American Democracy at a Crossroads

My views on politics changed on November 8, 2016.  Not in the sense that I suddenly became a Democrat (I was that since age four-just ask my parents who had to have their friends polled about that year's presidential election & whom they were voting for from a kid who couldn't yet read), though I will admit I have continued to become more progressive in the years since Donald Trump became president (and then was defeated but is in denial about this fact).  More so in the sense of my attitude toward politics.  

For starters, I used to talk about it more in my personal life than I do now.  This is because, pre-Trump, democracy as a whole felt lighter.  It was something that was more of a volley-and-serve.  This wasn't the appropriate way to handle it (people suffered long before 2016, and ignoring that was, to some degree, why it was possible for someone like Trump to come about), but it was also a case where the confines of democracy allowed for the pendulum to swing back.  If you lost this election, you could always try & win the next one.  If politicians were not competent, you could throw them from office.  Even if someone was in a red state and had a Republican governor, if that governor failed, the state would switch lanes (and vice versa).

But Donald Trump made common sense a partisan issue.  He aggravated norms.  In a previous era, someone like Trump would've faced intense pressure to resign in the face of firing James Comey or his illegal interactions with Ukraine or (most certainly) for his involvement in the January 6th insurrections.  But he didn't.  Republicans, seeing Trump as either someone that they could profit off of (financially or electorally) or as a solution to their own deep-seated beliefs, embraced him despite the clear moral & criminal threats he posed to the country & the safety of her citizenry.  The media wasn't prepared to fight against the rise of fascism in the United States, either because they were incapable of understanding what was happening or, perhaps more likely, they saw the profit to be made from a country where Americans were addicted to the news, like they were under the Trump presidency.

So we are in a world where the Republican Party has, while not officially, largely abandoned the pretense of fairness or democracy.  It's worth noting, at least as of this writing, that the Republican Party has not successfully upended an actual election-no Democrat in the country that received the most votes in 2020 didn't end up holding the office they were elected to, even if there are some Republicans who protest that they shouldn't have.  But 2020 marked the end of the peaceful transfer of power, the bedrock of American democracy.  The Capitol, where the Vice President, Speaker of the House, and most of Congress were residing, were attacked by hordes of domestic terrorists...who have since become martyrized by figures like Donald Trump & Marjorie Taylor Greene.  The few Republicans of any substance or honor like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, & Lisa Murkowski, have either become marginalized to the point of nonexistence or are potentially doomed for an electoral loss this November.  Democrats are the only people left that are able to save American democracy.

Democracy cannot function if only one side believes in it, both practically and in reality.  If you can essentially only choose one side in order to keep the country a democracy (i.e. only vote for Democrats) it's not really a democracy-it's just biding your time.  And it's also impractical.  The American system has never tolerated one side keeping power indefinitely.  While it's possible for Democrats (in theory) to buck the trends for a while (they could, conceivably, hold both houses of Congress this November or hold the White House for a few consecutive terms), there is no sign that the American people will grant them that kind of leeway forever.  It's increasingly unlikely, in fact, that either the electoral college or Senate is built in a way that would allow for such a scenario.  With the political spectrum increasingly drawn between urban/rural and college-educated/non-college-educated as being the dividing lines, there's not a lot of places for Democrats to gain that they haven't already, whereas Republicans have plenty of spots to go to.  Shifting demographics put places like New England and the Great Lakes states more at risk for Democrats than any states like Texas, Florida, Kansas, & Utah that might have favorable demographics for the Democrats in the near future.  The party needs to find some way to appeal to a mass audience, and its base doesn't seem interested in that; you will oftentimes hear complaints about how student loan reform is the key to Democratic success, but in the near term, how does it help a party that is hemorrhaging voters without a college degree (in a country where college-educated voters don't make up a majority of the electorate)?

I don't have a lot of answers here, and I don't know how to move past this.  It is clear that the country would like to try Republican rule for a while (the only reason that Trump ended up losing was clearly due to a once-in-a-century pandemic he didn't have the intelligence to manage), and in the old system this would've sucked for Democrats, but they would've moved on...they would've stayed in the wilderness for a while until a Kennedy or a Clinton or an Obama came along who could make the party popular with the people again.  In the new system, where the president can clearly try to stage a coup in broad daylight, and repeatedly break the law (even Robert Mueller indicated the only reason he didn't arrest Trump was due to him being a sitting president)...if he doesn't stand trial for what he did, seemingly repeatedly breaking the law, it's hard to grasp a way that the American experiment continues.  It seems increasingly plausible that Joe Biden & Merrick Garland, facing an unpopular administration where they don't want to put Trump in focus, have lost any appetite for charging members of the Trump administration and members of Congress who were involved with the January 6th, even if they did indeed break the law (as pretty much every bit of reporting coming out seems to indicate).  But if they don't-if we don't have a serious national debate that includes the Biden administration openly either dismissing charges against Trump on the merits or, more importantly, charging him with the laws that his administration clearly broke on January 6th (or in trying to overthrow the government through the pressure he put on Brad Raffensberger in Georgia), the lesson that the Republican Party will correctly take is that there are no consequences, either legal or electoral, to trying to dismiss the results of an American election.

And if they do it again, they could be successful...in which case American democracy is over.  I normally have a spin, I normally have a Plan B, but...I don't see another avenue here.  Either Trump faces the consequences of what he did, serving as a reminder that in America, there are consequences to your actions (and as a deterrent for future Republicans who might want to emulate his path to power), or we will continue to be just one election away from the death of democracy.