National Public Radio broadcast a chilling interview with Dartmouth professor of government Brendan Nyhan this morning.
It is chilling because it confirms that better than seventy per cent of Republicans polled believe that against all evidence the election was rigged against their presidential candidate. The truth is that Republican state legislators and governors have worked tirelessly over the last twelve years to deny working families and people of color representation commensurate to their population in Congress. The truth is that Republican state legislators and governors have done everything within their powers to restrict voting rights. But, as professor Nyhan notes, we live in times when the public has apparently lost interest not simply in political truth, but in institutional truth more generally.
Two points of light shine through in Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with professor Nyhan. First, if only seventy percent of Republican voters believe the election was rigged in Joe Biden’s favor, thirty percent do not. Added to the 76M who voted for Joe Biden that is a pretty good number. The second point of light is professor Nyhan’s observation that this number shifts dramatically if we select for income and education. Wealthy, healthy, educated Americans overwhelmingly trust America’s scientific, educational, and government institutions. This means that we have a fairly good grasp of the mechanisms at play in the rejection by almost three quarters of the republican electorate of institutional process. But this is also where the light grows specially dim. If thirty percent of Republican voters trust the process, where were they on Election Day? Where are they now? If we know the mechanisms at play in declining confidence in institutions, then where is the public outcry on behalf of income equality, educational equality, and health care equality?
Instead, Democratic National Committee members are once again tripping over one another to be first to recommend a pull-back from “radical” democratic messaging. This widespread denial, it should be noted, is just as pathological, perhaps even more pathological, than republican denial. It arises from an incapacity — not unwillingness — to face, much less accept, the social character of the collapse of democracy and democratic institutions in the United States. It arises from an incapacity — not an unwillingness — to face, much less acknowledge, the central role the Democratic National Committee played in the transition from republican values and democratic process to post-democratic, white Christian nationalism in the US. However, if professor Nyhan is correct then wealth inequality, exploding university tuitions and student debt, privatization and deregulation — all of which were eagerly, enthusiastically, supported by the DNC — were born in the womb of a Democratic Party that wholesale abandoned working families, women, students, and people of color.
What is this pathology? The answer lies in the “incapacity” itself. The Republican Party is selling “capacity.” It is selling a message of responsibility; the capacity to respond. You may remember that this was the cornerstone of the Clinton/Gore victory in 1992. The DNC genuinely believes that the message of capacity — Yes We Can! — is key to their future. But this means that they are incapable of facing the social and institutional, structural, grounds for post-democracy in the US. For to do so would entail admitting their constitutive role in the slide into post-democracy in the US; it would fundamentally undermine their entire vision and agenda. Moreover, it would suggest that the elites, the so-called “meritocracy” that currently governs the DNC did not earn its right to govern out of merit. It earned its right to govern out of privilege. The leadership in the DNC would have to face this privilege — the “private law” that empowers its members — in order to recover its capacity to govern differently.
I would like to believe that thirty percent of those who voted republican in this election could join those who voted democratic in a grand coalition of individuals ready to support republican values and democratic process; a grand coalition ready to embrace science and public institutions.
And, yet, if the DNC leadership is itself incapable of facing its demons, it seems unlikely that the Susan Colins of the world will be capable of facing theirs. They have built an entire ideology around personal responsibility. To shift now to a message of social, political, and economic enfranchisement would be even more difficult for republicans than for the DNC. Which is why we are still sliding into a post-democratic — our grandparents called it “fascist” — consensus in the US.