Can you reject the notion that Democrats have cornered the issue of American democracy? Yes you can.
David Greene, the former host of NPR’s All Things Considered, is struggling to reconcile his deep and commendable civic convictions with the demands of the journalistic enterprise. He’s in luck; these two creedal associations are not in conflict with one another. At least, not unless he needs them to be. But Greene seems to have determined that, when it comes to Donald Trump, one or the other has to go.
“I, as a journalist, believe in democracy. I support democracy,” Greene told the hosts of the Left, Right & Center podcast. And if democracy is on the ballot in 2024, as the Biden campaign insists, it’s incumbent on those who share his affinity for popular self-government to join the side they’re already on.
I believe that Donald Trump is very transparently and pretty brazenly, acting anti-democratic in a lot of ways right now — when he talks about his plans to dismantle institutions, to pack the federal bureaucracy with people who support him. I mean, he has praised authoritarian leaders around the world. So, I think the bind that a lot of journalists are in is, how can we be passionate believers in democracy and not be biased in a presidential election?
“Can you believe in democracy without being pro-Biden?” Greene pondered in conclusion.
There is a well-documented temptation among partisan voters on both sides of the aisle to attribute their adversaries’ political views and preferences to bad faith. They do not understand how their opponents could arrive at the conclusions they reach, and so they assume that irrationality or malign intent are at work. There’s evidence of that phenomenon in Greene’s unstated but apparent belief that Democrats have cornered the issue of American democracy. After all, how could anyone honestly believe otherwise?
Trump supporters should not be so quick to dismiss outright the Americans who conclude that the former president’s efforts to rewrite a handful of articles and amendments to the Constitution on the fly in the effort to retain power render him a genuine menace. But nor should Greene and those who share his political affinities assume that Republicans have no basis for their view that Democrats represent the greater threat to the American experiment.
The polling on the issue routinely demonstrates that most Republicans and Democrats are convinced that American democracy hangs in the balance this fall. And when pollsters press Republicans for specifics, many self-described GOP voters cite allegations of electoral malfeasance that supposedly cost Trump his reelection in 2020 but that neither he nor his allies have been able to prove. And yet, it’s foolish to attribute all of the GOP’s concerns to the conspiracy theories retailed by their party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
In the post-Trump era, Democrats — not wild-eyed progressives, but the party’s congressional leadership — have entertained legislative efforts to federalize elections, which are presently conducted at the state and municipal level. That same initiative would have assigned the process of redistricting to independent commissions, stripping local officials of the authority to redraw their respective state’s districts. What advocates of that proposal insist is merely an effort to outright ban “partisan gerrymandering,” its opponents call an attempt to “end community representation” by taking reapportionment out of the hands of elected officials responsible to voters.
Even if they don’t share the progressive Left’s affection for court-packing schemes, the Democratic Party’s leading lights don’t inspire confidence when they conflate FDR-style efforts to transform the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for a president’s agenda with the unremarkable act of filling vacancies on the bench. “The only court-packing going on right now is going on with Republicans packing the Court now,” President Biden said during the 2020 campaign. “It’s not constitutional what they’re doing.” What purpose does this outright lie serve other than to establish the narrative that Court-packing isn’t an escalation but a reciprocal response to Republican perfidy?
Dispiritingly enough, these are parochial concerns. There’s little indication that the average Republican voter is preoccupied with basic American civic hygiene. Democrats, by contrast, routinely rate the threat to American democracy high on their list of political priorities. That is to be expected given the degree to which the Democratic Party increasingly relies on a coalition that has become top-heavy with degree holders. “Democracy” is one of those issues that American Enterprise Institute scholar Ruy Teixeira derides as “boutique” because of their lack of salience among voters whose foremost concerns have to do with their physical and financial security. But just as the Democratic Party has become increasingly glutted with the products of higher education, so, too, have media outlets. It’s no surprise that Biden’s reelection themes register primarily with the fourth estate.
Fortunately, reporters are not called upon to arbitrate the validity of Joe Biden’s campaign themes. Journalists and media personalities are under no professional or ethical obligation to sacrifice the ideal of objectivity in deference to their civic scruples. Indeed, observing the principle of objectivity muddies the narratives the Biden campaign promulgates, which should help Greene navigate his moral quandary.