Democracy (Theory and Philosophy)
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The World’s Democracies Ask: Why Can’t America Fix Itself?
Conversations across continents reveal alarm over the United States’ direction, as it slides away from ideals it once pressed other nations to adopt.Lin Wei-hsuan was just a child when he observed his first Taiwanese election almost two decades ago. His parents took him to watch the vote-counting, where volunteers held up each paper ballot, shouting out the choice and marking it on a board for all to see — the huge crowd of citizens inside, and many more watching live on television.The open process, established after decades of martial law, was one of several creative steps that Taiwan’s leaders took to build public trust in democracy and to win over the United States, whose support might deter China’s aim of unification.At the time, America was what Taiwan aspired to be. But now, many of the democracies that once looked to the United States as a model are worried that it has lost its way. They wonder why a superpower famous for innovation is unable to address its deep polarization, producing a president who spread false claims of election fraud that significant parts of the Republican Party and the electorate have embraced.“Democracy needs to revise itself,” said Mr. Lin, 26, a candidate for a local council, campaigning for efficient trash removal and lowering Taiwan’s voting age to 18 from 20. “We need to look at what it’s been doing, and do better.”Taiwan’s National Day celebration in Taipei in October.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesFor most of the world, the U.S. midterms are little more than a blip — but they are another data point on what some see as a trend line of trouble. Especially in countries that have found ways to strengthen their democratic processes, interviews with scholars, officials and voters revealed alarm that the United States seemed to be doing the opposite and sliding away from its core ideals.Several critics of America’s direction cited the Jan. 6 riots, a violent rejection of democracy’s insistence on the peaceful transfer of power. Others expressed concern about states’ erecting barriers to voting after the record turnout that resulted from widespread early and absentee voting during the pandemic. A few said they worried that the Supreme Court was falling prey to party politics, like judiciaries in nations struggling to establish independent courts.“The United States did not get into the position where it is now overnight,” said Helmut K. Anheier, a sociology professor at the Hertie School in Berlin and a principal investigator for the Berggruen Governance Index, a study of 134 countries in which America sits below Poland in quality of life as defined by access to public services such as health care and education. “It took a while to get there, and it will take a while to get out.”The nation’s deep polarization has helped prevent change in election systems.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesTough Critiques From Old FriendsOn a recent afternoon in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which has long had economic and family ties with Boston, visitors and residents expressed sorrow, disappointment and surprise about their neighbor’s political situation.“I’m very concerned,” said Mary Lou MacInnes, a registered nurse who was visiting the Halifax Public Gardens with her family. “I never thought it would happen in the U.S., but I think it’s going to be perhaps autocratic going forward.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Final Landscape: As candidates make their closing arguments, Democrats are bracing for potential losses even in traditionally blue corners of the country as Republicans predict a red wave.The Battle for Congress: With so many races on edge, a range of outcomes is still possible. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, breaks down four possible scenarios.Voting Worries: Even as voting goes smoothly, fear and suspicion hang over the process, exposing the toll former President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods have taken on American democracy.In 1991, studies showed that Canadians were almost evenly divided on which of the two countries had the better system of government. In a follow-up survey last year, only 5 percent preferred the American system.For some, in Canada and in other countries that consider themselves close friends of America, the first signs of trouble emerged with the presidential race in 2000, when George W. Bush won a narrow victory over Al Gore with a decision from the Supreme Court.For others, it was Donald J. Trump’s winning the 2016 election while losing the popular vote, followed by his refusal to accept defeat in 2020 and the lack of consequences for those who parroted his lies — including hundreds of Republican candidates in this year’s election.Mr. Trump has challenged many of the United States’ democratic norms.Damon Winter/The New York Times“A lot of people imagined that Trump was this sort of idiosyncratic one-off and once he was gone, he was no longer president, everything would click back into normal gear,” said Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s center-right prime minister when Mr. Trump took office. “And that’s clearly not the case.”“It’s like watching a family member, for whom you have enormous affection, engage in self-harm,” Mr. Turnbull added. “It’s distressing.”Other countries do things differently.Canada has undertaken steady changes to improve its election system. In 1920, the country put federal elections under the control of an independent official who does not report to any government or politicians and who has the power to punish rule breakers. Responsibility for setting electoral boundaries was turned over to 10 similarly independent commissions, one for every province, in 1964.Taiwan and more than a dozen countries have also established independent bodies to draw voting districts and ensure that votes are cast and counted uniformly and fairly.The approach is not foolproof. Nigeria, Pakistan and Jordan all have independent election commissions. Many of their elections have still failed to be free and trusted.But in the places where studies show that turnout and satisfaction with the process are highest, elections are run by national bodies designed to be apolitical and inclusive. More than 100 countries have some form of compulsory or automatic voter registration; in general, democracies have been making it easier to vote in recent years, not more difficult.The world’s healthiest democracies also have stricter limits on campaign donations — in Canada, political donations by corporations and unions are banned, as are political action campaigns to promote parties or candidates. And many democracies have embraced change.Canadians almost universally believe their electoral system is better than America’s, a sharp swing in views in recent decades.Mark Blinch/ReutersNew Zealand overhauled its electoral system in the 1990s with a referendum, after elections in which the party with the most votes failed to win a parliamentary majority. South Africa is pursuing changes to its political-party-based electoral system to make it easier for independent candidates to run and win.Such systemic change would be possible in the United States only with overwhelming consensus in Congress, and even then, it may be out of the question in a country where campaign financing is protected as freedom of speech and states cherish their authority over elections in a federal system designed to be a bulwark against autocratic abuses.Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University who co-wrote a recent report on how polarized countries have depolarized in the past, said partisan divisions have kept the United States stuck in place, but so has myopia: Americans rarely look abroad for ideas.“We have such a myth around our Constitution and American exceptionalism,” she said. “First it makes people very complacent, and second, it takes leaders a very long time to recognize the risk we’re facing. It means it’s very hard to adapt.”Weakening Democracy WorldwideOn a recent morning in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, near a street named after Lenin during the Soviet Union’s occupation, a group of demonstrators waved Ukrainian flags and posters calling for an end to Russian aggression.Lithuania is a staunch U.S. ally and vocal supporter of Ukraine’s fight for self-determination, but even among the most committed, doubts about the strength and future of American-led democracy are common.A flag-raising ceremony for the three Baltic States in Vilnius, Lithuania, in March. The Baltic States look warily at their neighbors’ direction.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesArkadijus Vinokuras, 70, is an actor and activist who helps organize the rallies. Asked what came to mind when he heard the phrase “American democracy,” he responded with a slogan: “America is the defender of global democracy and the guarantor of the vitality of Western democracies!”That was how it seemed 20 years ago — then came Putin, Trump and a divided America.“Now,” he said, “even the biggest fan of the U.S. has to ask the question: How could this happen to the guarantor of democracy?”It’s a common query in countries that once looked up to the United States.On Thursday, in the political science department at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, half a dozen graduate students gathered in a professor’s office to debate whether elections could be stolen in America.“You take the U.S. democracy after Trump, no doubt that it’s weaker,” said Souleymane Cissé, a 23-year-old graduate student.Some of the world’s leaders have taken advantage of that perceived weakness. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, elected leaders with autocratic tendencies, have praised Mr. Trump and his wing of the Republican Party.Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas in August.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesIn India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has pursued a Hindu nationalist agenda, leading to accusations of democratic backsliding, now insists that the West is in no position to pressure any country over democratic benchmarks.From Myanmar to Mali, leaders of military coups have also found that they can subvert democracy without significant international pushback.“If you’re an autocrat or wannabe autocrat, the price that you pay is much less than the price that you used to pay 30 years ago,” said Kevin Casas-Zamora, a former vice president of Costa Rica who heads the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a pro-democracy group with 34 member states. “And that’s partly because of the U.S.”Even reformers are starting to wonder what they can reasonably expect of their most high-minded institutions. In South Africa, when a new chief justice was appointed a few months ago, there were questions about whether the court was apolitical or even could be.All these countries, and more, are confronting an enormous challenge that America has made more visible: antidemocratic actors, inside democracies.Mr. Vinokuras said that Lithuania and its neighbors had been more resistant to such forces because they can see where they lead by looking next door.“The fact that unbridled populism in the Baltic States is not yet gaining ground is, I repeat, because of fascist Russia,” he said.The dismantling of a Soviet-era monument in Riga, Latvia, in August. Kaspar Krafts/F64, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat democracies need, he added, are investments in improvements — the best ideas, no matter where they come from — and a strong commitment to ostracizing those who violate rules and norms.“In general, democracy has degenerated, it has become useless,” he said. “It’s become more like anarchy. Unlimited tolerance for everything destroys the foundations of democracy.”In Taiwan, many people made a similar point: The threat from China makes democracy more precious, helping people remember that its benefits can be realized only through shared connections across divides.“If a country is going to keep moving forward,” Mr. Lin said, “the leaders of both parties should play the role of a bridge.”Reporting was contributed by More
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A MAGA America Would Be Ugly
If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread on the eve of the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention.We can talk about the conventional stakes of these elections — their implications for economic policy, major social programs, environmental policy, civil liberties and reproductive rights. And it’s not wrong to have these discussions: Life will go on whatever happens on the political scene, and government policies will continue to have a big impact on people’s lives.But I, at least, always feel at least a bit guilty when writing about inflation or the fate of Medicare. Yes, these are my specialties. Focusing on them, however, feels a bit like denial, or at least evasion, when the fundamental stakes right now are so existential.Ten or 20 years ago, those of us who warned that the Republican Party was becoming increasingly extremist and anti-democracy were often dismissed as alarmists. But the alarmists have been vindicated every step of the way, from the selling of the Iraq war on false pretenses to the Jan. 6 insurrection.Indeed, these days it’s almost conventional wisdom that the G.O.P. will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper, but an ethnonationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. After all, U.S. conservatives have made no secret about viewing Hungary as a role model; they have feted Orban and featured him at their conferences.At this point, however, I believe that even this conventional wisdom is wrong. If America descends into one-party rule, it will be much worse, much uglier, than what we see in today’s Hungary.Before I get there, a word about the role of conventional policy issues in these elections.If Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress, there will be a loud chorus of recriminations, much of it asserting that they should have focused on kitchen table issues and not talked at all about threats to democracy.I don’t claim any expertise here, but I would note that an incumbent president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterms. The only exception to that rule this century was in 2002, when George W. Bush was able to deflect attention from a jobless recovery by posing as America’s defender against terrorism. That record suggests, if anything, that Democrats should have talked even more about issues beyond economics.I’d also say that pretending that this was an ordinary election season, where only economic policy was at stake, would have been fundamentally dishonest.Finally, even voters who are more worried about paychecks and living costs than about democracy should nonetheless be very concerned about the G.O.P.’s rejection of democratic norms.For one thing, Republicans have been open about their plan to use the threat of economic chaos to extract concessions they couldn’t win through the normal legislative process.Also, while I understand the instinct of voters to choose a different driver if they don’t like where the economy is going, they should understand that this time, voting Republican doesn’t just mean giving someone else a chance at the wheel; it may be a big step toward handing the G.O.P. permanent control, with no chance for voters to revisit that decision if they don’t like the results.Which brings me to the question of what a one-party America would look like.As I said, it’s now almost conventional wisdom that Republicans are trying to turn us into Hungary. Indeed, Hungary provides a case study in how democracies can die in the 21st century.But what strikes me, reading about Orban’s rule, is that while his regime is deeply repressive, the repression is relatively subtle. It is, as one perceptive article put it, “soft fascism,” which makes dissidents powerless via its control of the economy and the news media without beating them up or putting them in jail.Do you think a MAGA regime, with or without Donald Trump, would be equally subtle? Listen to the speeches at any Trump rally. They’re full of vindictiveness, of promises to imprison and punish anyone — including technocrats like Anthony Fauci — the movement dislikes.And much of the American right is sympathetic to, or at least unwilling to condemn, violence against its opponents. The Republican reaction to the attack on Paul Pelosi by a MAGA-spouting intruder was telling: Many in the party didn’t even pretend to be horrified. Instead, they peddled ugly conspiracy theories. And the rest of the party didn’t ostracize or penalize the purveyors of vile falsehoods.In short, if MAGA wins, we’ll probably find ourselves wishing its rule was as tolerant, relatively benign and relatively nonviolent as Orban’s.Now, this catastrophe doesn’t have to happen. Even if Republicans win big in the midterms, it won’t be the end for democracy, although it will be a big blow. And nothing in politics, not even a full descent into authoritarianism, is permanent.On the other hand, even if we get a reprieve this week, the fact remains that democracy is in deep danger from the authoritarian right. America as we know it is not yet lost, but it’s on the edge.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 Has Happened to My Country?
NASHVILLE — There I was, snug in my own bed in the middle of the night, turning to sleep on my side, when wham! the room slid sideways. Then it took off, spinning and spinning as though a sadistic carnival barker had flipped a switch and pushed the speed to max.Reader, I will spare you the details except to say that I have lately learned how delicate an instrument is the human ear, how many ways there are to disrupt its functions. As when, say, a lump of wax detaches itself from the ear canal through an exactly wrong combination of angles and gravity, lodges itself in the eardrum, and transforms the human vestibular system into a Tilt-A-Whirl. For days I lay in bed, trying not to move my head and reciting to myself lines from “The Second Coming,” a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats:Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer.At the otolaryngologist’s office, the source of my torture finally emerged after half an hour of patient manipulations by a doctor wielding tiny power tools. In the newly stationary room, I looked at it, amazed. How fragile the human body is that it can be thrown into chaos by something so small!The same can be said for the body politic. Right-wing politicians and media outlets have turned American democracy upside down through nothing more than a lie. They put forth Supreme Court candidates who assure Congress that they respect legal precedent but who vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade the instant they have a majority on the court. They endorse political candidates who openly state that they will accept only poll results leading to their own election.Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.They denounce calamities where no calamities exist, turning public schools into battlegrounds and library books and bathrooms into weapons. But their “answer” to the real calamity of children being slaughtered in their classrooms is to arm teachers, to bring even more guns into the classroom. Political violence and threats are rising, and so is the intimidation of voters and voting officials.The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.Here in blue Nashville, the Tennessee General Assembly carved the city into three different voting districts this year, hoping to send yet another Republican to Congress from a state where both senators are Republicans, and the entire congressional delegation, not counting the current representatives from Memphis and Nashville, is Republican.Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Representative Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog moderate, opted not to run for re-election, but Heidi Campbell, a state senator, stepped up. Ms. Campbell is a progressive who has significantly outpaced her MAGA opponent in fund-raising, but it would take a miracle turnout in Nashville for her to win in a district expressly drawn to make her lose.While Republicans are skilled at suppressing votes in districts that don’t favor Republicans, they have proven to be incompetent at administering the vote in these newly redrawn districts, which divide neighborhoods and sprawl out into the surrounding red counties. Last week, Nashville election officials — and keep in mind that the Davidson County Election Commission is regulated by the Republican state government and controlled by a Republican majority — distributed the wrong ballots to at least 200 Nashville voters. The error was caught not by voting officials but by The Associated Press.This may well be an honest mistake. Nevertheless, when you gerrymander a district out of recognizability with the express purpose of subverting the will of the political majority, and yours is the party screaming nonstop about nonexistent voter fraud, and you send people to the wrong district to vote, too, you deserve to be held accountable.On Friday, ACLU Tennessee filed a lawsuit on behalf of the League of Women Voters and two voters affected by the error. By Friday night, election officials had agreed to abide by a court order to address the error, though the solutions are complicated and will no doubt leave votes uncounted anyway.This chaos could’ve been avoided simply by allowing Nashville to continue to vote as a district and by honoring the will of the voters. “This is the result of a racist, bigoted, money-hungry Republican Legislature who is doing everything to hoard power to keep the system rigged against everyday working-class people,” said Odessa Kelly, the Democratic candidate in the redrawn Seventh Congressional District.Surely some revelation is at hand;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand.Americans belong to an electorate in which those who are most affected by voter suppression laws and extreme gerrymandering are so full of despair they may see no point in trying. Meanwhile, in the rest of America, voters aren’t especially concerned about the possibility of losing their own democracy.The best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.People often think I’m an optimist because I believe that human beings are mostly good, because I know that reasons for hope are everywhere if you look for them.The good people of Kansas voted to preserve abortion rights, for instance, and polls indicate that they would be far from alone if other red-state voters were given the chance to choose. The chaos agent formerly known as Kanye West has discovered the cost of antisemitism in the wide world, even if it mostly goes unchallenged in his squalid corner of the political sphere. The chaos agent known as Elon Musk may be on track to kill the hellsite known as Twitter. Best of all, a new report suggests that we haven’t yet lost the chance to prevent this verdant and teeming planet from becoming completely uninhabitable.Even so, I am not an optimist. I spend much of my life with my heart in my throat, and at this moment I am terrified. What has happened to my country that 20 percent of Americans believe political violence is justified? That an entire political party increasingly relies on lying and cheating to win elections? That Vladimir Putin, of all people, has become a Republican hero?And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?“I get why people are anxious,” Barack Obama said last week on the stump for Democrats in Georgia. “I get why you might be worried. I understand why it might be tempting sometimes just to tune out, to watch football or ‘Dancing With the Stars.’ But I’m here to tell you that tuning out is not an option. Despair is not an option.”Despair is not an option, but vertigo appears to be inescapable.My mother, too, was prone to both debilitating vertigo and frequent dizzy spells. At Mass one Sunday, in line for communion, she stepped up to the priest and started to tilt. Before she even had time to stumble, I put my hands on her shoulders and gently righted her. The priest looked over her head and met my eyes in understanding. Elder care is hard, he seemed to be saying, but this is what we do for one another. Somebody begins to fall. Somebody else catches the falling one.If only it were so in other realms. If only we could be counted on to catch one another before we fell. If only American voters will stand up for democracy and vote to restore the equilibrium of our fragile body politic. That would be the true answered prayer.Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”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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Election Workers Have to Keep Volunteering to Do This
DURHAM, N.C. — One of the challenges of being alive right now is making sense of the threat to the American election system: It’s hard to determine, conclusively, how widespread that threat is, how much chaos and danger we’re living through and what to do next.How bad are things? In an October Reuters/Ipsos poll, 43 percent of voters said they worried about threats of violence or intimidation while voting. New York Times/Siena College polling has found that insofar as people worry about threats to democracy in the United States, they attribute the problem to the opposing party — an untenable situation that is tough to resolve. Recently, people have shown up, armed, to watch voter drop boxes. Many, many Republican candidates continue to advance false claims about the 2020 election. All over the country, election officials and workers have quit, citing threats and demands on them. One violent episode can alter individual lives forever, as well as reverberate through politics in deep and unexpected ways. You can picture a grim scenario in which voting and election work moves, like other facets of American life, into a permanent siege posture.Nobody really wants to live like that; nobody likes to think we could. But understanding the tangible, everyday scale of these problems — what’s changed and what hasn’t — genuinely isn’t easy.In endless tension with more abstract questions about the big picture is the practical reality that in a democratic republic, real people, with real lives, set up the voting equipment in a middle school gym somewhere, check you in, hand you a ballot, hand you a sticker, make sure the tabulator is empty before the count begins — the full battery of mundane procedures that start in your neighborhood and filter up through the county and the state and, in a presidential year, all the way up through the country.This fall, I spent two days in Durham, N.C., talking with four election workers with whom the county’s board of elections connected me. This ended up being as far from violence and conspiracy theories as you can get: drinking coffee outside in prime North Carolina fall weather, crystal clear mornings and warm afternoons, talking about how people got involved and how the process unfolds in the days leading up to Election Day.The four workers, who are paid, ranged in age from 30s to 70s. Two signed up in more recent election cycles, and two started working at the suggestion of a friend more than a decade ago. All worked early voting and Election Day before. We talked about things like provisional ballots, process checklists and local safeguards. The tenor here was brightness and practicality.One of them said that if someone has concerns about election fraud, one way to alleviate the feeling, to trust elections again, would be to undergo the formal training to be a poll worker or watcher and to see the whole thing unfold. The cut-and-dried nature of the process appeals to him. “Like, here are the laws you must follow. Here are the rules and the process that you must go through,” he said.Asked what she wanted people to know about election workers in Durham, one woman, who’s been working elections since she moved there in the 1970s and whose two sisters are election workers where they live, too, said, “They’re everyday people. A lot of them are retired. A lot of them love the system. They’ve been working for years, so they enjoy doing the work. They know the work.” She said she likes the variety of the tasks, meeting workers and voters and seeing the process at the end, confirming the accuracy of the count. Another election worker mentioned that he liked the community nature of the endeavor, in which workers sometimes bring Bojangles and coffee to the precinct for the group.One mentioned the possibility of a violent episode and the bewildering question of what she would do if that happened at her site. But this was just one possible scenario she thinks about and plans for. “When we start a shift, I always like to start with: The voter walks in, what is that voter’s experience?” In precincts where she works, she said, she advises everyone to put down their book or magazine, even if the voter isn’t at their station, to ensure a sense of seriousness and value in the room. “That’s the only reason we’re there.”This is, probably, in the past two decades of American life, the more median experience with voting and election work: commonplace, uneventful, mechanical, populated by your neighbors. But we live in 2022. People like this in other cities or towns have become the subject of conspiracy theories and threats, frequently over a politician’s misrepresentation of a routine voting or counting procedure.This is a really big country. What’s happening in one place isn’t always happening in another, which is what makes it difficult to genuinely understand if the problems we have right now are temporary, existential or somewhere in between. In a democratic republic, we all are joined by both law and broader, harder-to-pin-down concepts like trust and fear. Preserving the uneventful and calm aspects of an election system while still recognizing its flaws and vulnerabilities is difficult in a moment of possibly deep peril.Ultimately, elections are administered by regular people who opt into the process. This prospect could make you nervous or, depending on your perspective, could deeply reassure you. The system requires people to continue to want to do this, and the fact that we’re talking about violence and intimidation at all highlights how fragile this arrangement could be. In North Carolina, for a couple of days, real life briefly felt normal: talking with four people about how the system works, about their lives, about doing that work and about voters who walk through the door.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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Dancing Near the Edge of a Lost Democracy
One of the most sobering statements from President Biden’s speech last week on protecting democracy was one that might well have gone unnoticed by many who heard it or read about it.In the speech, Biden pointed out, “The remarkable thing about American democracy is this: Just enough of us, on just enough occasions, have chosen not to dismantle democracy but to preserve democracy.”The sentence is damning. The dismantling of our democracy is just one apathetic electorate, one slate of voter suppression laws or one barrage of misinformation away.Modern presidential elections don’t often end in landslides. In fact, no president has won by a margin of the popular vote greater than 10 percentage points since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump was only four percentage points.These slim margins are obscured by the flaws and peculiarities of our electoral process, how small states are overrepresented and most states award electors on a winner-take-all basis.Biden won Georgia by just over 12,000 votes, which was just 0.2 percent of the votes cast in the state, but Biden got all 16 of the state’s electoral votes. That’s how we elect presidents in this country.But that same fluke means that the country’s last two Republican presidents were able to win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — George Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016.This is all to say that we are always a cat’s whisker away from calamity.And that doesn’t go only for presidential elections. The same dilemma has plagued this year’s midterms as control of Congress hangs in the balance, with the antidemocracy barbarians at the door.It is widely believed that Republicans will retake control of the House of Representatives, the only question being by what margin. But the control of the Senate is very much in play, with some of the most hotly contested races playing out in states that often swing presidential elections, like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin.In each of these states, the Republican candidates for the Senate have at one time either openly denied the results of the 2020 election or pushed false claims of fraud about that election.Those candidates have a chance to win, but even if they don’t, the damage their election denialism has done will linger. We are witnessing a generational curse being cast.Faith and doubt are opposites, but they operate using the same emotional energy, much like love and hate. And they are sticky.Republicans have turned doubt about the 2020 election — and about the legitimacy of any elections they lose — into a test of faith. It is the crucible through which one must pass to be a modern Republican in good standing. You are true only if you swallow the lie.Many elected officials and operatives are simply being opportunists, using the lie to excite voters or to benefit from the zealotry the lie has spawned. But for many Trump followers, the lie is gospel. It is being welded not only to the psyche but also to the soul.This mass delusion will not be easy to dislodge.When we have a deep faith in something, we find a comfort in it. Faith is precious, an improbable thing, a gift the mind created to soothe and assure. We do not relinquish it lightly.Faith and doubt linger like the ghosts of a lost soul. Even when we accept evidence that renders the idea in which we placed our faith false, the mind very often clings to a bit of what it had felt and believed.This is natural. This is human. But this is a problem for our democracy. The people fighting to save democracy are doing so with fact, but the people willing and working to destroy it are operating on a feeling. The former is relying on data and the latter on dogma.These are different languages speaking to different facets of the human experience. The antidemocracy faithful cannot and will not be dissuaded by facts. Faith, which doesn’t require evidence, can be fed and affirmed by things that aren’t true. And that is precisely what is happening.That faith doesn’t even allow for the notion that destroying democracy would be bad, or markedly worse than present conditions. So people may even believe that they will benefit from democracy’s demise.This is Trump’s twisted legacy, something that will endure, no matter what happens during these midterms and whether he runs once more for president. The damage he has done and continues to do will, in the end, be far bigger than he ever was.He has given birth to a distortion that will long outlive him.As Biden pointed out, the country is perilously close to installing officials who want to undo it and remake it, who want a partial democracy or none at all. America is one bad election away from being a memory.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More
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The Marjorie Taylor Greene-ing of America
WASHINGTON — Are we ready for our new Republican overlords?Are we ready for an empowered Marjorie Taylor Greene?Are we ready for a pumped-up, pistol-packing Lauren Boebert?“How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?” Boebert asked a crowd at a Christian campaign event in June. I’m going with none, honestly, but her answer was, “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.”The Denver Post pleaded: “We beg voters in western and southern Colorado not to give Rep. Lauren Boebert their vote.”The freshman representative has recently been predicting happily that we’re in the end times, “the last of the last days.” If Lauren Boebert is in charge, we may want to be in the end times. I’m feeling not so Rapturous about the prospect.And then there’s the future first female president, Kari Lake, who lulls you into believing, with her mellifluous voice, statements that seem to emanate from Lucifer. She’s dangerous because, like Donald Trump, she has real skills from her years in TV. And she really believes this stuff, unlike Trump and Kevin McCarthy, who are faking it.As Cecily Strong said on “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, embodying Lake, “If the people of Arizona elect me, I’ll make sure they never have to vote ever again.”Speaking of “Paradise Lost,” how about Ron DeSantis? The governor of Florida, who’s running for a second term, is airing an ad that suggests that he was literally anointed by God to fight Democrats. God almighty, that’s some high-level endorsement.Much to our national shame, it looks like these over-the-top and way, way, way out-of-the mainstream Republicans — and the formerly normie and now creepy Republicans who have bent the knee to the wackos out of political expediency — are going to be running the House, maybe the Senate and certainly some states, perhaps even some that Joe Biden won two years ago.And it looks as if Kevin McCarthy will finally realize his goal of becoming speaker, but when he speaks, it will be Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert doing the spewing. It will be like the devil growling through Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” — except it will be our heads spinning.Welcome to a rogue’s gallery of crazy: Clay Higgins, who’s spouting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, wants to run the House Homeland Security Committee; Paul Gosar, whose own family has begged Arizonans to eject him from Congress, will be persona grata in the new majority.In North Carolina, Bo Hines, a Republican candidate for the House, wants community panels to decide whether rape victims are able to get abortions or not. He’s building on Dr. Oz’s dictum that local politicians should help make that call. Even Oprah turned on her creation, Dr. Odd.J.D. Vance, the Yale-educated, former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” who called Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2016, before saluting him to gain public office, could join the Senate in January. Talk about American Elegy.Even though he wrote in his best seller that Yale Law School was his “dream school,” he now trashes the very system that birthed him. Last year, he gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy”: His mother-in-law is a provost at the University of California San Diego.It’s disturbing to think of Vance side by side with Herschel Walker. Walker was backed by Mitch McConnell, who countenanced an obviously troubled and flawed individual even if it meant degrading the once illustrious Senate chamber.Overall, there are nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot, but they will be all too happy to accept the results if they win.People voting for these crazies think they’re punishing Biden, Barack Obama and the Democrats. They’re really punishing themselves.These extreme Republicans don’t have a plan. Their only idea is to get in, make trouble for President Biden, drag Hunter into the dock, start a bunch of stupid investigations, shut down the government, abandon Ukraine and hold the debt limit hostage.Democrats are partly to blame. They haven’t explained how they plan to get a grip on the things people are worried about: crime and inflation. Voters weren’t hearing what they needed to hear from Biden, who felt morally obligated to talk about the threat to democracy, even though that’s not what people are voting on.As it turns out, a woman’s right to control her body has been overshadowed by uneasiness over safety and economic security.To top it off, Trump is promising a return. We’ll see if DeSantis really is the chosen one. In Iowa on Thursday night, Trump urged the crowd to “crush the communists” at the ballot box and said that he was “very, very, very” close to deciding to “do it again.”Trump, the modern Pandora, released the evil spirits swirling around us — racism, antisemitism, violence, hatred, conspiracy theories, and Trump mini-mes who should be nowhere near the levers of power.Heaven help us.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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They Are Betting $100 Million on Pluralism. Will It Work?
In February 2020, in the midst of a vitriolic presidential election, an idealistic group of donors from across the ideological spectrum met to plan an ambitious new project. They called themselves the New Pluralists and pledged to spend a whopping $100 million over the next decade to fight polarization by funding face-to-face interactions among Americans across political, racial and religious divides.Fixing what is broken in American democracy requires more than changing voter ID laws or the shape of our congressional districts, they argued. It requires forging deep personal connections that will change hearts and minds and ultimately American culture itself.Their experiment rests on a basic idea: Far too many Americans lack the skills, the opportunity and even the inclination to work together across lines of difference toward a common goal. Part of the solution, these donors believe, is embracing a very old idea that has fallen out of fashion: pluralism.The term “cultural pluralism” was coined in the early 1900s by Horace Kallen, a Jewish philosopher who proposed it in the midst of a huge wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. He argued that rather than try to stamp out their Polishness, Italianness or Jewishness, as many white Anglo-Saxon Protestants wanted, America should be a “nation of nationalities” where people learn to work together across lines of difference. The freedom to be different but still participate in political life as a vital part of the whole was key to the country’s genius, he argued. Mr. Kallen thought of the American people not as a melting pot, where everyone turns into the same bland stew, but as an orchestra, where distinct sounds join harmoniously.That notion fuels the New Pluralists, too. Although it’s hard to find two people who describe the project the same way, respecting difference, not papering it over, is seen as central.In his era, Mr. Kallen drew fierce criticism from those who accused him of promoting a Balkanization of the country. A scathing review of his book in The New York Times in 1924 declared that the nation faced a stark choice: “Is it to remain one in spirit, tradition and language, or is it to become a hodgepodge boardinghouse for alien groups?” It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the rise of the idea of multiculturalism, that his ideas were widely embraced.Today the New Pluralists project is grappling with a similar set of challenges as the ones Mr. Kallen wrote about over a century ago. An influx of immigrants is once again challenging prevailing notions of who Americans are and what it takes to make a country harmonious and whole. At the same time, the country does indeed feel Balkanized along a host of fault lines: rural versus urban, young versus old, religious versus secular and, of course, red versus blue.But the critiques that pluralism faces today are different. Far from being considered too radical, pluralism might not sound radical enough in an era of insurrection and potential coups. To some activists, pluralism sounds like both-sides-ism or a call to meet in the mushy middle. And yet pluralism feels more crucial than ever. Our multiracial democracy can’t survive without it.I discovered the New Pluralists this summer after I attended an online workshop on depolarizing hosted by one of its grantees, a group called Braver Angels. I found the group online because, at a time when so much attention is paid to toxic politics, I wanted to know more about groups that stood for just the opposite.Co-founded by Bill Doherty, a Minneapolis-based marriage counselor, Braver Angels is an organization with grass-roots chapters across the country that teach conservatives and liberals to debunk lazy stereotypes and clarify disagreements without yelling. In the workshop I attended, reds and blues wrestled with how they typecast the other side. Nearly all the participants were white and looked to be over the age of 40. And they were, by definition, open to reaching across the partisan divide. In other words, they were low-hanging fruit. I came away feeling more hopeful about the country nonetheless.I realized then that there was a whole ecosystem of groups, created during the Trump years, that is dedicated to bridging divides: the People’s Supper, which helps communities host potluck dinners and other events that promote racial and political reconciliation; the One Small Step project at StoryCorps, which brings together strangers for recorded conversations about their lives; More in Common, which surveys public opinion and put out an influential paper about the country’s “exhausted majority.” The New Pluralists help fund them all.The idea for the New Pluralists came about in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Jennifer Hoos Rothberg, the New York-based executive director of the Einhorn Collaborative, a foundation started by a Wisconsin-bred hedge fund manager, said it kept getting calls from people who were alarmed by the level of polarization and thought they could help fix it. One call came from Melissa Weintraub, a longtime conflict resolution practitioner who had worked with Israelis and Palestinians.“You know that tool kit I use in the Middle East? I want to bring that to Wisconsin and Iowa,” Ms. Rothberg recalled Ms. Weintraub saying.Right then and there, Ms. Rothberg told me, “we set up a rapid response organizing around bridging divides.” The Einhorn Collaborative gave away $6 million in one-off funds but wanted to do something bigger. In 2019, Ms. Rothberg invited other donors involved in similar work to a meeting in New York to see if they could pool their money to fund these projects on a larger scale. She purposefully invited donors from across the political spectrum. Stand Together Trust, formerly the Charles Koch Institute, which funds social ventures to solve common problems, agreed to join. But that made some social justice funders on the left balk because they didn’t want to be in the same room, Fay Twersky, who attended that meeting as a representative of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, told me.In the end, about a dozen donors stuck with it. They landed on the name the New Pluralists, partly because pluralism felt neutral in an era when so many words have taken on a partisan flavor. This past summer, they brought together a group of grantees for a retreat in Atlanta in an attempt to foster relationships among them. They included the civil rights thinker john powell of the Othering & Belonging Institute and Rachel Peric of Welcoming America. They are called field builders in the New Pluralists’ overly cerebral parlance. The big idea here is to turn pluralism into a coherent field — like public health — with clearly defined norms and practices that can be replicated, measured and improved.Lennon Flowers, a co-founder of the People’s Supper, told me that the gathering felt like a salve. She said the money and credibility her organization gets from the New Pluralists filter down to the local partners, showing that “this work matters and this proves we’re not alone.”But a big question remains: Can a group of wealthy donors change American culture from above? How exactly does that work? If you are trying to change a law, you hire a lobbyist. To change American culture, whom do you hire?Nevertheless, the group is doubling down on its vision. Over the summer, it put out a request for grant proposals from grass-roots groups engaged in this work. Eight hundred applications poured in — too many to fund. That’s when the New Pluralists began an effort to challenge donors to devote $1 billion over the next decade to pluralism, an initiative it announced at a White House unity summit in September.“The need is so great, and the opportunity is so great that we need more of philanthropy to take this seriously,” the New Pluralists’ executive director, Uma Viswanathan, told me.Even the most fervent of the New Pluralists admit that they aren’t sure they will succeed. But I hope they do. After all, orchestras don’t sound good by accident. People have to practice.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
