American democracy is at a tipping point. In the midterm election already underway, we may be deciding whether we will be taking a greater, terrible step toward autocracy, driven by people whose lust for power and wealth overrides any sense of patriotism. But on one critical level, a serious price has already been paid: The great American experiment, launched in September 1787 with the signing of our Constitution, has ended.
Oh, sure, we still have all the trappings: Three branches of government, processes for adopting laws and bringing cases through the judiciary, the ability to appeal to the Bill of Rights (which was added years after the Constitution was signed.) But it’s all a facade, one that hides the utter putrefaction of the Founder’s dreams.
Start with the accelerating collapse of our democracy. Freedom House, a research group based in Washington D.C., issued a report showing that the United States is on one of the fastest downward trajectories in its democratic foundations, ranking the quality of our democracy as equivalent to that of Croatia and Romania. In 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit, a business intelligence group, downgraded the United States to a “flawed democracy.” And the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide, now lists the United States as a “backsliding democracy.”
A lot of Republicans shrug off this horrifying trend with the nonsense sneer, “America isn’t a democracy. It’s a republic.” As if that means anything. My favorite comeback is, “What’s the difference?” And the question usually results in blank stares or confidently incorrect replies. You want to argue we have a republic? That means we have enumerated rights in the Constitution that ensure the majority does not impose its will on the minority in democratic elections. Thise elections are safeguarded by a constitution. And largely, that’s it. We’re not a democratic monarchy, like Great Britain. And we are not a pure democracy, where the majority can directly trample the minority.
Where are direct democracies? The pure form exists in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell Innerrhoden and Glarus, and the Crow Nation of Montana. While some states allow for ballot initiatives, the United States is a democratic republic, meaning it is a democracy established to protect the rights of the minority. So when Republicans break out their “not a democracy” nonsense, feel free to say “Yes, we are not Appenzell Innerrhoden.”
Protecting the minority is why we have a democratic republic, as the Founders made every clear. Alexander Hamilton said that a pure democracy could never be the best government. “Experience has proved that no position is more false than this,” he wrote. “The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure, deformity." A signatory of the Declaration of Independence, John Witherspoon said, "Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state – it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage."
Yet here, in our democratic republic, we have become “subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.” This underscores where the framers of the Constitution messed up - and George Washington saw it coming: Political parties, including one where politicians more thirsty for power than worried about laws and norms, could undermine the Founders’ vision even if these connivers represented a minority of the population.
In his farewell address, Washington warned as part of his condemnation of political parties that these factions would be “an artificial and extraordinary force” that could put, “in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community.” In other words, minority tyranny was distinctly possible when a political party acted corruptly, making government “the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.”
The poster child for the corruption in Washington’s warning is Senator Mitch McConnell, a man who has sacrificed this country on the altar of corporate kleptocracy. The emergence of the world Washington feared was first signaled in October 2010, when McConnell declared “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Now, McConnell went on to say that he didn’t really want Obama to fail, just - essentially - become more of a Republican. Oh, and if he did fail, well, that meant Republican policies could be adopted. So, yah! Four years of failure would be great for America.
Of course, those were only words, but they were a warning of what was to come. It hit in 2016, with the single greatest assault on our system of government in American history. And again, it was led by Mitch: The refusal to grant even a hearing to Judge Merrick Garland when President Barack Obama nominated him to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court.
McConnell’s argument - that it was wrong to allow Obama to name a justice in the last 25% of his second term because a new administration would be sworn in about a year after the death of Antonin Scalia, whom Garland would replace - was pure sophistry. There was no greater proof than when that same GOP rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett after voting had already begun in the 2020 election. Fox News and their hordes of acolytes trotted out a whole lot of “whatabouts” - a tactic perfected by the Soviet KGB - but the reality was that McConnell had found a way to manipulate the Constitution to override our norms and institutions.
Despite the mindless head-nodding by too many GOP voters when they hear Fox, Republican politicians, and their fellow propagandists spew ridiculous arguments or cite of a history that never existed, McConnell was using the Constitution as toilet paper. He had taken the “advice and consent” from Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 and drained it of all meaning. While Washington, Madison, and other Founders warned of the dangers of parties, McConnell proclaimed the advice and consent term allowed him to consider nothing but whether the party of the Senate was the same as that of the executive when deciding confirmations. He was treating the Constitution as if it was the tax code - just something where loopholes can be used to get the outcome he wanted.
What was the purpose of the advice and consent term? Largely, it was to prevent corruption by the President, to ensure that the executive did not use unchecked power to stick family, friends, or crooks into the judiciary. In The Federalist #66 and #76, Alexander Hamilton wrote that presidents would almost certainly make careful choices, since he had staked his reputation on the nominee. But if he were ever driven by “State prejudice,” “family connection,” “personal attachment,” or “a view to popularity,” the Senate could step in and block the nomination.
But here is where the Founders did not count on a chiseler like McConnell ending up in power. Hamilton wrote that, outside of a president nominating someone unfit for the judiciary, the Senate would “merely sanction the choice of the executive.” He believed that no senator would gain a benefit by opposing a nominee because of a preference for someone else, because the president’s next nominee might not be a better choice than the first - certainly, a senator would not be rewarded in getting his preference by blocking a qualified candidate. Scoffing at the whole idea, Hamilton wrote that the senate would not want to be seen as questioning the judgement of the president, since that would undermine public faith in our Constitutional government. Consent would be “an efficacious source of stability in the administration”—something that all senators and patriots would want.
As a result, Hamilton wrote, “the necessity of (the senate’s) concurrence would have a powerful, though in general, a silent operation… It is not very probable that his nomination would often be overturned.”
Oh, Hamilton. The lack of imagination on how our system could be corrupted by sharks like McConnell, the belief that all politicians - particularly those who laughably bang the “original intent” drum - would care about the original intent seems almost quaint now. Senators love to question the judgement of the president, and eagerly run to the television studios to bleat their condemnation to the world. The McConnells of the world would not have to worry about the next nominee being someone else they would not choose - they just wouldn’t accept anyone. And as McConnell made quite clear when he rushed through the Barrett nomination, all that mattered was whether the president and the senate were of the same party - the very corruption Washington feared could be driven by the minority if factions gained power.
Before the 2016 election, Republicans made clear that not only would they undermine the will of the electorate if Hillary Clinton won by blocking anyone she nominated, but they would keep the Supreme Court at a 4-4 split between nominees from Democratic and Republican presidents for four years, rendering it impotent when there were tie votes.
“If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court,” North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr said. Republican senators John McCain of Arizona and Ted Cruz of Texas also urged the blocking of any Clinton nominees. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he “can’t imagine” voting for any Clinton nominee.
Compare this abomination to the express expectations of the Founders: The Senate would only serve as a quiet check on potential presidential corruption, blocking any single nominee if the motivations for the selection were improper. Here, the Republicans didn't even know who the nominees they were pledging to block might be. They were perfectly willing to spit on the Framers’ intent, undermine the stability of the executive branch, and lead citizens to question the very operations of government. All for the benefit of parties which the Founders did not even want to exist.
This was the breaking point of our Founder’s dream. When self-proclaimed “originalists” so blithely override the original intent, solely for the advancement of the very party structure the Framers despised, the limitations through shame and patriotism ended, coupled with the elevation and sneering celebration of hypocrisy.
Take something simple: Science. Many of the Founders - John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and many others - were all community scientists, who studied the natural and physical world. Franklin standing out in a lightning storm to study electricity is perhaps the best known. But Jefferson - an inventor, geologist, and student of science and mathematics - called the pursuit of science his “supreme delight.” James Madison was an elected member of the 'American Philosophical Society,' the country's oldest scientific society. Washington and Thomas Paine conducted the first major scientific experiment in America, that the Will-o’-the-Wisp - atmospheric light seen over bogs and marshes - was due to a flammable gas released over muddy sediment. Jefferson saw the main justification for America’s independence on Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and John Locke—the creators of physics, inductive reasoning and empiricism. He called them his “trinity of three greatest men.” Adams even spoke of the “science of government” during the debates on the Constitution, a phrase well understood by his fellow Founders, all students of the Enlightenment. In their words, they expressed the commitment to utilizing the power of reason to build an effective and responsive government.
Small wonder, then, that the Constitution itself brings science in as part of its standards. It was not by accident that Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 - the intellectual property clause - has as its opening words “to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts.”
In what has been perhaps the most shocking evolution of the Republican Party, it is now purely science denialism. Too many of its politicians and voters are scientifically illiterate, with no understanding of the scientific method or how research is conducted. And those Republican politicians understand science - and its often hard to tell which ones those are - simply lie for their own convenience.
In a nation founded by men committed to science and reason, the Republican abandonment of the importance of training and comprehension is shocking in its magnitude. Pew Research Center found that Democrats with the lowest level of scientific knowledge were more likely to accept findings in peer-reviewed research on climate change and energy issues that the most scientifically literate Republicans. According to Gallup, Republican faith in science has collapsed from 72% in 1975 to 45% in 2021. That drop of 27 percentage points is astonishing, given that it occurred over a time when the rigors of research have increased and the success of science - in medicine, technology, astrophysics and virtually every other field - has reached heights that could not have been imagined in 1975. Success usually tends to be proof of reliability, but not to modern-day Republicans. Meanwhile, over that same period, Democrats moved from being the more skeptical of science - with 67% expressing confidence in the institution in 1975 - to the most confident in 2021, at 79%. Democrats, it seemed, looked at achievements of science that were so grand they bordered on the miraculous, and concluded that success in so many fields proved reliability. That Americans could move 39 percentage points in the acceptance of science simply based on party would have left our Founders astonished, and perhaps even have led them to rethink much of how the Constitution was written. Never could they have imagined that a document founded on the logic and reasoning of the Enlightenment which was at the foundation of the Constitution - not, as far too many Republicans argue, the Ten Commandments and the Bible - would confront a huge segment of the population willing to consider college dropouts like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh to be more knowledgeable about science that, you know, scientists. Small wonder though, when two-thirds of Republicans questioned by Pew Research in 2021 said that scientists were no better at making science policy decisions than people with zero training. Marjorie Taylor Green versus Anthony Fauci? No difference in knowledge, that giant chunk of Republicans believe.
How? How can a party once based in reason and science become so anti-intellectual, so suspicious of knowledge, so willing to believe that some guy on TV with no training knows just as much about science as someone who has spent decades in the field? It’s hard to prove, but I truly believe it comes back to the eagerness of Republican politicians to support corporate kleptocracy that sends more money to them as campaign contributions and other largesse in exchange for favorable policies.
Who benefits from climate change denialism? The oil and gas companies that shovel cash at Republican politicians in mountainous quantities. Who benefited from COVID denialism? This one’s a little tougher: Trump wanted the stock market rise to be the foundation of his reelection and COVID caused share prices to collapse. So, Trump declared it was a hoax, then it was going away, then it was no worse than the flu, overriding and hiding the information he was receiving from infectious disease experts. His MAGA cultists adopted the ideas, with large percentages of them becoming COVID deniers while fighting the use of masks and vaccines.
The next issue was that businesses wanted to reopen, and COVID got in the way. The only way to accomplish that was by barreling through, accepting the deaths that occurred, and let business do as it wished. This is not a theory: Texas Governor Greg Abbott put together a COVID task force that was almost exclusively composed of business leaders who were both his contributors and who knew literally nothing about the science. They did hire a consulting firm that was qualified in the field, which did a large-scale analysis and reached solid conclusions. According to people with knowledge of these events, the firm presented a report to Abbott and his cronies which called for a slow re-opening, county by county, that used the results in each location to formulate the best practices for how to both protect Texans and get back to work. Problem was, following a scientific approach wasn’t what the businesses on the task force wanted - particularly those who wanted Trump to preside over a booming economy again. So, these sources say, the report was trashed, and Abbott almost immediately announced that “Yee-haw!” the whole state was opening in a matter of weeks. The state opened in late May 2020. The result? Within 14 days, the number of COVID cases began to rise rapidly, Texas hospitals began to overflow, and dead bodies piled up around the state.
Denialism was murderous. While any fool could look around the world and see that people everywhere were being instructed by health experts and governments to wear masks and maintain social distance, somehow Republicans concluded this was just some conspiracy by the Democrats to do…something. Who knows what? But the result of denialism - with less mask wearing, social distancing and vaccination among Republicans than Democrats - was that GOPrs were ending up in the hospital and the morgue in far higher rates than Democrats. A working paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average number of deaths above what would be anticipated based on historical trends was 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats from March 2020 to December 2021. And a paper last June published in Health Affairs found that majority Republican counties experienced 72.9 excess deaths per 100,000 people relative to majority Democratic counties during the study period. “Our findings suggest that county-level voting behavior may act as a proxy for compliance with and support of public health measures that would protect residents from COVID-19,” the report said.
The Founders dreamed of a government built on reason, science, and shared commitment to the institutions of democracy. Republicans have turned against all of that. While democracy may ultimately survive the Republican assault, the dream is gone. Like a fine piece of crystal, once it has been shattered, it can never be fully repaired.