Tribune. American democracy is in danger. We narrowly escaped it in the 2020 election and the machinations that followed, but next time we probably won’t be so lucky.
Since the American Civil War, our homeland has never been so divided. Progressives and ethnic minorities dominate cities and coastal regions, pro-Trump rule over the vast rural areas of the interior. These two groups have completely different sources of information. Social media algorithms are accelerating this division and hampering any national cohesion around commonly accepted facts – such as the legitimacy of the 2020 results, rejected by 72% of Republicans.
Population growth – by 2045, “non-Latino whites” would already represent less than 50% of the population – threatens Trump supporters who are trying to build a bulwark around what remains of their empire. In this, they find themselves reinforced by a political system derived from the era of slavery which institutionalizes a disproportionate power of rural conservatives.
First, through the composition of the Senate, where all states have two senators. While rural Wyoming, with 579,000 inhabitants, sends two Republican senators to Washington, California, with its 39.5 million inhabitants, sends two Democrats to the Senate. The electoral college transposes this inequality to the presidential election, where a minority conservative candidate can easily become president. This was the case for Donald Trump in 2016 as it was for George W. Bush in 2000.
Removal from lists
These anomalies distort political life, especially when the Republican Party remains subject to the cult of the personality of Donald Trump. Republican elected officials who oppose the delusions of the former president are faced, in the Republican primary elections, with pro-Trump candidates. The GOP [Grand Old Party] no longer even seeks to propose policies capable of attracting a majority of Americans, which would force it to recognize the defeat of Trump, to soften its positions against abortion [interruption volontaire de grossesse], fight climate change, accept tighter gun control, etc. Rather, its strategy is to further distort the game by suppressing minority voting and appropriating the electoral machine.
Since the election of Joe Biden, Republicans have waged a state-by-state campaign to subvert the expression of popular will. According to one study from the Brennan Center for Justice, eighteen states have already enacted thirty new laws that make voting more difficult: registration is made more expensive, voters who do not vote in an election can be removed from the lists, voting mail order has been made more complex, voting hours are limited, etc. Republicans justify these measures with racist lies about alleged attacks on electoral security, but they are actually based on an observation: as recognized Donald Trump himself, if access to the polls was simple and easy, “You would never have an elected Republican in this country again”.
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