I borrowed the title of this piece from James Baldwin, the celebrated African American novelist, playwright, essayist and thinker. Baldwin wrote brilliantly and with prescient insight, in the 1960s and 70s, about America’s original sin: racism. Baldwin had also borrowed the title to warn white America that the completion of the democracy that Americans had begun in 1799 depended on the success of the struggle for equal rights then just barely started. This struggle was our last chance to eliminate the moral stain of racism and legacy of slavery and attain the real democracy we aspired to be. Baldwin borrowed it from a traditional African American spiritual which goes, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.”
I write below not about the stain of racism, but about the future of American democracy. After all, while American democracy will not fully flourish until racism is eliminated, without a working democracy, our hope of eliminating racism is lost forever.
We are learning more every day about our brush with an authoritarian coup d’état on January 6. And the more we learn, the more it looks like a real coup attempt rather than a Marx Brothers movie version of a coup. Members of Congress and Senators were hurried to safe places and a good many spent hours in dark rooms behind locked doors, hiding from groups of invaders who roamed the halls shouting threats. Most Americans who watched it unfold probably assumed it to be a very bad and dangerous happenstance. No happening so ugly and contrary to our history and political system could have been planned.
Well, the scales are falling from our eyes. As the media digs further into the event, it looks like there was much more planning than apparent of the sequence of actions and events and of the objectives, of at least some members of the invading mob. Sunday’s New York Times has a revealing article that traces a thread of behavior and actions by the former president Trump and some of his advisors that runs unbroken from just after the election on November 3 to the attack on the capitol on January 6. About 10 days after the election, the president, in a meeting with his lawyers (a cast that changed day by day) realized that he could produce no compelling evidence of fraud and that his efforts in various courts were doomed, so he would have to focus on “the big lie” about fraud to keep his most devoted followers fired up. A women’s group for Trump motivated by ‘the big lie’ toured the country organizing the January 6 rally, specifically choosing January 6 because it was the day the Constitution requires Congress to meet jointly to certify the electoral vote. According to the New York Times and many other public sources, a great amount of social media chatter between right-wing extremist groups discussed actions to be taken on that day, most of it very general, but some scarily specific.
Last evening came the news that the permit for the meeting did not allow the crowd to come anywhere near the Capitol, and at the last minute, the White House took control of the meeting away from its organizers. The fact of the permit not extending permission for the crowd to move down to the Capitol might be one reason why the Capitol Police were unprepared and undermanned to fend off the mob, and whether the White House taking control of the meeting also contributed to that is an interesting speculation.
Now, I did not start this piece intending just to assert that it was not completely happenstance. My intention is to argue that the role played by the Republican Party in the last two months makes it clear that it is now the biggest danger to American democracy. And the first inference to draw from that is as Joe Biden and the Democrats, who now control both the Executive and the Legislative branches of our government, have the greatest responsibility to reduce the Republican Party to an “also-ran” that will no longer have a role in shaping American politics. That may seem a gargantuan task in this era of great political division, but as I will explain below, that is what they will be doing if they succeed in achieving the aims of their agenda. If they do not succeed in doing that, the alternative is as the spiritual says, “the fire next time.”
Some members of the Republican Party were certainly part of the rather loose grouping of those who organized the January 6 meeting and intended it to overturn the results of a free and fair election won handily by the Democratic candidate Joe Biden. There is even the possibility that some of the Republican members of Congress were in touch with the invaders of the Capitol before and after they crashed their way into the building. The entire elected leadership of both parties were in the Capitol when the mob flooded in, and the session had begun.
The Republicans had begun their plan to object to the electoral votes of three states, and they ran in panic along with their Democratic colleagues to safe areas. After a long delay, when the building was cleared of interlopers, the session resumed and a handful of Republican Senators and most of the Republican members of the house still challenged the results, an empty exercise in futility, but indicative of where their hearts lie—certainly not firmly embedded in democracy.
But the great bulk of the Republican Party has not been firmly embedded in democracy for a long time. The Republican Party, which began its existence as the only serious anti-slavery party in American politics of the 1850s, the party that expanded democracy by freeing the slaves during and after the civil war, took the first step to unmoor itself from democracy and begin its long journey to its current authoritarian beliefs only 22 years after its birth.
In 1876, it traded its democratic credentials for power when it agreed to halt its enforcement of Reconstruction in the Southern (formerly rebel) States so its candidate for president, Rutherford B. Hayes, could take the office. The result, of course, was the elimination of democracy in the South—almost total suppression of the Black vote, legal segregation, repression of political and economic rights through force (the KKK, lynching). For about 90 years, the Southern states were authoritarian outliers in a democratic republic.
Since then, with many swerves and make overs, the Republican Party has become an exclusionary minority party which relies on voter suppression to maintain its power. Maintaining power has become its main obsession. It appeals now primarily to the that part of the electorate who are fearful that they are being left behind by demographics, globalization, modernization, and social change, and who look to conspiracy theories to explain their predicament and for power to bring their world back. The party and its core base were ripe for a demagogue like Trump with the mindset of a narcissistic authoritarian and a taste for absolute, self-aggrandizing power. It seemed for a brief moment after the January 6 coup attempt that the more traditional Republicans would pull the party away from Trump, but in fact, it is they who are now under fire from the majority of the Party and from the majority of the rank-and-file Republicans who make up the party’s loyal base (loyal to Trump, that is). This base still believes “the big lie” that Trump actually won the election.
The party faithful are urging it to demote the few traditional House Republicans who voted for impeachment or remain aghast at the January 6 attack. Any Senate Republican who votes for impeaching Trump is under serious threat. In fact, the bad news for all of us is that “the big lie” not only lives on but seems to have taken control of the Republican Party. This is leading Republican officials in swing states to use it as a reason to try to restrict voting rights even further; in other words, the minority party is seeking to increase voter suppression to regain national power.
There is no alternative to destroying the present Republican Party. If it remains as is and gets back power, democracy will be in serious danger. How to begin the implosion of the Republican Party is easy. Biden must succeed at getting his ambitious agenda implemented—controlling and eliminating the pandemic, bringing the economy, which has tanked because of the pandemic, back to full employment, and getting started on resolving the serious social and ethnic inequalities that plague the nation.
Biden focused on unity in the campaign, but with the Republican Party as it is now, I think that is impossible. He can, using some parliamentary legerdemain, that after his many years in the Senate he knows well get most of this through Congress in his four years. And he needs to get enough of it though in the first two years to ensure the Democrats don’t lose their very slim majorities in both the House and the Senate. In other words, what will ensure a democratic future in America is the same thing it always was—good, functional, effective, fair governance.
*The writer is a former diplomat, and is Senior Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He is also the President of Right to Freedom, a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization working toward peace and democracy in Bangladesh.
(The Friday Times)
February 5, 2021
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