Democracy Diary: Rule by an immoral minority

So -- how to redo the work? Who's the new Southern Christian Leadership Conference?

(As so often happens, this isn’t the post I’d queued up for today - and it’s a bit long, because I didn’t have time to make it shorter:)

In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes that Maine Senator Angus King made a comment published in the New Yorker yesterday that “In 1890, the Senate rejected a measure designed to protect the voting rights of Black men in the South, where southern legislatures had forced most of them from the polls. Southern Democrats and their northern allies killed the proposed law.

“King told Rohde, ‘The result was seventy-five years of egregious voter suppression in the South. That was a mistake made by a few senators. I honestly feel that we may be at a similar moment.’ He added, ‘I’m afraid we’re making a mistake that will harm the country for decades.’”

Yup. And, the harm is already here: “the 48 senators who voted to reform the filibuster represent 182 million Americans, 55% of the United States population, while those 52 senators who upheld the filibuster represent 148 million Americans, 45% of the country,” according to Ari Berman as cited by Richardson.

And we HAVE been here before. My sense of outrage about this comes precisely from my White privilege (of course, my vote SHOULD count) and that fact that I have lived my entire life during the period “from the mid-1960s through the early 2020s . . . a fairly short-lived and [potentially] ultimately aborted experiment, before a more restricted, white man’s democracy [is] restored.”

Yet again yesterday, a colleague said to me, after describing their pain over the political situation, well, I guess there’s not much we can do about that.

What? If we don’t think we can do anything about the political system under which we live, we already don’t live in a democracy — which perhaps isn’t news, but should always, ALWAYS be freshly alarming.

All last summer I could barely sleep, wondering when the Dems were going to run the Voting Rights Act. Their insistence on negotiations (and what choice did they have, perhaps), seemed dumb, a loss of moral momentum. But surely there are people who know better than I what to do. But they didn’t. They’ve screwed it up. They’ve let us down.

But those of us who want a multiracial, pluralist democracy are in the majority, and this push against democracy is precisely because Republicans know their backs are up against the wall of reality and justice. As Thomas Zimmer writes in “Americans Must Take Steps now to avoid a slide into authoritarianism:”

“The Republican party has been on an anti-democratic trajectory for a long time. For several decades, the Republican party has been focused almost exclusively on the interests and sensibilities of white conservatives who tend to define “real America” as a predominantly white, Christian, patriarchal nation. America, to them, is supposed to be a place where white Christian men are at the top. As a political project, modern US conservatism has been animated by the goal of preserving that white Christian nationalist version of ‘real America’ since at least the 1950s; it has been the Republicans’ overriding concern since the 1970s, when conservatives came to dominate the party.

“Due to political, cultural and most importantly demographic changes, Republicans no longer have majority support for this political project – certainly not on the federal level, and even in many “red” states, their position is becoming increasingly tenuous. That’s the paradox at the heart of the current political situation: yes, democracy is in grave danger because reactionary forces are on the offensive. But they are not attacking out of a sense of strength, but because they are feeling their backs against the wall. And they are reacting to something real. America has indeed become less white, less Christian, more liberal – has moved closer to the promise of multiracial, pluralistic democracy.” (Emphasis mine).

So. How do we democracy? Who’s the new Southern Christian Leadership Conference?