The End of Our Democracy? (2018 – 2024)
The 2024 election is nothing less than a referendum on the Constitution and the continuation of American democracy. This is not hyperbole, not some partisan rant, but a recognition that we are at a crucial moment in the Gingrich war for political power. Either we are nearing the war’s end in which the radicals win, or we are at a turning point in which pro-democracy Americans unite against their common enemy.
During the 2012 campaign, it took a secret recording of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for the public to learn his thinking about the 47% of Americans who don’t pay taxes. Twelve years later, the Republican radicals are now fully out of the closet, with Trump leading the way. Movement founders and newcomers have been emboldened to reveal their thinking more overtly. No longer are we in that quaint time when secret recordings were needed to understand what our public figures are thinking.
According to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, there are three basic principles that political parties need to follow for democracy to thrive: always accept the results of fair elections, unambiguously reject the use of violence to gain or hold on to power, and break ties to anti-democratic extremists. Based on research by the Republican Accountability Project, which examined the loyalty of Republicans in Congress in 2021 to these fundamental tenets, the authors write, “more than 80 percent of them adopted mostly antidemocratic positions.” And: “Only 6 percent of Republicans behaved in a consistently democratic manner, and most of them had retired or lost primaries by 2022.”
A Dire Warning: “Save our republic”
In March 2024, after Trump had all but secured the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, Liz Cheney, former Republican representative from Wyoming and vice chair of the January 6 Committee, issued this dire warning: “We have eight months to save our republic and ensure Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office again.”
Many conservative Republicans who had over the prior decades recognized the dangerous path the party was on – a path some helped engineer – many of them found renewed purpose in opposing Trump’s candidacy in 2016 and his re-election in 2020 and 2024. Bill Kristol, among the earliest to recognize the tightrope the GOP was walking, is among the founders of several pro-democracy, anti-Trump organizations including Defending Democracy Together, which supports a number of projects that defend democratic norms, values, and institutions, and The Bulwark, an exemplary member of the Fourth Estate that frames politics through a pro-democracy lens. The Lincoln Project, founded by some of the Republicans who helped pave the way for the authoritarians who now run the party, launched in 2019 to prevent Trump’s re-election and defeat Trumpism – the popular term for the authoritarian strain the party exposed itself to in order to achieve electoral victories in the preceding decades.
In 2024, an unprecedented number of conservative Republicans, including Cheney, and former members of Trump’s administration endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris.
2018
Gingrich: “The Old Order is Dying”
In a lengthy profile in The Atlantic, Newt Gingrich observed that freedom around the world has produced “a very deep discontent that the system isn’t working.” And he thinks that’s not just a good thing but essential for the survival of western civilization. He seemed pleased when he said, “The old order is dying.”
2020
GOP Messaging: “We Are Not a Democracy”
In June, The Heritage Foundation published a report explaining that America is a republic, not a democracy. In October, Republican Senator Mike Lee repeated this assertion. By 2022 it was often seen in comments on social media and by mid-June of 2024, it was being echoed by Trump rally goers.
2021
January 6: The Insurrection and the Bigger Lie of Erasure
On January 6, 2021, following a rally on the White House ellipse where then-President Trump incited rally goers to march on the Capitol and “never give up the fight”, marchers broke through police lines and illegally entered the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. Their goal was to disrupt the certification by Congress of the 2020 election. In the months and years that followed, Trump Republicans sought both to downplay and celebrate the event.
