May 8 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I consider the ways that treating our democracy for its ills is like a public health campaign—you have to get people to buy in. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Today, the Supreme Court of Virginia, where I live, overturned the referendum that voters approved just a few weeks ago, which would have allowed redistricting ahead of the November elections. The decision is already being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As Virginia Senator Tim Kaine noted, the court could have intervened ahead of the vote if it had concerns with what it was intended to authorize. But it’s problematic to allow the vote to happen, then cancel the results after the people have spoken. This is particularly true when the justices go out of their way to note in the decision that the measure only passed by a few percentage points as a way to discredit a legitimate election that went in a political direction opposite from how they wanted to rule.

I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t be making arguments about whether the referendum met the letter of the law on redistricting, or whether the court arbitrarily redefined “election” in this particular decision to allow it to rule as it did. Many legal journalists and experts will soon be commenting on that in more profound and articulate ways than I could.

Instead, I want to mention what all the political and historical writing I’ve done for the last two decades boils down to. And I’ll do so by talking about a conversation I had overseas a few years ago.

As anyone who’s read my books knows, I’ve traveled to Russia several times now, and historical events in the region have been part of all three of my books so far (and will be part of my fourth, too!) In the last fifteen years, I’ve had the good fortune to be able to have frank discussions about that country’s political history with dozens of people—from good friends to new acquaintances and even strangers.

I’ve met people who loved Muammar Gaddafi. I’ve met people nostalgic for the Soviet era, I’ve met people who have routinely protested the government, been fined, and released. I know people convicted of drug offenses, who were sentenced to prison for a time. I know people who left the country and hope to return. I know people who left the country and taken citizenship elsewhere, with no plan to return at all.

One person I met in Moscow encompasses a few of those categories. When we spoke, he was highly critical of the U.S. itself, from the high levels of violence to the number of guns in circulation that help drive that violence, and more.

I agreed with a number of this person’s specific criticisms and gave some context to them. Then I criticized several issues about Russia in return. He didn’t dispute how I was describing modern Russian society; he just wouldn’t acknowledge most of my observations as representing problems.

The conversation was respectful, but the back-and-forth devolved into this person defending Vladimir Putin’s abuses of power, even after acknowledging that they’ve led to greater repression. His opinion, more or less, came down to “if you don’t go looking for trouble, the government leaves you alone, and a real leader has to use force to keep society from crumbling.”

We talked about my research on concentration camps. I told him that in the past, two elements of political life had tended to make it possible for a country to shut down a concentration camp system and undo at least some of the harm. As I’ve written in this newsletter before, the odds are better if a country 1) keeps at least a partially functioning independent judiciary that can rule against the government, and 2) maintains the ability to dissent publicly.

“But why does that matter?” he wanted to know. (Again, this conversation was several years ago, so I have no idea if he feels differently in light of Russian atrocities and its high level of casualties in Ukraine.)

I told him that legislatures tend to become corrupt or sidelined in these kinds of societies. Court rulings and public dissent remain the only means by which you can block the government from further oppression and eventually remove leaders.

“If a country can’t replace its leaders,” I argued, “then its people are in a bad place.”

Needless to say, he didn’t agree. But I’ve thought a lot about that conversation since it happened. The people have to be able to replace their leaders. Not just sometimes get a new leader, but to be able to replace them.

It sounds obvious enough—and certainly it’s a metric that observers have used a long time around the world, looking at corrupt and unstable governments. But it’s another thing to watch it happen to your country in real time.

Between billionaires buying media outlets and politicians alike, and the courts backing Trump’s chronic authoritarian executive overreach, people in the United States are losing the ability to replace their leaders.

Billionaires are acquiring more power than politicians and are less accountable—becoming de factor leaders with no removal mechanism. But even elected leaders, particularly conservative leadership, is getting more difficult to replace. And our institutions have been so corrupted already, even sometimes when people are doing their jobs without harmful intention, the system’s momentum tends toward the dismantling of democracy. The background system is shifting to be less and less accountable to everyday people, particularly vulnerable groups that the system itself is also targeting.

Not every rejection of increasingly desperate attempts to keep democracy will be clearly illegal. Some will come with rational arguments; some will even involve assertion of real laws. But the ruling party in the U.S. is less interested in being popular enough to win elections and is more interested in how it can keep power.

Its sympathizers, who stand to gain in money or power themselves through expanded corruption, need only to put a finger on the scale intermittently—failing to enforce the law when it’s convenient, but enforcing it aggressively when that’s more useful. Even if most people in the system act as they did prior to widespread corruption, the system shifts. Like a car on a paved road, if the people in control turn the wheel a few degrees, it’s enough to send the car into a ditch.

The disparate reactions to gerrymandering are an obvious case in point. The Ohio legislature, rebuked by its state supreme court, ignored the judicial branch and proceeded anyway. The Florida legislature has routinely overruled its constitution and its own voters’ 2010 rejection of gerrymandering. Louisiana is another example of how court decisions are being seized upon to create electoral maps or change voting that violates the rules. But Virginia’s attempt to address the same issues gets blocked.

We need to be relentless with court cases, aggressive in the states where legislators are interested in saving democracy, and active in our communities. If the people who want to represent you don’t have a serious plan for defending democracy alongside their plan to deal with tangible issues like health care and housing, ask them why not—or find someone who does.

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