The Past: Mobilizing the radical Right

The U.S. political system is a representative democracy. Over time we as a nation have discovered that maintaining the health of this type of system requires guarantees of free and fair elections on the one hand, and on the other, the peaceful transfer of power when one political actor defeats an opponent in one of those elections. The attempted coup on January 6, 2021, along with its aftermath, presents a challenge to our political system because those requirements for a healthy body politic have now been put into doubt.

The attempted coup was only the climax of a new strain of far Right mobilization - and far Left mobilization, to be fair - that has heated up in the last few years in the U.S. However, there are major differences between the two far ends of the political spectrum. As an analysis from the Newlines Institute (formerly the Center for Global Policy) notes, their goals and methods differ substantially, even if they both sometimes engage in forms of violence. There is one crucial difference:

Whereas far-left extremist violence primarily results in property damage, far-right extremist violence – particularly from white supremacists and anti-government extremists, two of the largest and most well-known segments of the U.S. far right – is largely characterized by violence against people perceived as the enemy.

A few examples:

• On October 27, 2018 a man carrying an assault rifle and several handguns walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh, shouted “All Jews must die”, and killed 11 people while wounding six others.

• On August 3, 2019, a 21 year-old man used an assault rifle to kill 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Before doing that he uploaded a document to the internet that began with, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me.  I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by the invasion.”

• As the Anti-Defamation League recently chronicled, there were at least 150 other incidents like this from 1993-2017. This is hardly new.

Given all of this activity, it’s not surprising that some people foresaw the events of January 6th. Here’s a quote from a report that came out in August, 2020, before the election:

In the short term, particularly around the 2020 U.S. national elections, we expect there will be an increased risk of further turmoil. Many of the macro-level factors associated with the current upheaval — deepening socio-political polarization, the public health and economic crises linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the multifaceted components fueling the anti-racism protests — have not abated. In some cases, such as the public health crisis of COVID-19, they have intensified.

So looking back now with 20-20 hindsight, in a sense the coup attempt on January 6th shouldn’t have been a major surprise, even though it was the most egregious attempt to violently prevent an elected president from taking office that this country has ever experienced. Still, for the vast majority in the U.S. it had to be a major shock - it certainly was for me. Fortunately, many of the “foot soldiers” of the American Right who committed crimes at the Capitol on that dark day have now been given a measure of justice.

However, that measure of justice has not been enough to allow the country to move on from January 6th. Republican leaders who mobilized, encouraged, and later justified the attempted coup - by doing things like calling it “legitimate political discourse” - have yet to pay any legal or political price.

As a result, now comes the hard part. Now it’s necessary to address the fact that a significant portion of the American voting public still sincerely believes the Big Lie that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election - in other words, that it was stolen. This fact, the decline of belief in the presence of free and fair elections, now is the greatest danger to representative democracy in the U.S.

The Present: Aftermath of January 6th

In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection on January 6th some Republicans seemed to be chastened by the events that killed people that day. Even Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell turned against Donald Trump. But McConnell, who has flourished by playing political chess as well as anyone in recent memory, backed off when it came to making Trump pay any real political price - he assessed the mood of his party and quickly realized it was better to adjust to the new reality of a Republican party dominated by a single charismatic personality.

In the middle of 2021, before there was much interest in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans spent considerable resources on energizing their base around claims of election fraud:

…Republicans’ unwavering fealty to the voter fraud myth underscores an emerging dynamic of party politics: To build a campaign in the modern G.O.P., most candidates must embrace — or at least not openly deny — conspiracy theories and election lies, and they must commit to a mission of imposing greater voting restrictions and making it easier to challenge or even overturn an election’s results. The prevalence of such candidates in the nascent stages of the party primaries highlights how Mr. Trump’s willingness to embrace far-flung falsehoods has elevated fringe ideas to the mainstream of his party.

Since then, the level of highly news-worthy energy on voter fraud has dwindled, but this has been replaced by many successful Republican plans to install "electoral integrity" measures that they say will prevent individuals from engaging in voter fraud. Another possibility is that the measures will depress voter turnout, especially among the poor, who may not be as inclined to bear the cost - in time and money - to meet the new voting requirements. The true impact of these measures on differential Republican versus Democratic voter turnout remains to be seen in what are traditionally low-turnout midterms.

Parenthetically, it’s also important to note that Democrats haven’t been sitting on their hands in the midst of this wave of legislative activity. A recent analysis by the Brookings Institute summarized voter expansion legislation that has been passed since the last election. And yes, what the analysis makes clear “…is that restrictive laws have largely passed in Republican states and expansive ones in Democratic states.”

The Future: What will representative democracy look like?

So where are we at? Since the 2020 election and especially after January 6th, 2021, Republicans have been busy behaving AS IF there was an extraordinary level of voter fraud in the last election. Trump supporters, some of them elected officials, have been caught breaching voting systems in a search for evidence of fraud. Some on the Right have been harassing and assaulting trans people, bizarrely labeling them as “groomers” of children. They have passed bills targeting trans, gay and lesbian children. And they have, in Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Jesse Waters, a two-headed dragon that serves as an effective bully pulpit for far Right views, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

How does all this play out when it comes to the “free and fair” elections that are necessary for a healthy representative democracy? In the short term, we’re getting a taste of the future with the results in Ohio, where Trump-backed Senate candidate JD Vance won his Republican primary and will now face Democrat Tim Ryan in November. According to Vox the results in Ohio are a sign of Trump’s continued power to define the Republican party. As the primary season kicks into high gear we’ll get a much better idea of Trump’s ability to keep promoting the Big Lie through his endorsements - he now has a Trump slate of 140 candidates across the country.

In the longer term, if Trump’s candidates are soundly defeated over the next few months I’ll be much less concerned about a crisis of voter confidence in “free and fair” elections. But even if that happens - and please describe your reasoning in the comments if you think it will - the increasing use of gerrymandering will continue to raise serious questions about the health of our representative democracy.

And other threats are on the horizon. While violence from the far Right has trended downward recently, some groups like the Proud Boys have spent the time organizing and increasing their activities during the past year. Right now it’s difficult to imagine that groups like this are going to fade away in the near future. As the political scientist Yascha Mounk put it, it’s a “great experiment” that we’re engaged in, one centered around building and maintaining a healthy, diverse nation. The end result isn’t guaranteed.

So, how to negate the challenge to representative democracy in the U.S.? I think Mounk’s advice makes sense, though it will be difficult to do:

So, one of the most important tasks of both political parties is to advance the racial depolarization of the American electorate. The country would be much better off if Republicans truly tried to build a multiracial, working-class coalition and if the Democrats didn’t give up on many of the predominantly white states.

I don’t want to live in a country in which I can walk down the street, look at the color of somebody’s skin and know with a high degree of certainty whom they’re voting for.

That’s it for today. Until next time, take care.

Karl Pearson