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Several times in November I argued the critical importance of Democrats embracing a Democracy Agenda that embodies their entire policy and political agenda in the months and years ahead – here, here and here. It goes without saying today that the country needs more democracy rather than less. I wrote these posts before we saw the shocking spectacle of a sitting President leading a violent siege against the seat of government to prevent the majority from governing.
What is critical is to make clear that ending the filibuster, preventing a new raft of voter restrictions, placing the Capitol insurrection and its supporters beyond the pale of legitimate political discourse, making the District of Columbia a state, ending extreme gerrymandering and much more are not a grab bag of obscure procedural fixes and political hobbyhorses. They all amount to the same thing: Everyone gets to vote. Everyone’s vote gets counted. And the majority governs.
These are not obscure and opaque concepts. Despite the anti-democratic turn of the Republican party they have deep resonance in American political culture. They are not uncontested but they remain the high ground of American political culture. Republicans have entirely abandoned this ground so Democrats need not only to occupy it but advertise the fact again and again and again.
What’s critical is to make sure everyone knows the hymnal you’re singing from and not get too caught up in the individual lyrics. Put differently, the specific fixes are the libretto. What people understand and remember is the score. Any time you’re talking about cloture, and filibusters and bipartisanship you’re basically losing the storyline and the argument. Put baldly, it seems absurd that without our realizing it the percentage of votes required to pass a law went from 50%+1 to 60%. Everyone who’s ever watched an election knows that’s not how it works. It’s no more complicated than majority rule, democracy. We should treat as more or less inexplicable that we stumbled away from this very basic rule – because it really is inexplicable. The 60 vote threshold for legislation is an innovation or rather degradation of the early 21st century.
Supporting these three principles of democracy is why you should not lead a violent insurrection against the government because you lost an election. Yes, there are some people who really believe the fairy tales about millions of fraudulent votes. But we give far too much credit to the bad actors if we think this is really the product of a factual misunderstanding. It is rooted in a percolating, toxic belief that the only legitimate election results are ones in which the right wins, a belief Donald Trump wrested hold of for his own selfish and idiosyncratic needs.
One driver of the Democrats upending wins in the Georgia Senate races was the direct pledge that if Democrats won the Senate they would increase relief checks from $600 to $2000. Your vote counts and counts for a lot. If that doesn’t happen, much of the moral logic of political participation goes flat. Because votes count and the majority rules. If votes count and the majority doesn’t rule, the whole string of logic falls apart. So apart from functional democracy it is incumbent on Democrats to vindicate the logic of democracy. Your vote isn’t only counted. It matters. Anti-democratic nostrums like the modern filibuster not only violate the principles of democracy they undermine confidence in the principle of democracy, which is the dangerous effect.
The filibuster means your vote doesn’t matter. It means the majority actually doesn’t rule. The whole moral economy of civic participation starts to break down.
We may not be anywhere near eliminating the electoral college. But we should be treating it as a bizarre anomaly that one party has to win by about 4 percentage points to even win.
All of these points fit together: Everyone gets to vote; every vote counts; and the majority governs. The system has broken down to the point where none of those are entirely true anymore. Each of these individual fixes – obscure and technical in some cases – go together to make them true again. They all fit tightly together. If you’re arguing the technical mechanics of the individual points you’re losing. Democrats need to be arguing the real goal: democracy, making democracy work again. It remains the high ground of American civic culture and Democrats need to be making clear that they alone occupy it.
