The Alarm Bell is Blaring

The end of Roe v. Wade isn’t even the beginning.

Gerrymandering has put the Republican party in a position where it can win elections with a minority of votes. This minority is small enough that they can rely almost entirely on those susceptible to disinformation and misinformation campaigns. Those tactics may not work on everyone, but they don’t need it to.

The people overseeing elections are more and more driven by partisan motives than ensuring the stability of democracy. This, combined with gerrymandering and a fresh slate of voter-suppression laws, strongly favors unpopular Republicans winning elections. In my nearly 32 years alive, Republicans have won the popular vote for president exactly once.

The structure of the Electoral College and the Senate also grants unfair advantage to Republicans due to their dominance in small, rural, mostly white, low population states. The structure of these bodies, as well as the filibuster, were made with good intentions, but they have been corrupted. Rather than preventing tyranny of the majority, they have enabled a tyranny of the minority. Rather than ensure the Senate thoroughly debates before passing laws, they ensure gridlock.

The Supreme court is packed with partisan-motivated judges, marking the departure from that branch of government from pursuing their duties as intended in the Constitution. The court’s new purpose is to translate the far right’s ideology into law without being restrained by pesky public opinion.

Add to this the Republican party’s new fixation with authoritarianism and the result is the imminent end of democracy in the United States. There has already been one attempted coup with extremely limited repercussions for the leaders of it. All signs point to this becoming a larger problem.

More and more, it seems that two distinct nations are sharing one territory. Unless the ideological gap can be bridged and both groups can agree to live in the same reality, there is little hope for the future of this country. These issues run deep – deeper than can be resolved by expanding the Supreme Court or removing/reforming the filibuster. These problems are solvable, but require reaching some form of consensus. They requiring both groups (putting aside how the fact there are essentially only two groups is in itself a problem unforeseen by the Framers) to be able to agree to disagree about some things in order to do anything to improve the state of things in this nation.

Partisan solutions kick the can further down the road, just long enough for the opposing party to gain power and do the same thing. Each party views the other with fear as a malevolent threat to the continuity of the nation and their lives, and more and more, they see violence as being a justifiable retaliation. Blocking the other side becomes more important than objective improvement. Even if a large amount of this polarization is more emotional than policy driven, even if has more to do with people’s ideas of the other than the reality of the other, democracy still crumbles as a result.

Optimism is not inherently a bad thing, but if that is all people are counting on, consider the fact that it was primarily the optimistic Jews who did not flee Hitler’s Germany while it was possible. Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which hand fills up first.

When a smoke alarm goes off, it turns off shortly when it isn’t a serious fire. The democracy alarms have been blaring for years – it might be time to exit.

Part six of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.