Democracy Is Not Broken

Even before Donald Trump and his Project 2025 supporters began their attacks on the principles, institutions, and alliances that made this country the envy of the world and the enemy of Russia, I often heard people on the Left bemoaning our broken democracy and failed federal government. Some even said we were not a democracy, echoing an identical claim on the Right (but for different reasons).

Such irresponsible commentary betrays a narrow view of the American experiment and all it has accomplished in 250 years. It also helps feed the destructive narrative that supports the Right’s authoritarian power grab.

As in all experiments, there have been moments – including our current one – that put at risk the aspirations we have for our country. Now is not the first time the routines of daily life have made us forget we are conducting an experiment in self-rule. Our lack of vigilance allowed some of our “lab” partners to begin mixing in the wrong ingredients – the wrong ideas – that put the experiment at risk.

As historian John Meacham writes  in his latest book, “America has been defined by the perennial struggle between the appetites of the few and the privileged and the aspirations of the many who have rightly insisted that the nation live up to its self-professed creed of sacred rights and equal justice under law.”

What we are experiencing today is yet one more chapter in that struggle. True, what makes this time extraordinary is that the few and the privileged plan to use their grip on political power to prevent millions – possibly more than 21 million – from exercising their constitutional right to vote them out. It’s Jim Crow all over again, but at the federal level. And this time, students, transgender people, and women who use their spouse’s last name would be caught on the losing end of the proposed voter ID requirements, along with people of color.

We have dealt with extraordinary challenges before, when our partners in the experiment ceased to collaborate and instead sought to go their own way. Slavery and the South’s attempt to secede, the original Jim Crow era in the South, the corporate domination and wealth inequality of the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age, the ideological crusade of McCarthyism, the shredding of trust in institutions that began with the government’s lies about Vietnam and then Watergate. We haven’t always had the democracy we’ve wanted, but we’ve always managed to set it back on track.

That’s the way this experiment rolls. Things blow up – we confront our former partners in constitutional democracy and reassert our authority – and we get to work cleaning up the mess. Each failure makes us a little smarter, and so we modify the experiment’s parameters to make this a more perfect union. We added the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. We passed the Glass-Steagall Act and the New Deal legislation. We remembered decency and restored trust among the majority of Americans. We passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, began a war on poverty, and finally ended a war we could never win.

But first, each time we had to reclaim control of the experiment before we could again make progress. Right now, that means making sure the Constitutionalists – more commonly known by other labels such as Democrat, Independent, and RINO (the principled conservatives shunned by their own radicalized Republican party) – win the midterm elections.

Ensuring victory in the fall means taking actions we might not otherwise support, as Democrats in California and Virginia have done in an effort to match the MAGA Republicans gerrymander for gerrymander.

It means supporting candidates who have the best chance of winning in swing states and red states, too, even if they are not the candidates we prefer.

It means every eligible voter gets to cast a vote this fall, regardless of whatever emergencies the authoritarians declare to prevent them from voting.

It means putting platoons of Constitutionalists in between the voters and their ballots and whatever armed enforcers the president and his red state loyalists send in to intimidate and confiscate.

It means reminding the armed forces of their oath to uphold the Constitution and the penalty for betraying it.

It means making sure the results of the elections are respected, assuming we manage to pull them off with minimal interference. There can be no repeat of January 6. And if there is, we need to be better prepared to repel the attack.

These are our most important tasks, as Americans committed to preserving our democracy, despite whatever illegal war, abductions, murders, or corruption the news of the day puts before us.

Once we’re past this crisis, assuming power shifts back to the Constitutionalists (and if you are reading and nodding in agreement, you are one of us), then we can look at the lessons learned over the last decades and make the necessary modifications to our grand experiment in rule of the people, by the people, for the people.

Whatever new amendments, laws, and institutions are put in place, we will need to remember we will still be an imperfect democracy. Our country won’t look like the democracy everyone aspires to, but so long as it respects the principles of our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it will be the democracy we want.