Episode Details

Tomorrow begins Joe Biden’s two-day “Summit for Democracy,” whose avowed goal is to rally the nations of the world against the forces of authoritarianism.

Yet some of the authoritarian forces that pose the gravest threat to American democracy (and to other democracies around the world) are homegrown in the U.S. -- such as the former guy’s Big Lie and refusal to concede the 2020 election, his attempted coup, his instigation of the deadly January 6 insurrection, and his open encouragement of Republican state legislatures to suppress votes and take over state electoral machinery. And then, of course, the GOP’s willingness if not eagerness to go along with all this.

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And then there’s Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — both of whose relentless and intentional promulgation of lies and paranoid fantasies have done much to poison the American mind. (Not to be outdone, the former guy is about to launch his own media company, to be headed by Devin Nunes, the crazed pro-Trump California Congressman.)

American business groups have been invited to the Summit, despite their nonstop lobbying against proposed voting rights legislation in Congress and their increasing pollution of politics with corporate money.

Small wonder that Freedom House’s 2021 Freedom in the World report — which scores countries on a scale of 0 to 100 — has given the United States a score of 83, a major drop from America’s score of 94 just a decade ago.

With all this in mind, I thought today’s Office Hours would offer a good opportunity for us to speculate about the future of American democracy.

Please answer this question: What will American democracy be like ten years from now unless … [you fill in the blank]?

Eager to have your views. As usual, I’ll chime in around 10 am PT, 1 pm ET.

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Your comments so far are so thoughtful that you’ve prompted me to jump in earlier than I’d planned. Many thanks for this wonderful forum!

First, to summarize points that several of you have made, I see three existential threats to American democracy: (1) Big money, from large corporations and wealthy individuals, that goes into political campaigns and into issue ads. The money is essentially bribing lawmakers. There’s almost no countervailing sources of big money. Labor union contributions don’t come close. (2) Authoritarian, anti-democratic moves by Trump Republicans to rig elections in ways that suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters and give Republican legislators power over election officials – based on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen,” but really based on the Republican Party’s assessment that demographic trends work against it unless it shrinks the electorate. (3) A media (especially Fox News and Facebook) that lies incessantly to spread outrage, anger, panic, and paranoia in order to boost ratings and revenues.

Unless these three threats are contained and reversed, I see little hope for American democracy as we know it. Ten years from now we’ll be an oligarchy. We might still call ourselves a democracy. Hopefully we’ll still maintain the rule of law. But America will a democracy in name only.

What can we do? Fortunately, there are four immediate things we can do. But time is wasting. Each can be accomplished now, but each will become harder to achieve in coming months and years as anti-democratic forces gain ground.

1. Get big money out of politics. The Supreme Court is unlikely to reverse its shameful decision in Citizens United vs. FEC and related cases, especially given the cur