We need to build a stronger culture of democracy in this country. Caucuses and counting votes with smartphone apps are lesser symptoms of the same disease that gives us voter suppression, foreign interference and racist demagogues on the right.
I hesitated to send this because I didn’t want to reinforce all the false equivalence and conspiracy mongering. Trump and his lackeys will use anything to back up the lie that everyone cheats as much as he does. And the Democratic Party isn’t authoritarian like the GOP. But…
The problems with our electoral system aren’t strictly partisan. They run deeper than party. It’s a systemic problem that’s gone hand in hand with rich white male supremacy since before this country was founded. For all our talk, we don’t really have a culture of democracy.
The founders wrote about equality and democracy, but gave us a system of rich white male minority rule. We’ve been battling over those two visions ever since. And that battle has never been strictly partisan.
Today’s GOP is a hardcore pro-minority rule party. But Democrats, and the left, aren’t all hardcore anti-minority rule. Or we never would’ve allowed caucuses. We’d be talking voting rights and election security as much as we talk about the finer points of universal healthcare.
We’ve left our elections vulnerable to voter suppression, hacking and psychological operations. We’ve let them be abused by oligarchs, bigots and rapists. For all our progress, the US is still shaped more by abuse culture than by a culture of democracy.
medium.com/@AfroResistenc…
medium.com/@AfroResistenc…
“The abusive dynamics—the gaslighting, denial, victim-blaming and normalization—aren’t new…McConnell, Trump, and Kavanaugh are taking advantage of belief systems our country was already steeped in. This was always an abuser’s house.”
rantt.com/brett-kavanaug…
rantt.com/brett-kavanaug…
Taking democracy seriously means taking voter rights and election security seriously. But it also means rejecting the idea that some Americans are less American, less deserving of democracy, than others. That’s the abuser mindset behind Trump - and caucuses.
Looking at our politics thru the lens of abuse is (far too) useful. Take Rand Paul trying to out the whistleblower, while his colleagues justify Trump’s abuses of power and attack Trump’s victims.
dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/institutio…
dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/institutio…
And there’s not just one whistleblower. Reality Winner, Dr. Blasey-Ford, Kaepernick... In a sense, MeToo and BLM are whistleblower movements. They’re all telling us about abuses of power, and the way we treat them says something too.
theringer.com/year-in-review…
theringer.com/year-in-review…
Brian Phillips writes “Whistleblowers are the system-failure warning of a nation that’s changing from one thing into something else.” And it’s true that we’re sliding towards full-blown authoritarianism.
theringer.com/year-in-review…
theringer.com/year-in-review…
But there’s another way of looking at whistleblowers and the change they indicate. Our nation is moving toward authoritarianism, but it’s also moving toward equality. Because of people who are done with the abuse and are willing to stick their necks out to stop it.
Whistleblowers - especially in comparison to all the “adults in the room” who’ve stayed silent - are a reminder that good intentions don’t substitute for courage and action. For those of us who benefit from abusive systems, silence is complicity.
It’s not enough to not be an abuser. We have to be anti-abuse. We have to actively, publicly confront the abuse, whether it’s white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, voter suppression, gerrymandering...
They’re all different aspects of the same long fight between the America that tolerates second class citizens and the America that doesn’t. And we’re moving fast in both directions. We’re confronted with the choice between real equality and full blown authoritarianism.
It’s hard to see that fight going in the right direction unless privileged people with good intentions replace our passivity with actions, and stop pretending that we have a real democracy.
If we did have a real democracy, simply participating in it would be enough. But we have to build one first. And to do so, we have to use electoral and media systems that are flawed by design. We have to deal with friends, relatives and neighbors raised in abuser culture.
It’s going to take a lot of work. But it’s going to be worth it.
