2022 Will Test Whether We Still Have a Functioning Democracy

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Historians will look back on this current chapter of the American story and rightfully conclude that it was when many things started to go off the rails in our politics. One important through-line will be how our electoral process itself became subject to the most blatant of partisan pressures and outright interference. Over the past few weeks, I have discussed various examples of these, and today I’d like to pull them together a bit to form a larger picture.

There were the headline grabbing stories: Trump calling up the Secretary of State of Georgia and asking him to “find” him over 11,000 votes, leading to potential criminal charges against him in that state; the creating and spreading of the Big Lie about a stolen election, such that 70 percent of GOP voters still believe President Biden was not legitimately elected; a violent insurrection by a worked-up MAGA crowd that tried to physically stop the counting of electoral votes in Congress, with possible sedition charges now under consideration by the DoJ; and GOP-controlled states from Florida to Iowa to Georgia passing Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws aimed directly at reducing minority turnout.

Beneath these stories lie more deeply-rooted, structural problems. Chief among these is partisan gerrymandering of House seats, giving the GOP a distinct and predictable numerical advantage in places like Michigan, Texas and Ohio. We can add to that the anti-majoritarian filibuster rule, which is found nowhere in the Constitution, and which operates to prevent D.C. from having two Senate seats and effectively blocks all efforts to pass voter protection legislation such as the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Now it seems the very guardrails that are supposed to help guarantee free and fair elections, despite their deeper structural issues, are starting to crack. In populous Maricopa County, Arizona, a so-called “audit” of the 202 election—which is not an official audit provided for by law (two of which have already confirmed the count) but rather a partisan-backed, privately funded, non-transparent and highly dubious sham process initiated by far-right Republicans in that state—threatens to feed further conspiracy and doubt once it’s completed. That “audit” is now under review by the Justice Department as a potential violation of voter’s civil rights. 

Even at the national level, the Federal Elections Commission, in a party-line vote, yesterday dropped its investigation into Trump’s dubious hush money payments during the 2016 to adult film star Stormy Daniels, despite the go-between on the transaction, Trump’s one-time attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, being criminally convicted for that same transaction. The move provoked a harsh dissent from the two Democratic members of the Commission, who blasted the GOP member’s decision as “devoid of any explanation” and one that “defies reality.”

Defying reality appears to be the order of the day for the GOP as it clings to the very leader whose toxicity lost them the House, the Senate and the White House. The party’s response to these losses, however, is not to seek to recapture center-right voters, who are more aligned with Mit Romney and Liz Cheney in their politics, but to move further right to appease and hurl red meat to an increasingly radicalized and extremist base. It is a party that celebrates senators like Hawley, Cruz and Rand who regularly troll and “own the libs” but offer not substance but grievance, not aid to families but still more “cancel culture” wars. 

The result is a party that would sooner risk disenfranchising its own base of voters if it means they can stick-it to minority voters. We may have just seen this in action in Florida, where newly enacted mail-in ballot rules aimed at blunting the surge in Democratic absentee voting might become friendly fire that actually decimates GOP turnout among otherwise reliable elderly and rural voters. It is a party that censures any voices of reason like Liz Cheney but seems incapable of moving against sexual predators like Rep. Matt Gaetz or insurrectionists like Reps. Paul Gosar and Majorie Taylor Greene. With loyalty to Trump becoming a key litmus test for candidates in the upcoming GOP primaries, 2022 looms and presents a pivotal moment: Is America willing to allow madness to gain an even stronger foothold in our government?

In the end, historians will look back at this current chapter and wonder one of two things: either why the GOP went down this path and predictably self-imploded as a viable political party, or why voters in 2022 allowed such a dangerously unhinged and anti-democratic party ever to assume power once again in America.

It will be up to the voters to ensure the first, and not the second, outcome.