OPINION | BRADLEY GITZ: What threat to democracy?


Along with the distortions, lies and smears (comparing foes of overturning the filibuster to Jefferson Davis, George Wallace, and Bull Connor), Joe Biden's Atlanta voting-rights speech featured an assortment of illogical arguments suggesting both lack of intelligence on his part and contempt for the intelligence of his audience.

The first of these was that failure to gut the filibuster in order to pass the Democrats' voting bills in the Senate would usher in a new, dark age of American "autocracy."

Since the essence of the proposed bills involves retaining many of the voting innovations put in place in response to the pandemic, the obvious question arises as to whether America was an "autocracy" prior to it, when such measures either didn't exist or not to the same extent.

Given Biden's apparent definition of autocracy as any elections without the emergency measures implemented during the pandemic, we are left with the conclusion that American elections were somehow insufficiently democratic in 1980 or 1990 and even when Biden won the vice-presidency in 2008 as Barack Obama's running mate (not to mention all those elections to the Senate that he prevailed in in Delaware dating back to 1972, a state which had and still has fairly stringent voting rules and few of the voting measures he now claims are required for democratic legitimacy).

To say that you don't have a democracy without voting innovation X or Y requires explaining what America was throughout the vast majority of its history without X or Y and why the presence of more drop boxes and still more early voting are suddenly requirements for a free, fair democratic election but weren't before.

It also poses the question of why Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were content to prosper throughout their careers in a political process that they have now expeditiously defined as undemocratic. Their new criteria for legitimacy raise questions about their own, as well as that of everyone else elected to public office prior to about 15 months ago.

A second problem for the "pass these bills or democracy dies" argument is that it hinges largely on a claim--that voter identification requirements amount to "voter suppression" and thereby undermine democracy--which runs counter to the concept of popular sovereignty with which democracy is normally associated.

Claims to be "saving democracy" don't make a great deal of sense when what you have identified as threatening it (voter ID) is favored by overwhelming majorities of the voters, including those whose votes are allegedly being suppressed (African Americans).

Democratically elected legislatures using the democratic process to codify majority preferences into law constitutes more the essence of democracy than an assault upon it, such that those opposing voter ID can be more accurately depicted as the democracy opponents.

People supporting voter ID (and opposing the Democrats' voting reform proposals) are not domestic enemies, they do not want to bring back Jim Crow (let alone "on steroids," whatever that means), and they are not engaged in insurrection or planning any kind of coup. They are merely people who, on balance, believe, correctly or incorrectly beside the point, that voter ID is a reasonable, easy-to-comply-with requirement and that the array of emergency voting procedures put in place during a pandemic should not necessarily persist after it.

Democratic majorities are often wrong about a great many things, and there are many things that are appropriately beyond the reach of even lopsided majority sentiment (such as the status of minority rights), but one can't argue that the majoritarian principle should be invoked to eliminate the Senate filibuster but abruptly discarded when it comes to fine-tuning election procedures.

Reasonable people can disagree in civil fashion over how stringent or permissive voting rules should be; more precisely, over how to best balance the somewhat competing considerations of voting security and voting access, but there is no reason or civility, and only demagoguery, when we label those on the other side (and by implication, even members of your own party in the Senate) as "racists" and "bigots" who, in Biden's astounding assertion, seek "the kind of power you see in totalitarian states."

No serious person, including our president, really believes that anyone who wants to vote this November will be prevented from doing so, or even be seriously inconvenienced when going about it, in Georgia, Texas or anywhere else.

So has Biden now declared that the 2022 election will be illegitimate if the Senate does not pass his voting-rights bills (as seems likely)?

If the answer to that question is yes, as his rhetoric would suggest, then hasn't he in one fell swoop done more to destroy faith in our elections than anyone before him, even Donald Trump?

Pre-emptively declaring elections you expect to lose to be illegitimate is a vastly greater threat to democracy than voter ID or modest restrictions on mail-in voting.

You are, in such a case, proclaiming a prior unwillingness to abide by the results of the ballot box you otherwise present yourself as defending.

Trump claimed that the 2020 election was rigged; Biden is now claiming that 2022 will be.

But only if the Democrats lose.


Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.


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