For at least three decades, Americans have watched one incident after another of democratic backsliding and hoped, similarly, that these moments don’t represent who we are. There was the movement to delegitimize Barack Obama based on a false claim about where he was born. There were the Republican state legislators in North Carolina and Wisconsin who stripped constitutional and statutory powers from incoming Democratic governors. Earlier this week, there was the GOP-controlled state Senate in Pennsylvania that simply refused to seat a duly elected Democratic member, using its procedural powers to block the decision of the voters.
In the longer arc of history, these backslides aren’t an aberration at all. In fact, they’re quintessentially American, with roots in one of the deepest divisions in American politics, the conflict over race and power. Since the nation’s founding, a large portion of white citizens have embraced free and democratic elections only when the political system did not require them to share power with people of color.
This toxic current has shifted over the years. It was once the province of Democrats, and now it lives squarely in the GOP. The geography has changed, too. This used to be a uniquely Southern problem, but demographic changes over the past several decades — creating a realignment that has rendered the Republican Party more homogeneous and the Democratic Party more diverse — have made it national. What hasn’t changed is the underlying pattern, the one growing stronger in today’s Republican Party: a stubborn, and increasingly dangerous, contempt for the will of anyone’s voters but their own.
