One of the most serious claims contained in President Joe Biden’s speech last week about protecting democracy may well have gone unnoticed by many who have heard or read about it.
In the speech, Biden noted, “What is remarkable about American democracy is this: just enough of us, on just enough occasions, have chosen not to dismantle democracy, but to preserve it.”
The sentence is damning. Only an apathetic electorate, a series of voter suppression laws, or a flood of disinformation separate us from the dismantling of our democracy.
Modern presidential elections do not usually end in sweeping victories or defeats. In fact, no president since Ronald Reagan in 1984 has won by more than ten percentage points of the popular vote. Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump was four percentage points.
These narrow margins are obscured by the flaws and quirks of our electoral process, the way states are overrepresented, and the way most states nominate voters based on the rule that the candidate who receives the most popular votes gets all the votes in the state.
Biden was victorious in Georgia by just over 12,000 votes difference — just 0.2 percent of the state’s vote — but he received all 16 of the state’s electoral votes. That’s how we elect presidents in this country.
But that very chance means that the country’s last two Republican presidents can win the electoral college while losing the popular vote: George Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. .
And that doesn’t just apply to presidential elections. The same dilemma plagues this year’s midterms, with Congressional control swinging in the balance and anti-democracy barbarians looming at the door.
Almost everyone thinks the Republicans will regain control of the House of Representatives, the only question being by which margin. But control of the Senate is wide open, with some of the most contested races taking place in states that often tip the balance one way or the other in presidential elections, such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin.
In each of these states, Republican Senate candidates at some point either denied the results of the 2020 election or defended false allegations of fraud in that election.
These candidates have a chance to win, but even if they don’t, the damage their electoral denialism has already done will remain. We are seeing a generational plague be rang out.
Faith and doubt are opposites, but they operate using the same emotional energy, much like love and hate. And these are things we don’t get rid of easily.
Republicans have turned doubt about the 2020 election — and about the legitimacy of any elections in which they happen to lose — into a test of faith. It is the crucible one has to go through to be a well-regarded Republican. You are only genuine, you are only loyal, if you believe the lie.
Many officials and elected officials are simply being opportunistic, using the lie to mobilize voters or to benefit from the fanaticism that the lie has bred. But for many Trump followers, the lie is the absolute truth. She was fused not just into people’s psyches, but into their souls. It will not be easy to undo this mass delusion.
When we have deep faith in something, it comforts us. Faith is something precious, something improbable, a gift created by the mind to reassure and comfort us. We don’t give it up easily.
Faith and doubt remain like the ghosts of a lost soul. Even when we accept evidence that belies the idea in which we put our faith, the mind often clings to a little bit of what it felt and believed.
This is natural. It’s human. But it is a problem for our democracy. The people fighting to save democracy are armed with facts, but the people willing to destroy it operate on a feeling. The former are based on data, the latter on dogmas.
These are different languages ​​that communicate with different facets of the human experience. Anti-democracy believers cannot be deterred by facts, they refuse to do so. Faith, which does not require proof, can be nourished by things that are not true. And that is precisely what is happening.
This faith does not even admit the idea that destroying democracy would be negative or worse than current conditions. So people might even believe that they would benefit from the death of democracy.
That’s Trump’s twisted legacy, something that will endure no matter what happens in these midterms and whether Trump runs for president again or not. The harm he has caused and continues to cause will ultimately be far greater than he himself ever was. Trump has given birth to a distortion that will outlive him for a long time.
As Biden noted, the country is dangerously close to bringing to power politicians who want to dismantle it and remake it, who want partial democracy or no democracy at all. America is one ruinous election away from becoming a memory.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
