Platitudes and Wishful Thinking Won’t Save American Democracy

Democrats are talking like democracy is in crisis. Why aren’t they acting like it?

President Biden at July’s CNN town hall. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Vanity Fair.

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President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress appear to have settled on a new strategy for protecting voting rights and repairing America’s creaky democracy: pretend things aren’t that bad.

Things look pretty bad. The Brennan Center for Justice has identified more than 400 voter suppression bills that have been introduced this year in states across the country; 30 have already become law, with more on the way.¹ As Ari Berman reported in Mother Jones, partisan gerrymandering in just four key states could give the GOP the seats it needs to win control of the House in 2022.² In fact, thanks to Republican-led redistricting efforts, “the GOP doesn’t have to gain any political ground to win the House,” as the Washington Post put it. “It could take back the majority just by drawing district lines anew.”³ Meanwhile, Republican politicians are moving increasingly toward treating Democratic election victories as inherently illegitimate.⁴

In June, nearly 200 democracy scholars published an open letter warning that “radical changes to core electoral procedures… are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.”⁵ In a July letter to Biden, more than 150 civil rights organizations described the wave of voter disenfranchisement efforts as “the most significant assault on voting rights since the Jim Crow era.”⁶

Rhetorically, at least, Biden and Democratic leaders seem to get it. “This is election subversion,” Biden said last month in a closely watched address in Philadelphia. “It’s the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.”⁷ As House speaker Nancy Pelosi put it in June, “The clock is ticking on our democracy with respect to the sanctity of the vote.”⁸ In a July speech, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer wondered out loud, “What is happening to our democracy?”⁹

And yet, when you look beyond rhetoric to strategy, the Democratic plan looks a lot more like We’ll get ‘em next time! than The most dangerous threat in our history. As the New York Times reported on July 22, “In private calls with voting rights groups and civil rights leaders, White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression.’”¹⁰ Biden made a similar argument in his Philadelphia speech. “We’ll engage in an all-out effort to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote, and then get the vote out,” he said. “No matter what, you can never stop the American people from voting.”¹¹

Except, of course, you can. “We have seen this over and over again throughout American history,” the Times’ Charles M. Blow wrote.¹² The reason Republicans keep passing new voting restrictions is because these restrictions work. That’s why, as countless civil rights leaders, activist groups, and democracy experts have noted, you cannot simply “out-organize voter suppression.”¹³

What’s true of voter suppression is true of the other antidemocratic (and anti-Democratic) priorities of Republican-controlled legislatures, from partisan gerrymandering¹⁴ to new voter ID requirements¹⁵ to the politicization of election oversight.¹⁶ And even if it were possible to out-organize and out-vote these efforts, “it is unconscionable to insist that voters jump through hoops and overcome an ever-growing series of obstacles to exercise a fundamental right of citizenship,” as Jamelle Bouie put it in the Times.¹⁷

***

The fight in Congress isn’t over yet.¹⁸ But let’s think through the message Democrats will be sending if they prove unwilling even to try to use every tool they have to pass pro-voting, pro-democracy legislation.

Say you were a volunteer in Georgia during the 2020 election (and if you were, thank you). You went door to door, made phone calls, wrote letters, sent text messages. You sacrificed your evenings and weekends. You had doors slammed in your face. You were cursed at and insulted and berated. You did all this in an environment coursing with racism and conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rage, in a country with more guns than people, all while a deadly virus floated through the air.

You did all this because you understood that the 2020 election was the most important of your lifetime. You were told that if you did the work to elect a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, they would do the work for you. They would govern with the same energy and urgency with which they—and you—campaigned. Yes, they would take on infrastructure and the pandemic and climate change, but they would also protect your right to vote and strengthen the democracy you worked so hard for. That was their pledge.

And then, after the election came and went, and you were exhausted and the holidays were approaching and Covid-19 cases were spiking again—after all that, you went back out and knocked on doors and made phone calls and wrote letters and sent texts for two more months. Against all odds, you helped elect not one but two Democratic senators to represent your state. An African American senator and a Jewish senator in Georgia, of all places.¹⁹ Your work made that happen.

Today, more than six months later, you hear a lot about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and Senate filibuster. You watch Joe Biden call this moment “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”²⁰ Yet you also note that, in the same speech in which the president uses his bully pulpit to promise action on voting rights, he declines to say a word about the obscure Senate rule preventing action on voting rights. Later you see Biden go on CNN and continue to stand behind this arcane Senate tradition, somehow finding a way to claim that eliminating the legislative filibuster would “throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.”²¹

In 2020, Democrats pleaded for your time and perseverance. You showed up. They seem to take for granted that when they come calling in 2022, you’ll show up for them once again. But at a certain point, who could blame you for wondering whether your effort last time meant anything? What was all that work in 2020 for?

After all, what is political power for, if not to use it? If not to show up for the people who show up for you? “Constantly, we are showing up to protect democracy,” LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told Politico. “When in the hell are those who claim that they are committed to democracy going to show up to protect those that protect democracy?”²²

***

It’s true that Democrats are fighting a nihilistic, bad-faith opposition party that is “one-hundred percent” determined to see them fail.²³ I’m pretty sure Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer (and most Democratic politicians, for that matter) believe they’re doing as much as they can. I’m confident most White House and Democratic congressional staff have good intentions. Ultimately, however, good intentions don’t win elections. Good intentions don’t stop political power grabs. Good intentions without effective actions—or at least attempted actions—send the unmistakable message that protecting democracy can wait.

Democrats could do things that screw up their summer plans, like staying in Washington all summer and taking vote after vote on voting rights.²⁴ They could do things that leave wavering Democratic senators queasy and Republican senators angry, like changing the Senate rules and passing democracy reforms on a party-line basis. They could do things that make them uncomfortable, like going on bipartisanship- and both-sides-obsessed media outlets to defend that vote.²⁵

They still might not succeed. But at least we’d know that they see America’s democratic crisis as an actual crisis, rather than simply an opportunity to score points with their base on social media. We’d know that they’re willing to get as uncomfortable as they’ve asked organizers, activists, and voters—especially Black organizers, activists, and voters—to get, over and over again. We’d know, from their actions, that they’re trying.

***

What will we see when we look back on the Biden presidency in five, ten, or fifty years? Will we see public servants who proved willing to do the uncomfortable work of protecting democracy? Or will we see politicians who had the power to act but instead chose the comfortable path of platitudes and wishful thinking?

Last November, as America tumbled down the path toward autocracy and institutionalized minority rule, we managed, somewhat miraculously, to arrest our fall. For the moment, we’ve stopped sliding. We’re still clinging to that cliff, but we haven’t made it to safety.

While a lot of people are trying to climb back up, enough Democrats seem to think it might be easier just to let go. To close our eyes and hope for the best. They assume that falling couldn’t possibly be as dangerous as the activists and the doomsayers and the less powerful voices warn. They’re sure we’ll land safely this time, as we always have, because the United States is different. Because it can’t happen here.

Are we really willing to take that chance?

1. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-july-2021

2. The four states are Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/07/gop-could-retake-the-house-in-2022-just-by-gerrymandering-four-southern-states

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/14/house-republicans-have-two-critical-advantages-2022; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/28/republicans-gerrymandering-congress-elections

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/opinion/trump-georgia-senate-elections.html

5. https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/statements/statement-of-concern

6. http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/policy/letters/2021/072221-Letter-to-President-Biden-on-Voting-Rights-Bills.pdf

7. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-joe-bidens-speech-voting-rights-transcript/story?id=78827023

8. https://thehill.com/homenews/house/558353-pelosi-pens-letter-to-house-dems-voting-rights-bills-must-prevail

9. https://www.democrats.senate.gov/news/press-releases/majority-leader-schumer-floor-remarks-on-republican-attacks-on-voting-rights-democrats-will-not-stop-fighting-to-protect-voting-rights-and-defend-our-democracy

10. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/us/politics/biden-voting-rights.html

11. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-joe-bidens-speech-voting-rights-transcript/story?id=78827023

12. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/opinion/joe-biden-voting-rights.html

13. As 150 civil rights groups wrote to Biden, “[W]e cannot and should not have to organize our way out of the attacks and restrictions on voting that lawmakers are passing and proposing at the state level. Nor can we litigate our way out of this threat to democracy.”

14. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/28/republicans-gerrymandering-congress-elections; https://crooked.com/articles/gerrymandering-ban-democrats

15. https://www.democracydocket.com/2021/05/voting-round-up-2021

16. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-06/how-republicans-are-grabbing-control-in-voting-rights-push

17. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/opinion/manchin-sinema-filibuster-voting-rights.html

18. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/us/politics/biden-democrats-voting-rights.html. Schumer’s floor speech promised that a June test vote in the Senate was “the opening gun, not the finish line.”

19. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/21/georgias-new-senators-will-write-next-chapter-black-jewish-relations

20. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-joe-bidens-speech-voting-rights-transcript/story?id=78827023

21. As the Washington Post put it, “Biden has previously said he thinks the filibuster is a Jim Crow-era relic. At the same time, he has argued that it must be protected.” Or, as Charles M. Blow wrote in the New York Times in response to Biden’s comments, “What?! Getting rid of it to protect Black people’s ballot access is getting something done. Something enormous.”

22. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/26/democrats-gop-voting-laws-crisis-500726

23. Mitch McConnell: “One-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.” Wyoming senator John Barrasso: “Mitch McConnell’s come under a lot of criticism for saying at one point he wanted to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president. I want to make Joe Biden a one-half-term president.”

24. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/07/27/recess-can-wait-23-groups-demand-senate-stay-dc-pass-people-act; https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/biden-manchin-gop-voting-rights/619003

25. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/opinion/manchin-sinema-filibuster-voting-rights.html. As 150 civil rights groups wrote to Biden, “at critical times in our history, one party has been forced to act alone in securing the fundamental democratic rights of American citizens, including Congress’ passage of both the 14th and 15th Amendments.”