[[link removed]]

WHAT REAL DEMOCRACY MIGHT LOOK LIKE  
[[link removed]]


 

Jefferson Cowie
June 25, 2026
Democracy
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Any post-MAGA renewal of democracy starts with a federal right to
vote. But it hardly ends there. _

“The Fifteenth Amendment”, an 1870 print celebrating the passage
of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.,
Wikimedia Commons - Thomas Kelly

 

Pundits talk a lot—_a_ _whole lot_—about “preserving
democracy” in the face of President Donald Trump’s rising
authoritarianism. This is not the right call. Not because I disagree
that American democracy is under assault and we need to take action,
but because there’s a world of difference between struggling to
restore a defective political order and engaging in a spirited, long
term strategic fight for a real democratic future.

This is the problem of the authoritarian age: The liberal order gets
so knocked back on its heels that it ends up having to defend the
meager shreds of the otherwise indefensible. Such is the state of
voting rights today.

When contemporary commentators and politicians speak of
“preserving” American democracy, I ask, what is it they are
talking about preserving? The Constitution, with its near silence on
the question of voting rights and its core suspicion of democratic
values? The failure of the Fifteenth Amendment, which provided such a
truncated right to vote for freedmen that it led to Jim Crow? Felon
disenfranchisement that locks millions of people out of electoral
politics? I hope they are not talking about the system of
gerrymandering that allows parties to pick their voters rather than
voters to pick their party. They must also be ignoring the endless use
of the filibuster to destroy labor and civil rights laws in the
twentieth century, and how it has come to stymy nearly all legislative
progress in the Senate. They are clearly not talking about the
Electoral College that went from an odd historical appendage to, in
the last generation, a system that cedes the outcome of presidential
elections to a handful of low-information voters in a handful of
states. They are overlooking the zero-sum viciousness of current local
and state level ground wars aimed at restricting voting and engulfing
local ballot counting procedures in political chaos. I am sure they
are not talking about the latest trend: the circular logic of voter
suppression in the name of stopping a mythical scourge of “voter
fraud.”

As restrictions on the franchise increase, platforms shrink,
inflammatory rhetoric rises, and cynicism wins the day. Partisans cull
and shape an electorate to fit their own purposes rather than the
purposes of democracy. In essence, elections are not about the
interests of the national polity. They end up a chaotic, manipulated,
highly politicized—and often racist—state level affair that make
political rights a byproduct of whichever party can capture the
system. The insidious genius of it all is that corruption and
oppression can be dismissed as local aberrations. But the entire
system is a shambolic pile of local aberrations. As labor lawyer
THOMAS GEOGHEGAN
[[link removed]]
put it in Foucauldian terms, “We have a discourse of
representation” that to believe requires we “ignore the
Constitution.”

When, inevitably, the Democrats win back the instruments of national
office, they’ll most likely forget the enduring crisis of democratic
institutions. The worst outcome would be to proclaim that the system
worked and move on. One can already smell the complacency—the Trump
era is over, and now we’re back to normal. That moment should,
instead, be the moment for radical reform, a project to move voting
rights and enforcement from a patchwork controlled by states toward a
system of equal protection under federal law—preferably through a
constitutional amendment.

It is imperative to understand that the subversion of American
democracy is not a bad actor problem; it is a bad system problem. Stop
worrying about how President Trump will destroy democracy and start
thinking about how a feeble democracy produced him. The people are
better than we think, they just need a better system. Yet, as the
history of voting rights shows, we have frequently fallen short of the
needs of the citizenry, despite the maudlin mythology of “American
democracy.”

American democratic mythology begins with scrappy patriots fighting
off the British crown in order to create a democratic republic. The
other side of the story was about how a fear of the untethered masses
haunted the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The need to contain power
in the hands of the elite—and suspicion of the unreliable
“mob”—was therefore baked into the constitutional system.
Combine that with the need to appease the slave states, and the
requirement to keep the states knit together in a federated republic,
and we have a once-brave eighteenth-century electoral structure that
has long outlived its usefulness in the twenty-first century.

To understand constitutional electoral systems, one must read the
silences. The most deafening silence is an affirmative, federally
guaranteed right to vote. It could be argued that the language stating
that “every State in this Union” was to have “a Republican Form
of Government,” which appears in Article IV, Section 4 of the
Constitution, offers an implicit right to vote, but, as we shall see,
this has not proven to be the case. This absence is the fatal flaw
that plagues us today. When the Supreme Court ruled in _Bush v. Gore_
(2000) that “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional
right to vote for electors for the President of the United States”
until the states chose some kind of electoral system, it scandalized
the nation. But it was also the truth.

A similar uncomfortable silence dominated the Constitutional
Convention around the question of presidential selection. The
discussion typically rested on the presumption that the legislature,
not the direct vote of the people, would select the chief executive. A
series of factors—suspicion of the demos, giving power to small
states (though less important than people think), assuaging slave
states, and, towering above all else, failing to really think through
the problem of voting in a federated national system—made for a very
thorny procedural set of issues. Many ended up fearing that leaving
the decision of the presidency to the legislature would lead to
factionalism and corruption, so the search was on for some kind of
fresh idea for selecting the President. The founding fathers left the
problem to the last minute, and a committee came up with the
not-so-grand plan of states voting to deliver electors to a
“college” where they would deliberate and vote for the President
and vice president. Representation in the college would mirror the
congressional delegation in size: the two senators plus the number of
representatives.

As the voting rights historian Alexander Keyssar put it in his
wonderful history of the Electoral College, a “cursory glance at the
historical record makes plain that the system has not survived because
of the shattering brilliance of the arguments made in its behalf.”
Whatever scheme a state might choose to run its elections for the
presidency got funneled through the loopy procedural machinery of the
Electoral College. That system, which uses the combined number of
members of the House and Senate to build the power of a state’s
delegation to the Electoral College, exacerbates the already
ridiculous Senate system that gives North Dakota the same political
power as New York. As voting rights champion Richard L. Hasen argues,
both the Senate and the Electoral College “would be clearly
unconstitutional under current interpretations of the Equal Protection
Clause if they were not expressly stated in the Constitution.”

The subversion of American democracy is not a bad actor problem; it is
a bad system problem.

The result produces less of a national election and more of a series
of winner-take-all statewide elections. Even this framework might work
if there was a secure right to vote and states were divided up into
district level races. Yet this has not been the case. While slavery
was not the sole driving factor in the creation of the Electoral
College, the politics of slavery’s long, burning aftermath have been
the central element in preventing the College’s reform.

After the lack of a federal right to vote and the hastily constructed
Electoral College, the third key failure of democracy in the
Constitution was the Three-Fifths Compromise. Here was a special piece
of legislative insanity specifically designed as a sop to the
slaveholder interests. Counting enslaved humans as three-fifths of a
person in the census often goes down as an insult to the humanity of
people of African descent. By increasing the population of the states
by including its noncitizens, however, it achieved yet another
insidious goal: It supercharged the slave owners’ political power.
Ironically, the Three-Fifths Compromise was responsible for the
acrimonious and messy, election of the primary author of the
Declaration of Independence himself, Thomas Jefferson. Without the
three-fifths clause, the Virginian who was the great champion of
American democracy probably would not have been elected in 1800 over
the Yankee John Adams. “The Negro votes made Mr. Jefferson
president,” Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire famously noted.

Despite these three great flaws in the constitutional voting
order—no right to vote, the Electoral College, and the Three-Fifths
Compromise—the granting of the franchise to white property-owning
men did constitute the beginning of a democratic victory that would
begin to open the door to others who could make similar claims. By the
time of President Andrew Jackson, the right to vote came to include
almost all white men, making the United States the most democratic
place in the world. Fueled by the penny press, torchlight parades, and
fierce rough-and-tumble partisanship, a robust democratic culture took
root. Even moderately liberal historians agree, however, that
Jacksonian political culture was premised upon a national
“_herrenvolk_” or “master race” democracy that not only
tolerated racism but maintained racial exclusion as a foundational
principle. Even democracy in the free states, ARGUED ONE WHIG
[[link removed]],
“plants its heel on the neck of the abject and powerless negro, and
hurls its axe after the flying form of the plundered, homeless, and
desolate Indian.”

Racial exclusion finally began to fall during the “second
founding” or “second republic” delivered by the Reconstruction
amendments. The Thirteenth (emancipation), Fourteenth (equal
protection and birthright citizenship), and Fifteenth (the right to
vote without regard to “race, color, or previous condition of
servitude”) Amendments transformed U.S. democracy. The Fifteenth
Amendment went on to be heralded as the ultimate triumph of meaning of
the Civil War, even though its weak negative phrasing continued to
avoid an affirmative right to vote and left open an enormous number of
alternative methods for suppressing the franchise—including literacy
tests, poll taxes, or just plain intimidation and harassment.

The brief flourishing of biracial democracy during Reconstruction
collapsed in the face of white mob violence, a hostile Supreme Court,
and political neglect in the 1870s. Then came the notorious white
Southern “redemption” from alleged “Negro Republican
domination”: sharecropping, Jim Crow, convict leasing,
segregationist state constitutions, and the formal end of the Black
right to vote in the South by the turn of the twentieth century. At
that point, the Three-Fifths Compromise became a five-fifths
compromise as free Black people remained on the census but had few
voting rights, continuing to tilt the scales toward the politics of
white supremacy. As W.E.B. Du Bois put it in a perfect if oft-quoted
summary, “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then
moved back again toward slavery.”

“One of the Constitution’s most enduring mysteries,” as ONE
SCHOLAR
[[link removed]]
put it, is contained in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. It
denies states the right to count people for congressional
apportionment if those states denied people the right to vote. The
idea was simple and brilliant: Enfranchise people or lose
congressional representation. This powerful weapon sat on the desk of
the Republican Party to use against segregationist Democrats for
generations, but nobody ever loaded it, let alone wielded it, against
the enemy. It’s still laying around, unused, gathering dust.

After the sulfuric wave of state constitutions designed to
disenfranchise Black voters at the dawn of the twentieth the century,
the terrible logic of federalism and disenfranchisement was driven
home by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in _Giles v. Harris_ (1903).
Jackson W. Giles sought to make election officials in Montgomery
County, Alabama register him and thousands of other recently
disenfranchised Black voters. His complaint argued that the “whole
registration scheme of the Alabama constitution is a fraud upon the
constitution of the United States.” Holmes, writing for the
majority, offered a disturbing argument: The entire system was so
corrupt that the Court could not be a party to adding Giles to a
rotten system. Worse, he noted, that if the Supreme Court ruled in
Giles’s favor, the gesture “would be an empty form.” Holmes
implied that unless the Court was willing to take the drastic step of
supervising voting, as the federal government’s bayonets had done
Reconstruction, it could not realistically have a say over state-level
political rights. White supremacy was just too big to challenge.
_Giles,_ according to legal scholar RICHARD H. PILDES
[[link removed]],
was “one of the most fascinatingly repellant analyses in the
Court’s history,” that has since been “airbrushed out of the
constitutional canon.” This disappearance occurred not because the
decision didn’t matter, but because the entire issue of democratic
governance has not been taken seriously in constitutional thought and
practice.

The entire issue of democratic governance has not been taken seriously
in constitutional thought and practice.

The women’s movement grew up alongside abolition and civil rights,
and after generations of struggle, managed to achieve one of the few
expansions of voting that went relatively uncontested: the end of
discrimination by sex through the Nineteenth Amendment (1920).
Although there was plenty of fuss at the time—over the legitimacy of
its passage, its applicability to state-level voting, and whether it
applied to primary elections—the Nineteenth amendment, unlike the
flimsier Fifteenth Amendment, was one of the least contested and most
successful expansions of the American franchise. Yet today, in a
country that once came close to passing the Equal Rights Amendment,
discussion has emerged among the radical Christian right about ending
women’s voting rights. “The 19th Amendment was a bad idea,” one
Christian nationalist argued ONLINE
[[link removed]]. Foreshadowing
future actions to restrict voting, he claimed the need “to protect
our nation from their suicidal empathy.”

The next great leap forward in voting rights has proven neither as
great nor as durable as previously hoped. The Voting Rights Act of
1965, a legislative monument to the shoe leather and blood of a
generation, was the most significant federal intervention in voting
rights since Reconstruction. The act legally ended “the denial or
abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or color.” Yet
it still left voting in the hands of the states, only maintaining that
in whatever system a state concocted, they could not discriminate in
access to voting rights. For the first time, in 1965, it was
reasonable to think the United States could be considered an actual
democracy.

The Voting Rights Act included a “preclearance” provision,
requiring certain jurisdictions with particularly unfair voting
records to have changes to their voting systems cleared by the U.S.
Attorney General or the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C. Yet a
second, long, slow white redemption, much like the one following
Reconstruction, has since diminished the power of the Voting Rights
Act. _Shelby County v. Holder _(2013) ended preclearance provisions
and thus federal oversight. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that in the
South, “things have changed dramatically,” justifying the
evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. After _Shelby County v.
Holder_, the states’ rights model of local and state limitation and
repression of the vote returned with a vengeance. It has been
propagated by Republican state legislatures seeking to control the
process just as segregationist Democrats once did, though less simply
as a tool of racial control and now one of naked partisan power.

_Shelby_ _County v. Holder_ is worth pausing to consider fully. In
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, she argued,
contrary to my argument here, that a federal right to vote did exist.
“The Constitution uses the words ‘right to vote’ in five
separate places,” she argued. Those included the Fourteenth,
Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth (elimination of poll tax), and
Twenty-Sixth Amendments (lowering minimum age for voting). “Each of
these amendments,” she continued, “contains the same broad
empowerment of Congress to enact ‘appropriate legislation’ to
enforce the protected right. The implication is unmistakable: Under
our constitutional structure, Congress holds the lead rein in making
the right to vote equally real for all U.S. citizens.” While
theoretically Justice Ginsburg might be correct here, in practice the
courts and the legislature have proven her pragmatically wrong.

The post-Voting Rights Act moment was nonetheless propitious. The
Electoral College came close to being abolished. In 1968,
segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace ran for President with
the hopes of winning enough electoral votes to deny then-presidential
candidates Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey the needed majority to win
the presidency—thus throwing the race to the House of
Representatives. Wallace did not achieve this, but the whole thing was
too close for comfort. Back when bipartisanship was possible,
President Nixon backed Democratic Indiana Senator Birch Bayh’s
constitutional amendment to abolish the College. The House voted an
astounding 338 to 70 to send the immensely popular amendment to the
Senate. Then, of course, it hit another obstacle to democracy: a
classic Southern filibuster sponsored by South Carolina’s Strom
Thurmond. One anti-democratic mechanism trumped the reform of another.

The halcyon days after the Voting Rights Act saw further expansions:
the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowering the voting age to eighteen in
1971, the addition of minority languages in 1975 and physical
disability in 1982, and finally the National Voter Registration Act
(aka the “Motor Voter Act”) of 1993, which required states to
offer the opportunity for driver’s license applicants to register to
vote at the same time. This upward trend may have masked the deeper,
more problematic history of voting rights in the United States,
lulling the nation into a sense of infinitely expanding democracy. Not
all vectors were promising, however, as the Court decided in
_Richardson v. Ramirez_ (1974) that states, in this particular case
California, could deny the right to vote to convicted felons—even
those who had served their time and finished parole. It was the shape
of voting rights to come.

The recent _Louisiana v. Callais_ further guts the Voting Rights Act
by striking down the racial protections offered in fair districting.
It appears to be the final act of white “redemption,” as they
called it after Reconstruction, in the modern civil rights era. At
issue in the case were Louisiana’s two majority-minority
congressional districts (out of six), which had created a way around
the historic dilution of the Black vote. _Callais_, however, renders
the core of the Voting Rights Act, in the words of Justice Elena
Kagan’s dissent, “all but a dead letter.” It is easy to reach
the wrong lesson on the decision. The Court’s radical overreach, in
which partisan gerrymandering is affirmed while racial protections are
not, shines a light on the real problem: The United States needs to
get out from the endless project of plugging leaks in the ship of
racial politics and establish an incontrovertible and universal right
to vote—one that enters into a nonpartisan, equitably rendered,
system of representation.

The United States needs to get out from the endless project of
plugging leaks in the ship of racial politics and establish an
incontrovertible and universal right to vote.

A close reader of this schematic historical overview might note a
couple of discernable patterns. One is a three-steps-forward,
two-steps-back history of voting that looks more like a ground war
than a triumphant democratic narrative. The second is that no matter
what form the expansion of voting rights took, it was in a struggle
with the most enduring problem in American history: federalism, race,
and the lack of an affirmative right to vote. Alexander Hamilton hoped
that federal power would tame the states, or what he described as the
“infinity of little jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the
wretched nurseries of unceasing discord and the miserable objects of
universal pity or contempt.” His description was right, but his
faith was wrong. Hardly the “laboratories of democracy” that
Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis imagined in 1932, the states have
become a petulant swamp of electoral capture, racial repression, and
democratic subversion.

President Trump’s 2016 victory was a story foretold, if not in 1789,
then certainly in November 2000—when everything about the entire
dilapidated electoral process came bursting into the bright light of
day.

The 2000 campaign featured the stiff and wonky Al Gore fighting off
the affable but wholly unserious George W. Bush. Gore beat Bush in the
popular vote by 540,000 votes. Then, with every state except Florida
counted, Gore had 267 Electoral votes to Bush’s 246. One of them
needed 270 electoral votes to win. Florida held the remaining 25
electoral votes, but the Florida race appeared to have fallen into a
statistical tie. Television networks, based on early polling, first
gave the race to Gore, then called it for Bush, then said they
couldn’t call it at all. For more than a month, from election day on
November 7, 2000 through December 12 when the Supreme Court ruled on
the case at Republicans’ request, voting rights became an insidious
ground war. What shocked the nation was merely a Florida microcosm of
a system long overdue for reform.

We think of November 2000 as a problem of an inscrutable collection of
hanging chads, dimpled ballots, or illegible “butterfly” ballots.
The stock media image was one of election officials studying ballots
with magnifying glasses to divine the voters’ intentions. But the
2000 election was also indicative of how irretrievably, disastrously
messed up the American voting system has become. I’m not even
talking about the quality of campaigns, the money that corrupts the
system, the structures of the parties, the media game—any of that.
Just the electoral system.

The most obvious problem was the Electoral College itself. Swing
states dominated the 2000 campaign, leaving the vast majority of
states, large and small, completely out of the campaign equation. On
top of the madness of the Electoral College, an endless series of
additional problems came to the surface. As Al Gore aide Ron Klain put
it, “If I handed you how Florida worked on a piece of paper, you
would say, ‘This is a Third World banana republic.’” The state
vote was shaped by the suppression of voter eligibility through felon
disenfranchisement, restricting times and processes for registering to
vote, and an aggressive voter purge that removed qualified voters from
lists. The job of purging voters from the rolls was outsourced by
Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State and the co-chair
of the state’s Bush campaign. All sorts of errors surfaced in the
purge of 57,000 ex-felons, which most likely would have been enough
people to have delivered the state to Gore. Today, Florida wins the
prize for the largest number of voters disenfranchised for felonies,
with close to a million people stripped of their rights—the vast
majority of whom have completed their sentences but have failed to pay
various fees and fines.

In the midst of more than a month of political chaos in Florida, power
struggles filled the void. As Republican brawler James Baker argued in
the Florida fight, “Do you want to be ideologically pure, or do you
want to win?” The Democrats’ Warren Christopher seemed to choose
the former answer, looking to prop up a liberal order that barely
existed. One can draw a direct line from the ugly “Brooks Brothers
Riot” of Republican operatives trying to shut down a recount of the
vote, to Trump many years later championing the “Big Lie,” to the
storming of the Capitol. Vicious bullying always risks filling in the
failures of a robust electoral system.

In the end, the Bush campaign asked the Supreme Court for a stay on
the Florida recount on the grounds of the Fourteenth Amendment, which
guarantees equal protection before the law. But what might constitute
equal protection in such a case? Counting or not counting? If
counting, then counting what?

The legal complexities of what constituted a proper count and what
body got to pursue it (the state supreme court, the state
legislature?) mattered less than what ended up looking more like a
partisan power grab by the conservative majority of the Court. The
majority found that the many different vote counting systems being
used to gather the “intent of the voter” violated the Equal
Protection Clause, and it halted the recount that had been ordered by
the state court. It was a blood-boiling scandal that produced little
in the way of reform. It did, however, affirm that there was no
individual constitutional right to vote.

It continues to be a stunning fact, no matter how often it is said,
that a Democrat won the popular vote for the White House in every
presidential race from 1992 to 2020—with one exception, in 2004,
when President Bush won the popular vote against John Kerry during a
war launched on fraudulent claims. No wonder the Republican Party is
choosing electoral chaos over legal order. The present Trump-induced
turmoil, it is worth remembering, began in 2016 when President Trump
won the Electoral College, but Hillary Clinton beat him in the popular
vote by over 2.86 million.

What reforms happened after _Bush v. Gore_? Almost none, as the “war
on terror” quickly took over. The “Every Vote Counts Amendment,”
an attempt to get rid of the Electoral College in 2005, didn’t get
far off the ground. There have been plenty of other ideas out there
since. The “For the People Act,” a bill of major reforms that
would help rationalize this system, limit gerrymandering, and tame
money flowing into elections, passed the House in 2021 but was blocked
in the Senate. The “John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act”
would have restored lost aspects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. None
of these efforts, though, attacked the core lack of the right to vote.

Clearly, reformers have no shortage of ideas to repair the system, but
none will end the ground war. The sole best idea is to engage in a
long-term struggle for a constitutional amendment affirming a
universal right to vote that is not skewed by the eighteenth-century
logic of the Electoral College or the monstrous process of partisan
gerrymandering. One person, one vote, equally weighted.

Obviously, a constitutional amendment is an extraordinary difficult
thing. But the intellectual tide is turning. Legal scholar Aziz Rana
has recently shown, as the subtitle of his book _The Constitutional
Bind_ argues, “how Americans came to idolize a document that fails
them.” Jill Lepore, who directs the Amend Project, has recently
looked at reviving the amendment process in her new book _We the
People_. Law professor Richard L. Hasen put forth plans for _A Real
Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American
Democracy. _Anyone following sites such as the _Democracy Docket_,
which burns the midnight oil detailing the endless ground campaigns to
preserve voting rights, cannot help but conclude the system is
teetering on the edge. The National Constitution Center, committed to
nonpartisan civic education, has launched its _Article V: Amending the
Constitution_ initiative. In short, it is easy to feel the
intellectual ground shifting on constitutional change, even if subtly.
While Republicans are on the war path about voter corruption, perhaps
there is even a bipartisan space for a carefully crafted campaign that
unites people on the core value of democracy. The divide now is less
about red versus blue, than liberal versus non-liberal.

On the non-liberal front, President Trump was prepared to overthrow
the entire constitutional order because he did not win the 2020
election. “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude,” he wrote
online, “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and
articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great
‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent
Elections!” With such a threat from the then former President, one
might be happy to have the right to vote dispersed all over the states
and municipalities. The risk of centralization is that it could fall
into nefarious hands. Well before the current President, it already
had fallen into nefarious hands on the state and local levels. And had
there been a federally backed right to one person, one vote, equally
weighted, Trump never would have gained power in the first place. This
is why we need a federal commission on electoral oversight. The
Federal Reserve is a potential model here. As even the radically
right-wing Supreme Court seems to believe, the Fed must remain
independent, and the same concept should be applied for an electoral
oversight commission: a militantly independent federal body with the
capacity to ensure the right to vote.

President LYNDON JOHNSON’S FINEST HOUR
[[link removed]],
his 1965 post-Selma demand to Congress to send him a Voting Rights
Act, should remain our clarion call. “Many of the issues of civil
rights are very complex and most difficult,” he admitted. “But
about this there can and should be no argument. Every American citizen
must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse
the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily
on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.”

The problems with voting in the United States are such that piecemeal
reforms or restorations have proven inadequate time and again. The
prize will ultimately be to secure the right to vote in federal
elections under federal administration through a constitutional
amendment. This would include federally backed universal suffrage that
is evenly weighted without the antiquated and byzantine systems of the
Electoral College and partisan gerrymandering.

The true tragedy in this story is less about policy outcomes than it
is the erosion of faith in the democratic capacity of the people. Of
course, democracy is much more than the right to vote—it is a
culture, an ecosystem, a vision of self-governance. Yet without robust
institutions, laws, and mechanisms of enforcement of representational
democracy, liberalism fails. “A government without force,” argues
the Reconstruction historian Gregory P. Downs, “means a people
without rights.” We must at least consider that our current crisis
of democracy is not a crisis of the citizenry, but an enduring product
of the institutions that citizens participate in.

Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis is famous for saying
that the right to vote is “almost sacred.” In the abstract,
perhaps it is, but the intuitional processes of voting have long been
little more than profane. Unlike the immense victories of the civil
rights era, the future political paradigm will have to move away from
protected categories and instead speak to a militant universalism in
all forms—a vision that still allows for targeting marginalized
populations within an appeal to a right for all.

Preserving “democracy” in the United States is not the project.
Building it is.

JEFFERSON COWIE [[link removed]] is a
Pulitzer Prize winning historian and the author of, among other books,
_Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power_
(2022). He holds the John L. Seigenthaler Chair in the Department of
History at Vanderbilt University.

Subscribe to DEMOCRACY A Journal of Ideas
[[link removed]]   Donate to DEMOCRACY A
Journal of Ideas
[[link removed]]

* democracy
[[link removed]]
* voting rights
[[link removed]]
* U.S. history
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]