The biggest battle for the survival of American democracy is before us now.
We
stand on the threshold of momentous change in this nation. While it’s rarely
discussed in this frame, the next two elections will almost certainly determine
what form of government we’ll have for at least a generation.
Will
America become more free and democratic, or will we devolve into a 21st century
form of Trumpy fascism?
The
Democratic Party is institutionally committed to America finally realizing a
republican form of democracy, rejecting
gerrymanders and voter suppression while embracing the kind of
“maximum participation” ease of voting seen in every other advanced democracy
in the world.
Three
significant pieces of legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s gutting of the
Voting Rights Act and protect the integrity of the vote have passed the House
and if Democratic Leadership (looking at you, Biden and Schumer) can get them
through the Senate there is a vastly improved chance for the survival of our
form of government.
Additionally,
most federally elected Democrats support strengthening our democracy by ending
the filibuster in the Senate and adding at least Washington, DC as a new state
(with high support for Puerto Rico as well).
But
do Democrats have the will and power to fight a battle against financially
well-armed rightwing billionaires and their predatory and polluting industries?
The
Republican Party, having openly given up on democracy, is trying through
gerrymandering, voter suppression and election rigging to seize and hold
control of our nation against the will of the majority of
America’s voters.
Calling
it a “slow motion insurrection,” the Associated Press
reports how the GOP is taking over election systems across
America with the explicit goal of refusing to certify elections that they lose
in 2022 and 2024.
“Never
in the country’s modern history,” the AP notes, “has a a major party sought to
turn the administration of elections into an explicitly partisan act.”
In
the process, the Republican Party has put fascism on the ballot in 2022 and
2024.
Benito Mussolini pioneered this system back in the 1920s, synthesizing it out of the most corrupt eras of the declining Roman Empire, and named it after the fasces, the ancient symbol of that empire.
A
single thin stick is easily broken. But when you bundle a dozen or more
of them together and wrap them with a leather strap, they are collectively
unbreakable without enormous effort.
When
Mussolini put forward the fasces as the symbol for his new
Italian movement, however, the bundle of sticks he had in mind weren’t the
people: they were Italian corporations and the wealthy elite who owned and ran
them.
As
the dictionary notes, the system of government Mussolini reinvented
was called fascism and prescribed merging the interests of
giant corporations and their leaders with the power of the state. It is,
literally, “the merging of state and business leadership…”
Such
a merger was explicitly rejected by the Founders of this nation and the Framers
of the Constitution, who had just fought a war against Britain and its largest
and most profitable corporation, the East India Company.
Thomas
Paine said it best: we created government to serve We, The People first
and foremost.
“[I]ndividuals
themselves,” he wrote in The Rights of
Man in 1791, “entered into a compact with each
other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which
governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a
right to exist.” [italics added]
As
the Declaration of Independence says: “That to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed…”
But
even in the early years of our republic those who’d accumulated great wealth
tried to step in to take it over to promote their own interests.
Then-retired
President Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter to Samuel Kerchival what today
would be considered a blistering attack on corporate power:
“Those
seeking profits,” he wrote, “were they given total freedom, would not be the
ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has
always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in
government. … I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich,
are our dependence for continued freedom.”
Corporate
power has always been influential in America, but five “conservatives” on the
Supreme Court elevated it to a near-Mussolini level in their Citizens United decision,
opening the door for the GOP to embrace an Americanized version of Mussolini’s
idea:
The
“conservatives” on the Court first ruled that billionaires buying politicians
was “free speech” instead of “bribery” (Buckley 1976 and Citizens United 2010).
They
then unleashed corporate power, ruling that corporations are “persons” with
“rights” under the Bill of Rights, including the “free speech” and “assembly”
rights to “petition the government” and financially support politicians (Bellotti
1978 and Citizens United 2010).
Yes,
as Mitt Romney famously said,
“Corporations are people, my friend.” All because a handful of
lifetime-appointed right-wingers on the Supreme Court decided it would help
their wealthy patrons.
In Justice John
Paul Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United,
he pointed out how absurd this reasoning was: corporations in their modern form
didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written in 1787.
“All
general business corporation statutes appear to date from well after 1800,”
Stevens pointed out to his conservative colleagues on the Court. “The Framers
thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in
the service of the public welfare. … [T]hey are not themselves members of ‘We
the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”
As
if he were looking at today’s corporations that daily tell Congress what to
pass and what to block, Stevens added:
“Politicians
who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances
may be cowed into silence about that corporation.”
When
Ronald Reagan came into office and began America’s turn toward neoliberal
oligarchy there wasn’t a single billionaire in America because, in part, the
top 74% income tax rate prevented that kind of wealth accumulation.
Regardless of inflation since then, in 1980 nobody controlled
a fortune on the order of American oligarchs like Bezos or Musk do today.
Instead,
wealth flowed to working people, producing in the 1940-1980 era the richest and
broadest middle class in world history.
Similarly,
as Lee Drutman
documents for The Atlantic, before the Supreme
Court got into the act corporations generally avoided participating in politics
beyond routine PR.
“[V]ery
few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the 1970s,” he
writes. “To the extent that businesses did lobby in the 1950s and 1960s
(typically through associations), they were clumsy and ineffective.”
Today
lobbyists spend over $3 billion a year buying and selling votes and
legislation, which has destroyed Americans’ faith in government and brought us
to this crisis.
Thanks
to five “conservatives” on the Supreme Court, we are now well down the road to
a final “merging of state and business leadership.”
At
the same time, as Chauncey DeVega
brilliantly notes at Salon:
Domestic
terrorism experts have also warned that right-wing extremists and paramilitary
groups are organizing on the local and state level to intimidate, harass and
target “liberals,” Black and brown people, Muslims, Jews, immigrant communities
and others deemed to be their enemies.
This
is part of a nationwide campaign by Republican fascists and the larger white
right to attack American democracy on the local and state level in order to
facilitate Trump’s return to power (or the “election” of his designated
successor).
When
the ever-cautious National Public Radio runs a headline that
says: “Retired general
warns the U.S. military could lead a coup after the 2024 election”
you know we’re in deep trouble.
The
biggest battle for the survival of American democracy is before us now.
Authoritarian
forces have seized control of the GOP and are committed to ending democracy in
this country, replacing it with an Orbán-like
Hungary-style merger of corporate and state leadership.
January
6th is now openly viewed by Trump’s followers as a rehearsal for 2024 as they
fine-tune vote-counting systems and elect toadies who will bend to their will
and change election outcomes the next time voters reject them.
John
Hennen, professor emeritus of history at Kentucky’s Morehead State University,
nailed it when he said,
“We must build a democratic resistance that amounts to a counter-fascist coup…”
Every
American who cares about freedom, self-governance, and the ideal of democracy
must now rise to the occasion. The upcoming elections will be political wars
with stakes unlike those seen by any living citizens.
The
good news is that, increasingly, both our media and elected Democrats (and
former Republicans) are calling this out for what it is, a naked assault on our
system of government itself.
But
will it be enough? That will depend on Democratic turnout.
Professor
Hennen’s colleague, Brian Clardy, a Murray State University history professor
emeritus tells us
straight up: “The Democrats have to remind people that next
year and in 2024, democracy itself will be on trial.”
And
21st century fascism will be there right beside it, under the “R” column on the
ballot.
Our
work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to
republish and share widely.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.