On his website, Democracy Americana, the historian Thomas Zimmer wrote earlier this week:
[W]e could be, as dangerous as this situation is, on the brink of proving, perhaps for the first time ever, that a truly democratic society under conditions of multiracial, multi-religious, gender-egalitarian pluralism is indeed possible.
It’s possible despite the anti-democratic radicalization taking place throughout the United States. Zimmer argues the radicalization is a reaction to the collapse of “white Christian patriarchal dominance.” We’re not witnessing a rebirth but a final release, a death rattle. The living culture—in the form of a stable majority—desires “a truly democratic society under conditions of multiracial, multi-religious, gender-egalitarian pluralism,” and that’s why Zimmer wants us to see the glass as half full.
But in a society where ultra-rich, anti-democratic radicals use their money and their corporations to corrupt the electoral process and control and subvert our governing institutions, anyone who still sees the glass as half full needs their eyes examined.
Anti-democratic radicals may have difficulty winning a free and fair election, but they continue to wield extraordinary power because, fifty years ago, they used their money to fund a stealth campaign to seed the judiciary with people who will rule in their favor regardless of the preferences of the majority. The radicals began their campaign in the wake of the Warren Court’s Brown v Board of Education ruling, and they achieved one of their major goals when the Roberts Court (whose majority continues to be funded by ultra-rich, anti-democratic radicals) gutted the Voting Rights Act, invalidating a civil rights law designed to protect minority access to the ballot box.
Along with getting the Court to deny the voting rights of the “less white, less overwhelmingly Christian” majority, they used their money to capture state houses and take advantage of the Senate’s structural protections for small, white, rural states to establish and retain control of the governing institutions, not to mention use the electoral college’s protections for those same states to compete for the Presidency, despite the radical nature of their policy preferences.
Anti-democratic radicals can lose the majority and still hold the institutions. That’s why, instead of seeing the glass as half full, we need to see it as a glass where they left enough room to hide the poison in.
Pluralism and diversity are great when the people in our governing institutions commit to the principles of democracy. But when they don’t, the tree of liberty begins to look awfully thirsty.