The Future of Democracy
This is what citizens and lawmakers should do next to strengthen American institutions.
Gas prices, the war in Iran, data centers, health care: Americans have debated all of these subjects for weeks. But something more fundamental than control of Congress was on the ballot in these midterm elections. Americans were also voting to decide whether the United States, 250 years after its founding, would remain a democracy.
President Trump, who tried to overturn the 2020 election, did his best to manipulate this one too. Never before has the federal government demanded voter lists from states, and lost so many court cases in the process. Gerrymandering is an old tradition, but it has never before been directed from the White House. This put real pressure on state Republican leaders to redraw boundaries, in some cases with the deliberate aim of eliminating Black members of Congress. Once, the federal government helped state officials keep elections safe. This year it was the states that had to mount a defense against Washington to protect their constitutional right to run elections.
By now, most of us recognize Trump’s assault on elections as part of a pattern. Since he started his second term, the president has closely followed a playbook originally built by autocratic leaders in places like Hungary and Russia. He began with a full-scale attack on civil servants, universities, the legal profession, and scientists.
He appointed a conspiracy theorist to dismantle America’s public-health system and a narcissistic television host to run the most powerful army in the world. He used regulatory institutions to put pressure on journalists. He turned ICE into a federal paramilitary force. He let Elon Musk cut food aid and medical care for the world’s poor so abruptly and so incompetently that he wasted hundreds of millions of dollars and killed untold numbers of people in the process.
The White House oversaw assaults on America’s foreign broadcasters, cyber defense, counterintelligence. The president used the power of his office to earn money for himself, his family, and his business friends. He undermined America’s alliances, started a war in Iran, and prolonged the Russian invasion of Ukraine through diplomatic incompetence and possibly greed.
Through this period of chaos and destruction, the Republican majority in Congress either cheered or remained silent. Instead of asserting the legislative branch’s right to check the president, control the budget, and investigate corruption, congressional leaders let Trump break laws and norms egregiously and continuously. They let the president not only impose illegal tariffs, and therefore raise prices for all Americans, but they also looked the other way when he and his entourage bet money on the stock market while doing so. They refused to block his reckless war in Iran, they refused to restrain ICE even after it killed Americans, and they refused to ask why Musk was given power over agencies that regulate his companies, or why taxes on the wealthiest Americans were cut even as poor Americans lost their health-care benefits.
The next Congress can change this trajectory. Newly elected leaders must not only investigate the president’s worst abuses of power and help Americans recover from his destructive policies, but also restore the health of the political system. We may need to rethink the role of institutions that the president has weakened, or write laws that stop people with deep conflicts of interest from making American foreign policy. We have to confront an AI industry that is unable to control its models, and a health-care system weakened by the president’s reckless policies.
Above all we need to focus on the deepest source of imbalance in our politics: No other democracy spends billions of dollars on election campaigns, or gives so many opportunities for the wealthiest citizens to try to shape the result. The Democrats now have a unique opportunity to redress this imbalance. It will take more than two years to build a government that serves the needs of Americans, not a small class of oligarchs, but they can begin now.
Of course this election isn’t over until all the results are certified and all of the new members of Congress are sworn in. And we should expect that the president, as in 2020, will be considering many different ways of undermining this result. Over the next few days, watch for lawsuits, or unexplained delays.
But Americans can also be cheered by the fact that despite everything, people all over the country voted today, as is their right. There were no meaningful attempts to stop the vote. Turnout in many places was significant. Over the past 18 months, I’ve heard many people wonder out loud whether ordinary citizens, playing by the rules, could fight back against an autocratic president and shape their country’s future.
And it turns out, they can.
