On January 6, as
Donald Trump was revving up the rioters who would attempt an insurrection at
the
US Capitol, just a short distance away, he said to them: “We fight like
hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country
anymore.”
اضافة اعلان
Almost five months
later, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, fought like hell to block a
bipartisan independent commission to investigate what happened during that
insurrection and what caused it.
It is yet another
clear indication to me that America wasn’t ceasing to be a country, it was
ceasing to be a
democracy.
Indeed, I don’t
believe that Trump was saying that the country would end. Rather, the white
nationalist president was saying to his overwhelmingly white horde of
supporters that white supremacy in a white nation that honors the culture and
legacy of white people, at the exclusion of others, was in jeopardy.
And how does a segment
of the population that is losing its numerical majority — as the populations of
other ethnic and racial groups, particularly Hispanics and Asians, surge — maintain
control in a democracy? It abandons the basic tenets of democracy, that’s how.
It redefines democracy smaller. It excludes more people from participation,
while granting more power to others.
Republicans’ blocking
the independent commission to look into an insurrection that targeted the US
Capitol on the day that Congress was set to certify the results of the
presidential election is extraordinary in every way.
Republicans refused to
defend democracy from a mob that came to upend it.
But it isn’t only
Republicans in Congress chipping away at democracy, it’s happening all around
the country. The latest raft of voter suppression bills is another example.
Republicans don’t want to appeal to the existing and evolving electorate, they
want to shave it down to a form more desirable to them.
Perhaps one of the
more pernicious features are measures, like those in a Texas bill, which would
make it easier for states to overturn results of an election. As The Houston
Chronicle put it, not only would the bill change the burden of proof for fraud
charges from “clear and convincing evidence” to “preponderance of the
evidence,” a related measure would then “allow a judge to overturn an election
if the total number of ballots found to be fraudulent exceeds the margin of
victory.” The Chronicle continued, “In such cases, a judge could ‘declare the
election void without attempting to determine how individual voters voted.’”
On the front end,
Republicans are trying to limit the numbers and kinds of people who can vote,
and on the back end, they are trying to give themselves the option of voiding
those votes.
Another part of
limiting participation is also to rail against more people — particularly those
not coming from Europe — entering the country and becoming citizens.
One of the biggest
hangups to getting comprehensive immigration reform has always been the
trepidation Republicans felt about making more Hispanics citizens, since they
vote about 2-to-1 against Republicans and for Democrats.
That is the reason
that the Trump administration even wanted to limit legal immigration, and cap
the entry of refugees and to do away with the so-called “visa lottery.”
Then, there is the
influence on elections that the uber-wealthy — overwhelmingly white people in
this country — are allowed to have on our elections, especially since the
atrocious Citizens United ruling.
A recent report by
Issue One found that “just 12 megadonors — at least eight of whom are
billionaires — contributed a combined $3.4 billion to federal candidates and
political groups between January 2009 and December 2020,” and that those
donations “means that 12 megadonors and their spouses — a total of 19
individuals — accounted for about $1 of every $13 in federal politics” over
that period.
America was not
founded as a true democracy. Only wealthy white men were initially allowed to
choose the leaders of this country, and I doubt the framers of the Constitution
ever considered it would work differently than that. But, over the centuries,
we have expanded the vote and moved closer to the ideal of democracy.
But, those moves have
always been met with extreme resistance. And at times, they have been dialed
back. Just look at the way Jim Crow was used after Reconstruction to crush the
enfranchisement of Black people.
We are entering a new
era of extreme restriction, of white supremacy, and white oligarchy, and
Republicans are attempting to maintain power by redefining democracy backward.
They want to take “their” country back, back to a time when white people had
complete control of the halls of power, the levers of industry and the crafting
of narrative.
Most Republican
senators couldn’t vote for the independent commission, because the people
attempting the insurrection were their voters. The insurrectionists didn’t so
much want to completely destroy democracy but to redefine democracy as a system
in which their voice held more weight, determinative weight. The
insurrectionists want the same thing as the Republican Party that shields them.
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