GOP Steps Up Efforts To Create "Managed Democracy" To Maintain Power

The other day I wrote about how Trump and Bannon are taking a page out of the Putin/Surkov handbook in creating a “managed media”. Today it’s time to talk about another Putin/Surkov concept called “managed democracy”. The dangerousness of this concept is that, in many ways, the idea is grounded in some real truths. In a sense, every democracy is a “managed democracy”. Over the years, governments have always tried to control who and how citizens could vote. But, more recently, authoritarian governments have almost perfected the ability to retain all the trappings of democracy while ensuring they maintain absolute power, Putin’s Russia being the prime example. Sadly, you can see a similar situation developing in Erdogan’s Turkey. The reality is that a managed democracy is, by its very nature, anti-democratic.

Here in the United States, the entire history of our democracy has been focused on managing who would be allowed to vote. The shadow of racism and sexism hangs over the extension and exercise of the franchise, with its largest legacy today being the anachronistic Electoral College that allowed Donald Trump, with James Comey’s enormous help (let us never forget), to become President. The 20th Century was one long battle to extend the right to vote to all Americans, regardless of race or sex. That appeared to be accomplished with the successful implementation of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts under the Johnson administration, prompting racist Southern Democrats to leave the party in droves. But rather than relegating them to the ash heap of history where they belonged, the Republican party saw those racists as a path back to power and willingly embraced them.

As we moved into the 21st Century, it became more and more apparent that demographics were, as always, determinative and Republicans would soon become a permanent minority party. But they also realized that being a minority party did not necessarily mean losing electoral power. High powered computers and big data meant the GOP could gerrymander with utmost precision. But the GOP was happy to resort to more extreme methods, if necessary. Examples of those methods were the “Brooks Brothers” riot where paid GOP operatives shut down the Florida recount in Miami-Dade county and the 2003 mid-decade congressional redistricting in Texas in order to help Republicans control the House of Representatives.

Of course, the GOP had plenty of help from the Supreme Court in this assault against democracy. Bush v. Gore was probably the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scot and was so indefensible the Court actually included what was essentially a plea for future Courts not to use the case as precedent. That was followed up by the 2013 decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, which immediately spawned a wave of voter ID and other restrictions in GOP controlled states, tactics which had been used sparingly before.

All the while, Republicans were getting more and more aggressive with their gerrymandering and the courts seemed powerless or unwilling to stop them. For example, North Carolina has had three elections, 2012, 2014, and 2016, where the state and/or congressional districts have been ruled illegal due to racial gerrymandering. A special election in 2017 with redrawn districts was put on hold by the Supreme Court earlier this month, meaning that certain North Carolinians, predominately minority voters, will have had their voting rights severely diminished for most of this decade. In addition, the GOP is also fighting to stop the trend in the restoration of voting rights for felons. In Virginia, an estimated 20% of the African American voting age population was unable to vote due to felony convictions until Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe individually pardoned nearly 200,000 this year.

Even with all these efforts, or perhaps because of them, the GOP barely squeaked out a victory in the presidential race (with the help of James Comey), which has only led Republicans to redouble their efforts to rig the system in their favor. Trump’s talk of millions of illegal voters and his (worthless) promise to investigate just feeds into Republican efforts to create more obstacles for poor and minority citizens, largely Democratic, to vote. They all know the there is no real election fraud but Trump’s rantings will give the GOP legislatures more cover for abusive restrictions. Additionally, Trump’s “plan” to focus the investigation on blue states will also just feed into the ability of the right to question the validity of election results in those states, further subverting democracy and potentially laying the groundwork for not accepting the results of an election, as Trump did during this past campaign.

Meanwhile, where they can, GOP legislatures are trying to game the Electoral College. In Minnesota, Virginia, and New Hampshire, GOP legislatures are attempting to change the way their Electoral College votes get allocated. In all three states, Republicans are trying to pass some version of a law that assigns electoral votes by district with some remaining votes going to the popular vote winner in that state. Under that system, Trump would have gained an additional 11 votes in last year’s election. The GOP made a similar attempt in 2011 and 2015 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If those changes had been in place for the 2012 election, Mitt Romney would have received the majority of electoral votes in those three states despite losing the popular vote there. However, this strategy is not a sure-fire winner for Republicans because Trump would have received 13 fewer electoral votes in those states had those plans been in effect last year. All of these measures have and probably will be vetoed by Democratic governors but that may just temporarily negate the GOP’s efforts. There are two reasons why these kind of plans so dangerous. First, it will unfairly reward the candidate of the party that has illegally gerrymandered the state and/or severely restricted voting rights and access. With the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the federal courts, in general, unwillingness to really tackle the issues involved with the state’s control of election procedures, this will just enhance Republican efforts to game the system. The second, more dangerous, reason is that it increases the likelihood of a popular vote winner not receiving the majority of Electors in a particular state. And that only increases the likelihood of the national popular vote winner not winning the presidency in the Electoral College, as has happened twice in the last 16 years. With the increasing split between urban and rural voters, this possibility is already quite high and does not need any other impetus to increase its likelihood. When the popular vote winner continues not to gain power, it is hard to really call it democracy. And it is hard to see why the majority would continue to stand for that continual result.

The last example of the Republican-controlled legislature creating a “managed democracy” regards just the blatant attempts to ignore the results of elections. In North Carolina, the Republican legislature did everything in its power, including monkeying around with local election boards, in order to keep Democrat Roy Cooper from becoming Governor after he had clearly won the election. In addition, once the legislature was forced to accede to the result, it then stripped the Governor of significant powers. In South Dakota, voters, upset by continued and rampant corruption, passed a ballot measure that imposed campaign finance restrictions and new ethics oversight on state government. While there are some questions about the constitutionality of some of the provisions in the measure, the Republican governor and legislature immediately set about to override the voters’ verdict, with vague promises of a similar, more well-crafted, bill. The GOP majority leader was quite blunt in his analysis, saying, “We need to get rid of this as quickly as possible.” So, in an extraordinary move, the GOP made sure the voters would have no say in the matter. Under current South Dakota law, a ballot measure that is repealed by the legislature goes back on the ballot so that the voters have a chance to repeal that repeal. But, under a quirk of the law, that rule will not apply if South Dakota is under a state of emergency. And that is exactly what the legislature did, declared an emergency and repealed the ethics measure. As a sponsor of the ethics measure correctly pointed out, “This is a brazen overturning of the election results. It’s a brazen rejection of the will of the people.” It certainly is but that won’t bother the GOP legislature, because this is not the first time they have defied their own voters. In 2014, the legislature restricted a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage and the legislature promptly passed a law that blocked it from applying to anyone under 18. Voters overwhelmingly repealed that law this year when it went on the ballot again. With these new ethics laws, the GOP legislature made sure the voters would not have a chance to vote again on their repeal.

This is how managed democracies work. Clever use of the legal system ensures that the party in power remains safely ensconced. There is no need for military force. And the Republican party has been making enormous efforts to manage our democracy for the last two decades with great effect. The fact that a Republican president and his advisers have openly expressed admiration for this kind of managed democracy will only increase the party’s efforts, all in the name of maintaining power. As this analysis says, “In Russia’s managed democracy, all the institutions necessary for representative democracy—including the separation of powers, private media, a parliament, and a set of basic political parties—are technically present. However, none of them serves as part of a dynamic mechanism capable of self-regulation and reproduction. The elements of democracy do not work of their own accord but are quite openly controlled from above”. The US may not be quite there yet, but we are probably much closer than most people believe. And faith in our supposedly “strong institutions” may be severely misplaced. It is no coincidence that the Economist just downgraded the US to a “flawed democracy”. According to the study, “The US, a standard-bearer of democracy for the world, has become a ‘flawed democracy,’ as popular confidence in the functioning of public institutions has declined”, and now ranks just 21st in the analysis of 165 countries. With Trump’s blatant flouting of the Constitution with his rampant conflicts of interest, the crony capitalism his administration will bring, and the kind of “managed democracy” that the GOP currently employs to stay in power, I think we can expect our ranking to fall further. And that should scare us all.