US democracy is still in the danger zone
Threat has outgrown Trump as Republican states seek to control what happens in future elections
Edward Luce
Early into Donald Trump’s presidency, the Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the US to a “flawed democracy”.
Unfortunately it still belongs there.
Far from putting Trumpian distempers into the rear-view mirror, Joe Biden’s victory has deepened them.
Trump’s style of politics has taken on a life independent of him.
Even if he retired to a monastery, the Republican party has chosen its course.
The danger this poses to US democracy is twofold.
The first is to America’s rules of choosing its president.
The grip of what is rightly called the “big lie” about last year’s “stolen election” should not be underestimated.
Had there been any evidence of fraud last November, William Barr, Trump’s ultraloyal attorney-general, would have jumped on it.
His justice department found no evidence of malpractice.
Like all myths, the stolen election is immune to evidence.
Nor can it be dismissed, as it sometimes is, as purely the result of sore loser syndrome. Republican-governed states such as Arizona and Georgia are passing laws to seize control over their electoral college returns.
They are motivated as much by what they want to happen in 2024 as by an effort to placate Trump.
These are forward-looking power grabs from independent election officials.
Some such provisions would embarrass Viktor Orban’s Hungary — the original “illiberal democracy”.
The pattern is to deprive Democratic cities such as Houston of voting outlets while making it easier to vote in conservative rural areas.
The second danger is the nature of other laws that Republican states are passing, some of which make Trump look moderate.
Texas is about to remove the need for almost any gun buyer to have a licence.
The state also just voted to limit abortion to six weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest.
Texan Republicans have a reputation for being extreme.
Their platform calls for the US to withdraw from the UN and abolition of the Federal Reserve.
But the state is also a bellwether of where national Republicans often go.
It would be misleading to blame the party’s course solely on Trump’s base.
Many of these steps are being taken without pressure from below.
Some Republican leaders, such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, are angling to succeed Trump in 2024.
Others, such as Texas’s Greg Abbott, are enacting laws that have long been on their donor wish list.
There was no grassroots clamour in Texas to make buying firearms simpler or voting harder.
The strategy is to stoke dread of an America under existential threat from alien influences — Europeanised liberals who wish to outnumber hard-working Americans with imported voters.
Trump has long encouraged such paranoia.
But it has acquired a new velocity since his defeat.
In a recent poll for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, 56 per cent of Republicans supported the use of force to “protect the traditional American way of life”.
Of course, it is easy to over-dramatise what people tell pollsters they might do in real life.
Most Americans, including almost half of Republicans, reject political violence. Biden’s approval rating has not dropped below 50 per cent — a ceiling Trump never breached.
And the system passed a severe stress test between last November’s election and Biden’s inauguration. All of which is true.
But this account misses the serious changes to rules governing future elections.
Republicans are not far behind Democrats in the polls, at a moment when Biden is delivering a huge vaccine rollout that is driving an economic rebound.
The odds that Democrats will lose one or other chamber of Congress next year are high.
Before then, district boundaries will have been redrawn following America’s recent census.
The majority of states are Republican-controlled so the new map will largely favour them.
Were a 2020-style showdown to recur in 2024, the system will have been stripped of many of its protections.
Change — good or bad — sometimes hinges on the tiniest margin.
Biden’s presidency would be faring very differently today had his party not narrowly won the two Georgia Senate run-off elections in January.
This gave Democrats the 50:50 Senate he needed.
Since then, Georgia has rewritten its rules to make that outcome much less likely — a move Biden described as “Jim Crow in the 21st century”.
Biden was only exaggerating a little.
It is too soon to take America off the democracy danger list.
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