American Democracy May Be Dying

[BoSoxGal]

Opinion
American Democracy May Be Dying
Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
April 9, 2020, 6:47 p.m. ET

Wisconsin Republican leaders gave citizens a choice on Tuesday: give up their vote or go to the polls and risk their and their neighbors’ health.

If you aren’t terrified both by Covid-19 and by its economic consequences, you haven’t been paying attention.

Even though social distancing may be slowing the disease’s spread, tens of thousands more Americans will surely die in the months ahead (and official accounts surely understate the true death toll). And the economic lockdown necessary to achieve social distancing — as I’ve been saying, the economy is in the equivalent of a medically induced coma — has led to almost 17 million new claims for unemployment insurance over the past three weeks, again almost surely an understatement of true job losses.

Yet the scariest news of the past week didn’t involve either epidemiology or economics; it was the travesty of an election in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court required that in-person voting proceed despite the health risks and the fact that many who requested absentee ballots never got them.

Why was this so scary? Because it shows that America as we know it may not survive much longer. The pandemic will eventually end; the economy will eventually recover. But democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we’re much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize.

To see how a modern democracy can die, look at events in Europe, especially Hungary, over the past decade.

What happened in Hungary, beginning in 2011, was that Fidesz, the nation’s white nationalist ruling party, took advantage of its position to rig the electoral system, effectively making its rule permanent. Then it further consolidated its control, using political power to reward friendly businesses while punishing critics, and moved to suppress independent news media.

Until recently, it seemed as if Viktor Orban, Hungary’s de facto dictator, might stop with soft authoritarianism, presiding over a regime that preserved some of the outward forms of democracy, neutralizing and punishing opposition without actually making criticism illegal. But now his government has used the coronavirus as an excuse to abandon even the pretense of constitutional government, giving Orban the power to rule by decree.

If you say that something similar can’t happen here, you’re hopelessly naïve. In fact, it’s already happening here, especially at the state level. Wisconsin, in particular, is well on its way toward becoming Hungary on Lake Michigan, as Republicans seek a permanent lock on power.

The story so far: Back in 2018, Wisconsin’s electorate voted strongly for Democratic control. Voters chose a Democratic governor, and gave 53 percent of their support to Democratic candidates for the State Assembly. But the state is so heavily gerrymandered that despite this popular-vote majority, Democrats got only 36 percent of the Assembly’s seats.

And far from trying to reach some accommodation with the governor-elect, Republicans moved to effectively emasculate him, drastically reducing the powers of his office.

Then came Tuesday’s election. In normal times most attention would have been focused on the Democratic primary — although that became a moot point when Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign. But a seat on the State Supreme Court was also at stake.

Yet Wisconsin, like most of the country, is under a stay-at-home order. So why did Republican legislators, eventually backed by the Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, insist on holding an election as if the situation were normal?

The answer is that the state shutdown had a much more severe impact on voting in Democratic-leaning urban areas, where a great majority of polling places were closed, than in rural or suburban areas. So the state G.O.P. was nakedly exploiting a pandemic to disenfranchise those likely to vote against it.

What we saw in Wisconsin, in short, was a state party doing whatever it takes to cling to power even if a majority of voters want it out — and a partisan bloc on the Supreme Court backing its efforts. Donald Trump, as usual, said the quiet part out loud: If we expand early voting and voting by mail, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Does anyone seriously doubt that something similar could happen, very soon, at a national level?

This November, it’s all too possible that Trump will eke out an Electoral College win thanks to widespread voter suppression. If he does — or even if he wins cleanly — everything we’ve seen suggests that he will use a second term to punish everyone he sees as a domestic enemy, and that his party will back him all the way. That is, America will do a full Hungary.

What if Trump loses? You know what he’ll do: He’ll claim that Joe Biden’s victory was based on voter fraud, that millions of illegal immigrants cast ballots or something like that. Would the Republican Party, and perhaps more important, Fox News, support his refusal to accept reality? What do you think?

So that’s why what just happened in Wisconsin scares me more than either disease or depression. For it shows that one of our two major parties simply doesn’t believe in democracy. Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner.

[Gob]

"American democracy" is a contradiction in terms....

Runs away giggling...

[Lord Jim]

Says the guy who lives in a country where you can be tossed in the jug for "hate speech"...

[TPFKA@W]

Says the guy who lives in a country where you can be tossed in the jug for "hate speech"...

Not to mention get thrown in the can if you injure a home invader using excessive force. That freaking galls me.

[eddieq]

Trump is all for mail-in voting, as long as it's for him. His tweet the other day says:

Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which is “RIPE for FRAUD,” and shouldn’t be allowed!

The email I got from him/his campaign on the same days says:

The Pennsylvania Republican primary is now June 2nd. Request your mail-in ballot and avoid the crowds on Election Day to vote for President Trump.

Find out how to request your mail-in ballot: [removed URL]

This is the FIRST time every registered voter in Pennsylvania can vote by mail. Take this opportunity and vote from home to Keep America Great.

Request your mail-in ballot >>

We need every Pennsylvania Trump supporter to vote in the primary. Help us get a HISTORIC turnout!

Nor surprising at all.

[BoSoxGal]

Trump is all for mail-in voting, as long as it's for him. His tweet the other day says:

Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which is “RIPE for FRAUD,” and shouldn’t be allowed!

The email I got from him/his campaign on the same days says:

The Pennsylvania Republican primary is now June 2nd. Request your mail-in ballot and avoid the crowds on Election Day to vote for President Trump.

Find out how to request your mail-in ballot: [removed URL]

This is the FIRST time every registered voter in Pennsylvania can vote by mail. Take this opportunity and vote from home to Keep America Great.

Request your mail-in ballot >>

We need every Pennsylvania Trump supporter to vote in the primary. Help us get a HISTORIC turnout!

Nor surprising at all.

Send an email about that to Morning Joe or Anderson Cooper or Chris Cuomo, PLEASE! That shit needs as much airtime as his disgusting lies about mail-in voting 'fraud'.

[Gob]

Dear Jim and TPFKA@W,

Having laws which need to be observed is not a sign of a lack of democracy.

No charge for this lesson...

[Lord Jim]

Depends on the law...

[Joe Guy]

Says the guy who lives in a country where you can be tossed in the jug for "hate speech"...

Not to mention get thrown in the can if you injure a home invader using excessive force. That freaking galls me.

Things are different where Gob lives. Home invaders break into your house, slap you in the face with a glove and challenge you to a duel. Excessive force is rude.

[Econoline]

Commentary (from Charlie Pierce) on the Krugman piece in the OP:

You’d have to be a newborn from Mars to believe that Wisconsin wasn’t a bench test for what the Republicans have planned for the general election in the fall. The propaganda drumbeat against vote-by-mail already has started from the very top. The federal courts are largely in position as a backstop, and the only real solution—swamp the polls—actually could be a life-or-death choice for a great number of citizens. Nice little republic we had. Shame that something happened to it.

Pierce's whole blog post is worth reading, here.

[Gob]

Things are different where Gob lives. Home invaders break into your house, slap you in the face with a glove and challenge you to a duel. Excessive force is rude.

Indeed, I must brush up on my sabre work.

[Long Run]

We've had vote by mail for a quarter century (with partial vote by mail for a decade before that). It seems to work fine. There are anti-fraud policies and checks, but there has historically been little to no voter fraud here so that has never been an issue. It does change how the horse-race aspect is called since the experienced voters send in their ballots early, which get counted first, then the late rush of 18-25 year old ballots get dropped off minutes before the "polls close", which moves the returns decidedly to the left as the counting proceeds.

[MajGenl.Meade]

What worries me about voting by mail is that poor folks can't afford stamps. The same ones that can't go vote because they don't have cars or driving licenses or Google Maps or be bothered.

[Long Run]

Yes, that last category deserves to be left alone. But for everyone else, including the philately-challenged, you don't have to go more than a mile or 1609 meters (whichever comes first) to find a vote drop box during the three week voting period.

[BoSoxGal]

There’s no reason not to add .48 to the cost of the mailing by including a return postage paid envelope, either.

[BoSoxGal]

Yes, that last category deserves to be left alone. But for everyone else, including the philately-challenged, you don't have to go more than a mile or 1609 meters (whichever comes first) to find a vote drop box during the three week voting period.

That’s not at all true in the United States.

[Bicycle Bill]

... since the experienced voters send in their ballots early, which get counted first, then the late rush of 18-25 year old ballots get dropped off minutes before the "polls close", which moves the returns decidedly to the left as the counting proceeds.

Y'know, the way I read that is that the older people (who, let's face it, are generally Republican) line up, toe the party line, vote the way they are told to vote and do so early so that they won't get their minds all mixed up with issues, debates, statements, and (in some cases) the embarrassed withdrawal — think Gary Hart in 1988 — or death of their chosen candidate, while the younger people will wait until they have had a chance to review the facts and statements and make up their own minds for themselves.

In some ways, this is why I'm glad I live in Wisconsin and vote in a later primary rather than get all mixed up in that "Super Tuesday" free-for-all where anyone who can get signatures on a nomination paper can wind up on the ballot, even though they know going in they've got all the chance of a snowflake in a blast furnace.  When I voted last Tuesday I was able to skip over the drop-outs and select from the only two Democrats who have any chance of being nominated.  In that way, I feel my vote counted more than those poor people who voted for Buttigieg or Klobuchar or Harris or Bloomberg or the rest of the wanna-bees.

-"BB"-