It’s difficult to find reasons to be optimistic about the current U.S. political situation—in which, as Greg Sargent notes in the opening pages of An Uncivil War, “our democracy and its core institutions are under serious stress at best, and face profound or even existential peril at worst.” But the front end of this same sentence states that “many citizens who were previously uninterested in political participation . . . suddenly find themselves more actively engaged than at any other point in their lives.”
Sargent, who writes a blog called “The Plum Line” for The Washington Post, is focused on this conundrum: It’s absolutely tragic, he says, that it took the election of Donald Trump to wake Americans up about threats to our democracy. But now that they’re woke, what should they do?
His book, due out in mid-October, just prior to the midterms, identifies Trump as a uniquely toxic figure pushing the country toward authoritarianism and the wholesale destruction of political norms. It is full of satisfying putdowns of the President, like how he has flooded the public sphere with “blustery pronouncements, grotesque exercises in misdirection, flagrant distortions, staggeringly audacious lies, openly racist provocations, and all-around political trash talk of the rankest kind.” Sargent warns that the level of disinformation ushered in by Trump, aided by outside players including Russia, could have a major impact on electoral outcomes, if they haven’t already.
It’s absolutely tragic that it took the election of Donald Trump to wake Americans up about threats to our democracy. But now that they’re woke, what should they do?
But Sargent argues that the dangers to American democracy precede Trump and will persist after he’s gone. Chief among them are the largely successful efforts by partisans to sway elections by gerrymandering districts and selectively suppressing votes. He refers to this trend as “democratic backsliding.”
Sargent’s analysis of these issues is refreshingly fair-minded, yet he makes clear that Republicans, to date, have been much more willing than Democrats to secure an advantage by corrupting the democratic process. He grapples with the question of what the people not in power should do if and when they regain it. Should they be just as bad, and put Democrat above democracy?
It’s not an easy question to answer. There is an argument that can be made for playing political hardball to make up for lost ground. But Sargent ultimately argues in favor of fair play over partisanship, and offers some useful suggestions for making that happen, like automatic voter registration, the appointment of nonpartisan commissions to redraw voter boundaries, and a new Voting Rights Act to repair the damage the Supreme Court has done to the old one. He even gets into some visionary big-picture ideas, like breaking California into smaller states to increase its representation in the Senate relative to its population.
Achieving far-reaching democratic reform, Sargent writes, “will require not just an improvement in the rules shaping the behavior of politicians, but also a policy agenda that breaks the hold of money on our democracy and inspires the mass voter mobilization necessary to push our political system to accomplish that goal.”
That will not only get us through the Trumpocalypse, it will get us to a better place than we were before.