Democratic Presuppositions

A two-party democratic political system is not sustainable if one of the parties is not fundamentally committed to abide by the democratic process. That means that for the most part they accept the rules of the game, they essentially accept the norms of political contestation, and abide by the results of elections, including the peaceful and legal transfer of power. 

It has become increasingly clear over the last 30 years – essentially since the ascension to power of Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay in the early 90s – that the Republican Party has been moving away from being a legitimate participant in a democratic system of representative government. This process has clearly been exacerbated during the four years of the Trump Administration. Now, with the most recent actions of the Trump campaign, after bringing one outrageous law suit after another seeking to delegitimize the recent election, reaching the heights of calling upon the Supreme Court to authorize a bloodless coup d’état; and with 17 elected Republican state Attorneys General and some 125+ elected Republican members of Congress signing on, there can be no further doubt at the authoritarian and completely non-democratic character of the current (Trumpian) Republican Party. 

While this latest assault on our democratic institutions is clearly seditious, in the words of the Pennsylvania AG’s submission to the Supreme Court, it can no longer be acceptable for any public spokespeople to continue to act as if we still have a normal, functioning representative democracy, and to continue treating the Republican Party as a legitimate participant in the democratic process. For public people and media spokespeople to continue to so act as if representative normality continues to reign across this country, is to be morally irresponsible and to lack journalistic integrity. It is, in effect, to become, at best, an unwitting co-conspirator in the systematic subversion of US democracy.

From these facts emerges the profound and clearly existential challenge facing this country. Can we re-fashion our institutions and cultures so as to preserve the essentials of a representative democratic system? And what may be a path toward that outcome?

I pose this question in the most direct and starkest terms because I honestly believe this is the reality we are facing. And because I think that only by expressly appreciating our threatening current national political and cultural reality do we have the possibility of constructively addressing it. But I do not have any clear answers to the challenge I have posed. Only a series of quite diverse and uncertain possibilities. It is in that state of anxiety and uncertainty, that I detail this challenge, in the hope that I might help stimulate a series of creative and constructive responses that offer us a more fruitful path out of this yawning authoritarian abyss.