Do you believe, as many political activists and theorists do, that the contemporary Republican Party poses a threat to democracy? After all, much of its current leadership refuses to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and is dead set on undermining the concept of one person, one vote.
If it does pose such a threat, does that leave the Democratic Party as the main institutional defender of democracy?
If the Democratic Party has been thrust into that role — whether it wants it or not — recent election results and adverse polling trends suggest that it stands a good chance of losing both branches of Congress in 2022 and that Trump or a Trump clone could win the presidency in 2024.
The issue then becomes a question of strategic emphasis. Do Democratic difficulties grow more out of structural advantages of the Republican Party — better geographic distribution of its voters, the small-state tilt of the Electoral College and the Senate, more control over redistricting? Or do their difficulties stem from Democratic policies and positions that alienate key blocs of the electorate?
If, as much evidence shows, working class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial, and gender issues than by economics — many non-college whites are in fact supportive of universal redistribution programs and increased taxes on the rich and corporations — should the Democratic Party do what it can to minimize those sociocultural points of dispute, or should the party stand firm on policies promoted by its progressive wing?
I asked a group of scholars and Democratic strategists versions of these questions.
Three conclusions stood out.
There was near unanimous agreement that the Republican Party under the leadership of Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but disagreement over the degree of the danger.
There was across the board opposition to the creation of a third party on the grounds that it would split the center and the left.
In addition, a striking difference emerged when it came to the choice of strategic responses to the threat, between those who emphasize the built-in structural advantages benefiting the Republican Party and those who contend that Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues in order to regain support among working class voters, white, Black and Hispanic.
Theda Skocpol, a professor of sociology and government at Harvard, argued in an email that
Skocpol’s point:
Because the Democratic Party is structurally weakened by the rural tilt of the Senate and the Electoral College — and especially vulnerable to gerrymandered districts because its voters are disproportionately concentrated in metro areas — the party “may not have enough elected power to accomplish basic voter and election protection reforms. Very bad things may happen soon,” Skocpol wrote. Republicans are positioned, she continued, “to undo majority democracy for a long time.”
At the same time, Skocpol is sharply critical of trends within the Democratic Party:
The leaders of these groups, Skocpol stressed,
Along similar lines, William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and former White House aide during the Clinton administration, wrote, “For the first time in my life, I have come to believe that the stability of our constitutional institutions can no longer be taken for granted.”
Galston argues that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party threatens to limit, if not prevent, efforts to enlarge support: “Everything depends on how much the Democrats really want to win. Some progressives, I fear, would rather be the majority in a minority party than the minority in a majority party.”
“In my view,” Galston continued,
Democratic leaders generally and the Biden administration specifically, Galston said, have “failed to discharge, or even to recognize” their most important mission, the prevention of “Donald Trump returning to the Oval Office. They cannot do this with a program that drives away independents, moderates, and suburban voters, whose support made Biden’s victory possible.”
The party’s “principal weakness,” Galston observes “lies in the realm of culture, which is why race, crime and schools have emerged as such damaging flash points.” In this context, “the Biden administration has failed to articulate views on immigration, criminal justice, education and related issues that a majority of Americans can support.”
Not all of those I contacted have such a dire outlook.
Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, for example, agrees that “American democracy faced an unprecedented threat in 2020 when a sitting president refused to acknowledge electoral defeat,” but, she continued, “this threat was thwarted, to a great extent by that president’s own party. American democracy exhibited significant resilience in the face of the threat Trump posed.”
This, Lee points out, is “a story of Republicans judges and elected officials upholding democracy at personal cost to their own popularity with Republican voters. Republican elected officials in a number of cases sacrificed their political ambitions in service to larger democratic ideals.”
Lee cautioned that polls showing majorities of Republican voters questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election should be taken with a grain of salt:
Lee does agree that “election subversion is by far the most serious threat to American democracy,” and she contends that those seeking to protect democracy should “should focus on the major threat: Trump’s ongoing effort to delegitimize American elections and Republicans’ efforts in some states to undermine nonpartisan election administration.”
Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that she “certainly see threats, but I am not at all sure right now how deeply I think they undermine American democracy. If the Civil War (or more relevantly here, 1859-60) is the end of one continuum of threat, I don’t think we are close to that yet.”
At the same time, she cautioned,
Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is broadly cynical about the motives of members of both political parties.
“The finger pointing and sanctimony on the left is hardly earned,” Westwood replied to my emailed inquiries. Not only is there a long history of Democratic gerrymanders and dangerous assertions of executive power, he continued, but Democrats “can claim virtually no credit for upholding the outcome of the election. Courageous Republican officials affirmed the true vote in Arizona and Georgia and the Republican vice president certified the outcome before Congress.”
The “true problem,” Westwood wrote,
Westwood, however, does agree with Skocpol and Galston’s critique of the Democratic left:
The Democrats, in Westwood’s view,
ALG Research, one of the firms that polled for the 2020 Biden campaign, conducted postelection focus groups in Northern Virginia and suburban Richmond in an attempt to explore the success of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who defeated Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race a month ago.
A report on the study of 2020 Biden voters who backed Youngkin or seriously considered doing so by Brian Stryker, an ALG partner, and Oren Savir, a senior associate, made the case that the election was “not about ‘critical race theory,’ as some analysts have suggested.” Instead, they continued, many swing voters knew that
ALG focus group participants
In a parallel argument, Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, wrote in an essay, “Democrats, Not Republicans, Need to Defuse the Culture Wars,” that
Looking at the dangers facing American democracy from a different vantage point, Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” rejected the argument that Democrats need to constrain the party’s liberal wing.
“The Democrats have been amazingly successful in national elections over the last 20 years,” Levitsky wrote in an email.
Instead, he argued,
“Until our parties are competing on a level playing field,” Levitsky added, “I am going to insist that our institutions are a bigger problem for democracy than liberal elitism and ‘wokeness.’ ”
Jacob Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale, takes a similar position, writing by email:
Instead, Hacker argued, the Republican Party has become
The conservative strategy, which Hacker calls “minoritarianism,” means that “Republicans can avoid decisive defeats even in the most unfavorable circumstances. There is very little electoral incentive for the party to moderate.”
The result? “Neither electoral forces nor organized interests are much of a guardrail against a G.O.P. increasingly veering off the nation’s once-established democratic path.”
Julie Wronski, a professor of political science at the University of Mississippi, described the systemic constraints on the Democratic Party in an email:
The problem for Democrats, Wronski continued, is that
Those who would seek to restore respect for democratic norms in Trump’s Republican Party face another set of problems, according to Wronski. At the moment, she writes, a fundamental raison d’être of the Republican Party is to prevent the political consignment “to minority status” of “whites, and in particular white Christians, whose share of the population, electorate, and federal-level office holders is diminishing.” This commitment effectively precludes the adoption of a more inclusive strategy of “appealing to racial, ethnic, and religious minority voters,” because such an appeal would amount to the abandonment of the Republican Party’s implicit (and often quite explicit) promise to prevent “the threat of minority status that demographic change poses to white Christians.”
Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, anticipates, at least in the short term, a worsening of the political environment:
Enos argued in an email that “the liabilities of the Democratic Party can be overstated” when there is
Those trends worked to the advantage of Democrats as recently as the election of Barack Obama, Enos continued, when many working-class voters “looking for change, even voted for a Black man with a foreign-sounding name in 2008.” But, Enos continued, “when the Republican Party stumbled into a populist message of anti-elitism, protectionism, cultural chauvinism, and anti-immigration, it was almost inevitable that it would accelerate the pull of working-class voters toward Republicans.”
At the moment, Enos believes, the outlook is bleak:
All of this raises a key question. Has the Republican Party passed a tipping point to become, irrevocably, the voice of ultranationalist racist authoritarianism?
It may be that in too many voters’ minds the Democratic Party has also crossed a line and that Democratic adoption of more centrist policies on cultural issues — in combination with a focus on economic and health care issues — just won’t be enough to counter the structural forces fortifying the Republican minority, its by-any-means-necessary politics and its commitment to white hegemony.
The Biden administration is, in fact, pushing an agenda of economic investment and expanded health care, but the public is not yet responding. Part of this failure lies with the administration’s suboptimal messaging. More threatening to the party, however, is the possibility that a growing perception of the Democratic Party as wedded to progressive orthodoxies now blinds a large segment of the electorate to the positive elements — let’s call it a trillion-dollar bread-and-butter strategy — of what Biden and his party are trying to do.
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