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If you heaved a giant sigh of relief when election denier after election denier went down to defeat in the midterms; when the Democrats retained control of and then gained a seat in the Senate (before losing it, thanks to Kyrsten Sinema!); and when the Republicans barely eked out control of the House of Representatives " the sort of midterm results that hadn't been seen in a long, long time " I truly do understand. I did, too.
And if you experienced the same sort of relief when Donald Trump became the man of the hour (of decline) for promoting so many losing candidates, faced a new special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, and had his company found guilty of multiple charges, including tax fraud, I understand that, too. After all, what choice do we have but to take good news, however modest, wherever we can find it?
Still, whatever the joys of the midterms and the possible hobbling of The Donald, everything's not faintly okay. In fact, if you take a moment, you can feel our political system shifting under us in ominous ways. Just consider the Supreme Court. At the heights of the third branch of government, our judicial system is not just the ultimate set of judges overseeing the law, but a " possibly the " political actor of this moment. In fact, in two redistricting cases in the coming year, Merrill v. Milligan and Moore v. Harper, involving what's come to be known as the independent state-legislature theory, that court may change the very way our country works, politically speaking.
Its six right-wing judges could put their stamp of approval on the unconstrained ability of Republican state legislatures to gerrymander voting maps essentially any way they wish. As Andrew Marantz wrote recently in the New Yorker, they might even open up R#8220;the possibility that rogue state legislatures could put forward alternate slates of presidential electors, as some tried to do [for Trump] in 2020." In other words, we may already be on a different political planet, whether or not either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis makes it into the White House in 2024 " and no matter what a majority of American voters in this democracy of ours may want.
With that in mind, check out the latest piece by TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and author of We Cry Justice. Think about how, at a grassroots level, those disturbed by such a changing America might begin to respond and what kind of democracy it might still be possible to create. Tom
Everybody In, Nobody Out
Dreams of Democracy This Christmas
Last week, I was in Washington, D.C.'s Union Station. The weather had turned cold and I couldn't help noticing what an inhospitable place it had become for the city's homeless and dispossessed. Once upon a time, anyone was allowed to be in the train station at any hour. Now, there were signs everywhere announcing that you needed a ticket to be there. Other warning signs indicated that you could only sit for 30 minutes at a time at the food-court tables, while barriers had been placed where benches used to be to make it that much harder to congregate, no less sit down.
With winter descending on the capital, all this struck me as particularly cruel when it came to those unfortunate enough to be unhoused. That sense of cruelty was heightened by the knowledge that legions of policymakers, politicians, and lobbyists " with the power to pass legislation that could curtail evictions, protect tenants, and expand affordable housing " travel through Union Station regularly.
When I left D.C., I headed for my hometown, New York City, where Penn Station has been made similarly unwelcome to the homeless. Entrances are closed; police are everywhere; and the new Moynihan terminal, modern and gleaming, was designed without public seating to ward off unwanted visitors. Worse yet, after a summer spent destroying homeless encampments and cutting funding for homeless services, New York Mayor Eric Adams recently announced that the city would soon begin involuntarily institutionalizing homeless people. Rather than address a growing mental health crisis among the most marginalized in his city with expanded resources and far greater access to health care, housing, and other services, Adams has chosen the path of further punishment for the poor.
It's a bitter wonder that our political capital and our financial capital have taken such a hard line on homelessness and poverty in the richest country on the planet. And this is happening in a nation in which eight to ten million people lack a home entirely or live on the brink; a nation that reached record-high rents this year (with three-quarters of our largest cities experiencing double-digit growth in prices); that spends more on health care with generally worse outcomes than any other advanced economy; and that continues to chisel away at public housing, privatize health care, and close hospitals, while real-estate agencies, financial speculators, and pharmaceutical companies enrich themselves in striking ways.
Walking around Union Station, I also couldn't help thinking about the administration's decision to end the recent rail strike by stripping workers of their right to collective bargaining and denying them more than a day of paid sick leave a year. The president claimed that breaking the strike was necessary to protect the economy from disaster. Yet little attention was given to the sky-high profits of the railroad companies, which doubled during the pandemic. The price tag for more paid sick leave for union workers was estimated at about $321 million annually. Compare that to the $7 billion railroad companies made during the 90 days they opposed the strike and the more than $200 million rail CEOs raked in last year. In the shadow of such figures, how could paid sick leave during an ongoing pandemic be anything but a basic necessity for front-line workers?
The Deeper Meaning of Democracy
All of this left me thinking about the ongoing debate over American democracy, not to mention the recent Georgia runoff where Senator Raphael Warnock, even as he celebrated his victory over Herschel Walker, pointed to the negative impact of voter suppression on the election. Today, the rise in outright authoritarianism and white Christian nationalism in our body politic poses a genuine danger to the future health and well-being of our society. At the same time, a revived pro-democracy movement has also begun to emerge, committed to fighting for free and fair elections, the rule of law, and the peaceful transfer of power. But let's be honest: if we stop there, we cheapen the noble urge for a truly decent democracy.
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