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      Biden Has to Look Beyond Trump and His MAGA Millions

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      Last week, President Biden gave a wide-ranging interview to John Harwood of ProPublica that touched on his presidency, the Republican Party and the present state and future status of American democracy.Early in the interview, Harwood asks Biden whether he thinks the threat to democracy is broader than the refusal of Donald Trump and his allies to accept election defeats:As you think about the threat to democracy, do you think about it specifically as the refusal to accept election defeats and peaceful transfer of power? Or does it more broadly encompass some of the longstanding features of democracy, like the Electoral College, the nature of the Senate, the gerrymandering process, that sometimes thwarts the will of the majority?In his answer, Biden more or less confirms that yes, when he speaks of the threat to democracy, he specifically means the threat coming from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. For Biden, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the “underpinnings of democracy.” The issue, for him, is that MAGA Republicans would try to overturn elections and “prevent the people’s voice” from being expressed, not to mention heard.Toward the end of the interview, Biden takes care to emphasize the extent to which he separates MAGA Republicans from the rest of the public. “I really do believe the vast majority of the American people are decent, honorable, straightforward,” the president says. The MAGA radicals, he adds, are “a minority of the minority.” Biden goes on to argue that this majority of decent Americans “needs to understand what the danger is if they don’t participate.”This last point is interesting. If the most radicalized and anti-democratic segment of the public is also a small and unrepresentative minority, then there’s no real reason to worry about its influence on electoral politics. Yes, it may elect a few similarly radical members of Congress — who at this moment are giving the Republican speaker of the House a terrible headache — and it may even be strong enough again to choose a major-party nominee. But if these voters are a distinct minority, that nominee will be easily defeated at the ballot box. That is, unless the institutions of our democracy amplify that minority’s influence — which they do.Biden might reject Harwood’s suggestion that the institutions of the American political system constitute a threat to American democracy as dire as the threat posed by Trump, but the only way to square the circle of a radical minority with democracy-destroying potential is to acknowledge the way our institutions work to empower the people who hope to overturn constitutional government altogether.One response is to say that this dynamic represents a distortion of our political institutions: It’s just that they’re not working properly! But that’s not right, is it?Whatever they were, the radical impulses that animated or shaped the most prominent and influential of the American revolutionaries were refracted through an inherited commitment to the received hierarchies of status that shaped their world. What’s more, the framers of the Constitution were pushed toward a mistrust and wariness of popular government as a result of the riots, rebellions and other forms of mass discontent that characterized American politics under the Articles of Confederation.For as much as we have changed and transformed our political institutions — to make them far more inclusive and responsive than they were at their inception — it is also clear that they retain the stamp of their heritage.Our counter-majoritarian institutions, for example, continue to place an incredibly higher barrier to efforts to reduce concentrations of wealth and promote greater economic equality. There is a real chance, for example, that the Supreme Court will deem a wealth tax constitutionally impermissible in its next term. And the United States Senate is a graveyard of attempts to expand federal aid and social insurance, the most recent of which was a child allowance that, while it was in effect, slashed child poverty by nearly half in 2021.But more immediate to Biden’s concerns about democracy is the fact, as I have discussed before, that the Trump crisis may never have materialized if not for specific institutions, like the Electoral College, that gave Trump the White House despite his defeat at the hands of most voters. And even with the Electoral College, Trump might not have won if our Supreme Court had not, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated the most aggressive and effective rule for the federal protection of voting rights since Reconstruction.Trump aside, various efforts to invalidate elections and create durable systems of minority rule in the states are possible only because of a constitutional structure that gives a considerable amount of power and sovereignty to sub-national units of political authority.Naturally, a U.S. president cannot publicly say that the system he presides over has serious flaws that undermine its integrity. But it does. And there is a good chance that if Trump becomes president a second time, it will be less because the voting public wants him and more because our institutions have essentially privileged his supporters with greater electoral power. If anyone is aware of this, it has to be Biden, who won the national popular vote by six million in 2020, but would have lost the election if not for a few tens of thousands of votes across a handful of so-called swing states.All of this is to say that assuming we meet the immediate challenge and keep Trump from winning next year, it will be worth it for Americans to start to think — out loud, in a collective and deliberate manner — about the kinds of structural reforms we might pursue to make our democracy more resilient or even to realize it more fully in the first place.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What if the Framers Got Something Critical Wrong?

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      Here are three instances in American history, out of many, when the rules of our system preserved a failed or suboptimal status quo against the views — and the votes — of a majority of Americans and their representatives.In 2021, 232 members of the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in summoning and provoking the mob that attacked and ransacked the United States Capitol building on Jan. 6. Not long after, 57 members of the Senate voted to convict Trump. But because the Constitution demands a two-thirds supermajority for conviction in an impeachment trial, the considered decision of a substantial majority of Congress — backed by a substantial majority of the public — was thwarted by the veto of a self-interested, partisan minority.A couple of generations earlier, between 1971 and 1972, the vast majority of lawmakers in Congress — 354 members of the House and 84 members of the Senate — voted to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and send it to the states. Most Americans, according to surveys at the time, wanted to make the E.R.A. the 27th amendment to the Constitution. And within five years of passage in Washington, legislatures in 35 states — which constituted a majority of the nation’s legislators — had voted for ratification. But 35 states was three short of the three-fourths needed for the amendment to succeed. By the time the deadline for ratifying the E.R.A. came in 1982, the amendment was essentially dead in the water.Decades before that, in 1922, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the House, 230 to 119. It was supported by President Warren G. Harding, a Republican, as well as the large Republican majority in the Senate. But that majority was not large enough to overcome a Democratic filibuster — spearheaded by Jim Crow lawmakers from the South — and the bill died before it could come to a vote. It would take a full century after the death of the Dyer bill for Congress to pass, and the president to sign, an anti-lynching bill into law.The American political system — with its federalism, bicameralism and separation of powers — consists of overlapping majoritarian and counter-majoritarian institutions designed to promote stability and continuity at the expense of popular government. Not content to build structural impediments to change, the framers of the Constitution also insisted on supermajority thresholds for a number of key actions: executive and judicial impeachment, ratification of foreign treaties and the passage and ratification of constitutional amendments. The Constitution also allows for the legislature to make its own rules regarding its conduct and both chambers of Congress have, at different points in their histories, adopted de facto supermajority rules for passing legislation.Americans are so accustomed and acculturated to these supermajority rules that they often treat their value as self-evident — a natural and necessary part of American constitutionalism. No, we don’t want to subject our every political decision to simple majority rule. Yes, we want to raise the highest possible barrier to removing a president or changing the rules of the game.Defenses of supermajority rules tend to rest on claims related to what appears to be common sense. The argument goes like this: Supermajority rules stabilize our political institutions, encourage deliberation, secure consensus for change and protect minorities from the tyranny of overbearing majorities. But as the political theorist Melissa Schwartzberg argues in her 2014 book, “Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule,” the story isn’t so simple, and the actual value of supermajority rules isn’t clear at all.It is certainly true that supermajority rules promote stability of institutions and the norms that are supposed to govern them. There is a reason, after all, that the United States Constitution has only been amended 27 times in 235 years. But, Schwartzberg asks, “How can we determine which norms are worth stabilizing” since “for any given political community, different institutional arrangements could ensure security of expectations and make ordinary political life possible — even the set of rights and their scope could vary.”Do we defer to the wisdom of the framers? What if, in our estimation, they got something critical wrong? And even if they didn’t, should the dead hand of the past so strongly outweigh the considerations of the present? Do we defer to wisdom and tradition under the assumption that stability is de facto evidence of consent?But here’s where we come to the Catch-22, because the stability of our system rests on supermajority rules so strong that they stymie all but the broadest attempts to change that system. And who is to say that stability is such a paramount goal? In a dynamic society, which is to say in a human society, promoting stability with little institutional recourse for reform might ultimately be more disruptive because it creates friction, and thus energy, that will be released one way or another.What of the claim that supermajority rules — like the filibuster or the ones that structure the constitutional amendment process — promote consensus? Here again, Schwartzberg says, we have to think carefully about what we mean. If by consensus we mean the aggregate opinions of the community, then there might be a basis for supporting supermajority rules, although that raises another question: What is the threshold for success? The two-thirds demand for impeachment in the Senate, for example, is essentially arbitrary. So is the three-fourths of states threshold for ratifying a constitutional amendment. There is no rational standard to use here, only a feeling that “most” people want something.In which case, if what you want is some general sense that a specific outcome is what the community or legislative body generally wants, then it’s not clear that supermajority rules are the optimal solution. Consider what Schwartzberg calls an “acclamatory” conception of consensus. In this version, what the community believes is true or prudent is what it is “willing to let a belief stand as the group’s view,” even if there is a significant minority that disagrees.Not every American may believe, to use Schwartzberg’s example, that “freedom of the press ought to be unlimited,” but they are “willing to accept that the view of the United States is that Congress should not restrict the ability of newspapers to publish as they see fit.” As citizens, Schwartzberg writes, “they recognize they are implicated in this view, even if as private individuals they may disagree with it.”If what we want out of a decision to remove a president or pass an amendment is an acclamatory consensus of this sort, then rather than set a supermajority rule — which would permit a minority to preserve a status quo that no longer commands the acclamatory support of the group — what we might use instead, Schwartzberg suggests, is a system that privileges serious and long-term deliberation, so that the minority on a particular question feels satisfied enough to consent to the view of a simple majority, even if it still disagrees.As for the question of minority protection from majority tyranny, one of the quirks of nearly all supermajority rules is that they make no distinction between different kinds of minorities. This means that they are as likely to protect and strengthen privileged and powerful minorities as they are to empower and defend weak ones. Looking at the American experience, we see much more of the former than we do of the latter, from the arc of the “slave power” in antebellum America to the specific case of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to recent efforts to protect the civil rights of more vulnerable Americans.This gets to the most powerful point Schwartzberg makes about the impact of supermajority rules on democratic life. Democracy, she writes, “entails a commitment to the presumption of epistemic equality among its citizens.” Put another way, democracy assumes an equal capacity to judge one’s interests — or at least what an individual believes is her interest. This epistemic equality is “manifested institutionally in formally equal voting power.” In a democracy, our political institutions should affirm the fact that we are equal.In the United States, ours do not. The rules of the game here tend to elevate the views and judgments of some citizens over others, to the point where under certain circumstances small, factional minorities can rule with no regard for the views of the majority in their communities. Whether it is the supermajority rules of the Senate or the counter-majoritarianism of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, our system makes it clear that some voices are more equal than others.One might say, even so, that the wisdom of the framers and of past generations holds true. But as Americans struggle against their own counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajoritarian rules to stop the ascendance of a wannabe authoritarian, I am not so sure that wisdom holds true.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden to Create Library Honoring His Friend and Rival John McCain

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      In a stop in Arizona, a key battleground state in next year’s election, the president plans to embrace the longtime Republican senator and vocal Trump critic.President Biden plans to announce on Thursday that he will devote federal money to create a new library and museum dedicated to his old friend and adversary, Senator John McCain, seeking to embrace a Republican who stood against former President Donald J. Trump.After stops in Michigan and California this week, Mr. Biden arrived in Phoenix on Wednesday night in advance of a speech at the Tempe Center for the Arts on Thursday morning, when he intends to honor the legacy of Mr. McCain, who represented Arizona in the House and Senate for 35 years before dying of brain cancer in 2018.The McCain project was compared by people familiar with the plan to a presidential-style library and museum for a man who tried twice to reach the White House but never did. In affiliation with Arizona State University, the new institution would house Mr. McCain’s papers as well as offer exhibits about his life, including possibly a reproduction of the so-called Hanoi Hilton, where he was held in North Vietnam as a prisoner of war for five and a half years.The announcement will be included in a speech that is meant to focus on what the president characterizes as a battle for American democracy as he faces the prospect of a rematch next year against Mr. Trump, who has been charged by both federal and Georgia state prosecutors with trying to subvert the 2020 election to hold on to power. In a summary that it distributed, the White House said defending democracy “continues to be the central cause of Joe Biden’s presidency.”The speech, according to the White House, will focus on the importance of American institutions in preserving democracy and the value of following the Constitution. It comes after three addresses Mr. Biden gave last year about the state of the country’s democracy and will brand Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement a radical threat.“There is something dangerous happening in America,” Mr. Biden plans to say, according to advance excerpts released by the White House. “There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: the MAGA movement.”“Not every Republican — not even the majority of Republicans — adhere to the extremist MAGA ideology,” he plans to add. “I know because I’ve been able to work with Republicans my whole career. But there is no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA extremists. Their extreme agenda, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the institutions of American democracy as we know it.”The renewed focus on Mr. Trump comes as Mr. Biden is being pressed to draw a sharper contrast with his once-and-possibly-future rival to remind Democrats and independents disenchanted with his own presidency of the stakes in next year’s election.Months of trying to claim credit for “Bidenomics,” as he calls his economic program, have not moved his approval numbers, as many voters, including most Democrats, tell pollsters that they worry about the 80-year-old president’s age. Democratic strategists argue that whatever Mr. Biden’s weaknesses, swing voters will come back to him once they focus on Mr. Trump as the alternative.In paying tribute to Mr. McCain, Mr. Biden hopes to reach out to anti-Trump Republicans and appeal to voters more generally in one of the battleground states that many analysts believe will determine the outcome next year. Mr. Biden and Mr. McCain served in the Senate together for many years and were friendly despite being from opposite parties. Even after running on opposing tickets in 2008, when Mr. McCain was the Republican presidential nominee and Mr. Biden was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, they maintained a respectful relationship.Mr. McCain was one of the most vocal Republican critics of Mr. Trump, and Cindy McCain, the senator’s widow, endorsed Mr. Biden against the incumbent president of her party in 2020. In return, he appointed her to be his ambassador to United Nations agencies for food and agriculture in Rome. Earlier this year, she was appointed executive director of the United Nations World Food Program.Mrs. McCain will join Mr. Biden on Thursday morning along with other relatives of the senator, Gov. Katie Hobbs and members of Arizona’s congressional delegation. The president plans to use leftover money from the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief spending package approved shortly after he took office, to finance the new library.The library, described as a facility to provide education, work and health monitoring programs to underserved communities, will be formed in partnership with Arizona State and the McCain Institute, a public policy organization devoted to advancing issues like democracy, human rights, national security and human trafficking. More

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      The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket

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      This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.The country needs a right-of-center party. But today, as the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.The Georgia election case against Mr. Trump and 18 others makes for a particularly powerful X-ray of the party. The sheer array and specific identities of those indicted in the case highlights how easily a conspiracist approach to political life, unconstrained by a party now incapable of policing boundaries or channeling passions into a larger purpose beyond raw hardball, can justify and compel illicit machinations.The defendants in the Georgia case represent every major component of what scholars term a modern “party network”: formal party organizations at the state and local level (like the former Georgia party chairman David Shafer), informal activist and interest groups (like John Eastman of the Claremont Institute) and candidate-centered operations (like Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump).Beyond those indicted, the broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.Conspiracism has a long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. So does a ruthlessly mercenary view of political parties. A speaker at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975 deemed parties “no more than instruments, temporary and disposable.” Such activists soon occupied the party’s commanding heights.Along with that activism came the constriction of the party’s vision for the public good. Starting in the 1970s, Republicans won elections by marrying a regressive economic agenda with us-versus-them populist appeals. At moments like the “Reagan revolution,” Jack Kemp’s work to broaden conservatism’s appeal to more working-class voters or George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s ambition to build an enduring Republican majority around an “opportunity society,” the party’s collective effort could take on a confident and expansive cast.But the programmatic side of the party, under the leadership of figures like Paul Ryan (a Kemp protégé), came eventually to alienate even the party’s own base with an unpopular agenda more and more tailored to the affluent.By 2016, as a demagogue unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.But conspiracy and party have an even longer history, one that stretches back to the frenzied and unbounded politics of the early Republic. In the 1790s, the emergent parties of Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans fell into personalized strife, but possessed neither the legitimacy nor the machinery to channel and stabilize the conflict. The organizers of new party activity on both sides were, to a one, avowedly antiparty politicians, and so they conceived of their efforts as a temporary expediency — emergency measures necessary to combat the nefarious conspiracies threatening to undermine the Constitution.In an era in which personal reputation was still inextricable from conflict over public matters, politicians refused to accept their opponents as legitimate, let alone as constituting a loyal opposition.For example, the vitriol and paranoia that attended the election of 1800, pitting the incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson, underscored the danger that a politics unfettered by strong parties poses to the Republic. The election featured not merely epic bouts of mudslinging but credible threats of collective violence and secession from both sides.The construction of mass political parties in subsequent generations — organizations with huge electoral bases and institutions like nominating conventions for party decision-making — channeled individual ambition into collective public purposes. At times, to be sure, as when Democratic pioneers of the mass party of the 19th century aimed for a cross-sectional politics that would sideline the divisive slavery question, the stability achieved through party politics actually suppressed conflict necessary to providing genuine political alternatives.But with mass parties came a shared understanding that the erosion of collective party principle could threaten a reversion to the 18th century’s politics-as-cabal. As the early political scientist Francis Lieber put it in 1839, “all parties are exposed to the danger of passing over into factions, which, if carried still farther, may become conspiracies.”The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to that danger, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.Without that commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene.This is not to impugn every Republican. As confirmed by both the federal and Georgia election-related indictments, many Republican officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, resisted intense pressure to interfere with the election and did their duty. And for all their defenses of Mr. Trump against his several indictments, his Republican presidential rivals have generally shied away from taking the critical step of saying they would have acted differently from Mike Pence when the Electoral College votes were counted at the Capitol on Jan. 6.But these responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.Might that project emerge from Republican governors? Lacking the option of substituting antics for governance, they have forged viable approaches in power. Indeed, many of the country’s most popular governors are Republicans.But our polarized political system is also a nationalized one, where state-level success as a problem solver too often obstructs rather than clears a path to national influence within the Republican Party. And we have no illusions that behavior dangerous to democracy will lead to long-lasting punishment at the polls.To see the personalism around Mr. Trump in the context of the entire party is to see past the breathless statements about his magnetic appeal and to observe a party more bent on destroying its enemies than on the tough work of solving hard problems.As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.Sam Rosenfeld, an associate professor of political science at Colgate, and Daniel Schlozman, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, are the authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republicans Don’t Mind the Constitution. It’s Democracy They Don’t Like.

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      “A very large portion of my party,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah tells McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”Romney doesn’t elaborate further in the article, and Coppins, who spoke to him in depth and at length, beginning in 2021, for a forthcoming biography, does not speculate on what exactly Romney meant with this assessment of his co-partisans.If Romney was using “the Constitution” as a rhetorical stand-in for “American democracy,” then he’s obviously right. Faced with a conflict between partisan loyalty and ideological ambition on one hand and basic principles of self-government and political equality on the other, much of the Republican Party has jettisoned any commitment to America’s democratic values in favor of narrow self-interest.The most glaring instance of this, of course, is Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which was backed by prominent figures in the Republican Party, humored by much of the Republican establishment and affirmed, in the wake of an insurrectionary attack on the Capitol by supporters of the former president, by a large number of House and Senate Republican lawmakers who voted to question the results.Other examples of the Republican Party’s contempt for democratic principles include the efforts of Republican-led state legislatures to write political majorities out of legislative representation with extreme partisan gerrymanders; the efforts of those same legislatures to raise new barriers to voting in order to disadvantage their political opponents; and the embrace of exotic legal claims, like the “independent state legislature theory,” meant to justify outright power grabs.In just the past few months, we’ve seen Tennessee Republicans expel rival lawmakers from the State Legislature for violating decorum by showing their support for an anti-gun protest on the chamber floor, Florida Republicans suspend a duly elected official from office because of a policy disagreement, Ohio Republicans try to limit the ability of Ohio voters to amend the State Constitution by majority vote, Wisconsin Republicans float the possibility that they might try to nullify the election of a State Supreme Court justice who disagrees with their agenda and Alabama Republicans fight for their wholly imaginary right to discriminate against Black voters in the state by denying them the opportunity to elect another representative to Congress.It is very clear that given the power and the opportunity, a large portion of Republican lawmakers would turn the state against their political opponents: to disenfranchise them, to diminish their electoral influence, to limit or even neuter the ability of their representatives to exercise their political authority.So again, to the extent that “the Constitution” stands in for “American democracy,” Romney is right to say that much of his party just doesn’t believe in it. But if Romney means the literal Constitution itself — the actual words on the page — then his assessment of his fellow Republicans isn’t as straightforward as it seems.At times, Republicans seem fixated on the Constitution. When pushed to defend America’s democratic institutions, they respond that the Constitution established “a republic, not a democracy.” When pushed to defend the claim that state legislatures have plenary authority over the structure of federal congressional elections and the selection of presidential electors, Republicans jump to a literal reading of the relevant parts of Article I and Article II to try to disarm critics. When asked to consider gun regulation, Republicans home in on specific words in the Second Amendment — “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — to dismiss calls for reform.Trump tried to subvert American democracy, yes, but his attempt rested on the mechanisms of the Electoral College, which is to say, relied on a fairly literal reading of the Constitution. Both he and his allies took seriously the fact that our Constitution doesn’t require anything like a majority of the people to choose a president. Attacks on representation and personal freedom — the hyper-gerrymandering of legislatures to preserve and perpetuate minority rule and the attempts to limit or restrict the bodily autonomy of women and other Americans — have operated within the lines drawn by the Constitution, unimpeded or even facilitated by its rules for structuring our political system.Republicans, in other words, do seem to believe in the Constitution, but only insofar as it can be wielded as a weapon against American democracy — that is, the larger set of ideas, intuitions, expectations and values that shape and define political life in the United States as much as particular rules and institutions.Because it splits sovereignty between national and subnational units, because it guarantees some political rights and not others, because it was designed in a moment of some reaction against burgeoning democratic forces, the Constitution is a surprisingly malleable document, when it comes to the shaping of American political life. At different points in time, political systems of various levels of participation and popular legitimacy (or lack thereof) have existed, comfortably, under its roof.Part of the long fight to expand the scope of American democracy has been an ideological struggle to align the Constitution with values that the constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need to function. To give one example among many, when a Black American like George T. Downing insisted to President Andrew Johnson that “the fathers of the Revolution intended freedom for every American, that they should be protected in their rights as citizens, and be equal before the law,” he was engaged in this struggle.Americans like to imagine that the story of the United States is the story of ever greater alignment between our Constitution and our democratic values — the “more perfect union” of the Constitution’s preamble. But the unfortunate truth, as we’re beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden Plans Democracy-Focused Speech After Next Republican Primary Debate

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      One location under consideration for the remarks is the democracy-focused McCain Institute in Arizona.President Biden is planning to deliver a major speech on the ongoing threats to democracy in Arizona later this month, with the address scheduled the day after the next Republican presidential primary debate. One location for the speech that has been under discussion is the McCain Institute, according to a person familiar with the planning. The institute, which is devoted to “fighting for democracy,” is named for Senator John McCain, a Republican who served for more than 20 years in the Senate with Mr. Biden and who sparred repeatedly with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party’s front-runner in 2024.Mr. Biden has made the perils facing American democracy a central theme of his 2020 campaign and also his 2024 re-election bid. He also made the case ahead of the 2022 midterms that Mr. Trump and his allies posed a threat to the “soul of the nation.”Anita Dunn, a top White House adviser, told Democratic donors about the upcoming speech on Wednesday in Chicago, the site of the party’s 2024 convention, according to people familiar with her remarks.The White House and Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee invited major contributors to a preview of the party’s convention this week in Chicago. The Biden Victory Fund, which includes the Biden campaign, the national party and all state parties, can collect contributions as large as $929,600 from big donors.Mr. Biden was close to Mr. McCain, who died in 2018, and during his recent trip to Hanoi in Vietnam he visited a memorial there for the late senator, who was held captive as a prisoner of war. “I miss him, I miss him,” Mr. Biden said.The speech would underscore previous efforts by Mr. Biden to focus attention on the cause of democracy. He delivered speech in Philadelphia last September that attempted to frame the midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of this nation,” an echo of his 2020 campaign slogan and another speech in Washington days before the midterm elections.Mr. Biden also briefly pushed for a package of federal voting rights laws last January before dropping the issue after it became clear there was not support among Senate Democrats to change the chamber’s rules to advance the legislation. More

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      The Authors of ‘How Democracies Die’ Overestimated the Republicans

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      One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal. “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,” they wrote.Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”“Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.A disturbing part of the answer, Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, lies in our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy. “Designed in a predemocratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them,” they write. The Constitution’s countermajoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.Liberals — myself very much included — have been preoccupied by minority rule for years now, and you’re probably aware of the ways it manifests. Republicans have won the popular vote in only one out of the last eight presidential elections, and yet have had three Electoral College victories. The Senate gives far more power to small, rural states than large, urbanized ones, and it’s made even less democratic by the filibuster. An unaccountable Supreme Court, given its right-wing majority by the two-time popular-vote loser Trump, has gutted the Voting Rights Act. One reason Republicans keep radicalizing is that, unlike Democrats, they don’t need to win over the majority of voters.All liberal democracies have some countermajoritarian institutions to stop popular passions from running roughshod over minority rights. But as “Tyranny of the Minority” shows, our system is unique in the way it empowers a minority ideological faction at the expense of everyone else. And while conservatives like to pretend that their structural advantages arise from the judicious wisdom of the founders, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how many of the least democratic aspects of American governance are the result of accident, contingency and, not least, capitulation to the slaveholding South.It’s worth remembering that in 2000, when many thought George W. Bush might win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College, Republicans did not intend to quietly accept the results. “I think there would be outrage,” Representative Ray LaHood, a Republican from Illinois, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Bush camp planned to stoke a “popular uprising,” in the words of The Daily News, quoting a Bush aide: “The one thing we don’t do is roll over. We fight.”Most Democrats, however, feel little choice but to acquiesce to a system tilted against them. Depending on the Constitution for protection from the worst abuses of the right, they’re reluctant to delegitimize it. Besides, America’s Constitution is among the hardest in the world to change, another of its countermajoritarian qualities.Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t have any shortcuts for emerging from the straitjacket of minority rule. Rather, they call on readers to engage in the glacial slog of constitutional reform. Some people, Ziblatt told me, might think that working toward institutional reforms is naïve. “But the thing that I think is really naïve is to think that we can just sort of keep going down this path and that things will just work out,” he said.Personally, I don’t know anyone who is confident that things will just work out. It’s possible that, as The New York Times reports, Trump’s Electoral College edge is fading because of his relative weakness in battleground states, but he could still, running on a nakedly authoritarian platform, be re-elected with a minority of the vote. I asked Levitsky and Ziblatt how, given their work on democracy, they imagine a second Trump term unfolding.“I think the United States faces a high risk of serious and repeated constitutional crisis, what I would call regime instability, quite possibly accompanied by some violence,” said Levitsky. “I’m not as worried about the consolidation of autocracy, Hungary or Russia-style. I think that the opposition forces, civil society forces, are probably too strong for that.” Let’s hope that this time he’s not being too optimistic.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Trump Is Nothing Without Republican Accomplices

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      During the first Republican debate of the 2024 presidential primary campaign last month, Donald Trump’s rivals were asked to raise their hands if they would support his candidacy, even if he were “convicted in a court of law.” Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election wasn’t just a potential criminal offense. It also violated the cardinal rule of democracy: Politicians must accept the results of elections, win or lose.But that seemed to matter little on the debate stage. Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand shot up first, and all the other leading candidates followed suit — some eagerly, some more hesitantly and one after casting furtive glances to his right and his left.Behavior like this might seem relatively harmless — a small act of political cowardice aimed at avoiding the wrath of the base. But such banal acquiescence is very dangerous. Individual autocrats, even popular demagogues, are never enough to wreck a democracy. Democracy’s assassins always have accomplices among mainstream politicians in the halls of power. The greatest threat to our democracy comes not from demagogues like Mr. Trump or even from extremist followers like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, but rather from the ordinary politicians, many of them inside the Capitol that day, who protect and enable him.The problem facing Republican leaders today — the emergence of a popular authoritarian threat in their own ideological camp — is hardly new. It has confronted political leaders across the world for generations. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, mainstream center-left and center-right parties had to navigate a political world in which antidemocratic extremists on the communist left and the fascist right enjoyed mass appeal. And in much of South America in the polarized 1960s and 1970s, mainstream parties found that many of their members sympathized with either leftist guerrillas seeking armed revolution or rightist paramilitary groups pushing for military rule.The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz wrote that when mainstream politicians face this sort of predicament, they can proceed in one of two ways.On the one hand, politicians may act as loyal democrats, prioritizing democracy over their short-term ambitions. Loyal democrats publicly condemn authoritarian behavior and work to hold its perpetrators accountable, even when they are ideological allies. Loyal democrats expel antidemocratic extremists from their ranks, refuse to endorse their candidacies, eschew all collaboration with them, and when necessary, join forces with ideological rivals to isolate and defeat them. And they do this even when extremists are popular among the party base. The result, history tells us, is a political firewall that can help a democracy survive periods of intense polarization and crisis.On the other hand, too often, politicians become what Mr. Linz called semi-loyal democrats. At first glance, semi-loyalists look like loyal democrats. They are respectable political insiders and part of the establishment. They dress in suits rather than military camouflage, profess a commitment to democracy and ostensibly play by its rules. We see them in Congress and in governor’s mansions — and on the debate stage. So when democracies die, semi-loyalists’ fingerprints may not be found on the murder weapon.But when we look closely at the histories of democratic breakdowns, from Europe in the interwar period to Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s to Venezuela in the early 2000s, we see a clear pattern: Semi-loyal politicians play a pivotal role in enabling authoritarians.Rather than severing ties to antidemocratic extremists, semi-loyalists tolerate and accommodate them. Rather than condemn and seek accountability for antidemocratic acts committed by ideological allies, semi-loyalists turn a blind eye, denying, downplaying and even justifying those acts — often via what is today called whataboutism. Or they simply remain silent. And when they are faced with a choice between joining forces with partisan rivals to defend democracy or preserving their relationship with antidemocratic allies, semi-loyalists opt for the latter.It is semi-loyalists’ very respectability that makes them so dangerous. As members of the establishment, semi-loyalists can use their positions of authority to normalize antidemocratic extremists, protect them against efforts to hold them legally accountable and empower them by opening doors to the mainstream media, campaign donors and other resources. It is this subtle enabling of extremist forces that can fatally weaken democracies.Consider the example of France. On Feb. 6, 1934, in the center of Paris, thousands of disaffected and angry men — veterans and members of right-wing militia groups — gathered near the national Parliament as its members were inside preparing to vote for a new government. They threw chairs, metal grates and rocks and used poles with razor blades on one end to try breach the doors of Parliament. Members of Parliament, frightened for their lives, had to sneak out of the building. Seventeen people were killed, and thousands were injured. Although the rioters failed to seize the Parliament building, they achieved one of their objectives: The centrist prime minister resigned the next day and was replaced by a right-leaning prime minister.Although French democracy survived the Feb. 6 attack on Parliament, the response of some prominent politicians weakened its defenses. Many centrist and center-left politicians responded as loyal democrats, publicly and unequivocally condemning the violence. But many conservative politicians did not. Key members of France’s main conservative party, the Republican Federation, many of whom were inside the Parliament building that day, sympathized publicly with the rioters. Some praised the insurrectionists as heroes and patriots. Others dismissed the importance of the attack, denying that there had been an organized plot to overthrow the government.When a parliamentary commission was established to investigate the events of Feb. 6, Republican Federation leaders sabotaged the investigation at each step, blocking even modest efforts to hold the rioters to account. Protected from prosecution, many of the insurrection’s organizers were able to continue their political careers. Some of the rioters went on to form the Victims of Feb. 6, a fraternity-like organization that later served as a recruitment channel for the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government established in the wake of the 1940 German invasion.The failure to hold the Feb. 6 insurrectionists to account also helped legitimize their ideas. Mainstream French conservatives began to embrace the view — once confined to extremist circles — that their democracy was hopelessly corrupt, dysfunctional and infiltrated by Communists and Jews. Historically, French conservatives had been nationalist and staunchly anti-German. But by 1936, many of them so despised the Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, that they embraced the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum.” Four years later, they acquiesced to Nazi rule.The semi-loyalty of leading conservative politicians fatally weakened the immune system of French democracy. The Nazis, of course, finished it off.A half-century later, Spanish politicians responded very differently to a violent assault on Parliament. After four decades of dictatorship, Spain’s democracy was finally restored in the late 1970s, but its early years were marked by economic crisis and separatist terrorism. And on Feb. 23, 1981, as the Parliament was electing a new prime minister, 200 civil guardsmen entered the building and seized control at gunpoint, holding the 350 members of Parliament hostage. The coup leaders hoped to install a conservative general — a kind of Spanish Charles de Gaulle — as prime minister.The coup attempt failed, thanks to the quick and decisive intervention of the king, Juan Carlos I. Nearly as important, though, was the reaction of Spanish politicians. Leaders across the ideological spectrum — from communists to conservatives who had long embraced the Franco dictatorship — forcefully denounced the coup. Four days later, more than a million people marched in the streets of Madrid to defend democracy. At the head of the rally, Communist, Socialist, centrist and conservative franquista politicians marched side by side, setting aside their partisan rivalries to jointly defend democracy. The coup leaders were arrested, tried and sentenced to long prison terms. Coups became virtually unthinkable in Spain, and democracy took root.That is how democracy is defended. Loyal democrats join forces to condemn attacks on democracy, isolate those responsible for such attacks and hold them accountable.Unfortunately, today’s Republican Party more closely resembles the French right of the 1930s than the Spanish right of the early 1980s. Since the 2020 election, Republican leaders have enabled authoritarianism at four decisive moments. First, rather than adhering to the cardinal rule of accepting election results after Joe Biden won in November, many Republican leaders either questioned the results or remained silent, refusing to publicly recognize Mr. Biden’s victory. Vice President Mike Pence did not congratulate his successor, Kamala Harris, until the middle of January 2021. The Republican Accountability Project, a Republican pro-democracy watchdog group, evaluated the public statements of 261 Republican members of the 117th Congress after the election. They found that 221 of them had publicly expressed doubt about its legitimacy or did not publicly recognize that Biden won. That’s 85 percent. And in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, nearly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against certification of the results. Had Republican leaders not encouraged election denialism, the “stop the steal” movement might have stalled, and thousands of Trump supporters might not have violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election.Second, after Mr. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted to acquit him, even though many conceded that, in Senator Mitch McConnell’s words, the president was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack. The acquittal allowed Mr. Trump to continue his political career despite having tried to block the peaceful transfer of power. Had he been convicted in the Senate, he would have been legally barred from running again for president. In other words, Republican senators had a clear opportunity to ensure that an openly antidemocratic figure would never again occupy the White House — and 43 of them, including Mr. McConnell, declined to take it.Third, Republican leaders could have worked with Democrats to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 uprising. Had both parties joined forces to seek accountability for the insurrection, the day’s events would have gone down in U.S. history (and would likely have been accepted by a larger majority of Americans) as a criminal assault on our democracy that should never again be allowed to occur, much like Spain’s 1981 coup attempt. Republican leaders’ refusal to support an independent investigation shattered any possible consensus around Jan. 6, making it far less likely that Americans will develop a shared belief that such events are beyond the pale.Finally, with remarkably few exceptions, Republican leaders say they will still support Mr. Trump even if he is convicted of plotting to overturn an election. Alternatives exist. The Republican National Committee could declare that the party will not nominate an individual who poses a threat to democracy or has been indicted on serious criminal charges. Or Republican leaders could jointly declare that, for the sake of democracy, they will endorse Mr. Biden if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee. Such a move would, of course, destroy the party’s chances in 2024. But by keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House, it would help protect our democracy.If Republican leaders continue to endorse Mr. Trump, they will normalize him yet again, telling Americans that he is, at the end of the day, an acceptable choice. The 2024 race will become another ordinary red vs. blue election, much like 2016. And as in 2016, Mr. Trump could win.Republican leaders’ acquiescence to Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor unavoidable. It is a choice.Less than a year ago in Brazil, right-wing politicians chose a different path. President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in 2018, was an extreme-right politician who had praised torture, death squads and political assassination. Like Mr. Trump in 2020, Mr. Bolsonaro faced an uphill re-election battle in 2022. And like Mr. Trump, he tried to undermine public trust in the electoral system, attacking it as rigged and seeking to replace the country’s sophisticated electronic voting system with a paper ballot system that was more prone to fraud. And despite some dirty tricks on Election Day (police roadblocks impeded voter access to the polls in opposition strongholds in the northeast), Mr. Bolsonaro, like Mr. Trump, narrowly lost.But the similarities end there. Whereas most Republican leaders refused to recognize Mr. Biden’s victory, most of Mr. Bolsonaro’s major political allies, including the president of Congress and the newly elected governors of powerful states like São Paulo and Minas Gerais, unambiguously accepted his defeat at the hands of Lula da Silva, the winner on election night. Although Mr. Bolsonaro himself remained silent, almost no major Brazilian politician questioned the election results.Likewise, on Jan. 8, 2023, when angry Bolsonaro supporters, seeking to provoke a coup, stormed Congress, the office of the presidency and the Supreme Court building in Brasília, conservative politicians forcefully condemned the violence. In fact, several of them led the push for a congressional investigation into the insurrection. And when the Superior Electoral Court barred Mr. Bolsonaro from seeking public office until 2030 (for abusing his political power, spreading disinformation and making baseless accusations of fraud), the response among right-wing politicians was muted. Although the electoral court’s ruling was controversial, few Brazilian politicians have attacked the legitimacy of the court or defended Mr. Bolsonaro as a victim of political persecution.Not only is Mr. Bolsonaro barred from running for president in the next election, he is politically isolated. For U.S. Republicans, then, Brazil offers a model.Many mainstream politicians who preside over a democracy’s collapse are not authoritarians committed to overthrowing the system; they are careerists who are simply trying to get ahead. They are less opposed to democracy than indifferent to it. Careerism is a normal part of politics. But when democracy is at stake, choosing political ambition over its defense can be lethal.Mr. McConnell, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top Republican leaders are not trying to kill democracy, but they have subordinated its defense to their own personal and partisan interests. Such reckless indifference could make them indispensable partners in democracy’s demise. They risk joining the long line of semi-loyal politicians littering the histories of interwar Europe and Cold War Latin America who sacrificed democracy on the altar of political expediency. American voters must hold them to account.Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (@dziblatt), professors of government at Harvard, are the authors of “The Tyranny of the Minority” and “How Democracies Die.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More