How Fragile Is Our Democracy?

 
 
Settled in before the Superbowl with some fantastic reporting from Molly Ball on the secret bipartisan campaign that saved the 2020 election. Her story for TIME describes the tremendous effort, much of it behind closed doors, by a broad coalition of people and organizations to shore up the election process and save the republic. To Ball’s great credit, she managed to capture a sweeping story of loosely coordinated, pro-democratic forces that united in the interest of election integrity. It’s a story about the recent past that carries deep implications for the future. In considering all that had to come together to keep us from spinning out, we’re reminded that the democracy in which we cache our hopes and dreams and ambitions cannot be taken for granted.

Getting groups that normally work at cross-purposes to see the bigger picture and speak with one voice is a hurdle as ancient as time. But it seems that’s just what a handful of determined individuals managed to pull off in the lead-up to the most contested election in twenty years. While much of the narrative centers around unionizer Mike Podhorzer, who spearheaded a lot of the discussions that took place, the aims of he and his allies ultimately required buy-in from entities all across the political spectrum. The unlikely convergence of labor and capital, of the AFL-CIO and US Chamber of Commerce, it turns out, was just what the doctor ordered in terms of delivering the right messaging to the American people.

First and foremost there was getting out the vote, no easy task amid the confines of a pandemic and the haze around mail-in voting. Then came announcing the count, certifying the count, and moving forward with the transition of power, with each step along the way sure to be undermined by an incumbent prima donna. We had a decent roadmap, after all, for how this would play out courtesy of Trump himself. The simplemindedness, recklessness, and sheer pettiness with which he approaches every conflict all but telegraphed his future actions. To this trove we could also add the playbook of other would-be authoritarians and full-fat dictators throughout history. We were not dealing with someone who would seek to win the argument through discussion or indeed by democratic will, but rather with legal tantrums and easily debunked propaganda.

But the scope of this effort required more than knowledge of Trump’s past conduct and the contours of democracy across historical time. It also required intimate knowledge of America’s election systems and in particular the American people’s unique susceptibility to disinformation and longstanding distrust of civic institutions. Advance messaging would be critical, as would applying pressure in the right places and to the right people in power. In some cases this proved to be the legislators in charge of certifying the results in battleground states like Michigan. Some of it played out in PR campaigns, some of it in the streets.

The results of this concerted effort more or less speak for themselves. But this story should give us pause — what if things had broken differently? What if more of the usual suspects had thrown in with Trump & Co? What if people in key positions had succumbed to the same wave of disinfo & paranoia that animated radical elements of our electorate? What if the primed messaging had been bungled, or come too late? What if the electoral college results had been closer in margin? What if committed people hadn’t shown up in the same numbers and with the same level of boldness to counter the attempts at disruption? The democratic order prevailed this time around with its institutions intact, but is it strong enough — are we strong enough — to weather the next storm?

If anything, this story demonstrates the fragility of our democracy, that it depends as much on longstanding institutions and norms as accidents of history and grassroots organizing. We ignore the lessons from this election cycle at great peril. In the end, the democracy we save is our own.

P.S. I do feel like this is a story that ought to be memorialized in some way beyond a long form article. The sporadic, decentralized nature of the pro-democracy effort may not lend itself especially well to a feature film, but a documentary should absolutely be on the table. Bless each and every one of these people. Excerpts (emphasis mine):
 

“This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”

[…]

“The best way to ensure people’s voices were heard, they decided, was to protect their ability to vote. “We started thinking about a program that would complement the traditional election-protection area but also didn’t rely on calling the police,” says Nelini Stamp, the Working Families Party’s national organizing director. They created a force of “election defenders” who, unlike traditional poll watchers, were trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a “joy to the polls” effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities.”

[…]

“It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump’s bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied. “I was concerned things were going to get weird,” says Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen describes it as “the scariest moment” of the entire election.”

[…]

“Reyes’ activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey’s journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they’d pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.”

[…]

“Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence could reject states’ electoral votes. He told them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Then he returned to the White House as they sacked the building. As lawmakers fled for their lives and his own supporters were shot and trampled, Trump praised the rioters as “very special.”

It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples. “There’s an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable democracy is.”

[…]

“As I was reporting this article in November and December, I heard different claims about who should get the credit for thwarting Trump’s plot. Liberals argued the role of bottom-up people power shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly the contributions of people of color and local grassroots activists. Others stressed the heroism of GOP officials like Van Langevelde and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither likely could have succeeded without the other. “It’s astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is,” says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director. “It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff–if you don’t look down, you don’t fall. Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down.”

Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.“

 

Further reading:

Feature image credit: Michelle Gustafson for TIME

Tags: