If Republicans face a choice between democracy and power, well, guess what?
by Tom Toles
The thought experiment for today is how much Republicans actually care about representative democracy. But don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking it over, because it’s more than a thought experiment, and the results are already in.
It has been reported many times that overall, voters prefer the basic platform of the Democratic Party. They don’t like increasing wealth disparity, they want access to health-care coverage, they believe climate change is real, they believe in a moderate and humane immigration policy, they support reproductive rights for women, and of course, they support the federal safety net.
And yet, the government is controlled by the party that opposes all these preferences. Huh. How does that happen, exactly? It doesn’t happen by accident; that’s for sure. Yes, history has vicissitudes and anomalous outcomes, and no electoral system will produce results in perfect harmony with voter wishes all the time. But we are in a period where the divergence is so longstanding and becoming so stark that our democracy is being stretched to the breaking point.
In a piece for the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky outlines the pattern of non-democratic intentionality. “The shutting down of the recount in Florida in 2000. The aggressive gerrymandering, first engineered by Tom DeLay. The Hastert Rule, holding that bills could pass the House only with a majority of Republicans, and not with bipartisan support. The attacks on voting rights—straight-up attempts to make it hard or even impossible for certain citizens to vote.” And the coal slurry on this cake is the minority-vote president Donald Trump governing from the hard right as though he had been given the largest mandate in history (which of course he claims). He is proceeding to establish a governing style built on lies, intimidation and a relentless assault on the free press. Thank you, Vladimir!
We are at the point now where voters, with clear support for Democratic candidates, have to hope against hope that they can overcome gerrymandering and voter suppression to capture even one house of Congress.
Naturally, Trump is busy taunting Democrats about this. He told the Wall Street Journal about his upcoming campaign efforts: “I think the Democrats give up when I turn out. If you want to know the truth, I don’t think it energizes them. I think it de-energizes them. I think they give up when I turn out.”
We’ll just have to see about that.
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OCU
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