The Left’s Backward Plan to ‘Save’ Democracy

I n his farewell address as president, George Washington warned that “the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge,” could be a “frightful despotism” and lead to an even more miserable tyranny. Washington here recognized that factional passions — especially when they cloak themselves in the language of existential emergency — can unsettle a democratic republic.

Two recent documents illustrate how calls for emergency politics can worsen the polarization that is causing so much political disruption today. First, a New York Times editorial warns that every day is January 6; the Republican Party is supposedly targeting democracy, so the legislative filibuster should be ended to save democracy. Second, a “dear colleague” letter from Majority Leader Chuck Schumer makes the same point even more explicitly. Comparing elected Republicans across the country to “the violent insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol nearly one year ago,” Senator Schumer threatens to nuke the filibuster — for democracy’s sake, of course — if Republicans continue to filibuster certain Democratic election-reform proposals.

It should go without saying that this sort of domestic politics of existential conflict itself poses grave risks to democratic stability.

Unfortunately for American democracy, the Capitol riot was not a sui generis event but the extension of an escalating series of efforts over the past two decades to challenge the counting of electoral votes and the results of presidential elections. Though the Republican challenge to the 2020 election garnered more congressional support than previous such challenges, it was far from unprecedented.

For the four years of the Donald Trump presidency, top Democrats and Trump’s critics in the press promoted allegations that the 2016 election was somehow not, in Hillary Clinton’s words, “on the level.” And this campaign bore fruit. In a November 2018 poll, 67 percent of Democrats believed that Russia had changed 2016 vote tallies in order to elect Trump. One of the members of the House’s January 6th committee, Jamie Raskin (D, Md.), himself cooperated in a challenge to the results of the 2016 election. Raskin’s office shared a clip to YouTube of the congressman’s objecting to the counting of Florida’s electoral votes, and his official account describes the clip this way: “House Democrats challenged the validity of electoral votes on January 6, 2017.” In a statement declaring that he would not attend Trump’s inauguration, Raskin said that he had grave doubts about “the legitimacy of this presidency.”

The fact that Democratic office-holders have regularly challenged the elections of Republican presidents over the past 20 years does not excuse Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. And a mob storming the Capitol is far removed from members of Congress appealing to their base by engaging in a futile challenge to the counting of a state’s electoral votes. But this longer legacy of challenging election results does reveal the ways in which escalating polarization has assaulted the institutions of American democracy.

Here it might be worth asking why the House has been the congressional epicenter of campaigns to delegitimize the results of presidential elections in 2001, 2005, 2017, and 2021. And it seems a decent bet that structural incentives are a part of the answer. Political polarization has hit the House hard. Many of the reasons for this are outside the control of the House itself; the modern primary system, biannual elections, and more politically homogeneous districts all encourage polarization in that body. But the House’s institutional character also likely plays a role. As a majoritarian body, the House rewards centralized party discipline. It gives legislators fewer reasons to collaborate with members of the other party, and its dominance by the majority party’s leadership means that there’s less need for bipartisan buy-in.

The Senate has long been a very different institution than the House. As with the House, this is partly because of things outside the body’s control, in particular six-year terms and broader constituencies. But some of the difference might also be attributed to the institutional rules of the Senate. The protections for individual senators frustrate partisan control and create incentives for developing alliances across the aisle. The Senate still resists that tendency toward polarization and party discipline. Only a handful of Republican senators (almost all of them first-termers) objected to the counting of electoral votes in 2021.

Eliminating the legislative filibuster — the prospect raised by both the Times editorial board and Schumer — would undercut those anti-polarizing incentives. The use of the so-called nuclear option in 2013, which eliminated the filibuster for all executive-branch nominees besides the president’s Supreme Court picks, has already further polarized the appointments process. The elimination of the legislative filibuster would both represent escalating polarization in Congress and, very likely, contribute to further division.

There is the additional irony that nuking the legislative filibuster would actually increase the chances of disruption to American electoral institutions. Indeed, Schumer’s threat alone might hamper efforts to find common ground on election reforms that could otherwise draw bipartisan interest. For instance, voices on both the left and the right (including the editors of NR) have spoken on behalf of revising the Electoral Count Act to lessen the risk of a constitutional crisis. Why isn’t that being prioritized? A recent Axios report offers one possible explanation: “Some Democrats are concerned that making changes to the Electoral Count Act would reduce the urgency to pass federal voting rights bills.” On Tuesday, Schumer publicly dismissed an effort to reform the ECA, claiming, “That makes no sense. If you’re going to rig the game and say, ‘Oh, we’ll count the rigged game accurately,’ what good is that?” Creating an atmosphere of paralysis (a precondition for the nuclear option) requires holding back targeted bills that could garner a bipartisan support.

Just like there may be something self-defeating about destabilizing the institutions of American democracy to “save” democracy, there can also be real danger in denouncing the opposition party as an existential threat to the republic. The editorial board of the New York Times warns that the GOP endangers democracy in part because “party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power.” Yet in the same paragraph, the board itself likens the Republican Party to an “authoritarian movement.” Senator Schumer alleges that Republicans seek to “undermine free and fair elections” by propagating the “Big Lie” that “our elections are not on the level.” Yet “not on the level” was how Hillary Clinton described the 2016 election, and Schumer himself has referred to a “rigged game” in discussing American elections. In a democracy, to call a political faction “authoritarian” or a foe of free elections is to impugn its legitimacy.

The claim that the other party represented an existential threat to the country was, of course, a talking point of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6. The sense that democracy is over if your opponents win is a sentiment that can be used to justify many abuses of power and threaten the institutions of democracy itself. The politics of polarization and existential crisis helped lead to January 6 — and could lead to much worse.