Defending Democracy

David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column is an interesting exercise. He opens by taking the back of his hand to the Republicans:

When it comes to elections, the Republican Party operates within a carapace of lies. So we rely on the Democrats to preserve our system of government.

but after that it’s almost completely devoted to how offbase Democrats are in “defending democracy”. He provides a series of “myths”, debunks them, and then points out what the Democrats are doing. I’ll take them one at a time.

Myth #1: the whole electoral system in crisis

Elections have three phases: registering and casting votes, counting votes and certifying results. When it comes to the first two phases, the American system has its flaws but is not in crisis. As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout. The votes were counted with essentially zero fraud.

The emergency is in the third phase — Republican efforts to overturn votes that have been counted. But Democratic voting bills — the For the People Act and its update, the Freedom to Vote Act — were not overhauled to address the threats that have been blindingly obvious since Jan. 6 last year. They are sprawling measures covering everything from mail-in ballots to campaign finance. They basically include every idea that’s been on activist agendas for years.

Myth #2: voter suppression efforts are a major threat to democracy

Given the racial history of this country, efforts to limit voting, as some states have been implementing, are heinous. I get why Democrats want to repel them. But this, too, is not the major crisis facing us. That’s because tighter voting laws often don’t actually restrict voting all that much. Academics have studied this extensively. A recent well-researched study suggested that voter ID laws do not reduce turnout.

Myth #3: higher turnout helps Democrats

Political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik, authors of “The Turnout Myth,” looked at 70 years of election data and found “no evidence that turnout is correlated with partisan vote choice.”

Myth #4: the best way to address the crisis is top down

Democrats have focused their energies in Washington, trying to pass these big bills. The bills would override state laws and dictate a lot of election procedures from the national level.

Given how local Republicans are behaving, I understand why Democrats want to centralize things. But it’s a little weird to be arguing that in order to save democracy we have to take power away from local elected officials.

He concludes:

The crisis of democracy is right in front of us. We have a massive populist mob that thinks the country is now controlled by a coastal progressive oligarchy that looks down on them. We’re caught in cycles of polarization that threaten to turn America into Northern Ireland during the Troubles. We have Republican hacks taking power away from the brave state officials who stood up to Trumpian bullying after the 2020 election.

Democrats have spent too much time on measures that they mistakenly think would give them an advantage. The right response would be: Do the unsexy work at the local level, where things are in flux. Pass the parts of the Freedom to Vote Act that are germane, like the protections for elections officials against partisan removal, and measures to limit purging voter rolls. Reform the Electoral Count Act to prevent Congress from derailing election certifications.

So, let’s recap. Vote fraud exists but at such a low level it’s not a dire problem. Voter suppression exists but it doesn’t influence turnout or election outcomes. Higher turnout doesn’t provide an advantage of one party over the other. Republicans are worried about “a coastal progressive oligarchy” and the Democratic strategy for improving democracy is to place more control in their hands. Nothing to worry about there, obviously. So, where’s the beef?

It seems to me that the crisis is one of trust. Not only does neither party trust the other they view the other party’s members as enemies rather than as competitors. I think the solution to that is not just one of messaging.