Opinion – Ross Douthat: Midterm results question scaremongering of endangered US democracy

For all those furiously debating the state of American democracy, the 2022 midterm election was a beautiful thing — a gift for both sides of the argument, a Rorschach test that fits both interpretations.

Suppose, first, that you are among the endangered democracy alarmists, for whom Trumpism and Maga’s republicanism (“Make America Great Again”) pose not just chaotic populism but an existential threat. What did you see happen?

Well, you saw an attacked president, Joe Biden, decide that the defense of democracy itself would be his main election issue. For that, he has been scorned from many quarters — for ignoring day-to-day issues, mistaking normal conservative positions for authoritarianism, failing to offer the kind of radical bipartisanship his diagnosis would imply.

Yet it seemed to work in the end: voters who would normally be inclined to vote for GOP candidates tended to reject exactly the kind of “Maga Republicans” —endorsed by and more paranoid-looking Donald Trump impersonators— that Biden’s argument attempted. isolate.

The red wave predicted by fundamentals and history disappointed, in part, because Americans judged a subset of Republican candidates too extreme to trust them with normal democratic powers. The public has done the job of “de-trumpling” that Trump-era Republicans themselves failed to do — and they did, it could be argued, precisely because of the alarm bells raised in the name of democracy.

So, the happy conclusion for the alarmist camp: democracy was in danger and, in this cycle at least, we saved it.

But then imagine yourself a non-alarmist, looking at the same results. In recent years, you’ve heard alarmists argue that the problem isn’t just Trump or his disciples — that the entire Republican Party has been recast as an authoritarian formation, that its preferred election rules are the new version of Jim Crow, that government structures Americans are allowing permanent minority rule by a white identity right, that the US is on the brink of civil war, that January 6th is not over yet, and that the right will accept no result it does not like.

However, what did you see happen? Most Republican candidates lost and admitted it normally, including the Maga candidates. Georgia, supposedly ground zero for the new Jim Crow (racist laws), had average turnout and another strong performance from its African-American Democratic senator.

US government structures have handed Republicans less power in Washington than their raw vote numbers would imply, with a Democratic Senate and minimal House majority for Republicans despite their apparent solid majority in the popular vote.

A continued migration of minority voters to the Republican Party, suggesting that the country is indeed becoming less polarized by skin color. And a notable absence of the kind of violence that harbingers of the new civil war continue to expect.

Between these two interpretations of 2022 –the alarmists celebrating a tough victory for democracy and the non-alarmists seeing a predictable return to normality–, is any synthesis or handshake possible?

Let me propose two possible concessions, one from each direction. First, alarmists might concede that Trump’s unique brazenness, coupled with the strange circumstances of 2020 — the pandemic, a wave of riots and protests, a rapid overhaul of election procedures — were likely more determinants of Republican paranoia. of fraud and its consummation on January 6th than a deliberate ideological turn towards authoritarianism or semi-fascism.

In other words, the 2022 results do not vitiate the original alarmist idea that Trump is a dangerous figure who should not be trusted with the presidency. But they question systemic scaremongering, the belief that the entire Republican Party is moving away from normal democratic politics and that Trump’s rise was just one trigger of that process.

In the same way, the non-alarmist can admit that this alarmism of “fascism on the march”, however exaggerated it may seem, can be one of the forces that tend to stabilize a democratic system, mobilizing and balancing against the excesses and paranoia of the other side .

That pre-midterm hyperbole — think of TV historian Michael Beschloss imagining a right-wing dictatorship arresting and executing children — may have been one of the reasons so many “Stop the Robbery” candidates were eliminated from the race.

And that such scaremongering no doubt always played a version of this balancing and stabilizing role, from the early days of the Republic, when the various factions reliably exchanged accusations of royalism and Jacobinism.

This last image, of extremisms and anxieties about extremism balancing each other out, also suggests a hopeful way for Trump-era alarmists and non-alarmists alike to think about our relationship to one another: not just as rival interpreters of our democracy’s discontents, but as partners, in a strange way, in its continued stability.