How Do We "Save Democracy"?

Hint: It's going to take more than one election

Keep democracy alive!

Save democracy in November!

Democracy is on the line!

The sign I put out at the end of my road. The MV at the end of the URL stands for Martha’s Vineyard, which is where I live.

The dire warnings are everywhere, on the road, online, but barely if at all, I’m sorry to report, in the major news media.¹ They’re true. Never in my life has there been a presidential campaign where one major-party candidate and a whole major party have been so blatantly anti-democracy.

Ex-president Trump went off-script in a speech a couple of days ago. This is what he said:

“Christians, get out and vote! Just this time! You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It will be fixed, it will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you don’t have to vote.”

The wishful, skeptical part of my brain wants to believe that he’s just bloviating again, but the rational part has read enough of Project 2025 to take it very seriously. Much has been, and continues to be, written about Project 2025, the Republican agenda for the U.S. if Trump is elected in November. Google and you’ll learn more about the far right’s dystopian fantasy than you ever wanted to know, but here’s how it introduces itself on its very own website:

The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.

It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. 

Project 2025’s plans don’t surprise me, nor does its notion that the “radical Left” is calling the shots in Washington. The right wing has very deep roots in our history,² and it always resists expanding democracy to include more workers, women, people of color, immigrants, and anyone who believes that government should be of and for the people, not just the wealthy and their corporations.

What flabbergasts me is how blatant they’re being about it. Are they in such a bubble that they don’t realize that most USians don’t share their views? Or do they have compelling reasons not to care what most USians think?

So how did things get this bad? And did they have to get this bad for USians to wake the hell up?

Our democracy was in serious trouble before 2016. Did “we the people” sleep through the Citizens United decision and the Iraq War and the demonizing of Black people during the Clinton administration and the myriad far-reaching disasters of the Reagan administration? No, plenty of us didn’t, but often we didn’t connect the dots well enough to understand what was at stake.

In AA and other recovery circles there’s a saying that the alcoholic or addict has to “hit bottom” before they get serious about recovery. No, a person does not have to be on skid row before they realize they have a problem. But as the great singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds (1900–1978) noted, it’s easy to fool yourself. When you think you’ve hit bottom, very often “there’s a bottom below.”

     There's a low below the low you know
     You can't imagine how far you can go -- down
     . . .
     There's the nightmare kind where you fall and fall
     And you wake to find you haven't been dreaming at all

And that’s the secret: Democracy, like recovery from alcoholism or addiction, isn’t a one and done. After the election, we can’t leave it all up to the people we’ve elected, or to the valiant activists drafting and pushing for important legislation. The right wing doesn’t go home. Do they ever even sleep? It took them decades to orchestrate a Supreme Court that would blow the lid off campaign spending in Citizens United, enshrine every USian’s right to own an assault weapon in Bruen, and get Roe v. Wade overturned.³

We need to be every bit as persistent, and every bit as vigilant, as the right-wingers. Our numbers alone won’t do it. Let’s make this election a turning point as momentous and consequential as the ratification of the 20th Amendment, and victory over fascism in World War II, and the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. Let’s make it crystal-clear that WE’RE NOT GOING BACK.

NOTES

1. This includes the one I subscribe to that declares “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” One wonders where they put the flashlight, or if they’ve run out of batteries.

2. Plenty of excellent writing has been done about this from different angles. A few books that I’ve found helpful: Rachel Maddow’s Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism (2023), which focuses on the homegrown and imported Nazis and fascists at work in the U.S. in the run-up to World War II; Jacob Heilbrunn’s America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (2024); Carol Anderson’s The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (2021); and Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020). On my to-read list is Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), but meanwhile Ben-Ghiat’s Substack Lucid (“Big Picture Thinking About Threats to Democracy Around the World”) is indispensable.

3. And now Dobbs is biting them in the butt. Aww . . .