The “crisis of democracy” across Western countries is generally attributed to rising inequality, the hollowing out of the middle class, and the politics of mass migration, but another major factor is demography, especially in the US, where the threat to democracy tracks developments affecting white voters.
Moreover, since demographic trends cannot be easily reversed, the US’ growing dysfunction is likely to be a persistent factor in global politics for a long time.
By 2044, white Americans would represent 49.7 percent of the US population, down from 70 percent today and almost 90 percent in the 1960s. This change could be immensely consequential from a political and psychological standpoint.
For the first time in the country’s history, white Americans would be a minority — even if they remain more numerous than black Americans, Hispanic Americans and other cohorts.
Already, white voters’ waning political influence is creating a sense of lost status and marginalization, as partly reflected in surveys showing that nearly 60 percent of Republicans “feel like a stranger in their own country.”
Against this backdrop, the US presidential election next month should be seen as part of a longer-term political conflict that would end with either the eradication or the restoration of the country’s historical racial hierarchy.
Simply put, today’s Democrats embrace the idea of a multiracial democracy, whereas Republicans want to make the country “great again” by re-establishing elements of the old white supremacy.
This conflict predates US presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump.
Republican presidential candidates have garnered a majority of the white vote in every election since 1964, the year that then-US president Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, won the White House and went on to sign the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts.
More recently, former US president Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was a moment of reckoning for the white electorate, many of whom began to grapple with the implications of the country’s changing demographic structure.
After Obama’s re-election in 2012, the Republican National Committee drafted a report acknowledging the need for the party to focus more on attracting minorities.
However, at the state level, Republicans moved in the opposite direction, doubling down on their appeals to white voters through voter-suppression measures and racially gerrymandered congressional districts.
Then, in 2016, Trump tapped into white discontent to win the Republican Party’s nomination.
Another Trump presidency would intensify the battle to restore the US’ historical racial and political hierarchy, given Trump’s plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
However, even if Trump is defeated, the fight would continue. Trumpism is likely to survive because the “Make America Great Again” doctrine now permeates a Republican Party that has rid itself of moderate conservatives.
It might seem suicidal for a party to bet its future on a demographic cohort whose political weight is fated to decline — even if support from non-white voters has increased in recent years (reflecting effective messaging about reviving sectors of the economy where ethnic minorities also find employment). However, the US Constitution provides one explanation for this strategy.
As Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out, the US system includes several counter-majoritarian institutions that were meant to ensure stability, but that also can empower a political minority.
For example, what counts in US presidential elections is not the popular vote, but the Electoral College.
That is how Trump won in 2016, despite receiving fewer votes than his opponent. Similarly, each state is assigned two seats in the US Senate regardless of the size of its population.
Demographers estimate that by 2040 about 70 per cent of Americans would live in just 15 states, meaning the disproportionately whiter and older remaining 30 percent would elect 70 senators.
The combination of demographic trends, a Trumpified Republican Party, and counter-majoritarian constitutional rules would make the US’ democracy highly dysfunctional in the years ahead.
While its strong institutional foundations can help prevent the US from succumbing to autocracy, it seems destined for periods of heightened political tension and conflict.
In this context, it is not far-fetched to imagine constitutional crises involving the US federal government and state legislatures over the management of elections and voting rights; or between the US Congress and a far-right US Supreme Court over civil rights; or between Congress and a polarizing president.
There are no quick fixes. Any constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College or reform the Senate and Supreme Court (which has no term limit for justices) would be dead on arrival because it would need supermajorities in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Could Americans converge to the center and marginalize the far right and the far left? It does not look likely any time soon.
The election next month would not yield a binary outcome. A victory for Democrat candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris would not save the US’ democracy, and a victory for Trump would not suddenly kill it.
Instead, it would be yet another installment in the longer-running demographic conflict that began six decades ago, and which shows no signs of ending.
Edoardo Campanella, senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, is co-author (with Marta Dassu) of Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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