Opinion
Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break
America apart
Jonathan
Freedland
Even some conservatives fear a power grab might
trigger the disintegration of the US. It’s happened to superpowers before
@Freedland
Fri 25 Sep
2020 16.40 BSTLast modified on Fri 25 Sep 2020 18.55 BST
Illustration
by Thomas Pullin
We know
that US democracy is on the line this November, but what about the United
States itself? Is it possible that not only America’s democratic health hangs
in the balance, but the very integrity of the country?
Such talk
sounds hyperbolic, but start with the danger to the US democratic system that
becomes more clear and present each day. This week Donald Trump was asked if he
would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of his defeat. His
reply: “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens.”
Later the
White House clarified that of course the president would accept the results of
a “free and fair election”. But that formulation contained an implied caveat:
what if he decides that the election was not “free and fair”? After all, Trump
has said repeatedly that if Joe Biden wins, that can only mean that the
election was “rigged”.
How this
might unfold was laid out this week in a chilling essay by Barton Gellman in
the Atlantic headlined The Election That Could Break America. Many of the
dangers are by now familiar. Aware that polls show them unable to win a
straight contest, Republicans are already working hard to un-level the playing
field. They have purged electoral rolls of likely Democratic voters. They have
hobbled the Post Office, to prevent mail-in ballots – which are likely to
favour Democrats – arriving in time.
Once the
polls close, Team Trump will claim only the in-person votes, tallied on
election night – and likely to skew towards Republicans – should qualify. They
will try to stop the votes being counted, whether by lawsuit or by physical
disruption (a tactic deployed successfully in the infamous Florida recount of
2000). As Gellman argues, it’s not just that Trump will refuse to concede
defeat: he’ll use all the power at his disposal to “obstruct the emergence of a
legally unambiguous victory for Biden”, even to “prevent the formation of a
consensus about whether there is any outcome at all”.
There is
one trick up Republican sleeves so outrageous that no one had even contemplated
it until now. It’s technical, but bear with me. The president is chosen by an
electoral college, made up of electors from all 50 states. For more than a century,
those electors have been chosen to reflect the winner of the popular vote in
that state. But Republican officials have noted that there’s nothing in the
constitution that says it has to be that way. The legislatures – the
mini-parliaments of each state – have the power to choose the electors
themselves. And guess what: Republicans control the legislatures in the six
most hotly fought battleground states. If they declare that the official vote
tally showing Biden the winner is unreliable – on the grounds that, as Trump
says, all postal votes are suspect – there is nothing to stop them choosing a
slate of pro-Trump electors instead, claiming this reflects the true will of
the people of their state.
It sounds
like a Lukashenko manoeuvre, a coup against democracy – and that’s exactly what
it would be. And yet there are Republican party officials talking on the record
of how they are contemplating that very move.
Ah, but
surely the supreme court would never allow such a thing. And yet, as of last
week, there is a vacancy on that court. Trump plans to replace Ruth Bader
Ginsburg at speed, aiming to seat his own handpicked judge in time to settle
any election-related cases in his favour. That too he says out loud. Again, the
Belarusian reek is unmistakable.
The trouble
is, Democrats are all but powerless to stop a president and a party that has no
shame in smashing through every democratic guardrail regardless of the
hypocrisy: recall that, in March 2016, Senate Republicans refused to give
Barack Obama’s supreme court pick so much as a hearing, insisting it was
unconscionable to make such an appointment in an election year. Yet here they
are, ramming their choice through a matter of weeks before polling day.
The result
is that soon there will be a 6-3 rightwing majority on the US’s highest court,
ready to overturn landmark decisions on healthcare or reproductive rights, and
to thwart action on the climate crisis. What’s more, a seat on the supreme
court is for life, and several of these rightwing judges are relatively young.
That 6-3 majority could be in place for decades.
So now a
dark question arises. What will the US’s increasingly progressive majority do
if Republican state officials reinstall Trump in the White House, in defiance
of the voters? What will they do if that 6-3 court overturns Roe v Wade and
bans abortion across the entire country?
Think for a
second how that latter situation will have arisen: it is because the Senate
picks the judges, and the Senate enshrines minority rule. With two senators per
state, tiny Wyoming (population: 600,000) has the same representation as
gargantuan California (40 million). On current trends, 70% of Americans will
soon have just 30 senators representing them, while the 30% minority will have
70. When it comes to their right to medical treatment or to rid their streets
of military-grade assault weapons, the urban, diverse majority are subject to
the veto of the rural, white, conservative minority.
How long is
that sustainable? How long will a woman in, say, California accept the presence
of guns and the absence of abortion rights because that’s what a minority of
voters in small, over-represented states wants? Serious people are beginning to
ask that question. Gary Gerstle, professor of American history at Cambridge
University, says he’s found himself reading about countries that once had
democracy but lost it – and that he’s doing that “to understand the future of
America”.
He wonders
if progressive, “blue” states might increasingly go their own way – flexing
their right to deviate from the federal government, as branches of it move ever
further out of democratic reach. As we spoke, New York governor Andrew Cuomo
announced that he will not accept any federally approved Covid vaccine for his
state until New York experts have tested it first. That, says Gerstle, could be
a harbinger of things to come, including perhaps a revival of the pre-civil-war
concept of “nullification”, whereby dissenting states declare decisions made in
Washington null and void. It would be a historic turnaround for the American
left: “states’ rights” was the rallying cry of the segregationist south,
asserting their right to be racist. Now it could become the weapon of liberal
America.
In a new
book, Divided We Fall, the conservative writer David French raises the
once-taboo question of “America’s secession threat” – imagining, for example, a
“Calexit” as California leads a breakaway of liberal western states after a
rightwing supreme court has struck down a California law to curb guns. Since
Ginsburg’s death, that reads less like dystopian fiction than a forecast.
Such talk
might seem fanciful. Yet there was probably a similar reaction to Andrei
Amalrik’s 1970 essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?. At the time, it
must have sounded absurd: of course the USSR was here to stay. But Amalrik was
not far off. Twenty-one years after he had asked the question, a once mighty
superpower lay in pieces. Oceans rise, empires fall – and even America is not
immune.
• Jonathan
Freedland is a Guardian columnist
• Who’ll
win the race for the White House? Join Guardian journalists Jonathan Freedland,
Daniel Strauss, Lauren Gambino and Richard Wolffe for an online Guardian Live
event, on Tuesday 20 October, 7pm. Book tickets here : https://membership.theguardian.com/event/guardian-newsroom-the-us-presidential-election-121712185423
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