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AMERICA IS NOT A DEMOCRACY  
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David Dayen
January 29, 2024
American Prospect
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_ The movement to save democracy from threats is too quick to
overlook the problems that have been present since the founding. _

, (Illustration by Daniel Zender)

 

Democrats have spent much—some might say all—of the last two
presidential elections warning about the threats to democracy embodied
by Donald Trump. The 2024 election is already being pitched not as a
choice about taxes or health care or social policy, but a final test
of whether we will have a republic or a dictatorship.

Trump is a more than worthy subject of concern for anyone hoping for
democracy in 2025. Last time he was president, he actively resisted
the peaceful transfer of power, a hallmark of despots the world over.
To the extent he and his authoritarian-friendly advisers
[[link removed]] learned
anything from the first term, it was how to neutralize obstacles to
expanding power. His musing about being a “dictator on day one” is
really not loose talk. The plans emanating from Team Trump to destroy
the civil service
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government lawyers to rubber-stamp unconstitutional actions
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personal enemies
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and even deploy troops on American soil
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truly alarming.

But something troubles me about that term, “threat to democracy.”
It has become a catchall phrase for resistance to conservative
extremism, and specifically Trump. Yet the deficiencies in American
democracy go back to the very founding, and the long arc of history
hasn’t come close to correcting all of them. The larger crisis we
now face is not solely attributable to an individual with malign
intent for our government; it’s more about the system of government
itself.

Exactly what part of democracy are we trying to save? Is it our
democratic legislature, gerrymandered and malapportioned beyond
recognition, with supermajority thresholds that deny rule even by that
corrupted majority? Is it our democratic presidency, which Trump
legally took over after losing the popular vote in 2016, and George W.
Bush in the same fashion 16 years earlier? Is it our democratic
judiciary, morphed into a super-legislature and habitually twisting
the Constitution to advantage those with power, money, and influence?

Are we worried about a democracy that can be so easily purchased,
where corporate lobbyists either win whatever they want on Capitol
Hill, or win by regulatory change or international trade treaty
whatever they don’t? Has this government, where the most important
modification of our democracy’s original sin, the second-class
citizenship of Black people, is now being steadily reversed by state
legislatures and the courts, earned our support? Is there despair over
losing something that has produced unequal opportunity, unequal
justice, and the conversion of economic power into political power?
Where can we find this democracy we need to fight to preserve?

No democracy perfectly distills the will of the people. But America is
uniquely terrible at achieving democratic outcomes. It’s worth
focusing our energies to repair that, because the alternative really
is too grim to contemplate. But there are only a few options here. We
can defend “democracy” as an amorphous concept that this country
has almost never lived up to. We can uncover escape hatches,
short-term circumventions of the rules, either to disqualify Trump and
the threat he represents, or to take action on policy challenges. We
know the names of these band-aids: budget reconciliation, the
Electoral Count Reform Act, the 14th Amendment.

But we don’t deserve to live as political Houdini figures, trying
constantly to work our way out of shackles imposed on us by our own
system of government. If a political movement is going to style itself
as the savior of democracy, it should also speak plainly about the
myriad deficiencies in our democracy, and what it would actually take
to fix them.

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY ISN’T VERY SUCCESSFUL not despite being the
world’s oldest, but because of that fact. The Founding
Fathers—primarily aristocrats, land speculators, and
slaveholders—had noble aspirations but limited belief in true
democracy. They distrusted agglomerations of power, whether in a
monarch, political parties, or the people. As historian Terry
Bouton has written
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Founders like Alexander Hamilton and Elbridge Gerry detested an
“excess of democracy
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dangerous outbreak of economic equality.

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They thus devised a system built for a small, agrarian country,
intended to make addressing social challenges extremely difficult.
Presidents don’t get to form the government, and the legislature
responsible for enacting the laws is elected at different times. The
framers wanted the House, Senate, and presidency to compete with one
another, to curb each other’s power, and in that competition to
disable the desires of the people, even if they constituted a
majority. Montesquieu, the French philosopher who inspired the
founders to build a system of checks and balances, hoped a government
so conceived
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naturally form a state of repose or inaction."

The biggest tell of how misaligned this approach is for the modern
world is that, when we periodically overthrow perceived enemies and
install what we call democracies in other countries, we almost never
use the core aspects of our own system. The federal government of
Iraq
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a figurehead president and a parliament, with the prime minister as
the head of government. Democracies installed after World War II in
Germany and Japan and Italy were given a similar framework.

In a parliamentary structure, the head of government runs the
legislature. Coalitions can collapse, but then snap elections are held
for a new majority that can adopt its platform. America can have
divided government indefinitely; since 1980, the presidency and both
houses of Congress have been in the same hands for only 12 years and
six months (from January to June 2001, after which a party switch
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the Senate), with the other 31 and a half years divided. Both Congress
and the president can claim popular mandates to thwart the other,
leading to unsatisfying stasis at best and perpetual crisis at worst.

In the last nine national elections, America has changed at least one
house of Congress or the presidency every time except for 2012. More
than half of those elections were landslides: 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014,
and 2018. Legislative action in those two decades in no way matches
these successive Democratic and Republican mandates. Bipartisan
fetishism aside, there are real differences of opinion in America,
which should be settled through elections. But voters keep electing a
new party to fulfill promises that are blocked by the structure of the
political system and its status quo bias.

Political scientist Juan Linz’s 1990 essay “The Perils of
Presidentialism [[link removed]]” makes the
case that governments with separately elected presidents are
notoriously unstable. American democracy sidestepped these showdowns
for decades, Linz explained, due to ideological flexibility among the
parties. Anyone pining for these “good old days,” of course, is
pining for the racism that was the principal reason for this temporary
condition. Southern segregationists with historical ties to Democrats
stuck with the party for much of the 20th century, with liberal
Republicans anchored to that party’s radical past. This gave
Democrats and Republicans separate liberal and conservative wings,
creating pressure for cross-partisan dealmaking.

After Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation and wrote off the
Solid South, politicians gradually sorted into polarized ideological
camps, and this brought inevitable, inescapable gridlock. That
conflict is built into our system of government, not the character of
its politicians.

America combines its presidential framework with first-past-the-post
voting, where election winners take all the power, rather than a
proportional system of power-sharing. Political scientists have
observed something called Duverger’s law
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which says that a first-past-the-post system with a single ballot
(rather than a runoff) inevitably favors two parties, while two-ballot
or proportional representation systems favor multiple parties.
That’s why third-party voters in the U.S. are routinely demonized as
spoilers, even “the biggest threat, I think, to democracy,” as
Barack Obama campaign manager Jim Messina recently said
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While we see democracies with both presidential and parliamentary
systems, and democracies with first-past-the-post and proportional
representation, America’s variant is exceedingly rare. Lee Drutman,
a senior fellow at New America, looked at 78 relatively stable
democracies
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the world, and found just four with presidents and majoritarian
legislatures: the U.S., Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Our system
is not replicated because it’s not effective.

THE FOUNDERS WANTED LITTLE TO DO with democratic self-government, and
instead vested presidential electors, chosen by whatever manner a
state legislature saw fit, with the power to exercise independent
judgment [[link removed]]. (In the
original conception, all electors were faithless.)

Things have gradually moved in the direction
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making electors _pro forma_ tribunes of the popular will. But that
creates 51 parallel and improperly weighted elections in the states
and the District of Columbia, giving residents of smaller states more
control over who wins the presidency. Today, California has 18 times
as many electoral votes as Wyoming, but 66.3 times the population
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It’s actually worse than that. Since college, I’ve lived in
Illinois and California during every presidential election, and have
been disenfranchised every single time. The machinist from Alabama or
the teacher from South Carolina has also had their vote essentially
extinguished. All four of those states have voted for the same party
in the presidential race since 1992. This year, conventional wisdom
suggests that there will be no more than six true swing states
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with two swing congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine, the only
two states that apportion some electors based on the district vote).
The other 45 elections are already committed to the Democratic or
Republican nominee.

Within those swing states, you can pinpoint the tiny universe of
voters who will pick the most powerful ruler in the free world for the
next four years. Campaign strategists
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consistently
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around 400,000 voters, out of 150 million expected to vote in the next
election. So about 99.8 percent of all voters are rendered relatively
unimportant. This has huge consequences for democratic legitimacy,
because swing voters do not always match the broader electorate. In
two of the last six elections, the elected president did not get the
most popular votes. The second-place vote-getter almost won a third
time in 2020, and could easily win again in 2024.

In the last nine national elections, America has changed at least one
house of Congress or the presidency every time except for 2012.

The rules for choosing Congress are as anti-democratic as the rules
for choosing a president. The 17th Amendment (1913) at least made U.S.
senators popularly elected rather than installed by state
legislatures. But the awarding of equal numbers of seats by state
continues to make a mockery of democracy
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A series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s determined that
districts in state and federal legislatures needed to have equal
populations, to follow a “one person, one vote” standard inherent
in the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Under this standard,
the Senate is blatantly unconstitutional, despite being embedded in
the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the House’s balance of power is today increasingly
determined not by the popular mood but by arbitrary district lines.
Only a tiny fraction of House seats are even competitive, with most
pre-arranged for Democrats or Republicans. And in an age of greater
mapping technology, redistricting has led to a titanic clash of raw
political power. As David Daley ably documented
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his book _Ratf**ked_, $30 million in corporate contributions tossed
into state legislative races in 2010 definitively changed who had the
power to draw district lines, and therefore the country’s
legislative output, for close to a decade.

Redistricting battles no longer end with the first map. In 2024,
Maryland, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana,
and New York will likely use different congressional district lines
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in 2022, due to changes in the political orientation of state supreme
courts, rulings at the federal level, or unresolved court fights.
There is also active litigation in Florida, Utah, Texas, Arkansas, and
Tennessee, and possibly Wisconsin. That’s over one-quarter of the
country’s states potentially redoing redistricting after maps were
already set. Somehow, none of these skirmishes address the fact that
the approximately 678,972 residents of Washington, D.C., nearly half
of them Black, are offered no voting representation in Congress, just
because.

Currently, all of these defects in the constitutional order wire
Washington for Republicans, because the party controls more small
states, wastes fewer votes in presidential elections, and maximizes
its redistricting advantage. Democrats control 11 of the 12 Senate
seats in true swing states, yet still need three seats in Republican
Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia to hang onto the barest 51-seat
majority. Similarly, the party often needs large popular-vote
majorities to take the presidency
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But minor geographic voting shifts or Democratic gerrymandering
victories could flip that script. Texas flipping to a purple or blue
state could lock Republicans out of the White House. So nobody truly
benefits from a misshapen electoral system, least of all the people.

EVEN IF OUR GOVERNMENT WERE REDESIGNED to resemble the preferences of
the people voting, we still wouldn’t have much democracy in America.

For one, you cannot presume that public preferences are reflected in
ballots cast. From the beginning of the republic, factions have
limited the universe of voters to those most inclined to agree with
them. Black people didn’t obtain access to this democracy we revere
until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and that law has been under
legal attack
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since. John Roberts’s Supreme Court, declaring racism over, gave
states the opportunity to suppress votes without Justice Department
interference in the _Shelby County_ ruling
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court went further recently when it ended private litigation
challenges
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the VRA.

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Voter suppression comes in so many forms that Black people aren’t
the only ones caught up in the dragnet. Five states prohibit student
IDs
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be used for voting, and some students are prevented
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voting in the locations where they attend college. A lack of physical
voting machines in poorer areas can cause long lines at the polls
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Many states, to be sure, are expanding access to the ballot. But that
is creating inequality in voting rights by state
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where your chance to participate in our democracy is bounded by your
residence.

Once lawmakers do reach Congress, the situation is arguably bleaker.
The Founders designed the Senate as a cooling saucer
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the hot passions of the larger and more democratic House of
Representatives. That saucer has been frozen over by the filibuster,
an accident of history that makes it so that 41 senators representing
a small fraction of the population can block all legislative action.
While historically employed rarely, mainly to shut down civil rights
legislation
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the filibuster has in recent decades become a catchall for a minority
of the Senate to impose its will. “In the Senate today, perhaps
alone among the legislative bodies of the world,” writes Sen. Jeff
Merkley (D-OR) in his recent book _Filibustered!_, “the power to
bring a policy bill to a vote by simple majority does not exist."

Filibustering lawmakers no longer need to speak to wield the minority
veto; they can just lodge an objection to shut things down. Even
relatively uncontroversial votes can take days, regardless of support,
as long as one senator is determined enough to oppose it. Sen. Tommy
Tuberville (R-AL) blocked hundreds of perfunctory military promotions
for months over Pentagon abortion policy; confirming each promotion
separately would grind the Senate to a halt. Lawmakers in the minority
know this, so they take every opportunity to run out the clock.

You can fill a book with issue areas where public opinion
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supports action
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Congress doesn’t act. Minority vetoes are partially to blame, as is
distorted representation. But there’s also the problem of who
lawmakers see as their constituents: the wealthy and powerful.

The classic text
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this comes from Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, two researchers who
found in 2014 that the preferences of “economic elites and organized
groups representing business interests” mattered far more for policy
outcomes than ordinary citizens or coalitions of public-interest
groups. There have been rebuttals to their data over the years, but
reality is on Gilens and Page’s side. In a recent interview, Page
said
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“When they say democracy may be failing, I would disagree. I think
it hasn’t been tried!”

Between 71 and 98 percent of U.S. federal elections over the past 20
years were determined by which candidate had the most campaign money
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This was enabled by a judiciary that allowed corporations to be
considered people
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purposes of equal protection under the law, a constitutional provision
intended to safeguard the rights of Black former slaves. Corporations
later obtained what amount to free speech rights in the _Citizens
United _case, part of a decades-long approach, as writer Corey Robin
has explained
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to reorient the practices of “the businessman and the banker” as
speech.

With creative interpretations and invented doctrines, the Supreme
Court has reorganized itself into a second legislature, rendering an
additional veto over laws it doesn’t like. The key strategists
behind this new order like to use the term “originalism,” linking
their perversion of democracy’s present to the inadequate structures
of the past.

Every action the government takes is now viewed through the lens of
potential infringement on corporate rights, pulverizing the will of
policymakers, who regulate and enforce with an eye toward not getting
sued. And corporations are in the room where it happens. Government
lobbying cost over $1 billion
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just the first three months of 2023. When the Dodd-Frank Act
passed—with the tailwind of a world-historic financial crisis
enabling a muted reform to barely gain enough votes—lobbyists from
the financial services industry called it “halftime
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and set about to shape the rules derived from the law in their
interest
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mostly successfully.

There have certainly been moments in American history when
concentrations of economic power were seen as dangerous; we’re
living through the resurrection
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one of those moments right now. But the relinquishing of antitrust
enforcement [[link removed]] over
nearly half a century prior has given large corporations far too much
political power in our democracy. Indeed, the very act of
concentrating business sectors leads to a loss of basic, inalienable
rights: the liberty to pursue your talents or discover new inventions
without being muscled out by an economic leviathan.

When success in American politics hinges so overtly on wealth and
influence, can the word “democracy” truly be used?

OUR SCLEROTIC GOVERNMENT NATURALLY LEADS the politically engaged to
seek work-arounds to get things done. For example, the budget
reconciliation process, intended to facilitate spending decisions, has
been turned into a one-time “get out of the filibuster free” card,
allowing governing majorities to pass bills along party lines.
Reconciliation bills must have a budgetary impact, putting an entire
segment of policy ideas into a more insurmountable category of
legislating.

Many would count me as guilty of an “end run around democracy”
mindset. In 2019, we featured in these pages the Day One Agenda
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a series of options to use executive action to implement existing laws
in ways that would solve pressing problems in the country. I
definitely cop to having a lot of frustration over policy gridlock and
congressional abdication of lawmaking. And I do see the constitutional
role of the executive branch, to “take care that the laws be
faithfully executed,” as perfectly consistent with making sure that
those existing laws are carried out with maximum impact.

However, I recognize that the line between creative statutory
interpretation for the public good and measures to simply arrogate
power to the executive can often be razor-thin. Last December, at a
time when Joe Biden was presenting his re-election campaign
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a battle to preserve democracy, his State Department twice
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lawmakers
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their statutory responsibility to review military sales. Both cases
involved shipments to Israel, and the administration cited emergency
exceptions in the Arms Export Control Act. But these were clearly
employed to evade legal scrutiny
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bars the U.S. from providing weapons to countries that violate
international law and human rights.

The emergency trigger was last used in the Middle East in 2019 by the
Trump administration, to hand over weapons to Saudi Arabia
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its proxy war in Yemen, which as in Gaza led to untold civilian
casualties. No president has a monopoly on expansions of executive
power [[link removed]]; you
could go back to Lincoln suspending habeas corpus
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rounding up American citizens
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Japanese descent or successive presidents making war in Vietnam
without a congressional declaration to find some really juicy
tramplings of constitutional law. War powers are violated routinely,
statutes are ignored or twisted with regularity, and implementation
rarely follows the straight line that legislative intent might
dictate.

Between 71 and 98 percent of U.S. federal elections over the past 20
years were determined by which candidate had the most campaign money.

But you cannot solely blame individual actors for lifting up the rug
in search of a trapdoor to flee the escape room that is American
democracy. If our government made any sense at all, you wouldn’t
need budget reconciliation to simply hold a majority vote. I certainly
wouldn’t pound the drum for executive action so much if it weren’t
practically the only way to have a successful presidency in the modern
era.

Government by random leverage plays is not a sustainable solution to
our ills. First of all, it enables escalating aggrandizements of
power, using the ever-popular “they started it”
rationale. Constitutional hardball
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as Harvard Law’s Mark Tushnet calls it, leads to chronic shattering
of norms and conventions, especially when combined with modern
political polarization.

We’re seeing this play out in real time. Donald Trump has taken to
describing Joe Biden and his allies, actually, as the true “threat
to democracy
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for attempting to hold him accountable. The conservative reaction to
the judicial project to throw Trump off the ballot
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per the 14th Amendment’s disqualification for citizens who “have
engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, is
that it risks a democratic breakdown
[[link removed]]. The
series of criminal indictments Trump has faced, meanwhile, has led
him to announce
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he will appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and
others if he returns to office.

There’s nothing new about Trump or his allies spinning attacks back
onto their accusers. He is depicting for his voters a politics that is
fully self-serving, where the rules matter if they benefit him and
don’t matter if they don’t. The problem is that even legal
constitutional work-arounds can often resemble this anything-goes
world that Trump wants to operate in, to justify his own illiberal
conduct. It can lead to public confusion or even anger. Which
democratic principle is a president willing to subvert? Why is
speeding weapons to pulverize civilians in Gaza worth cutting
statutory corners, but not ensuring that all Americans have quality
and affordable health care?

The observation that laws only apply some of the time breeds cynicism
and alienation. Americans no longer believe
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working hard and playing fair allows people to prosper. That learned
helplessness is reinforced by a political system where outcomes are
unconnected to majoritarian wishes. America has slipped behind peer
nations
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a host of economic metrics because its government is not equipped to
keep up. And when the public feels consistently ignored by their
government, they lose trust and search for answers in demagogues with
simple answers and familiar scapegoats, people like … Donald Trump.

It is true that even Western democracies with superior governmental
structures are suffering from crises of legitimacy, rising
nationalism, and the ascent of right-wing populists. Global
hyper-capitalism and neoliberal accommodation surely plays a role
here. But America casts a long shadow, and handing over policy to big
business was a function of the handcuffs our government places on
itself. Some people may recoil at putting the nation’s founding
documents at the center of our problems. But I don’t think it’s
avoidable, given the evidence.

A remarkable poll result last December showed that majorities of
Republicans _and_ Democrats believe democracy is at stake
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the 2024 election, for entirely different reasons. Trump
actually leads in some polling
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measures like “protecting the Constitution.” I would argue that
straining to overcome the sundry obstacles the Founders put in place
looks too much like subverting democracy for inattentive people to
discern the difference. And the chronic inability to overcome those
hurdles means that the primary threat to democracy is the Constitution
itself.

THE INABILITY FOR PRESIDENTS AND PARTIES to enact their platform when
they win is a primary cause of so much frustration within the
political system. The bind we’re in is that the kind of reforms we
need, so that people can believe that political participation means
something, don’t map onto a Constitution that locks the people out.
As law professors Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn have described
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a politics that asks an inadequate higher law to settle disputes
“inevitably orient[s] us to the past and misdirect[s] the present
into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on
what the present and future demand for and from those who live now.”

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I’d prefer a parliamentary system, with the president demoted to a
ministerial role. A House with proportional representation that gives
a portion of representatives in a particular district or state to
candidates who attain a certain percentage of votes would inspire
parties to compete on the basis of attracting voters rather than
demeaning rivals as a waste of a vote. It would also make
gerrymandering irrelevant. My top solution for the Senate is to not
have one; a second-best option would see it transformed
into something like the House of Lords
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without the power to veto legislation, just to amend with approval
from the House.

This setup, which serves much of the rest of the industrialized world
just fine, would allow multiple parties to vie for power, form
governing coalitions, and transform America into a functioning
democracy. Most of it is incompatible with the current rulebook, where
the president and the Senate’s powers are clear and unbending. The
Senate’s membership, per the Constitution, also must be equal by
state. And in their wisdom, the Founders made their creation almost
impossible to amend
[[link removed]].
(Lowering that barrier somewhat might be the most democratic reform of
them all.)

It’s tempting to say that we need a constitutional convention to
completely rewrite the nation’s governmental order. But that’s a
dicey scenario. In the meantime, we can also move toward the better
democracy we need by trying democracy for a change.

Abolishing the Electoral College, supported by the public
[[link removed]] by
a 2-1 margin, is one piece of low-hanging fruit. The National Popular
Vote compact would allow states, as is their constitutional right, to
band together and deliver their electoral votes to the popular-vote
winner. States with 205 electoral votes have already signed this into
law [[link removed]]; the final 65
electoral votes will be difficult to find but not insurmountable.

A popular-vote election for president would force broader appeals and
create imperatives among parties to expand rather than suppress voting
rights. (Enforcing Section 2 of the 14
[[link removed]]th
[[link removed]] Amendment
[[link removed]],
which as written can strip representatives and electoral votes from
states that disenfranchise voters, would also realign incentives.)
Perhaps more important, it would signal that the people have the power
to throw off the constitutional straitjacket.

If we don’t end the Senate, we can consign the filibuster to the
dustbin of history, so a majority of senators can pass legislation
they favor. The Senate can also be made more democratic by extending
representation to voters who are currently completely shut out, like
those of Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and other territories, to at
least give American citizens the unequal representation they deserve.

Increasing the House’s membership so that one representative
doesn’t speak for such a large constituency is an option. Congress
has the authority to set the number of House members, but the
435-member House has not changed since 1913; at the time, there
were a bit more than 200,000 constituents
[[link removed]] for
every House member, and today there are 761,169
[[link removed]].
This could also reduce the bite of gerrymandering, as smaller
districts offer fewer opportunities for distortion. Congress could
also require independent redistricting commissions to stop the endless
tit-for-tat of gerrymandering.

But Congress could also adopt proportional representation in the
House, through Article I, Section 4, authority from the Constitution
to decide the “time, places and manner” of its own elections. It
could create multimember districts and minimum thresholds for
representation. An aggressive Congress could even vote through changes
to its internal structure, making the Senate more of an advisory body
and putting a proportionally elected House in the lead.

What if the Supreme Court, in its self-appointed role as
super-legislator, decides that these changes remove our democracy from
its previous character and therefore must be nullified? Many Court
reforms [[link removed]] have been discussed, from 18-year
term limits that allow presidents to nominate a justice every two
years, to expansion of the Court’s membership. But Congress
doesn’t need to let the Court even have a say in this matter.
Bringing the judiciary’s power to review policy decisions in line
with other democracies by stripping jurisdictions
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restoring congressional prerogatives is an option the legislative
branch is increasingly using
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and it could rebalance the coequal branches and reverse judicial power
grabs.

We can and should make voting easier, through automatic voter
registration, expanded early vote and vote by mail, and universal
voting
[[link removed]] that
requires every citizen to vote. But a transformative democracy agenda
would also enable political participation _outside_ of Election Day.
Having representatives who are closer to the people and able to
actually do their job would give the public a greater chance of being
heard by their leaders.

None of this will be easy. The same high veto points that alienate
people from this democracy will provide tremendous obstacles to
overhauling it. But as Perry Bacon Jr. has written
[[link removed]] in _The
Washington Post_, being specific about the actual democracy we want,
rather than an abstract idea that doesn’t match America’s reality,
is more honest and more likely to inspire support. Voters in 2022 and
2023 reacted to _specific_ revocations of rights, like the right to
an abortion. They were not inspired by a generic rights agenda. The
way to save democracy is to promise to give people one in the future.

WE KNOW IT’S POSSIBLE TO FASHION an agenda like this, because
it’s already been done. In December 2012, the Communications Workers
of America (CWA), Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the NAACP launched
the Democracy Initiative
[[link removed]],
a plan to challenge the “democracy blocks” that stymied popular
reforms. It was fitting for this to come out of the labor movement.
After a decisive Democratic victory in the 2008 elections, unions had
a majority of votes in Congress in favor of reforming U.S. labor law,
but could not get them through a supermajority Senate. This roadblock
is the primary reason private-sector unionization has fallen from 35
percent to 6 percent
[[link removed]] since
the 1950s.

The coalition highlighted three key areas of reform: changing Senate
rules to eliminate the filibuster, limiting money in politics, and
enhancing voting rights. They actually notched some partial victories.
The Senate changed its rules in 2013 to allow for a majority vote for
executive branch and judicial nominees. Voter participation has
gradually risen in some locations, in part due to new pandemic-era
rules to maximize participation, which states like Michigan
have retained
[[link removed]].

The inability for presidents and parties to enact their platform when
they win is a primary cause of so much frustration within the
political system.

Larry Cohen, CWA’s former president, has used his perch as a
Democratic National Committee member to ban superdelegates
[[link removed]],
party regulars who get a personal vote in presidential nominating
races. But that ban only lasted until 2020 and will need to be
relitigated at the 2024 convention. Cohen also believes that Democrats
could ban dark money in primaries, which are organized privately by
the parties and could proceed under party rules. (An attempt to even
discuss this at the DNC last year was squashed.)

Cohen thinks the reform movement needs to build, because people are
losing faith. “That’s what [former Sen.] Tom Harkin said so
well,” Cohen told me. “He repeatedly said, ‘People are cynical
in this country because we don’t have a democracy.’”

The truth is that a few unions and membership-based organizations
don’t have the strength to carry home the more prodigious project of
fundamental transformation. It needs to come from a head of state, a
product of the democracy we have who lays out the steps to improve it.

Joe Biden’s first speech
[[link removed]] of
his re-election campaign was held about 15 miles from Valley Forge,
Pennsylvania, where the Continental Army sheltered for a long winter
in 1777 to regroup in its battle with the British. He eloquently laid
out his likely opponent’s contempt for basic tenets of democracy:
his failure to honor the outcome of elections or respect the
Constitution, his threats of violence against political opponents, his
vows to use political office as a platform for revenge.

“Today, I make this sacred pledge to you: the defense, protection,
and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been,
the central cause of my presidency,” Biden told the audience.

This presumes that American democracy was bumping along just fine
until Trump descended that gilded escalator in Trump Tower in 2015.
It’s next to impossible for someone with 50 years inside the system
to admit that democracy has always been under threat in this country.
But failing to speak that truth helped bring us to this point. If
defending American democracy is indeed Biden’s central cause, he
shouldn’t be so shy about pointing out its insufficiencies.

_David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has
appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is
‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’_

_This article appears in the February 2024
[[link removed]] issue of The American
Prospect magazine. Subscribe here
[[link removed]]._

_The American Prospect is devoted to promoting informed discussion on
public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue._

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