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When Democracy Itself Is On the Ballot, We’ve Already Lost
The last few weeks have been a particularly strange stretch in a campaign year that is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced.
The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of the occasion.
It was different in the tumultuous summer of two attempted assassinations against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal from the race, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and the political conventions. That period felt as historic as the decision voters would make in November. But since then, things have settled into a odd limbo, like we’re all waiting out the clock until Election Day, resigned that a sufficient number of our fellow citizens may in fact decide to ditch the American experiment as we know it, imperfect though it’s been, in favor of some kind of gaudy neofascist kleptocracy.
In some respects, once Harris replaced Biden and took the doubts about his age and fitness off the table, the election became a referendum on Trump. And what, really, is there left to say about Trump? Everyone who pays any attention to politics long ago made up their minds. All that’s left to do is the expensive work of trying to make sure those people actually cast their votes while also trying to capture a slice of the hapless folk who after all these years still haven’t made up their minds about Trump. In the meantime, everything else is frozen in place until a decision is made on whether democracy is the way to go.
Compiling Morning Memo each day has been harder in recent weeks than ever before, not because there is no news but because there’s little that seems to capture the present moment in full, which has forced me to think hard about why, instead of building to a crescendo in November, we seem to be slouching toward a potential second coming of Trump.
I don’t have an especially satisfying global answer, but there are some dynamics that contribute to this unpleasant sensation that we’re walking eyes wide open into the abyss.
It is a mark of the poor health of our democracy that democracy itself is on the ballot at all. A choice between democracy or not democracy isn’t a choice but an existential threat that doesn’t sustain or nourish civic life. The social compact has already been broken when we can’t agree that free and fair elections are a universal goal or that we abide by the results of those elections or that the rule of law should apply equally to everyone. We can’t even agree on whether an auto-coup by a sitting president is a good or a bad thing – or a thing at all.
To put a finer point on it: While we should hail the self-sacrifice of Republican Never Trumpers for forgoing their own political ambitions in service of defeating Trump and upholding the rule of law, something is fundamentally broken when it requires a coalition that ranges from AOC to Liz Cheney to elect a pro-democracy candidate. Democracy is designed to mediate the differences among those who believe in democracy, not resolve the conflict over whether to have democracy at all.
These kinds of dynamics – and the presence of Trump and MAGA Republicans – skew public discourse in ways that I’m not sure we fully recognize let alone understand. I could debate with Liz Cheney til the cows come home on the proper role of government, on how to fine tune the balance between liberty and equality, on where the rights of the individual should yield to the common good, and on more mundane topics like health care policy, the energy transition, and foreign affairs. But those are not the debates anyone is having.
For much the past eight years, and especially in the last several months, the long-running debates that form a through line for American democracy have been sidelined by the existential threat posed by Trump and Trumpism. So while there is honor in linking arms with former foes to unite in defense of the very democracy that allows us to argue these finer points with each other, there is much to mourn in what we have already lost: years of some the most pressing issues we face relegated to secondary or tertiary significance; vibrant and essential public debates left to molder while we confront the more immediate threat; time, energy, and resources diverted from supporting the best of who we are to fend off the worst of who we can be.
The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.
Most of political journalism fails to meet the moment because it has chosen to maintain – or is unable to break free of – the illusion that the 2024 campaign is another in the long line of great quadrennial public debates engaged in mostly good faith by two sides seeking to coalesce the will of the people around their preferred vision for the country. It’s nowhere more painfully apparent than watching the TV networks continue to try to competitively exercise their convening authority to stage the presidential campaign in front of their cameras. We’ve catalogued at length the ways that using the same old journalistic constructs normalizes Trump, creates false equivalencies, and generally allows the anti-democratic forces to pantomime as democratic while denigrating, undermining and delegitimizing democratic institutions, including news outlets themselves.
What that has left us with is a curdled public discourse in which the pro-democracy side is mostly yelling at each other about what more can be done to stop Trump; holding up scorecards like figure skating judges on the effectiveness of this or that anti-Trump strategy; assessing the purity of each other’s anti-Trumpism; and railing against democratic institutions like the media for wilting in our hour of greatest need. Not all of those are bad impulses, and to be clear they are not the cause but rather a symptom of our current predicament. It’s what happens when the “other side” rejects democracy as a means of resolving these differences. It’s like having a public debate against an abandoned lectern.
2024 Ephemera
- NYT on Elon Musk: “In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.”
- NYT: A Stern Obama Tells Black Men to Drop ‘Excuses’ and Support Harris
Good Read
WSJ: When the Hurricane-Relief Worker Turns Out To Be a Neo-Nazi
Ethel Kennedy, 1928-2024
Ethel Kennedy, the activist, advocate, and widow of Robert F. Kennedy, has died at 96.
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