“Donald Trump Is Attacking American Democracy at Its Core,” declared the New Yorker’s John Cassidy; “Trump is the Worst Threat to Our Democracy Since the 1930s,” said the Washington Post’s Max Boot; “Can American Democracy Be Saved?” pondered The Atlantic’s George Packer. These were just a few headlines over the course of a month this fall, as numerous experts, journalists and activists urged their fellow Americans to take seriously the fragility of democracy in the upcoming elections.
But as any of these experts would tell you, the threat to American democracy did not begin when Trump descended on his golden escalator, nor will it end on January 20. The roots of anti-democratic policies and legislative procedures go back to at least the Newt Gingrich-led Republican Revolution in 1994, while the rightwing takeover of the judiciary arguably began some 25 years earlier, under Richard Nixon.
One of the major missteps by Democrats in both the Clinton and Obama years was their failure to combat the right’s procedural jiu-jitsu and flaunting of norms. Here are the top scholars and leaders with big ideas to finally fight back.
Some want nonpartisan change but are willing to take partisan ends to get it
Of those experts and scholars who have studied American democracy well enough to know that it’s crumbling, a fair number are committed to working on reform while fighting the good, nonpartisan fight. This group is best represented by the American Academy of Arts and Science’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, whose leadership includes Danielle Allen, director of Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics; Stephen Heintz, president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and Eric P. Liu, CEO of Citizen University and director of the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program.
The nonpartisan commission, whose members include New York Times columnist David Brooks and American Enterprise Institute Scholar Norm Ornstein, among others, spent two years studying the issues and published their recommendations in a report titled “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century.” The commission endorses policies like enlarging the House of Representatives, term limits for the Supreme Court, expanded access to voting rights and democratic empowerment plans like “pre-registration” for 16- and 17-year-olds.
Another big idea from the commission is federal legislation allowing states to implement multi-member congressional districts, paired with ranked-choice voting. This is the main subject of the book “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” by New America senior fellow Lee Drutman, another committed nonpartisan who sees the way Americans elect their members of Congress as a major impediment to bipartisanship and democratic representation. Like the commission, Drutman also recommends expanding the House of Representatives. David Daley is another expert supporting multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting, and like Drutman, he believes the practice could both empower voters and virtually eliminate partisan gerrymandering.
Daley is a senior fellow with the electoral reform group FairVote and the author of “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” (on gerrymandering) and “Unrigged: How Americans Battled Back to Save Democracy” (on the legal and political battles for fair redistricting). Unlike Drutman and the American Academy commission, Daley is willing to point fingers more forcefully, as his reporting and research have identified Republicans as the clear villain in the expansion of gerrymandering, with complacent Democrats as their unwitting sidekicks. Either way, for any of the big reforms to which Drutman, Daley or the American Academy commission are committed, Democrats are the only ones who share their interest.
Many experts recognize deeper problems and have higher ambitions
Of the scholars who rose to prominence in their defense of democracy, few shined brighter than Johns Hopkins University professor and frequent Atlantic contributor Yascha Mounk. Mounk, who has extensively studied the construction and decay of liberal democracy into authoritarianism around the world, has spent much of the past four years writing about the United States. But Mounk, who is German, has recognized key failures in American democracy that other scholars ignore, such as economic stagnation, the decay (or absence) of a welfare state, and the extreme distance between elected representatives and their constituents. Mounk is also less concerned by partisanship and more interested in cultural exclusion and populism, which led him to found Persuasion, a newsletter and media startup focused on thoughtful debate and political writing.
San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin likewise saw impending doom for American democracy as Donald Trump was elected president, but his concern was specific: Mitch McConnell could now stack the courts with Republican judges. Seeing the conservative takeover of the judiciary, coupled with Trump and the Republicans’ extreme procedural measures and attacks on voting, Belkin founded Take Back the Court, a group advocating for Democrats to expand both the Supreme Court and lower courts to overcome the Republican appointees.
For Belkin, expanding the courts is only one necessary measure to save the country; the Senate must eliminate the filibuster, and Congress needs to pass H.R. 1, a bill that would greatly expand voting rights, reform campaign finance systems and tighten ethics rules for all three branches of government. With willing and able Democratic majorities - no small ask - court expansion, ending the filibuster and H.R. 1 could all become reality in a matter of months; Belkin believes that Democrats must pursue all three or else the Senate will be unable to pass anything, Democrats will potentially permanently lose their majorities, and even if H.R. 1 passes, Republican-controlled courts will simply strike it down.
Belkin isn’t alone in his desire to take off the gloves. David Faris, a professor at Roosevelt University, authored a book-length plan for Democrats to take back power and permanently push Republicans into minority status. Faris’s aptly titled “It’s Time to Fight Dirty” reads like a wishlist for progressive activists: expand the Supreme Court and lower courts, give statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, outlaw partisan gerrymandering or replace congressional districts with ranked-choice, multi-member districts, and break California into seven blue-leaning states (yes, he has the maps to do it drawn up already).
Faris’s plans read like a mishmash of every idea for expanding democracy and beating back Republicans, but he has the willingness to say Democrats should do it all. Center for American Progress scholars Sam Berger and William Roberts have arrived at similar realizations, advocating for Democrats not only to pass H.R. 1, but an additional 20 reforms, like banning lobbyists from fundraising for politicians and requiring any corporate lobbying expenditures to be approved by 75% of a company’s shareholders.
With an ongoing economic and public health crisis, only time will tell if Democrats finally choose to make democratic reform a major priority in 2021. If they do, there are a few people who may have some ideas for them.
