Tag Archives: Democracy

Let Me Explain This One More Time…

I see that Tucker Carlson has applauded the demise of Roe v. Wade, and characterized the decision as a “return to democracy.” Evidently, someone needs to explain America’s approach to democratic self-rule to Tucker and his constitutionally-illiterate audience.

Democratic systems can take several forms. In a “pure” democracy, where an unrestrained majority rules, voters participate in all government decision-making; the majority is even able to decide who has the right to vote. (I’m unaware of any country with so “pure” a democracy, for obvious reasons.)

America’s Founders didn’t choose that system. (For one thing, their concerns about the “passions of the majority” were well-known.) Instead, they crafted a republic in which voters would choose lawmakers from among the ranks of the thoughtful and knowledgable (!!), and those lawmakers would debate the merits of legislative proposals, negotiate and compromise among the various points of view, and pass well-considered laws.

Then they constrained those lawmakers by enacting a Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights–as I have often explained in these posts–is essentially a list of things that American government is forbidden to do, even when a majority of voters approve. Thanks to the Bill of Rights, government cannot censor our communications. It cannot prescribe our prayers (although after the Court’s most recent ruling, it can evidently coerce them) or dictate our reading materials. It cannot search or seize us without probable cause.  It cannot invade our liberties or take our property without due process of law.

Let me reiterate that, for the edification of any Fox viewers who might be lurking: the Bill of Rights limits what popular majorities can authorize government to do. It is a limitation on majority rule–on what the Tucker Carlsons of this world conceive of as democracy. It protects the right of individuals to choose their own political and religious beliefs and follow their own life goals, their own telos, free of government–or majority– interference.

Over the years, the Court has had to interpret the operation of the Bill of Rights–to apply its broad principles and protections to specific situations. Since the 1960s and until this week, the Court has recognized a right to privacy, and has drawn a line between decisions that government can properly make, and those that must be left to the individual. It has based that line on citizens’ right to due process.

There are two kinds of due process: procedural and substantive. Substantive due process (often called the right to privacy) is the doctrine that requires official respect for individual autonomy–the doctrine that forbids government from making decisions that are none of government’s business, “intimate” decisions that under longstanding understandings of the Bill of Rights must be left up to the individual involved.

The existence of that line protecting individual liberty from government interference rests on multiple precedents interpreting the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. 

If the doctrine of substantive due process goes away, those “democratic” state governments so beloved by Tucker Carlson will have the right to prohibit same-sex or interracial marriage, re-criminalize sodomy, and ban the sale and use of birth control…All of those rights and others are in the cross-hairs so long as Republicans can keep their stranglehold on American government via gerrymandering, the Electoral College and other mechanisms  (mechanisms that are all, ironically, exceedingly anti-democratic). 

The decision overturning Roe was deeply dishonest, especially in its discussion about  whether a particular right was historically recognized, but Alito’s distorted history is ultimately irrelevant– a red herring. In order to find that the government has a right to control the reproductive decisions of individual women, the Court had to fatally undermine the doctrine of substantive due process. And when that doctrine is no longer viable, all other personal rights are vulnerable.

Clarence Thomas may have been the only Justice willing to admit to the obvious agenda of this rogue Court, but it is abundantly clear that the other four members of the religious tribunal that now controls the Court share that agenda.

Debates about abortion have always been both superficial and dishonest. “Pro life” has always been a misnomer, since anti-choice policy is blatantly indifferent to the lives of women (and to the lives and welfare of fetuses once they become children). But there needs to be far more recognition that this decision isn’t simply an endorsement of the right of state governments\ to make very bad policy decisions–it is an endorsement of autocracy, of the right of government to invade the most personal precincts of citizens’ lives, and to impose the religious views of those in power on those of us without.

Giving legislators the right to make my most intimate decisions isn’t the Founders’ view of “democracy”– and it sure as hell isn’t mine.

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It Can Be Done

Americans can be forgiven for feeling dispirited–okay, monumentally depressed–when reading headlines and listening to news. The Senate is unlikely to do anything meaningful about the daily gun massacres; Republican misuse of the filibuster has kept that august body from doing anything  meaningful; we hear daily about court decisions that confirm the success of the decades-long effort to pack the federal courts with rightwing ideologues…

I could go on and on, and so can most of you reading this.

There are, however, “nuggets” of news suggesting the possibility of emerging from this  period of extended stalemate.

One of those stories is emerging from Idaho, of all places. As the linked article begins,

Idaho is one of the most conservative, rural, and Republican-dominated states in the nation. It’s also on track to enact the sort of progressive economic policies that continue to elude Democrats in Washington, DC.

Earlier this month, grassroots organizers submitted what should be far more than enough petition signatures necessary to qualify a proposal called the Quality Education Act for the November ballot. The initiative, if passed, would raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy in order to fund the state’s beleaguered public K-12 school system.

A wealth tax. To support public education. In Idaho, a state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by a 4:1 margin and Donald Trump crushed Joe Biden by 30 points. How is this happening?

The organization behind this seemingly impossible scenario is called Reclaim Idaho. Its webpage eschews the usual appeals to ideology and political identity/tribalism in favor of a simple statement focusing on the policy issue at hand, and offering “a solution to a broadly acknowledged problem.”

The current campaign follows the organization’s first success, achieved In 2018.  That year, organizers and committed volunteers drove around the state in a 1977 RV painted bright green, and talked–door to door–in favor of a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid.  The initiative passed with more than 60% of the vote.

With its success, Reclaim Idaho pried open access to government-sponsored health care to more than 60,000 economically challenged Idahoans and rattled the state’s political establishment. As a feel-good documentary chronicling the unlikely underdog story swept up awards at film festivals, the Republican supermajority in the Idaho legislature sought to kill future initiatives by making ballot qualification far more onerous.

Reclaim Idaho sued the state over Senate Bill 1100, which was ultimately struck down in a state Supreme Court decision that affirmed direct democracy as a “fundamental right.” The year-long legal battle cast the organization as a nonpartisan champion of democracy, which Mayville says helped generate the sort of coverage that won them a wave of new supporters and volunteers.

Reclaim Idaho builds on the belief that ballot initiatives are an important aspect of democracy, and a pathway to better policies and politics. In Idaho, support for  tightly targeted initiatives are also building a long-term political infrastructure –one that doesn’t rely on  corporate donors.

“We have a long-term goal of making the Idaho government more responsive to the needs of everyone and not just those with the most wealth and political influence,” Mayville explains. “To do that, we believe it’s necessary to build a constituency of voters who are going to put bread and butter issues like education funding and health care first. Initiatives get people in the habit of voting directly on these issues.”

As I have previously noted, Indiana lacks anything that could reasonably be considered home rule, and the state doesn’t have an initiative mechanism either–although some local government units do. As Ballotpedia reports,

No initiative and referendum process of any kind is available in Indiana local governments for local ballot measures.

This article sets out the laws governing local ballot measures in Indiana. It explains:

Which local units of government make the initiative process available to residents.
How and whether local units of government, including school districts, can refer local ballot measures (such as school bond propositions) to the ballot.

As a result, in Indiana and similar states, citizens cannot exercise “habits of voting directly on these issues,” and the legislature can–and routinely does–ignore public opinion.

There are certainly downsides to initiatives and referenda. (See California…where numerous ballot measures clog election ballots and offer multiple ways for well-funded campaigns to mislead voters and stir up mischief.)

I used to believe that we should leave the determination of policy to the presumably sincere and thoughtful people we elect to legislative bodies. In Indiana these days, anyone characterizing the super-majority in our legislature as “sincere and thoughtful” probably needs a mental health evaluation.

Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned from Idaho, and an important one is to focus political campaigns on specific issues salient to the voters of the relevant political subdivision–a tactic that’s also likely to help get out the vote.

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Civic Lethargy

Max Boot had a recent column in the Washington Post bemoaning poll numbers that seem to show most Americans brushing off the growing danger signals to our democracy. Boot was formerly a Republican; he now considers himself an Independent, and he is appalled by the extent to which the GOP has been co-opted by authoritarians of various varieties.

He is especially baffled by the widespread dismissal of the reality that is before our eyes.

A year after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, a CNN poll asked whether it’s likely “that, in the next few years, some elected officials will successfully overturn the results of an election.” Fifty-one percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats said it’s not at all likely. Only 46 percent of Democrats and independents said that U.S. democracy is under attack, which helps to explain why Democratic candidates aren’t campaigning on defending democracy.

Boot finds this optimism difficult to understand, especially given the constant stream of damning details that emerge daily about Trump’s bizarre behaviors as President, and especially about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.  The former president “remains the dominant figure within the GOP, which means that most Republicans have tacitly accepted that inciting an insurrection is no big deal.”

Look at what just happened in Ohio’s U.S. Senate primary: J.D. Vance, who had been languishing in third place, won the nomination after Trump endorsed him. A fervent, born-again Trumpkin, Vance told a Vanity Fair reporter that Trump supporters “should seize the institutions of the left” and launch a “de-woke-ification program” modeled on de-Baathification in Iraq. (That worked so well, right?) He says that if Trump wins again in 2024, he should “fire … every civil servant” and “replace them with our people.” If the courts try to stand in the way, ignore them. As Vanity Fair noted, “This is a description, essentially, of a coup.”

Given Trump’s continued popularity within the GOP–some 70% of self-declared Republicans believe the “Big Lie”–and given Biden’s sagging popularity, Boots thinks Trump would easily win the nomination in 2024. He then sketches out a horrific–and all-too-plausible scenario:

His “trump card,” so to speak, is the House, which is likely to be under GOP control after the midterms. CNBC founder Tom Rogers and former Democratic senator Timothy E. Wirth point out in Newsweek that controlling the House would allow Trump to steal the presidency if the election is close.

Republican state legislatures in swing states that Biden (or another Democrat) narrowly wins can claim the results are fraudulent and send in competing slates of electors pledged to Trump. The House and Senate would then vote on which electors to accept. Even if the Senate remains Democratic, a GOP-controlled House could prevent Biden from getting the 270 electoral votes needed to win. It would then fall to the House to decide the presidency.

If that scenario sounds hyperbolic, Boots reminds us that a Russian invasion sounded hyperbolic to most Ukrainians before Feb. 24. He concludes that the only way to avert disaster is to vote Democratic in the fall. It no longer matters if you have policy differences with the Democratic Party, as he has–he says that a vote for the GOP is a vote to dismantle American democracy (or what remains of it).

The question Boots asks, but doesn’t answer, is why so many Americans who haven’t “drunk the Kool-Aid” are nevertheless sanguine about the ability of the nation’s institutions to withstand the fascism growing within. That question reminded me of the mindset of many Germans during Hitler’s rise. With a little Googling, I found a fascinating–albeit very disturbing– interview conducted shortly after the war with a German scholar who lived through that time. The interviewee explained how daily events distracted the population from recognizing the larger trajectory of political authority, and how the accumulating deviations from decency were normalized.

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head….

You really need to click through and read the entire interview. it’s chilling–and it could happen here far more easily than most of us ever imagined.

Boots concerns are not hyperbolic.

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An Accidental Insight

My husband and I were on a cruise ship for two weeks, on our way to Amsterdam where we  visited our son. Anyone who has taken one of these trips across the Atlantic can attest to the fact that Internet access–when available–is maddeningly slow and intermittent. It’s also expensive. On our cruise, connecting to more than one device at a time was costly, so I was unable to make planned use of my Kindle by accessing those of my books that reside on “the cloud.”

As a result, I inadvertently encountered some important research.

A couple of years ago, I had downloaded a book on the “Submerged State,” a title issued by Chicago Studies in American Politics. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d read very little of it. (One of the enduring problems with academic research is academic language, which tends to be dense and inaccessible to all but the most determined readers…)

Since my vacation novels were unavailable, I decided to be determined, and to revisit it.

The authors make a basic–and very important–observation: thanks to America’s penchant for small government, conservatives have been able to give us governance that–despite being every bit as costly and ubiquitous as it it is elsewhere– is “uniquely invisible.”

They define the “submerged state” as policies and programs that function by providing incentives, subsidies or payments to private organizations or households to encourage or reimburse them for conducting activities deemed to serve a public purpose.

The result is that we have channelled a preponderance of the government programs that benefit citizens through private and nonprofit intermediaries, and that practice has had some very negative consequences: it has obscured the extent to which many of these policies enrich the already affluent; it has kept ordinary Americans from recognizing the role of government in their lives while allowing the programs to be “plainly evident” to the special interests that reap the rewards; and worst of all, by obscuring government activities and their positive consequences, it has reinforced anti-government attitudes.

In short, by “submerging” the operations of government, we have kept most citizens blissfully unaware of the ways in which government makes a positive difference in their lives.

The researchers considered a number of programs with varying degrees of visibility; they then surveyed recipients in order to evaluate their awareness of the benefits they receive, and recognition that those benefits originate from government.

Most of the citizens who had saved substantial dollars thanks to the home mortgage deduction, for example, claimed never to have been beneficiaries of a government program. Students whose federal loans are serviced by lending institutions are frequently unaware that those dollars come from (or are guaranteed by) government, and that eligibility and interest rates are considerably more favorable as a result.

Tax policies like Obama’s “Making Work Pay” are so obscure that the general public often  thinks rates have been increased when they have actually been lowered, leading to a pertinent question: can a reform be considered successful if it goes unnoticed?

Policy debates are also hijacked by widespread ignorance of the extent of government’s actual current role.For example, while many Americans know that the country spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, few of us are aware that government already foots most of the bill (estimates range from 56% to 70%), and that a program of national health care–with its vastly lower administrative costs– would be unlikely to cost much more.

The book has numerous other examples, but what I found most important was the researchers’ conclusion about the effects of non-visible governance on democracy. As they emphasize, an idea fundamental to democracy  is the premise that people are citizens, and citizens are active participants in governance. Participation requires that they be reasonably aware of what their elected representatives do on their behalf–that they should be in a position to form opinions about policies and be able to be involved in the political process. The submerged state, however, empowers interest groups and disempowers the public.

A couple of quotations that sum up the central point of the book:

The idea that public policies should reflect the will of the majority of citizens is a basic principle of representative democracy. Yet in the case of the submerged state, many citizens lack basic information, and public officials fail to provide it.

And

As long as public officials criticize government but persist in channelling public resources surreptitiously through private means, Americans will be deluded.

I guess I should thank the inadequacy of oceanic internet for a deeply instructive–if very depressing–read.

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“Crazy” Isn’t Just A Song By Patsy Cline

I wish I had a dollar for every well-meaning liberal who is preaching the importance of listening to “the other side.” I grant you that such advice is reasonable when the “other side” is rational–when the “other guy” wants policy X and you want policy Y.

But I constantly read about the people who vote Republican these days, and I defy anyone to enter into a civil, reasoned conversation with individuals who hold these particular views.

Just two examples:

The first is from a report in The Washington Post about a Tennessee pastor named Greg Locke.  Locke, who is  45, is head of something called the Global Vision Bible Church, and he has–according to the Post– millions of followers, “many of them online.”  He gained national attention during the coronavirus crisis “when he kept his church open and defied the mask mandates of the ‘fake pandemic.'”

Locke is an “ambassador” of a movement where he and other pastors around the country appear at rallies and tent revivals preaching Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen as a new holy war, according to Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, an organization dedicated to religious freedom.

Locke was on the Capitol steps on January 6th. He’s divided his small town on the outskirts of Nashville, “most recently with a book burning where he and followers threw copies of the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series and Disney villain merchandise into a giant bonfire. He has declared he now wants to “deliver” people from demonic influences and witchcraft.”

There’s much more, and it’s all pretty horrifying to those of us who neither burn books with which we disagree nor believe in demons and witchcraft.

If that isn’t enough crazy for you, I highly recommend this column by Dana Milbank, titled “I Tried Trump’s Truth Social So You Don’t Have To.” (“Truth Social,” you will recall, is Trump’s competitor to Twitter, which banned him. It has “truths” rather than “tweets” and has been mired in technical glitches.)

And what did Milbank “learn” from visiting “Truth Social”?

Hunter Biden is involved in building and running biolabs in the country.

The CIA and National Institutes of Health are both “deeply involved” in the Ukrainian biolabs.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was set in motion by a CIA false-flag operation that was funded by George Soros.

The covid-19 pathogen originated not in China but in Shpyl’chyna, a village in Ukraine.

The bioweapons developed in Ukraine specifically target the “Abrahamic Bloodline.”

Neo-Nazis from Ukraine joined with the FBI to infiltrate the Capitol on Jan. 6 and participated in the insurrection.

Ukraine was planning to use drones to attack Russia with pathogens from the U.S.-funded bioweapons labs.

President Biden has been using Ukraine to launder money.

Ukrainian neo-Nazis controlled the Ukrainian city of Mariupol before Russians invaded.

Russia’s alleged war crimes were staged.

I also found many posts calling President Biden a pedophile (or a “groomer” in the new parlance of QAnon). I found badly photoshopped images of Vice President Harris in sexualized situations. I found ceaseless attacks on trans people, an edited video of a cat attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attacks on Disney for opposing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, references to satanic sacrifice by the “deep state,” a few racist epithets and endless accusations about Hunter Biden’s laptop and drug abuse.

When Milbank looked for “hashtag Ukraine,” he found posts produced by Russian state propaganda, and a variety of doctored images–one showed Trump holding a sign saying “Zelensky is the Avenatti of leaders,” another was a doctored video of Putin saying “Let’s go, Brandon.” There were also posts accusing Ukrainian leaders of being corrupt, and a claim that Ukraine is “defending the NWO” — New World Order.

If you have the stomach for it, I encourage you to click through and read both the report on Locke, the Christian Nationalist preacher, and the column by Milbank. Then tell me how a rational person can have a respectful, productive exchange of views with people who firmly believe that LGBTQ+ people are the spawn of Satan (and that Satan is real!) and that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election,  (those inconvenient seven million more Biden votes were all fraudulent)….

I’m perfectly fine with the fact that many reasonable, sane people disagree with me on issues ranging from national health care to minimum wage to First Amendment jurisprudence. I promise that I can listen to those people, and engage in civil discourse with them.

I can’t–and won’t– sit down with the crazies.

What terrifies me is how many of them there are.

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