Former – and possibly future – President of the United States Donald Trump reappeared on Saturday at the podium in Arizona, in front of an ecstatic crowd, under the inscription “Save America”. He promised a year of reconquest “of the House and the Senate”, before “taking back the White House in 2024”.
Last week, a federal bill—supposed to protect the right to vote for all against the legislative assaults of many Republican states that want to restrict it—was declared virtually dead. The reason, once again: the defection of two conservative senators, nominally “Democrats”, but whose choices are often aligned with those of the Republican opposition.
A year after losing power, the Republican Party seems well placed to win it back. And this fact will only be incidentally linked to the vagaries of the Biden presidency. A presidency at rock bottom in the polls, battered in Congress by the systematic opposition of the Republicans, which enjoys the circumstantial and decisive support of the “Democratic” senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.
What is brewing is not an alternation like the United States, and many other countries, have normally experienced since the dawn of liberal democracy. But much more an attempt to subvert the system, a veritable “coup d’etat in slow motion”. A coup that has begun and is taking place before our eyes.
In the Washington Congress, but even more so at the state level, of which they control 60% of the chambers, the Republicans are systematically weaving their web, so that the clumsy and improvised attempt of November December 2020 is repeated… But that next time, in 2024 , it is otherwise better executed.
How? ‘Or’ What ?
By dozens of laws, adopted throughout 2021, and still others no doubt in 2022. Laws that tighten the conditions for exercising the vote, in a way that discriminates against the poor, the minorities (voters normally more difficult to mobilize, and who tend to vote more for the Democrats).
By conquering elective positions, or positions subject to partisan appointments — sometimes obscure and technical positions, but tomorrow decisive: judges of state, secretaries of state, sheriffs, not to mention governors — during the November midterm elections 2022.
At that point, as much as the vote in the Senate or the House of Representatives, it will be necessary to monitor all these micro-elections – sometimes accompanied by referendums – which are part of the Byzantine system in lieu of a biannual electoral exercise in the United States.
And also, we want to give the people who run the elections the power to ultimately cancel the votes taken: we must therefore “place the right people” in these positions. Openly partisan officers will also be given the responsibility of redrawing electoral maps. The United States is the country champion of this type of manipulation: the gerrymandering… or how to guarantee 60% of the seats to a party that has 40% of the vote.
And finally, it is a question of granting to the state legislatures, after the presidential election, the right to overthrow ultimately, if need be (… after all that precedes!) the suffrage of November. By sending whoever they want to the group of electors supposed to make the final decision, in January. And this, by invoking a host of arbitrary, even revolting reasons… but which can always be legalized. And that in fact, we have started to legalize.
All this for what? To ensure that, during the presidential meeting of 2024, the attempt will not fail, unlike the dress rehearsal – aborted and tinged with amateurism – of 2020.
The United States is a technologically and culturally advanced society, but one that has remained archaic in many areas.
The electoral system has not changed fundamentally since the XVIIIand century. The indirect vote through the electors as well as the disproportionate weight of the rural and sparsely populated states (Midwest, center of the country) give rural and conservative regions an extraordinary influence in the face of the immense populations of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, with megacities like New York and Los Angeles which have become the poor relations of this system.
For example, in the Senate — where, ultimately, almost everything is decided — a state like Wyoming, with its 578,000 inhabitants, has two votes… exactly like California and its 40 million inhabitants. With such aberrations, if today, by pure hypothesis, the United States wanted to enter the European Union… the Luxembourg Court of Justice would certainly block them!
To understand the very serious threats to American democracy today, we have rightly spoken of the weight of lies (“the stolen election” of 2020) in contemporary political discourse, groups that no longer speak to each other, the absence of common grounds for discussion.
We talked of course about the Trump factor: this formidable demagogue knew how to bring to the surface all kinds of repressed poisons, which had never left American society for two centuries. He has transformed the Republican Party, with his God-chosen “Duce”, who must regain power by any means.
But it’s America’s outdated electoral system that makes this terrifying “slow-motion coup” possible…something unimaginable anywhere but in this country.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]