Democracy in the United States is in Danger.

José Manuel Suárez Mier*

The Republican Party of the United States, kidnapped by its most ignorant and radical segment of white supremacists, is a huge political threat because it is modeled on the Know-Nothing Party that emerged in 1853 to group those who wanted purity Anglo-Saxon and Protestant race and rejected everything foreign.

The opposite extreme is equally dangerous: intolerant and radical political correctness with identity politics that exalt “original” and mixed races, dissident sexual preferences, and solidarity between subjugated classes that together proclaim their oppression and demand a radical change in the social order.

The extreme political polarization in the US, which prevents civilized dialogue between political opponents, who are no longer such but enemies to the death, implies high risks for democracy in the country that saw it reborn and may die at the polls in 2024 with accepted and legal rules.

Unlike a hurricane, Trump did not arrive only to sweep away everything in his path and then disappear because his corrosive figure remained and made the Republican Party that he took by storm and to which he had never belonged, become undemocratic, like him, that portends grave dangers.

Last year, for the first time in US history, a sitting president refused to accept defeat and tried to annul the election result. Instead of opposing this attempted coup, the Party leaders cooperated openly or tacitly by publicly refusing to acknowledge his defeat.

In the period between the election and the Three Kings Day coup, the vast majority of legislators and Party officials refused to denounce extremist groups that spread conspiracy theories, inviting armed insurrection and carrying out executions, culminating in the brutal assault on the Capitol.

According to the authors of How Democracies Die**, the Republican Party violated the three basic principles that define a democratic political party: 1) accept electoral defeat; 2) avoid violence; 3) refrain from having ties to extremist fanatics.

As the aforementioned authors point out, the political system depends on the self-control of those who operate it: votes that demand qualified majorities; processes to remove officials; financing of the treasury; and judicial nominations. This complex system of checks and balances works only when politicians of all parties wisely deploy their institutional prerogatives.

Contemporary democracies die when the leader plays dirty with the existing rules, as Putin, Chávez-Maduro, Ortega, Erdogan, and many more have done, which scrape the democratic essence behind a screen of legality and respect for the wishes of the “people,” which they embody.

This is what can happen in the next US elections as Republican Party operators are already laying the necessary legal infrastructure, with 216 initiatives in 41 states of the Union to change the rules of the game of who can vote, how and when, and allowing the manipulation of the results by local legislatures dominated by themselves.

We will continue with this topic soon.

*Consultant in economics and strategy in Washington DC and professor at universities in Mexico (ITAM) and the U.S. (Georgetown and American) Email: aquelarre.economico@gmail.com

**Steven Levitsky y Daniel Ziblatt, 2018, Penguin Random House

This column will also be published in Spanish on July 22, 2021, in the Excélsior newspaper, based in México City