How Republicans completely destroyed American’s half-broken democracy
Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election was quite decisive. He won the popular vote by a margin of over 6 million votes. And he won the electoral college 306 to 232 (a result that Trump called a landslide in 2016). He gathered more votes than any US presidential candidate in history. He managed to flip 5 states. He only needed Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to win back the presidency for the Democrats, yet he succeeded in additionally winning two historically red states: Georgia and Arizona. This was in no way a close election. By the numbers, the 2016 election was much closer.
Why did it feel that close then? The way things unfolded on election night due to how each state counts its votes may have given the impression to people that this was a tight race. But I think there is another reason. Many people are still having a hard time understanding how Trump even had a chance in this election after what we have witnessed in the past four years. It turns out, he didn’t just have a chance. He managed to increase his popular vote and over 73 million people voted for him. This will lead us to the same debate that happened in 2016, on how this happened. Why do millions of people vote for such a monster? Is it because they are monsters themselves? Or because the other party had failed them? These are important questions.
But what is more important is what is about to come. Polls show that 70% of Republicans do not believe the elections were free and fair. Moreover, 38% believe the results will be reversed and Trump will be inaugurated for a second term on January 20th, 2021. We live in complete separate realities. This is obviously due to the bigger role social media has played in our lives in the past decade. But blaming this solely on social media is misguided and fails to recognize the real culprit: the Republican party and the leaders of the conservative movement in the U.S.
As Barack Obama was elected in 2008 by a historical 10 million vote margin between him and his opponent, the Republican party leaders realized they were done. Demographics are changing at a rate that they could never win an election again. And instead of revisiting their policies and trying to appeal to new voters, they decided that their strategy will be to make it personal. The Tea Party movement was launched on February 19th, 2009, less than a month after Obama’s inauguration. And at every attempt and debate from now on, it was all about him. A disinformation campaign by the right wing media portrayed him as a socialist dictator who is trying to take away people’s freedom.
Obama was anything but a dictator. In his first month of office, he negotiated with Republicans the financial crisis stimulus bill despite the Democrats having the majority in the House and the Senate and hence not needing the Republican support. He genuinely wanted the bill to have bipartisan support. No Republican supported the bill. While trying to pass Obamacare, he did an extraordinary step and visited the Republicans at their annual retreat to directly address their criticism of the bill. Only one Republican voted for the bill. Republicans have made this issue so personal that to this date, many conservatives have a positive view of the Affordable Care Act but not of Obamacare, failing to realize they are the same thing.
Similarly, Obama was anything but a socialist. As Fareed Zakaria reminds us in his Washington Post column:
“Barack Obama was a moderate Democrat — “conservative in temperament,” he acknowledges — and governed as one. For his key economic advisers, he chose the most centrist, market-friendly experts of the party, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. He kept on Bush’s defense secretary and offered another key Cabinet job, commerce secretary, to Republican Sen. Judd Gregg. He sent in thousands more troops to Afghanistan and expanded drone warfare. And his health-care plan was modeled on the conservative Heritage Foundation’s old proposal, one that also served as the basis for Mitt Romney’s program when he was governor of Massachusetts.”
For 8 years, the Republican party, truly controlled by the Tea Party movement used a mix of fear and disinformation tactics specifically targeted at white voters. They played on their worst instincts and turned the whole political discourse into a culture war, that later resulted in Donald Trump winning the Republican party nomination, followed by the presidency. There is no doubt that Trump won certain states in 2016 and came to close to re-winning them in 2020 due to real economical hardships caused by globalization and automation, which he somehow managed to blame the Democrats for. But anyone still trying to claim that this has been about economic policies is blind. This has been and still is about culture and identity.
It has been about white voters and rural/suburban voters seeing their privileges and their way of life fade away in front of their eyes. When folks say “Make America Great Again”, it’s not from an economy or foreign policy perspective. It’s from a culture and identity perspective. The issue is that when conservatives raged that culture war over a decade ago, they didn’t foresee someone like Trump becoming their leader. They also did not foresee that their disinformation campaign will be successful to the point that 50% of their voter base will believe baseless conspiracy theories such as QAnon. And they certainly did not foresee that at the end of all of this, at least a third of the country would have lost all faith in all institutions including the election process itself.
And as Republicans witnessed things getting worse, they didn’t stop. They decided to go all in as any gambler who is doubling their bet after each loss. Gamblers do run out of money at some point (or someone gets to kick them out of the casino) but in this case, Republicans betting on bringing this country to its knees seems to have no limit. They had already weakened people’s belief in the political process and its ability to make their life better, by putting the country in a deadlock for 6 of the 8 Obama years. Nothing describes this better than the Vice documentary “A house divided” in which Shane Smith describes the extent of this issue:
Now partisan politics in Washington had become so vitriolic, that not only did the speaker of the House have to actually sneak into the White House, but that just by speaking to the president, he was immediately seen as tainted by his own party.
Furthermore, after they managed to ensure people lost faith in the political process, the majority of Republican leaders are contributing to people’s losing faith in the electoral process by supporting Trump’s bogus claims of voter fraud. After all, American democracy has so many flaws (voter suppression, electoral college, gerrymandering, partisan judicial system, unlimited campaign financing, and the list goes on) but voter fraud is not one of them. And if people do not trust anymore the one component of the democratic system that was actually working, then you may as well consider it dead.
