This Election Day, Democracy Is On The Line

Not to be alarmist, but the November 8 midterm elections could be the last in which the United States operates as a functional democracy. President Joe Biden hinted at this when he declared on September 1 that America is at “an inflection point—one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after.” Yet the President stopped short of stating the obvious: The 2022 competition pits his own relatively hapless Democratic Party against an authoritarian Republican Party that seeks power in order to rig the electoral process to its permanent advantage.

Biden got it right when he said, “Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: Either they win or they were cheated. And that’s where MAGA Republicans are today.” But then he asked us to imagine that MAGA Republicans are somehow distinct from the Republican majority.

A veteran of thirty-six years in the U.S. Senate and eight years in the vice presidency, Biden can’t wrap his head around the fact that the Republican Party of Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush is no more. “Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans,” he insisted, “are MAGA Republicans.”