What is an Adequate Response to Republican Anti-Democracy?
By: Jim Carroll
Tags: Congress, Senate Republicans, Politics

Can we actually acknowledge history and embrace actions that create real change?

It depends, as someone with no power joining protests is really about all we have access to. Yet it is pretty clear from history that protests rarely solve democracy flaws…. Yet, it is possible for people in power to change the trajectory away from an Authoritarian bent. That is why we need a gang of six now, there is an opportunity for a very small number of people to change our politics by claiming power and being bold. And it isn’t the progressives who have this opportunity. It is the relative moderates in the Senate.

The six senators I see as the gang have a historical opportunity to disrupt our political dysfunction, in a relatively straightforward manner yet in a powerful manner. There are so many people who have big solutions to our political dysfunction, and the dysfunction has never been clearer than in having almost ½ of the Republicans in the House of Representatives side with a lawsuit to overturn a valid and fair election. Our political dysfunction is that one of our two current major parties has adopted an anti-democracy[1] & anti-good government[2] platform.

A piece of the main argument in How Democracies Die(HDD)[3] revolves around the fact that people in the ruling party who understand that their party is undermining democracy in their country act too late and in too limited a fashion.

“Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking. We have been colleagues for fifteen years, thinking, writing, and teaching students about failures of democracy in other places and times — Europe’s dark 1930s, Latin America’s repressive 1970s. We have spent years researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession.”

“But now we find ourselves turning to our own country. Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places.”

“But when faced with a would-be authoritarian, establishment politicians must unambiguously reject him or her and do everything possible to defend democratic institutions — even if that means temporarily joining forces with bitter rivals.”

It’s fairly clear that Trump’s Republican party has taken a heavily anti-democracy tack over the past four years and it is also evident that a small number of Congressional Republicans are aware of this and oppose it. See Representative Paul Mitchell[4] who just declared as an independent, statements by Romney[5], Collins[6] and Murkowski[7]. Of these obviously the most substantial is actually leaving the party and declaring as an independent. But to make those declarations impactful, Rep Mitchell needs to make clear on a range of policy areas they are going to be a pro-democracy vote, and align with the Democrats to oppose anti-democracy policies & Senators Romney, Collins and Murkowski need to find a way to make their critique matter.

The gang of six idea would be for the three Republicans in the Senate who have indicated that they are aware that Trump and McConnell have taken an anti-democracy policy stance to avoid the HDD failure. They could take a meaningful action now; declaring as independents and working with moderate democrats to claim leadership roles in a tightly divided Senate would be an obvious and meaningful action. Another PR statement is not adequate to the scale of the problem. As Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest joining forces with former rivals is a much more powerful action.

So, I would love to start a Progressive for a functioning moderate party campaign. I just am not sure how to do it.