Managed democracy and the scandal of what’s legal

Mr. McClure, I have this crazy friend who says that American democracy is in serious danger of ceasing to exist. Is she crazy?

No Jimmy — just ignorant. The Constitution, guardrails, the new IPhone — hey look, a squirrel!

The progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the Republican-led pressure on political systems is so great that there is “a very real risk” democracy will cease to exist in the US within a decade.

The leftist Democratic politician derided efforts by Republican legislatures around the country to restrict voting rights as the “opening salvos” in a war on democracy, which she said could result in a return to the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of racial minorities.

In the interview with the New Yorker, she warned that the clock was ticking for Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders to do anything about it, with huge chunks of the president’s agenda, including legislation to protect voting rights, stalled in Congress by more conservative or moderate members of her own party.Advertisement

“Honestly, it is a shitshow,” Ocasio-Cortez said of working in the same Democratic-controlled Congress in which centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have blocked both electoral reforms and Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better social spending initiative.

“We don’t have much time,” she said. “The president has not been using his executive power to the extent that some would say is necessary.”

The issue of voting rights was a dominant theme of the interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who asked her about her previous use of the phrase “if we have a democracy 10 years from now”.

“There’s a very real risk that we will not,” she said. “What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn’t.

“We’ve already seen the opening salvos of this, where you have a very targeted, specific attack on the right to vote across the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics.

“You have white nationalist, reactionary politics starting to grow into a critical mass … the continued sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems, all in order to overturn results that a party in power may not like.”

Commenter Murc, Giver of Laws, makes a good and scary point about white Christian nationalists:

Many of these people would be unhappy to learn all of the details about what their leaders are proposing… but for identitarian, tribalist reasons, not substantive ones. They’d be opposed to establishing an American fascist theocracy out of some vague civic belief that this is America and therefore we’re not an fascist theocracy and so they don’t like it.

It’s like the woman said: “People love what I have to say. They believe in it. They just don’t like the word ‘Nazi,’ that’s all.”

And the problem with that is, when push comes to shove, when the two identities eventually cannot coexist, they’ll have to pick one. When their political movement, that’s entwined deeply into their church, community, and home life tells them “well, these are the steps you need to support in order to continue to be a paid-up member in good standing” and their vague sense of civic patriotism tells them “but those things are incompatible with being a traditionally good American,” what the majority of them are going to do is jettison the latter identity, the weaker one, and incorporate their view of what it means to be a good American into the totality of the former one.

And the hell of it is, they might not even need to make that kind of stark choice. Modern American authoritarianism has gotten real good at obscuring what its doing. It straight-up ended democracy in the state legislatures in Wisconsin and Michigan over a decade ago and yet the majority of the population of both those states aren’t aware of that! And that makes it even easier to get where you’re going. That may eventually change; the endpoint of any movement that uses political sleight-of-hand is to eventually stop doing so. But for now it’s a very easy thing to ignore, especially if you don’t WANT to see it.

I see a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about how America may be going down the road of Hungary, and Turkey, and even Russia in regard to the creation of a managed “democracy,” in which the ruling party makes it practically impossible for it to lose power without even needing to rig elections illegally, since it can do so very successfully within the strict letter of the law.

Interestingly I see almost no mention of a possibly more germane example, which is in every sense much closer to hand: Mexico. Mexico had a classic managed democracy for many decades under the PRI, and moreover one that was particularly resilient because it managed to rid of itself of the cult of personality caudilloism that plagued Mexico in the 19th century, and continued to beset the rest of Latin America throughout the 20th and into our own time. (This latter fact may be relevant to discussions of the extent to which fundamentalist Christian identity politics survive Donald Trump as a major force in American life).

The fact that about 12% of the current US population is Mexican-American makes this omission all the more striking, but on the other hand if you just never pay attention to something for long enough you won’t necessarily start doing so even when doing so might be particularly useful and revelatory.

In any case, as Murc suggests, the Republicans might not even need to (technically) steal many if any elections in the short and even medium term, since those elections are going to be as good as stolen anyway, by following the Sacred Rules of the System, handed down from on high so very many years ago, or at least as time is reckoned in El Norte.

As he also suggests, what AOC calls a Potemkin democracy may eventually give way to something that rips the mask off, but that’s probably in the long run, and in the long run . . .