For anyone who wonders why so many Americans are concerned, disgusted, alarmed, and even angry at Republicans today, here’s the reason why.
In their new book, Tyranny of the Minority, which is essentially a sequel to their previous book, How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that Trump Republicans are using the very Constitution that established American democracy to undo it.
Our founders, the two Harvard professors write, rightly feared that without safeguards the democracy they were creating might eventually evolve into a tyranny of the majority over the minority. Thus, they established checks and balances to keep that from happening.
Examples such as each state having two senators regardless of population, a Supreme Court not subject to political coercion, three equal branches of government, states having control over the election process, come to mind.
Unintentionally, these very safeguards laid the foundations for the emergence of the opposite problem that we have today, which is, the tyranny of the minority. It is a problem and a threat to our democracy because the Republican Party is the embodiment of this tyranny.
Republican tyranny of the minority, the authors say, is why government today is mired in constant conflict and obstructionism, the result of which is public disgust of government dysfunction just as the Republican minority wants. The only place government is working is in red states where a Republican legislative supermajority is enacting laws not supported by the majority of voters.
The Levitsky/Ziblatt book meticulously examines why the tyranny of the minority is so dangerous, not least because it represents a turn away from democracy by the Republican Party.
One of the most important and telling examples of this fact is the refusal of the majority of Republican office holders and voters to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The peaceful transition of power from one political party to another, Levitsky and Ziblatt remind us, was something that had never happened anyway until Federalist John Adams left the White House quietly in 1801 to make way for Thomas Jefferson, a member of the Democratic- Republican Party, to assume office.
That moment, the authors note, is when American democracy truly became possible. Democracies can take root, they say, only when parties learn to lose. That principle has been accepted and followed by every American president throughout our history until Donald Trump.
I think it is fair to say that most Americans, including myself, have underestimated the profound threat Trump’s refusal to accept the legal verdicts that the election was not stolen from him represents. That is why his criminal indictments for trying to subvert the peaceful transfer of power are so important for the future.
If he is not held accountable, it will happen again, perhaps as soon as 2024 if he is the Republican presidential candidate. When he loses, and I believe he will, he will predictably refuse to accept defeat once again, and Republicans in Congress will likely back him, only this time they will be better positioned to pull off the coup they failed to do in 2020.
The long and short of the story is that Republicans have embraced the democracy busting goal of establishing a Republican autocracy and are hard at work using the weaknesses in our system of government our founders unintentionally created to make it happen.
As Levitsky and Ziblatt put it, Republicans are using our democratic institutions to undo democracy itself.
The solution they propose is what they call “democratizing our democracy.” That involves several steps, including institutional changes, but essentially their answers to our political crisis ultimately depend on one primary thing, how people vote and whether or not they vote at all.
In other words, they say, we, the people, are the ones who must save our democracy. Our government cannot do it for us, our democratic institutions cannot do it. The responsibility lies with us, the people, a theme you have read here numerous times because it is true.
Voters put politicians into positions of power and voters can take them out. That is what we must do in 2024. Republicans in office must be voted out and no new ones elected, if we want to defeat the anti-democracy forces we now face.
The irony is that Republicans know this. That’s why they are trying in every state where they hold power to limit the ways people vote, the hours people are allowed to vote, the identification required for voting, and even the way ballots are collected and counted.
The Republican Party has become the primary threat to American democracy. That is the real message of the Levitsky/Ziblatt book.
But don’t take their word for it or mine. A story published this week in the Atlantic, quotes retiring Republican Senator Mitt Romney speaking candidly about what has happened to his party: “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
But don’t take his word for it either. Look at what Republicans are doing and then decide for yourself which political party believes in American democracy and which one has turned away from it.
linnposts.com 