Rights Act, which broke down many obstacles to Blacks’ political representation. Since many more Blacks vote Democratic than Republican, the Republicans in state legislatures and the courts have worked assiduously to restore their power to discriminate by gerrymandering and other means.

In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the law’s longstanding provision requiring states and districts with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear with the Justice Department any change in its voting laws and procedures.

Then last April, the Court dealt the act a fatal blow by ruling that it was no longer enough to document the discriminatory effect of a districting map. Now, intent would have to be shown, a virtually impossible proof when legislators are canny enough not to say so out loud. Several states rushed to redistrict in favor of Republicans, with California and Virginia doing so to favor Democrats. (The new Virginia map was thrown out by the state’s supreme court on a procedural technicality, leaving the Republicans with a net gain thanks to the Republican-dominated Supreme Court.)

Dire predictions are being made. Trump might declare a state of emergency and seize ballots and voting machines. Trump might deploy troops to polling places. He might station ICE agents there, intimidating even US citizens whose complexions are not snowy white. After all, being detained by ICE, even mistakenly, has been less than delightful.

Whether all these methods, taken together, will undermine the integrity of the elections is the question. Whether they are a dry run for the 2028 presidential election is the larger question. They are forms of defensive aggression, prompted by fear at the top of the voters at the bottom.

 Experts who have studied transitions from democracy to autocracy see what Steven Levitsky of Harvard calls “competitive authoritarianism” taking shape in the US—where an opposition exists but cannot overcome a rigged system to gain political power. Does that describe the United States? A tentative answer—but not the final one—will come on November 3 and its aftermath.     

Trumpism is not Dead

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Despite Donald Trump’s political wounds from the mid-terms, his strategy of hateful polarization and autocratic assaults on democracy have not been defeated. They no longer depend on his personal demagoguery but have been woven into the fabric of the Republican Party. No true cleansing seems likely without a much more thorough drubbing at the ballot box than Republicans just experienced a week ago.

There is good reason for the relief that prevailed on the American left after Republicans failed to sweep the mid-term elections “as expected.” But expectations are figments of prediction, not reality. The Democrats held the Senate, yes, and few of Trump’s endorsed candidates achieved high enough office to rig vote counts, thankfully. Subverting democracy is not so easy.

But a glass half full is also a glass half empty. Many races were infinitesimally close, with millions of Americans ignoring Republicans’ dangerous campaign to undermine faith in elections, whose integrity is the pillar of government by the people. And the Republicans are still at it: gerrymandering upheld by rightwing judges, voter suppression laws, intimidation at the polls, threats scaring honest election workers to resign, and their biased replacements infiltrating local electoral systems.

According to much of the post-election analysis, the voting seemed less about Republicans vs. Democrats than about Democrats vs. Expectations. The expectations lost, mainly because they were so excessive.

Who was expecting what? Pundits, speculators, politicians, and reporters engaged in an orgy of expectations: the expectation that history would win by overrunning the party in power, as usual in mid-terms. That inflation would win by blaming the party in power. That crime would win by indicting the party in power. The word “expect” in all its parts of speech should be banned from political coverage.

                But did the Democrats win? If getting through a stalemated war without getting killed is winning, sure. But this war is far from over, and the bad guys are still at the gates.

On the one hand, none of the Republican candidates who called the 2020 presidential election fraudulent won office to supervise the next elections in swing states, including Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. That removed part of the threat that the accuracy of future vote counts would be undermined by partisan secretaries of state and governors. On the other hand, election deniers won as secretaries of state in four states, and eight were elected as governors.

The mainstream of the Republican Party remains a conduit for the once-fringe white supremacist theories of social grievance and calls to political violence. Republicans swept Florida, the epicenter of school censorship, book banning, immigrant-bashing, and other assaults on liberty. The party retains its anti-democracy desires.

And while Democrats cheered the narrowness of Republicans’ takeover of the House of Representatives, it is precisely that razor thin majority that will give leverage to the radical Freedom Caucus and its most demented members, such as Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ironically, a larger majority might have given the Republican leadership space for some moderation. Depending for votes by the likes of Boebert and Greene will make the chamber into a platform for slander, character assassination, guilt by association, wild fabrications, and other do-nothing cacophony.   

Conventional interpretations of political developments reveal two chronic problems of journalism. One is short-term memory. The other is the personification of policy.

The first is imposed by tight news cycles, which tend to create fads of interest. Topics and analyses flare and disappear like shooting stars. “News” is defined as something “new.” Therefore, events comprising both the changing and the unchanging—as most significant events do—are distorted by a lens that puts newness into focus and blurs the rest. What is different is emphasized; what remains constant is not. The midterm elections were a classic example, for much in the body politic remained basically unchanged.

The second defect—personification--comes from journalism’s limits of time and space, and its need to catch and appeal to the fleeting attention of the public. Attributing policy to personality—"Biden’s agenda,” “Trump’s candidates”—isn’t all wrong, obviously, but it’s too easy when it ignores the society’s contributing faults and virtues. Maureen Dowd had it right when she wrote that Trump had opened the Pandora’s Box of American demons. For years he was pictured as the cause when he was in fact the symptom, the facilitator. Now, it’s clear that Trumpism has taken root and can grow without him.

Therefore, while Trump’s political stature has been a central topic of coverage, and he remains the object of our obsession as he runs again for president, his malice has been institutionalized.

The same can be said of Vladimir Putin, by the way. Our concentration on him as the wellspring of all Russian evil misses the broader historical patterns of yearning that have transcended Russian governments since before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Even if Putin were toppled, Russia’s thin-skinned sense of humiliation, its messianic impulses, and its lust for respect through territorial expansion would not necessarily be toppled as well. His replacement might be as bad or worse.

So might Trump’s. In the White House, he was crude and sloppy, incurious about how to pull the levers of government and cultivate alliances within law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies. There are potential Republican challengers who are smarter and equally malicious: Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, for example, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who just won election in a 19-point landslide.

In rallies, though, Trump is a marksman, hitting the targets of resentment. Perhaps a Trumpist successor would lack the rhetorical skill to incite mobs of hateful white Americans to channel their sense of powerless and marginalization. Perhaps. But Trump has been a model of demagoguery, so emulation can be expected.

There are those of us looking forward eagerly to a Trump political failure. But it would be no guarantee of salvation. Pandora’s Box has been opened.