Republican Talking Point Reveals Undemocratic Ideals
“That is a phrase that is uttered by people who, looking back on the sweep of American history, see themselves as safely at the center of the narrative, and typically they see their present privileges under threat,” documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor told Slate in 2020. “And so, they want to shore up the privileges that they possess, and they’re looking for a sort of historic hook.”
Taylor points out that the United States has never really been a fully inclusive democracy — going back to the Founders who denied women and Black people the right to vote — and who didn’t even count the enslaved as fully human. Still, the political pendulum of the last few years has been swinging away from that conceit to a view of American democracy, while not fully majoritarian, is nonetheless evermore diverse and inclusive.
A recent report by Catalist, a major Democratic data firm, showed that the 2020 electorate was the most diverse ever. Pointedly, the analysis found that while white voters still make up nearly three-quarters of the electorate, their share has been declining since the 2012 election. That shift “comes mostly from the decline of white voters without a college degree, who have dropped from 51 percent of the electorate in 2008 to 44 percent in 2020,” the analysis notes.
Meanwhile, 39 percent of the coalition that backed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was made up of voters of color, the analysis found, while the remaining 61 percent of voters were split more or less evenly between white voters with and without a college degree. The Trump-Pence coalition, meanwhile, was about as homogeneous as you’d expect it to be: 85 percent were white.
Republicans who wanted to “make America great again” were looking back to a very specific and mythologized view of the country: One that preserved the rights and privileges of a white majority.
With Trump gone, but scarcely forgotten, the “Republic Not a Democracy” crowd is just another look on the same endlessly aggrieved face.
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An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek. Copyright 2021 John L. Micek, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
Copyright 2021 John Micek, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com