Up Close in Paris

The United States is a Republic in Peril

The insurrection of January 6 is over, but it is far too soon for euphoria. 

Today we have a Guest Post by Steven Wolfram, a college classmate.  He is an attorney who practiced with US based law firms, stationed in Paris, France. France established a republic shortly after the U.S. did, but France's history shows that republics are fragile.  Every French schoolchild knows this. Americans say the Pledge of Allegiance by rote, assuming that the republic for which the flag stands is, of course, unquestionably secure. We are learning better.

Steven Wolfram

Guest Post by Steven Wolfram. 

Writing from my perspective of over thirty years as a French resident, I can confirm that the sigh of relief in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s wide margin of victory in both the popular and electoral college vote was heard as loudly in Paris and across Europe as it was in America. At last, after more than four anxious years, supporters of democratic principles around the world --whether on the right or on the left. – could hope that the November 2020 election would be remembered as the high-water mark of Donald Trump’s threat to American democracy. 

Then came in rapid and ugly succession the unprecedented refusal of Trump and millions of his supporters--with no factual basis--to recognize the Biden victory, the concerted effort by Trump and allies to overturn a free and fair election, and then their active encouragement and engagement in open insurrection on January 6. The recent treatment of Liz Cheney within the cult of personality still known as the Republican Party comes as only the latest in a series of reminders that the existential threat to American Democracy constituted by the Trump movement is more powerful than ever.

The time for the euphoria of victory is over.

Until the era of Trump, while disagreeing vigorously on many policy issues, Americans on both the left and the right still believed in and relied upon a common set of fundamental democratic principles: The sanctity of the vote, universal respect for free and fair elections, and the need for a peaceful transition of power in accordance with election results. Now we can no longer rely on this democratic consensus. Rather, we must now face up to the harsh truth that we are witnessing the coalescing --whether or not by intelligent design--of atmospheric political conditions capable of unleashing an anti-democratic hurricane of unprecedented force in the run-up to 2022 and 2024.

The hijacked Republican Party has demonstrated that it will stop at nothing to seize control of the House and the Senate in 2022, most notably through voter suppression measures in the states. A broad coalition that is either hostile or indifferent to Lincolnesque democratic values has no qualms about putting greed, addiction to materialism, and fundamentalist/nationalist religious doctrine--whether sincere or only professed--above respect for the Constitution. Given what we have seen over the last several months, there is no reason to believe that members of Congress who voted not to accept the results of the 2020 election will not be prepared to do so again in 2024, potentially in greater numbers. Armed with newly promulgated state election laws, Republican-dominated state legislatures can now be expected to attempt to exercise new powers to overturn those popular votes in federal elections where the results are not to their liking --the principle of universal suffrage be damned.

 In some sense, it might be said that this storm of anti-democratic reaction is not entirely novel. Stripped of its reassuring myths, the truth of our history is that democracy has from the start been only partial and fragile, with its ideals often -and for long periods -- honored only in the breach. During the post-Reconstruction 19th century, the Republican (mostly) stampede for wealth in the Gilded Age opened the door to Jim Crow. And then in the 20th century prior to Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Party largely sacrificed Black civil rights to the political expediency of retaining the Solid South.

Since Johnson and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the full acceptance of democratic principles has remained in play. Reagan jettisoned economic equality but did not reject the sanctity of the vote. With Reagan, however, the Republican Party began the cynical embrace of the increasingly politically powerful fundamentalist movement and of the convenient philosophy that accumulation of wealth is a good in itself, and that the social safety net is more of a hindrance than a help. Reagan thus created the propitious evolutionary conditions for the growth of the coalition of cultural and economic anti-democratic forces that eventually brought us to the present crisis.

The US is, of course, not alone in its history of imperfect democracy. As the home of the Lumières, France quickly followed America’s constitutional adoption of the democratic ideals of the Enlightenment in the Revolution and the First Republic. But the struggle for the firm establishment of French democracy raged throughout the 19 th century, with long periods of first dictatorship and monarchy (Napoléon I followed by the Restoration) and then authoritarian rule under Napoléon III. While the Republic was restored in 1870 after the collapse of the Second Empire in the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War, only with the turn of the century did it begin to look as if the forces of the Ancien Régime had finally been exhausted and that democracy in France could at last become securely rooted. 

History repeats itself. After the Bush years, Obama was a champion of a bold new democratic vision and program in some ways reminiscent of the spirit of Léon Blum and the left-coalition Front Populaire in France in the 1930s. In 2016 we saw former Obama supporters turn out for Trump. In France, the virulent reaction to the Front Populaire from a Right fearful of losing its remaining social and economic domination ultimately facilitated the vote of dictatorial powers to Pétain and the abolition of the Third Republic in favor of the Vichy régime and the armistice with Hitler.

Will the ongoing reaction to the Obama vision of a racially neutral, multi-cultural democratic future lead us to a similar catastrophe for democracy in America?

President Biden has spoken clearly and eloquently about the threat to our democracy. But we are at a point where he alone cannot do all that it will take to avoid authoritarian takeover. Collective grass-roots action is required to muster a robust defense and to rally those who might be inclined to remain passively indifferent in their cocoons of material security.

We need a national, broad-based non-partisan pro-democracy movement akin to the civil rights movement that draws strength from all possible levels and sectors of society and from all citizens who will stand up for fundamental democratic values. It would certainly help if a transformational, providential leader like MLK, Churchill or de Gaulle could emerge to give this movement an inspiring voice. Whether or not that happens, however, it is time--at a minimum--to eliminate the filibuster, at least to the extent necessary to pass some meaningful form of HR 1 in time for the 2022 election. And the Biden administration must use all other levers of federal power to fight back.

Given that nothing short of the integrity of American Democracy is at stake, until the crisis passes we should be careful to avoid playing into the hands of the opposition with controversial positions on issues of relatively marginal importance. But let’s accept that, whatever we say or do (or not say or do), nothing will stop the absurd but predictable epithets about pointy- headed liberals, socialists or what-have-yous coming from the pro-authoritarian opposition. They are to be ignored or calmly brushed aside.

United in active defense of fundamental values, we can and must prevail.