WAKE UP AMERICA

My very good friend Jerry, who was born in Philadelphia, graduated from Haverford College, and worked with me in Philadelphia, just gave up his American passport and citizenship. He made a career in international trading and now lives in Geneva Switzerland, after stints in Hong Kong and Singapore. After pursuing dual citizenship and receiving his Swiss passport, he decided he had lost his affinity with what America has become and therewith his pride in being an American citizen. And he brought his belief to its ultimate conclusion. It was not for fiscal reasons that he severed ties with his country of origin, it was because he is repulsed by what he sees happening in America. He did not act on impulse, but after carefully assessing where he saw America heading. Wake up America!

America’s two-party system that has long provided the operational framework for public governance is at risk of morphing into a one-party system, not because voters want it to go that way, but because the Republican Party has patiently and inexorably rigged the system in its favor. It has been able to do so by taking advantage of the people’s reverence for the Constitution, even where it no longer serves the exigencies of the modern society or where it has been misinterpreted by the Supreme Court. By taking advantage of archaic provisions in Senate rules like the filibuster and in voting laws and the laws governing the composition of Congress like the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. By packing the courts with members of the Federalist Society. And by the process of gerrymandering Congressional Districts, to the effect that in many Congressional Districts the Republican primary, not the general election, decides who occupies the seat in the House of Representatives.

There are sensible, well written and well publicized, solutions to the imperfections in America’s public governance system, but today’s Republican Party has no interest in pursuing any of them, since they all would limit its inherent grip on power resulting from the fact that representation in Congress is adjudicated not on the basis of the national popular vote but on the basis of States (for the Senate) and Districts (for the House of Representatives). Don’t you see the threat to our democracy? Wake up America!

The American people have every right to be disenchanted with the way they are governed, or not governed. It is simply too hard to produce any significant legislation that deals with improving the lives of ordinary citizens. But do you throw the baby out with the bathwater? It is not democracy’s fault that no significant results come out of the Beltway. The fault lies with the two-party system that fails when one of the parties is hell bent on rigging the game and does not care about democracy. Under Trump, and even after losing the 2020 Presidential election, the Republican party has decided to do to democracy what Trump has done with programs, initiatives, and institutions he did not like: kill them rather than try to rework and improve on them. Cases in point: Transpacific Partnership, Paris Accord, Iran Nuclear Deal, World Health Organization, Obamacare (only saved because of one vote by John McCain).

The Republican Party (I deliberately stopped referring to them as the Grand Old Party, which it is no more) is running without a policy platform, only intent on blocking the Democratic agenda as a way of taking control of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, by hook or by crook. The Republican Party is putting the great American experiment, democracy itself, in jeopardy and not by chance, but intentionally. The Atlantic Magazine is spelling it out in detail in Barton Gellman’s article ‘Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun’ in the January/February issue https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/

The Atlantic Magazine is one of several media voices that are raising the alarm bell. At issue is no longer the difference in expectations of what government should deliver, which is a legitimate policy debate; it is about the functioning or dismantling of our democracy. In this struggle, the Republican Party does not want America to be leading the world in championing for democracy; rather, it is following the example of what authoritarians in Russia, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey have managed to bring about, a one-party rule in what is only a nominally democratic system. What irony would it be if democracy were to be smothered in the cradle where it came to life in the modern era! And yet, that’s exactly what we are facing. Wake up America!

My friend Jerry had seen enough. He threw in the towel and gave back his US passport. But he was already living away from the States and had found a home and citizenship in Switzerland. What about us, who are horrified by what we witness but have no choice but to stay Stateside? First, we should resist the impulse to fight fire with fire. The leftist rhetoric is as ugly and damaging as the torrent of lies, hate, and conspiracy emanating from the populist right. We can only protect democracy by exercising our democratic rights. Second, we need the remaining champions of democracy to stop fighting internally and seek common ground between the moderates on both sides of the center. It does not make sense to argue about a ‘Build Back Better’ plan, when democracy is under the gun. We need to sort out who is a (small cap) democrat and who is authoritarian and then use our votes to place or keep the true democrats in office. Democracy’s path goes through the voting booth. Wake up America!

There is a reasonably good chance that the anti-democratic, authoritarian, drift of the Republican Party will self-destruct. That the fire will burn itself out by intensity. That may happen when, with typical tyrannical abandon and hubris, the Republican Party will continue it’s ideological cleansing in the primary process. My bet is that they may go too far in putting up candidates for elective office, Statewide and National, who are unpalatable to the voters in general elections. The conventional wisdom is that the party of the incumbent President will lose the mid-term elections and the betting is that this will happen again in 2022. In a normal democracy that would not be a disaster. In America, in 2022, it would be the death knell of democracy. And yet, it will happen unless the election produces an unequivocal repudiation of authoritarianism. Wake up America and throw the insurgents out.