Opinion article

Trump's exit will not suffice to repair the damage done to democracy

Trump was not the only factor representing a unique and anomalous threat to American democracy.

Reuters

The good news is that President Donald Trump appears close to leaving the White House, but the bad news is that Trump was not the only factor representing a unique and anomalous threat to American democracy.

Democracy is already deeply damaged, so that no single election can repair this damage.

And even with the advent of the running of presidential candidate Joe Biden, the worsening structural inequalities rooted in the nation for centuries - which Republicans blatantly exploited to govern with little support from minorities - will remain with us for a while.

These are embodied in institutions, such as the electoral college that elected Trump in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.

In fact, the Democratic presidential candidates won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections, including Biden, but due to the bias of the countryside (the one vote cast for the president in Wyoming counts roughly four times the vote cast in California). And with the complex elevating the importance of a handful of Midwestern states, most of which are white, Republicans have won the White House by twice as many votes since 2000.

Representative equality is also lacking in the US Senate, which favors granting disproportionate advantages to those who are older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative.

Currently, states that represent only 17% of the country's population can elect a majority of the senators.

By 2040, the fifteen most populous states will be home to 67% of Americans, yet only 30% of the Senate.

Republicans have not won a majority in the Senate since the mid-1990s.

Yet they have dominated the Senate for 10 years over the past 20 years, and they have used this advantage to shape ideological balance in federal courts.

Trump is responsible for only a small portion of that.

American democracy will not last unless his party decides to move away from methods of repression and resorts to honest competition for the multi-ethnic American vote.

Trump may have lost, but the behavior of the Texas governor, who restricted the number of ballot boxes to one box per county, will not work, and this also applies to his colleagues in Congress, who refused to finance the vote by mail.

And what about Wisconsin lawmakers who forced voters to vote in person this spring, amid the coronavirus outbreak?

Or Republican officials who refused to start processing millions of ballot papers in the mail early, causing Trump to try to portray the poll with postcards as aiding the fraud somewhat?

Democratic reform should be the number one task of the Biden administration and his allies in Congress.

It would be naive to imagine that many of these reforms would be permitted by the Supreme Court, which also means that court reform must go hand in hand with efforts to reform democracy.

David Daly is the author of "How America Struggles to Preserve Democracy"

American democracy will not last unless the Republican Party decides to move away from methods of repression and resort to honest competition for the votes of multi-ethnic Americans.

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