Happy New Year?
It’s rare to know in advance that you’re about to live through history. I don’t mean Y2K, events linked mundanely to the mechanical function of clock and calendar. I mean the uncertainty of true history, when the outcome is unknown, yet the import momentous. I speak, of course, about American democracy. I speak, of course, about 2024.
Next year will be a competition between two versions of Americas, not only a national election, but a battle between two imperpretations of what America is. One is the story we have told ourselves since 1776: freedom, justice, equality, progress. It is a story of the advances in rights that have been achieved when we are attentive to these values. In this story, the autocrat is defeated by the rule of law.
The other narrative looks to a bleaker fact pattern. It notes that America began not as a constitutional democracy, but as a land grab by way of a genocide, that its wealth was built in factories, but also in forced labor camps we euphemistically call plantations. It notes that the period of working class progress, of union power, was also a time when women and people of color were excluded from these institutions of economic uplift. It is a history of mass murder, enslavement, caste, and reactionary backlash to change. In this story, the autocrat wins.
In a system that is unequal, it is rational to seek and ferociously retain a higher spot. It is understandable to support someone who tells you he will keep down those people previously constrained from advancement by law and custom and the lash. If democracy does not compellingly promise the best chance for the happiness that the Constitution itself enshrines, it will be unappealing.
So we find ourselves in a situation where the courts are asked to protect democracy from the voters, who wish to elect an autocrat. Making such prohibitions is indeed how democracies are protected. Those who have a record of undermining a democracy are excluded from governing it. But to block a popular autocrat is a terribly unstable position for a country to be in, the result of a procession of failures that should have protected the republic and didn’t. In 2024 we will live through history, and it’s okay to feel a bit nervous about that.
