American democracy is in a fragile state

It is frightening to consider what could have happened in a closer election, with a more competent incumbent hell bent on overturning the result.

This article featured in Issue XIII of our print magazine which can be purchased on this website. You can also subscribe here for this, and future issues.

It ended right where it began, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It was here, in April 2019, that Joe Biden launched his third presidential campaign. And it was Pennsylvania, with its twenty electoral college votes, that finally delivered to him the White House.

The president-elect never forgot his roots. Having been born in Scranton, a small industrial city about a two hours drive from Philadelphia, he always considered it his true home state. Neither did Biden forget what happened here in 2016, as the Commonwealth voted narrowly for Donald Trump.

Alongside Michigan and Wisconsin, it represented a collapse in the so-called 'blue wall', a set of historic Democratic strongholds which the party had neglected to its peril.

Hillary Clinton infamously failed to campaign in Wisconsin since winning the Democratic nomination. She then lost it by twenty thousand votes.

Biden opted not to make the same mistake, even as the polls showed him with huge leads. It paid off. The blue wall came home.

At the heart of every election victory is a personal triumph. Not least for Joe Biden, who will be seventy-eight years old by the time of his inauguration, the oldest president in American history. Having tried and failed twice before, first in 1988 and then in 2008, he will now assume the Oval Office at the very end of his political life.

It is true that this was not the blowout victory many on the left had hoped for. There are also many who have claimed, without evidence, that a landslide could have been achieved with another candidate, or a different campaign. Yet let us not lose sight of the bigger picture, for this election still ended with the rare defeat of an incumbent president, an event not seen in almost thirty years.

Biden’s victory, while not huge, was nevertheless substantial. The president- elect has won 306 electoral college votes, the same as Donald Trump in 2016.

Crucially, Biden won the popular vote by at least five million, granting him the kind of national mandate which his predecessor never had.

While Democratic hopes were dashed in Florida, North Carolina and Texas, the party still made inroads into Trump’s 'red wall' of Southern states. Arizona and Georgia went blue for the first time since 1996 and 1992 respectively.

For all the talk of their imminent decline, the Democrats remain the most electorally successful left of centre party anywhere in the Western world.

Ever since the 2008 crash, their contemporaries have fallen victim to a process dubbed 'Pasokification', as populist alternatives expanded their appeal.

In France, the Socialist Party has been reduced to fourth place in the National Assembly. The German SPD, Europe’s oldest social democratic party, is likely to finish third at next year’s federal election. The British Labour Party has not won a majority in over fifteen years. Meanwhile, the Democrats have now won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

Held back by an electoral system that favours land over people, they have still held the White House for most of the last decade.

They have won successive majorities in the House of Representatives despite intense partisan gerrymandering. Only the Senate, where California is equal to Wyoming and Vermont is worth the same as Texas, has remained a consistent bulwark of Republican strength.

This was not a good year for populism, real or imagined. While New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern trampled over her conservative and nationalist rivals, Joe Biden won the presidency with exactly the kind of campaign many had assured us was outdated and unworkable.

For years, we have been told that the only way to defeat right wing populism was with left wing populism. That was the argument made by proponents of the Corbyn project and by supporters of Bernie Sanders. Biden, however, did not seek to drive a rift between the 'pure people' and 'nefarious elites'. He ran on unity, not division. On defending the very system many, Trump included, pledged to have torn down.

We have been told that Trump, unlike previous Republicans, had built a winning coalition of the 'left behind'. The evidence does not support such claims. Joe Biden crushed the president among voters earning under $100,000 a year. He won by sixteen points among those whose household includes at least one member of a labour union.

The president did not build a new Republican base, he radicalised its existing one. His administration oversaw a period of record polarization and social division.

Going forward, America desperately needs a period of healing it is unlikely to get. Instead of conceding defeat and urging unity, Trump has chosen to claim that the election was stolen from him. He has made baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud and demanded courts throw out thousands of legally cast ballots.

His spokespeople have suggested that Republican state legislatures take matters into their own hands, disregard the winner in their states and send pro-Trump electors to the electoral college.

These efforts are unlikely to bear fruit. They will, however, leave millions of people with a deep distrust in the democratic process.

Whether or not Trump fades into irrelevance, the damage he has done to American democracy, with the tacit endorsement of the Republican Party, will last for a generation. Indeed, it might prove to be his most enduring legacy.

And let us be clear, Republicans had planned for this to happen. They knew that unprecedented numbers of Democrats were expected to vote by mail. They knew that Trump told his supporters not to. They knew that Republican-controlled legislatures in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin rejected measures to process mail ballots early, therefore ensuring that initial returns favoured Trump. And then, when mail ballots were counted and Biden closed the gap, they tried to gaslight an entire country.

'President Trump was leading, often solidly, in many key States — in almost all instances Democrat-run and controlled. Then, one by one, his lead started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted', reads an email from the Trump campaign.

It has been said that the political parties are the ‘gatekeepers’ of democracy. If that is true, the Republicans have failed their country badly.

At the time of publication, only a few Senate moderates have even recognised Biden’s win. Many others have decided that their interests are better served by peddling conspiracy theories. Texas Senator Ted Cruz has falsely claimed that Republican observers were thrown out of counting centres. South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham alleged, without evidence, that mail-in voting led to widespread fraud. In Georgia, Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler demanded the resignation of Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state. Since they made no specific allegations, one is left only to infer that Raffensperger’s crime was to oversee an election which Joe Biden won.

And all of that for Donald Trump, a man who couldn't care less about the Republican Party or its future. A man who, it must be said, is hardly even a conservative. A man who dodged the draft as Americans bled in Vietnam, who is twice divorced, who paid hush money to a pornstar. A self-proclaimed 'chosen one' who has never read the bible. But the Republican Party does not care about ideology as much as it lusts for power.

The likes of Cruz and Graham were not always willing to shed their dignity at the altar of Trumpism. When, during the 2016 primaries, the president shared an image mocking the Texas Senator’s wife, Cruz called him a 'snivelling coward'. At that year’s convention, he told Republicans to vote their conscience. Graham, meanwhile, once referred to him as a 'race baiting, xenophobic, bigot'. Trump, he said, was not even fit to be commander in chief. And now Graham is donating half a million dollars to the president’s legal fund. What happened?

Republicans are fighting a war on two fronts. Having consistently underperformed the party’s House and Senate candidates, they must see that Trump has been a liability. However, they also know that a huge section of the base remains devoted to the president. Should Trump decide to stick around as a political power broker, or perhaps to even run again in 2024, they cannot ignore the forces he unleashed.

As Joe Biden prepares for government, it is unclear how he will fare in this hostile environment. While the president-elect loves to tell you that he comes from Scranton, he has learned to be a man of Washington. An ultimate insider, his long career at the upper echelons of U.S. politics has been defined by bipartisanship, and he is used to sacrificing liberal priorities.

However, despite running as a moderate, he has adopted a relatively radical platform. Getting any of it through will be an uphill battle.

Biden might fancy himself a deal-maker, but only a fool would think that a Republican-controlled Senate would subscribe to expanding Obamacare, or to raising the minimum wage, or to forgiving student debt, or to financing huge investments in green energy.

If the Democrats take control of the upper chamber in January, Biden might secure himself a legacy. Should they fail, he risks being reduced to a lame-duck president.

Either way, progressives will not get the deep, structural change they hoped for. There will be no statehood for D.C. or Puerto Rico and no expansion of the Supreme Court. The Senate filibuster will remain in place. So will Citizens United, the 2010 ruling which allowed for limitless corporate money to influence elections and their contestants.

Americans like to think of their democracy as the greatest in the world, yet it remains a fragile one. It has only existed, in its modern form, since 1965, when African Americans finally achieved equal voting rights. On the federal and state level, it remains plagued by electoral systems that enable persistent minority rule. It's judiciary is dangerously politicised. It’s elected officials increasingly ignore established norms.

Donald Trump will very likely fail to sue his way to victory, but that does little to absolve those institutions which allowed him to get this far. The social media giants that enabled a pandemic of misinformation. The news networks where ratings take priority over fact. The Republican Party which continues to entertain his authoritarian behaviour. The officials who would not stand up to him. The courts he packed with partisan ideologues. An electoral college which allows its 'electors' to disregard the people’s vote.

It is frightening to consider what could have happened in a closer election, with a more competent incumbent hell bent on overturning the result.

As Americans brace for four more years of gridlock and polarisation, they should know that democracy does not succeed just as long as it survives, but when there is trust; when all sides acknowledge that the process was legitimate. When a slide into authoritarianism is unthinkable, not merely unlikely.