Democracy is a Spectrum, II: 2024 and Beyond

This post continues the previous one, but as ongoing events are told from a different point of view than those of the past, this is a separate post.

Part I ended with the assertion that capitalists are the main power holders in the US, not politicians.

This is relevant to one of the most-discussed issues this election cycle, illegal immigration. Specifically, despite the rhetoric, it’s unlikely to be stopped any time soon. Illegal immigrants represent cheap labor, so wealthy people want a certain amount of illegal immigration. Labor shortages lead to wages increasing as the workers get leverage, and illegal immigrants are a weapon against that for capitalists. If Trump wins, there will be a certain amount of symbolic crack downs and unnecessary violence to “send a message”. It’s likely, though, that the Republican power base depends too much on immigrants for them to allow a mass deportation of the scale Trump has promised. This is not to say people should ignore Trump’s rhetoric, which is dangerous and dehumanizing, but rather to clarify that illegal immigration isn’t allowed to happen by accident, but because enough people, including wealthy and powerful, want it to.

The US population is not growing fast enough to feed an economic model that relies on growth, so immigration is important to the economy. There’s enough well-educated people wanting to move to the US, that the US can fill much of the quota from that pool. However, the reality is that while many Americans’ jobs are in comfortable offices, the economy still relies on real work at the end of the day. Much of that has been outsourced, but not all of it can be. Agriculture in particular depends on manual labor, so undocumented workers willing to do that job are critical to keeping the current US economy working. Interrupt that by deporting all illegal immigrants, and the prices of food will skyrocket. Illegal immigration is important to the US economy, just like legal immigration.

Not to mention, rounding up all illegal immigrants for deportation will make them more violent. Despite Republican rhetoric, illegal immigrants commit less crime than US citizens, which makes sense, since they want to avoid run-ins with the law that could lead to deportation. However, if a mass deportation takes place, that leaves illegal immigrants with nothing to lose. If keeping their head down stops being enough to avoid being deported due to federal policy, there will be little reason left to not break the law to avoid being detained. Republicans are lying about how violent illegal immigrants are, and about how much they care about stopping it, but if their stated policy is implemented, it will create the boogeyman they claim to be defending Americans against. It’s all a farce to distract people from the real issues in the US, as described more in Part II of the media post prior.

One of the demographic implications of more immigration is that it often favors Democrats, who are the more pro-immigration party. This is not always the case, as some immigrants want stricter immigration laws. It does make the US more diverse, and Democrats in recent history have been more popular with non-white people.

On the other hand, this narrative of demographics trending against Republicans has been talked about for decades now, but Republicans are still powerful. It’s easy to see this as crying wolf.

However, George W Bush in 2004, with a post-9/11 incumbent boost, is the only time a Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote in the last 35 years. If the US was more democratic, that wouldn’t have even happened, since Gore got more votes in 2000, and the Electoral College’s undemocratic nature gave the election to the less popular candidate. The same happened in 2016.

The last time Republicans in the Senate represented a majority of the US population was 1998. Despite this, Republicans have had a majority in the Senate for more than half the time since. Due to them being more popular with less populated states, Republicans are overrepresented in the Senate. Still, consistently since 1998, more Americans have wanted Democratic senators than Republican.

Republicans also do more partisan gerrymandering, giving them an undemocratic advantage in the House and state legislatures (the latter of which gives them the power to continue controlling gerrymandering). Their over-representation in the Senate and Electoral College, as well as playing dirty by shrinking/growing the size of the Court, while Democrats “take the high road”/shoot themselves in the foot, has given Republicans a 6-3 advantage on the Supreme Court.

Regardless of how it got there, if the party that’s been less popular with the citizens for over 30 years has a super-majority on the Supreme Court, that’s undemocratic. It is by playing dirty and eroding US democracy that Republicans have stayed relevant as demographic trends have favored their opposition for decades. George W. Bush’s speechwriter David Frum summarized this when he said:

If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

This is nothing new, though. Paul Weyrich was one of the biggest influences in revolutionizing the Republican party in the 70s and 80s. He co-founded the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that have played a large role since in setting the Republican party’s platform and writing the bills they pass. In 1980, he gave this speech in which he said:

Many of our Christians … want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. Quite candidly, our [Republicans’] leverage in the election goes up as the voting populace goes down.

One of the most important forces behind the modern Republicans said openly in 1980 that Republicans should try to prevent voting, another way of saying Republicans should be anti-democratic. To that end, Shelby County v. Holder, passed 5-4 by Republican appointments, discussed in Part I, allowed more voter suppression, and Republican states quickly increased their voter suppression as a result. Alabama and Mississippi already had laws in place waiting for the decision, and Texas and North Carolina passed voter suppression laws shortly after. Of course, it’s all no surprise since suppressing democracy was the main goal of conservatism from the start.

Today, one of the Republicans’ largest donors is Peter Thiel, who is even more explicitly anti-democracy. He wrote this piece for Cato institute, with the following opening:

I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good … But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

His case was that we should choose “freedom” (for billionaires like himself to do whatever they want) over democracy. He claims freedom and democracy are not compatible primarily for two reasons: welfare, and giving women the right to vote:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

Thiel is aggressively anti-democracy, and he’s one of the biggest players in the Republican party. He got his initial wealth as one of the founders of PayPal, then after 9/11, he got involved in the increased government surveillance by founding Palantir, the private industry arm of the NSA, funded in part by the CIA. Being a tech billionaire, Thiel has been involved with start-up incubators, where new companies are funded and advised by existing tech elites, who hope to control the next generation of tech companies through the process. Thiel used a similar strategy for politics, choosing two venture capitalists he worked with to bankroll and advise as they transitioned into politics.

These two political proteges of Peter Thiel were Blake Masters, who lost a senate run in Arizona in 2022, and the winner of the senate race in Ohio the same year, JD Vance. The same guy who’s now the running mate for the one who tried to prevent the certification of the last election to stay in power.

The Heritage Foundation, mentioned above, is a think tank that’s produced much of the Republican Party’s platform since the 80s. For this election, they wrote Project 2025, found here. It’s more or less a playbook on how Republicans want to further dismantle US democracy and further intrude on reproductive freedoms. Trump totally knows nothing about it, even though he gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation dinner, thanking them for “detail[ing] plans for exactly what our movement will do.” It’s also a coincidence Trump chose a VP who wrote the foreword for the book by the head of the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025.

Republicans want to act like the mainstream media is overreacting by saying the Trump/Vance ticket is a threat to democracy, but let’s look at the facts. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election by stopping the certification, something never seen before in US history, and this year promised to “fix things” if he wins so you “won’t have to vote anymore”. He called for turning the US military on the “enemy from within“. The few Republicans who tried to hold Trump accountable for January 6, like Mike Pence, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney, have since been pushed out of the party in favor of more rabidly anti-democracy Republicans. Vance is a well-documented puppet for the publicly anti-democracy Peter Thiel & Heritage Foundation.

Acknowledging a ticket has clear ties to anti-democratic influences is not unfair, it’s what a media with any concern for journalistic integrity has to do. Republicans are trying to spin a narrative that the media reporting on Trump’s anti-democratic ways is why there have been assassination attempts, but they’d need to look in the mirror to see the real cause. Saying Trump is a threat to democracy is a problem, but it’s not a problem that in 2016 Trump called for someone to assassinate his opponent? His second attempted assassin said he supported Trump at the time, meaning Trump is quite literally the one who told him to use political assassination to get his way. We’re supposed to act like he didn’t bring this on himself? We’re to be okay with Republicans’ decades-long effort at intentionally dividing the US and promoting guns, violence, and hatred, but draw a line at acknowledging they did that? Democrats repeatedly bend over backwards to remain civil towards Republicans who pride themselves on not reciprocating that respect.

Telling the populace who the Republicans are will make voters more likely to vote for Democrats, so in the twisted obsession with being “unbiased”, the media will act like this means the right thing to do is to make Republicans sound better than they are. After all, Republicans only have oversized power in the Senate, House of Representatives, Presidency, Supreme Court, and state legislatures, how are they supposed to succeed without also having the media unfairly benefit them too?

If you’ve paid attention to the 2024 election, you might have noticed that Trump isn’t trying much to appeal to people outside his base. Picking JD Vance doesn’t broaden the ticket’s appeal as much as, say, a woman or an evangelical like Mike Pence. Vance is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who disingenuously presents himself as a common man, leaning on his roots, which he wrote a book about abandoning to become one of the coastal elites he’s supposedly against. That’s a pretty similar image to Trump, another rich white guy acting like he’s not rich.

If you present the Republicans as a good-faith political party, choosing Vance would seem like a mistake. The Republicans aren’t a good-faith party, though. Trump’s plan is not to win by getting more votes, it’s to steal the election via voter suppression, intimidation, throwing out votes due to made-up fraud, stopping certification, using the courts, and stoking violence (again). He cares more about his inner circle being willing to join him in this effort than whether they have broad appeal. This was confirmed by Vance’s “damning non-answer” in the VP debate, when asked if he believed Trump won in 2020.

The binary view of democracy would say the US is still a democracy, so those complaining about authoritarianism for years were overreacting. Democracy isn’t binary, though, and the US has become less democratic in recent decades. Would you make the same argument when the gas tank dropped from 80% to 10%? The car’s still running, so those saying it needs fuel are overreacting? Just because US democracy hasn’t been fully destroyed doesn’t mean the country hasn’t become less democratic. If you wait until all semblance of democracy is gone to take this threat seriously, you will be too late, there will be no outlet to peacefully change things, nor anything left to save once you finally acknowledge the problem.

The history of the past 50 years has shown Republicans, and conservatives in both parties, have made the US less democratic. Over that time, the Republicans have become increasingly brazen in their fight against democracy, which is now completely out in the open. If you want to keep the US a free and democratic country, you need to understand this fact. The immediate course of action is removing Republicans from power by voting for Democrats, but we also shouldn’t expect that voting for anyone will actually make things more democratic. It’s never worked that way. Freedom and democracy are only ever taken by the masses, not given by the politicians. Democracy is hard work.

Republicans are an active threat to democracy, and the best way most Americans have to help stop them is by voting for Democrats in this and foreseeable future elections. Voting for Democrats, however, is not “saving democracy”, it’s just avoiding another blow from authoritarian forces. Another one is always coming. With less democratic power through civic, labor, and political organizations, it’s harder to soften the blow. Voting is left as the only democratic mechanism people feel like they have.

Voting in the US thus becomes defensive. The ball’s so far to the authoritarian side that every election is like defending a shot on goal. Hence, every election is presented as an existential threat to democracy. Of course, saying that is also a good way to energize supporters, so both parties will use similar rhetoric.

You can’t win by only being on the defensive, though. It is critical to defend the shot on goal, by voting for Democrats and urging others to join. Just as importantly, an offensive strategy needs to be developed. That may sound radical, but it’s far from it.

The foundation of democratic representation is organizing, and that starts with the basics. The “offensive strategy” being suggested begins with getting involved in your communities, whether it’s a neighborhood, work place, social club, or church, to name a few.

It’s always a good idea to stay on good terms with your neighbors, if possible. It’s especially good to have people you engage in some form of trade with. Ideally, it’ll take the form of friends just doing what friends do, but even more transactional connections are important. These can range from a gardener trading produce for a handyman to fix a leak, to good ol’ knowing a guy who will do good roof work for an honest price. The internet, smart phones, Amazon, and more have made it easier to not rely on these sorts of social bonds, but they’re highly important for building a social fabric. That social fabric is the foundation democratic representation is formed on. Leaning on your community instead of large corporations is almost always a good thing. Whatever the future holds, people will always be better off with strong communities.

It’s not so easy to unify in a country being intentionally divided, though. One good step is becoming informed about how and why the division is being promoted. Part I of this post described the role capitalists and the government play in that process, and Part II of the media post before it covered the media’s role. Knowing the motivation behind and tactics of the effort to divide Americans will help to identify and neutralize rhetoric from the media, politicians, and corporations that’s intended to divide, not inform.

In summary, vote for Democrats, but also talk to your neighbors, start a club, grow food, love one another, and rely on each other. That will make it easier to cross whatever the next bridge is.

Likely another “existential threat.”