Democracy is on the ballot
The 2024 election poses the starkest of choices, with the values we profess as Democrats and as Americans – justice for all, the expansion of opportunity, environmental stewardship, world leadership, the freedoms we hold dear – on the line. Also at stake, to a degree that has rarely been true of American elections, are the bedrock principles and norms of constitutional democracy, the foundation upon which all else is built. Most of us never expected to face an election of this character – but neither did we anticipate the rise and seductive appeal of a demagogue like Donald Trump, nor the embrace of authoritarian means and ends by one of our major political parties. It is important to understand these historic developments and the obligations they place on us as we pursue an absolutely essential victory this fall.
It was evident in the 2016 campaign, and certainly as early as the publication by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die (2018), that Donald Trump tested positive on all four components of the litmus test for autocrats:
Weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game. Recall the frequent, false claims of voter fraud and the contempt for constitutional and legal constraints.
Denial of the legitimacy of opponents. Trump perpetuated “birther” claims about Barack Obama for years, and repeatedly called Hillary Clinton a criminal, encouraging followers to chant “Lock her up.”
Toleration or encouragement of violence. Trump encouraged assaults on protestors at his rallies and frequently hinted that followers should act on their Second Amendment rights.
Readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Trump constantly threatened his media opponents with retaliation and demanded that the Justice Department do his bidding to protect his interests.
By 2020, when I produced the fourth edition of The Congressional Experience, Trump’s indictment had lengthened: delegitimizing and downgrading judicial, investigative, and security agencies; blocking legitimate investigations of his own conduct; abusing his power to declare emergencies, seeking to rule by fiat; diverting funds appropriated by law to pet projects such as a border wall; and claiming absolute power under the constitution. “I have an Article II,” Trump famously declared. “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
And then it got worse than anyone had imagined. As it became evident that Trump had lost both the popular and electoral vote in 2020, the point of all his years of falsely claiming voter fraud and rigged elections became clear: he asserted that the election had been stolen and set out to subvert it and block the peaceful transfer of power – anti-democratic actions unprecedented in American history.
Trump and his collaborators pressured state officials to undo or tamper with the election results, engineered the formation of alternative sets of fake electors in contested states, and pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count the legitimate electoral votes from those states. Trump urged his supporters to make their way to Washington, to march on the Capitol and do whatever it took to stop the certification of the electoral college vote. A violent insurrection ensued, taking the lives of five Capitol police officers; Trump delighted in the scene for hours, despite the pleas of family and staff to call off the rioters. “Remember this day forever,” Trump told his followers as the Capitol was finally being secured.
The sad spectacle of the party of Lincoln abandoning democratic norms and practices antedated Trump. Particularly significant was the “Tea Party” election of 2010, after which Republicans in multiple states, including North Carolina, set out to reverse the country’s progress toward an inclusive, multiracial, pluralist democracy. Indeed, our state was Exhibit A for these efforts, which featured restrictive voter ID laws, onerous registration requirements, restrictions to early voting, extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering, and the wholesale abandonment of the formerly bipartisan Voting Rights Act.
Trump’s presidency did not create the Republican Party’s turn to white Christian identity politics, but it greatly accelerated it – a movement anti-majoritarian by definition and increasingly anti-democratic in the means it required. By 2020, Levitsky and Ziblatt note in their new book, The Tyranny of the Minority, that “voices of conservative opposition to Trump’s extremism” had been virtually extinguished within the Republican Party.
These are the foes we are facing in 2024. And as grave as the implications are for our own democracy, they do not stop there. As former chair of the House Democracy Partnership (HDP), the bipartisan commission dedicated to building effective representative institutions in developing democracies, I am particularly sensitive to the implications of a second Trump presidency for democracy worldwide and for America as its champion. Trump has displayed only disdain for such diplomatic efforts, preferring an “America first” approach to foreign relations, rooted mainly in military power. His budgets radically slashed funding for democracy promotion, cuts which Congress only partially restored.
Earlier this year, I visited Guatemala with an HDP delegation, offering support to their Congress at a critical time for their democracy. President Biden is widely credited for the skillful diplomacy that resulted in the seating of a newly elected reformer, Bernardo Arevalo, as president, despite powerful forces seeking to subvert the election result. We quickly learned that these same autocratic forces are eagerly awaiting a second Trump term, confident that it will spell the end of international pressures to abide by democratic norms.
Democracy, indeed, is on the line. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Kamala Harris warned in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. As is readily evident from the Trump team’s Project 2025 and their candidate’s own words, Trump plans to implement the “unitary executive theory” that would give him unchecked power, removing the guardrails represented by the independent status of the Justice Department and other agencies, civil service rules, and the constitutional prerogatives of other branches of government. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the removal of civil service protections for thousands of federal employees and their replacement by political appointees. Even the military would be subject to political purification.
Given the chance by a reporter to disavow concerns that he would seek retribution and abuse power, Trump responded that he planned to be a dictator only on “day one.” We should take him at his word, and be assured that the assault on democracy and the rule of law would not stop on day one. The only way to stop it is never to let Donald Trump near the presidency again. That is exactly what we intend to do, giving Kamala Harris and Tim Walz a resounding victory in North Carolina and across the nation.