“We are not in this for a moment, but for a movement,” said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. “Our deadline is victory.”
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By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 14, 2022 ~ Even within economic circles, there is a growing nervousness that the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States – with the power to electronically create money out of thin air, bail out insolvent Wall Street megabanks, balloon its balance sheet to $8.8 trillion without one elected person on its Board while the U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for 98 percent of that, and allow its Dallas Fed Bank President to make directional bets on the market by trading in and out of million dollar S&P 500 futures during a declared national emergency – has carved out a no-law zone around itself. The latest ruckus stems from the Fed’s release on December 30 of the names of the 23 Wall Street trading houses and the billions they borrowed under its cumulative $11.23 trillion emergency repo loan facility that the … Continue reading →
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2022 ~ On September 16, 2019, exactly one day before the Federal Reserve would embark on its first emergency repo loan operations since the financial crisis of 2008, $2.7 billion in credit default swaps (CDS) on a single name blew up. The dealers in those credit default swaps were the very same trading houses on Wall Street that sought, and received, tens of billions of dollars in repo loans from the Fed in an operation that grew to a cumulative $11.23 trillion before its conclusion on July 2, 2020. (In just the last quarter of 2019, the Fed pumped a cumulative $4.5 trillion in repo loans into Wall Street’s trading houses, according to the transaction data it released on December 30 of last year. That was before even one case of COVID-19 had been reported in the U.S.) On September 16, 2019 the … Continue reading →
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When trying to figure out how they should interact with political parties, social movements face a common challenge: Should they push from without or seek to operate from within? Should they act as a destabilizing threat to all politicians, or should they work to build strength within a mainstream party?
Frances Fox Piven and Daniel Schlozman are two theorists who stand at opposite poles of this debate. In Piven’s view, movements win by deploying disruptive power from the outside that can polarize the public and create discomfort among politicians. “[M]ovements of mass defiance fired the most important episodes of class and racial reform in the 20th century,” she contends. “This capacity to create political crises through disrupting institutions is … the chief resource for political influence possessed by the poorer classes.”
Schlozman, on the other hand, upholds the view that movements wanting to wield power in the United States do best when they move toward the inside and embed themselves within a traditional political party — and he warns that failure to do so can reduce once-promising mobilizations into historical footnotes. “Movements for fundamental change in American society seek influence through alliance, by serving as anchoring groups to sympathetic parties,” he argues, “because parties hold the special capacity to control the government and its resources, and to define the organizable alternatives in public life.” Movements that limit themselves to outside agitation, he believes, lose much as a result.
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This debate is one with genuine consequences. At present, climate justice organizers, Black Lives Matter activists, and a resurgent socialist movement are all debating how they should engage with mainstream parties — and how they can most effectively extract concessions from the Biden administration. Even as mass protests have risen up, community organizations long averse to electoral politics are throwing down to elect champions to local office. Criminal justice reform advocates have propelled a new wave of progressive district attorneys to office. Meanwhile, groups like Justice Democrats are working to expand the Squad in Congress and, in the process, create a faction powerful enough to realign the politics of the Democratic Party.
As they pursue such diverse efforts to build power, activists must make some tough decisions. One of them is choosing what side they will take in the debate between Piven and Schlozman. While some movements have tried to split the difference by combining electoral work with outsider organizing, there are unavoidable tensions between the two approaches, and these frequently generate conflict between organizations taking different paths. How groups manage these tensions will have a profound impact in determining how effective they can be in creating change.
“Disruptive dissensus” and the power of outside agitation
Now in her late 80s, Frances Fox Piven long held the post of Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. In her landmark 1977 book, “Poor People’s Movements,” written with her late husband and longtime collaborator Richard Cloward, she made the case that movements of the disenfranchised have the most impact when they defy well-meaning advisors who tell them to work through the accepted channels of mainstream politics and instead become unruly. Historically, Piven argues, such groups have gained leverage by harnessing the power of disruption and deploying such tactics as “militant boycotts, sit-ins, traffic tie-ups, and rent strikes.” These cause “commotion among bureaucrats, excitement in the media, dismay among influential segments of the community and strain for political leaders.”
“When [marginalized groups] just quietly follow along and support political leaders, they’re ignored … It’s only when they make trouble that they are attended to.”
Piven’s theory of “dissensus politics” holds that movements make gains by threatening to pull apart the majorities that elected officials have cobbled together. “Politicians don’t like divisions,” she said, “They especially don’t like divisions within their coalition. To fend off the splintering of their coalition, they will try to propose reform. And that’s how movements win.”
“We have to start by realizing that the dynamics of electoral politics and movement politics are very different,” Piven explained. “In particular, the sort of logic of winning in electoral politics is different from the logic of winning in movement politics. If you have a two-party system, and you want to win elections, you need a majority. And to create a majority, you have to build coalitions and alliances between different groups. The magic of the electoral politician is the ability to bring these groups together by finding the issues, the rhetoric, and the mood that will unite them.” Social movements, on the other hand, rely on “division and polarization,” she argues: “In movements, agitators identify issues and raise hell over them. They drive groups into action — and some groups they will drive away.”
For people lacking wealth and insider status, such cleavages are a source of power. “When [marginalized groups] just quietly follow along and support political leaders, they’re ignored,” Piven states. “That’s the way it’s always been. It’s only when they make trouble that they are attended to. It’s only in the aftermath of trouble that you can have some dialogue.”
Elaborating on this point, Piven and Cloward wrote in 1999, “Although a small poor people’s lobby can be ignored with impunity by political leaders, institutional breakdowns that contribute to discontent among large and variegated segments of the [electorate] cannot be.” Movements that exacerbate such crises play a unique role in shaping political consciousness. As Piven and Cloward write, “Disruptive protests have communicative power, the capacity — through the drama of defiant actions and the conflicts they provoke — to project a vision of the world different from that in ruling-class propaganda, and to politicize millions of voters.”
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This politicizing function is especially critical in the United States. “For reasons that are deeply rooted in our history and governmental structures (not least mass disenfranchisement of the poorer classes by voter registration procedures during most of the 20th century), the political parties in the United States are not sharply class-based,” Piven and Cloward argue. Absent the kind of labor party that we might typically see in Europe, “it is difficult for people to define their interests in a way that is consistent with their class position. Thus movements generate the conflicts that politicize voters, and that makes votes count.” It is when social movement groups politicize the electorate that politicians must scramble to respond. Or, as Piven and Cloward put it, “To avoid worsening polarization and to restore institutional stability, political leaders must either promulgate concessions or institute repression.”
This dynamic does not usually lead to harmonious relations between movements and politicians. Instead, the fact that the two have different sources of power inevitably leads to tensions. “As an elected politician, coalitions are sort of your meat and potatoes,” Piven said. “And if activists have the effect of straining those coalitions, then it’s difficult to treat these people as allies. But they are allies if you’re interested in addressing injustices.”
“There are all sorts of things that have to be done in electoral politics, but movements have a distinctive contribution to make in order to create substantial democracy.”
Piven also acknowledges that sometimes polarizing actions by social movements can hurt the Democrats. “Not everything a movement does supports the broad agenda of reform,” she said. “It’s true some disruption drives some people away.” Nevertheless, she sees polarization as an essential element in propelling reform. “In a memorable saying, [famed community organizer Saul] Alinsky admonished organizers to ‘Rub raw the sores of discontent,’” Piven and Cloward wrote. “We add, ‘Rub raw the sores of dissensus.’ It is then that political leaders will attempt to stabilize a new realignment … and concessions to the bottom may become possible.”
In short, Piven argues that the unique role of movements is to raise hell on the outside, not to focus on the internal maneuvering of factions within mainstream political parties. “I think that’s for somebody else to do,” explains Piven. “Movement organizers who are trying to build power among low-income people and racial minorities don’t have to work on that. There needs to be a division of labor. There are all sorts of things that have to be done in electoral politics, but movements have a distinctive contribution to make in order to create substantial democracy.”
The decision to anchor a party
While also writing from a left-of-center perspective, Johns Hopkins political scientist Daniel Scholzman takes a decidedly different position on how movements can best propel change. Unlike Piven, who entered academia by a circuitous route after previously working with anti-poverty groups in New York City, Scholzman pursued a more conventional path, volunteering in the Cambridge office of the Democratic Party while working on his PhD in government and social policy at Harvard. Nevertheless, he has taken a keen interest in social movements, and his 2015 book, “When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History,” has been of significant interest within Justice Democrats and among other activists seeking to vie for power within the Democratic Party.
For Schlozman, political parties have a unique and unavoidable role in the political system, one that is too often underappreciated by outside agitators. In his book, he quotes mid-century political scientist E.E. Schattschneider, who argued, “A political party is an organized attempt to get control of the government.” In other countries, movements that differ ideologically from major political parties simply break off and form their own. However, the entrenched two-party system in the United States inhibits such action with ballot access restrictions, first-past-the-post voting, and a lack of proportional representation. Instead, it compels movements to either align with the Democrats or Republicans, or to give up on a key route to power. “We have a political system that is stacked against big change,” Schlozman said. “And in this system, conflict largely takes place inside parties.” If movements want to share in the control over government that parties offer, he believes, they must become full participants in this internal battle.
Connecticut ILGWU members rally supporting John F. Kennedy for U.S. president, 1959. (Flickr/Kheel Center)
Schlozman’s book proposes that the movements which are most successful at executing this gambit become “anchor” groups in electoral politics by mobilizing a reliable base of support for a chosen political party over an extended period. Schlozman pays particular attention to how organized labor secured lasting influence within the Democratic establishment starting during the New Deal, and how the religious right became an anchor within the Republicans in the Reagan era. “Inside parties, anchoring groups exercise broad influence on national politics by virtue of the money, votes and networks that they offer to the party with which they have allied,” he explained. In exchange for loyalty, anchoring movements gain the ability to shape parties’ long-term trajectories and influence their ideological character.
As opposed to standard pressure groups, who will push their issue on both sides of the aisle, anchors exhibit loyalty to a single party on an extended basis. “How did we get to the world where the Supreme Court threatens basically to overturn Roe v. Wade?” Schlozman asked. “Answer: a party-wide project that has played out over a long, long time. This was not just the Christian Right treating abortion as one issue among many, where they were going to lobby legislators. By becoming an anchor and entering the Republicans, they shaped the whole worldview of the party around their priorities.”
In contrast, movements that fail to become anchors face serious consequences. Schlozman points to the populists of the 1890s and the antiwar movement of the 1960s as political formations whose legacies were severely diminished by their inability to enter a major party. “With Populism died the most serious challenge to corporate capitalism that the United States would ever see,” he writes. And “although its personnel occupied positions at the top of the Democratic Party for decades, the antiwar movement failed to restrain American empire.”
The decision to try to anchor a political party, however, is not one that movements can take lightly. As a cost of entering into an alliance with a mainstream group, movement leaders may have to distance themselves from radicals in their ranks who pursue precisely the type of disruptive protest that Piven recommends. “We see the price mostly clearly with the labor movement in the late 1940s,” Schlozman explained. “As the Cold War escalates, they have to push out the Communist unions that contain their most dedicated organizers. As for the Christian Right, they had to accept that they’re not building a Christian America; they had to accept that, within the party of Ronald Reagan, they would still play second fiddle to economic conservatives for a long time. Those are heavy prices.”
President Reagan addressing the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983. (Flickr/Levan Ramishvilli)
Any yet, Schlozman believes that “given the rules of the game, [this] is a price well worth paying.” Those movements unable to exert influence from inside a party risk being ignored completely. “One benefit of durable, long-term alliance is that you don’t get abandoned the minute your movement is no longer in the spotlight,” he explained. “The Christian Right has secured long-term benefits, even as its demographic share in the population stopped rising and as public religiosity declined. But in exchange for a durable alliance, you give up your freedom to say exactly what you want, when you want — because you have to protect your allies.”
Schlozman recognizes that many activists will reject the uncomfortable bargain inherent in such alliances. “Maximalists who prize movement autonomy and confrontational tactics may … [wish] to continue to agitate from the outside,” he writes. But he believes that this decision is incredibly risky: “No social movement has sustained effective militancy on a society wide basis … over decades. Passions fade; radicals and moderates split; organizations collapse.”
Scholzman’s disagreement with Piven’s theory of “disruptive dissensus” largely comes down to a debate about timeframe. “For a theorist like Piven, everything happens at [moments] of crisis,” he said. “But if you understand politics as something that happens over a series of decades, then you can’t really understand the ongoing influence of social movements unless you think of them all the way through this long lifecycle. You have to look at how movements can continue to exert influence. You have to look at how that influence is dependent on their mass base, but is often done through ‘regularized’ means of electoral work and lobbying, even during lulls in protest.”
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Although Schlozman acknowledges that periods of intensive uprising can put movements on the map, he argues, in the tradition of a famous essay by Bayard Rustin, that activists must move “From Protest to Politics” if they want to be effective in the long run.
Weighing the debate
Needless to say, Piven and Schlozman represent stances that are far apart, and their respective followers would pursue very different courses of action. What lessons, then, can activists draw from their debate?
First, although juxtaposing the two perspectives reveals incontrovertible differences, it is worth noting that both theorists acknowledge that militant protests and long-term organizing can each have a role at select times. Schlozman notes that confrontational protest can be critical in helping movements to break into public consciousness and to create the types of networks that make parties welcome them in the first place. “There is a role for militancy, and there are certain moments when movements need to strike when the iron is hot,” he admitted.
For her part, Piven affirms that in times of retrenchment, when the prospect of widespread defiance seems distant, more conventional organizing and political work is warranted. “During quiescent periods,” she and Cloward write, “it is reasonable for organizers to emphasize organization-building.” Substantial portions of Piven’s career have been devoted to projects other than raucous protest. For years, she and Cloward were involved in advocacy to build up voting blocs favorable to progressive politics, founding an organization called Human SERVE (Human Service Employees Registration and Voters Education) to advance voter registration in low-income communities. Their work was critical in securing passage of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly referred to as the “Motor Voter Bill.” This law makes voter registration available at social services agencies that provide unemployment, welfare, and disability benefits — as well as at places where people renew their drivers’ licenses.
“People don’t join movements unless they think they can win something. What makes them think that they can win is often the electoral environment and the promises that politicians make.”
“The reason we undertook this rather conventional electoral reform project,” Piven and Cloward explained in 1999, “is that the success of disruptive protest depends … on the ability of the protesters to galvanize and polarize electoral blocs, to fragment or threaten to fragment electoral coalitions. But protesters obviously need supportive voter blocs if this process of dissensus is to benefit them. This means, for one thing, that the social base from which protesters are drawn must be fully able to vote.”
Piven has long argued that movement and electoral approaches are not exclusive. “People don’t join movements unless they think they can win something,” she said. “What makes them think that they can win is often the electoral environment and the promises that politicians make. When politicians are trying to win an election, they blast off about what they’re going to do differently, and they create a good deal of hope. By doing that, they help to instigate the kind of hopefulness and ambition that fuels movement politics.”
Later, according to the dissensus model, movement constituencies can extract concessions by being disruptive and threatening to fracture electoral coalitions. But obviously there are limits to this approach. If disruptive movements pull apart the blocs that sympathetic politicians assembled to get elected, it can allow most hostile rivals to take advantage. Along these lines, civil rights activists succeeded in expelling Southern Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party, but the defection was a boon for Republicans.
While Piven offers the warning that being quiet and loyal can be a recipe for being taken for granted, Schlozman cautions that boisterous action can also have down sides. Movements can overplay their hand if they do not control large enough constituencies. “In a vast country like the United States, change is really hard, and no small element is going to be a majority,” Schlozman argued. “If you start off with those elemental facts about American politics, then paying the price of alliance suddenly looks a lot more worth it than it might look if you’re just focused on immediate tactics.”
Influence outside anchoring
A second point to consider in weighing the debate between Piven and Schlozman is whether anchoring is the only option available to social movements seeking to achieve influence — or whether there might be multiple ways for activists to pressure political parties from both inside and out, while never embracing a complete marriage.
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Schlozman makes a compelling case that institutionalizing by embedding within a political party can lead to victories. And yet many of the major movements of the past century do not fit within his “anchoring” typology, but they nevertheless possess significant legacies. The movement for LGBTQ rights, and its landmark victory on the issue of same-sex marriage, serves as an important case in point. This is not a movement Schlozman identifies as an anchor group, and still the gains it has achieved arguably rival those of the labor movement or the religious right, which have burrowed within the major parties.
Schlozman explains victories by LGBTQ communities as examples of what he calls “cultural persuasion.” As he states, “I think that the LGBTQ movement is a good example of when culture is upstream from politics. … If you have a group that is treated unsympathetically, which you want to be treated more sympathetically, figuring out how to do this kind of persuasion is smart.” By reframing values and ideas, Schlozman explains, movements can persuade through cultural means rather than directly political ones. “I’m not sure I would have advised that movement correctly,” he admitted. “But I think they got that right.”
While Schlozman believes that such persuasion only works with a select few issues, those in the Pivenite camp would see a large part of social movement activity as being “upstream” of formal politics. And they would argue that the boundaries between what are cultural issues and what are political ones is constantly being redefined. “The urgency, solidarity and militancy that conflict generates lends movements distinctive capacities as political communicators” Piven writes. “Where politicians seek to narrow the parameters of political discussion, of the range of issues that are properly considered political problems and of the sorts of remedies available, movements can expand the political universe by bringing entirely new issues to the fore and by forcing new remedies into consideration.” In other words, movements change the political landscape within which elected officials operate.
The antiwar movement of the 1960s provides an intriguing example. Here, Schlozman sees an effort that fell short: “The antiwar movement did not just want to end the invasion of Vietnam, it wanted to roll back the worst parts of American imperialism,” he said. “As they aged, members of that movement became part of the new Democratic establishment, but there’s no actual organized movement that they brought with them. So there’s no real, ongoing dovish presence to push against American empire. It’s just not there. Instead, many of these politicians who might have identified as young activists in the ’60s become the liberal hawks of the 1990s and 2000s.”
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Certainly, it is legitimate to criticize such shortcomings. But they are not the whole story. Beyond helping to end the Vietnam War and eliminating the military draft in the United States, there is good argument that the movement had a lingering effect in constraining overt militarism for a significant period. Scholars such as Stephen Zunes have taken the position that the prospect of mass protest and public revolt “served as a deterrent for large-scale U.S. military interventions overseas for the next three decades, a phenomenon known by detractors as ‘the Vietnam Syndrome.’” Notably, the likelihood of public backlash made it politically impossible for the Reagan administration to directly deploy U.S. troops in Central America during the death squad wars of the 1980s — something that many administration officials would otherwise have been eager to do.
The antiwar movement did not win everything it wanted, but what political formation ever does? Despite anchoring within the Democratic Party, the labor movement has dwindled to a fraction of its size of a half-century ago, and it has perennially failed to get serious labor law reform enacted. Ultimately, efforts as varied as second-wave feminism, environmentalism and the civil rights movement do not become anchor groups by Schlozman’s definition, but have had major impacts. Each movement has institutionalized over the decades through a combination of means — winning some legal gains and some political ones; some advances in culture and others within business, religious, and other non-state institutions. Put together, the changes they have wrought show that even movements that do not embed within a political party can have lasting importance.
From Piven’s perspective, the fact that long-term gains are never guaranteed is reason to maximize the impact of disruptive moments when they occur: “Turbulence will not last,” she and Cloward advise: “Get people what you can, while you can.”
An ecological view
As much as organizers might wish for strategic unity, in the end movements are diverse and messy formations, involving both inside and outside politics. Bayard Rustin’s proposal that movements transition from “Protest to Politics” proposes a linear progression for organizers to follow, but an alternate way of looking at movements would use an ecological perspective. At any given time, a movement will contain groups and individuals devoted to different strategies and organizing models: In addition to the advocates of disobedience that Piven champions and the inside-game players that Schlozman highlights, there will be base-builders who focus on building unions, community organizations, and other structure-based groups, and there will be counter-cultural groups focused on keeping radical ideas alive by carving out alternative spaces and dissident communities. Each of these approaches has important contributions to make, and all of these tendencies together help to form an ecosystem that promotes change.
Although organizers must decide where their own organizations stand in the debate between anchoring and disruption, they must accept that not all groups will make the same decision. Therefore, they need to figure out methods for collaborating and coexisting with those who have different strategies. Even as they sometimes butt heads with people in these groups, they must determine how to act in ways that allow the ecosystem as a whole to thrive.
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To the extent that there is a progression between them, we can look at how different elements of the ecology come to the fore at various moments in the life cycle of a cause, only to recede at other junctures — and how some might re-emerge to once again play a significant role later, defying a clean and linear succession. Watching a whole movement ecosystem develop over time might reveal, for example, that groups without skill in mass protest will sorely miss that capacity in peak moments of social tension, and that those accustomed to always striking an outsider pose may leave worthwhile gains on the table if they lack insider allies in times when the establishment is ready to grant concessions.
Schlozman, for his part, acknowledges that “Movements always have their radicals and their moderates. And they may need both. But that doesn’t say exactly how radical the radicals should be, and how moderate the moderates should be — and whether or not they can actually work together.” Expanding on this point, he offers a word of caution: “I would say that people in movements should be aware of where they are in that spectrum and figure out how to support one another, and not eat each other alive. Because when they can’t work together, that’s really bad.”
Both Piven and Schlozman see social movements as being critical forces in shaping American democracy, having an influence on formal institutions that most political scientists fail to appreciate. This influence comes not from a single protest group or coalition moving in strategic lockstep. Rather, it comes from a sometimes chaotic amalgam of grassroots groups operating with diverse backgrounds and ideologies, whose combined efforts result in sometimes unpredictable transformations. Taking an ecological view does not exempt organizers from strategic decision-making, nor from taking seriously the dilemma of whether disrupting political parties or anchoring them represents a more fruitful goal. But it does suggest that how they interact with others who make different choices will be as important as the path they choose themselves.
Research assistance provided by Celeste Pepitone-Nahas.
A week before the ninth anniversary of her son’s murder, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) discovered that Republicans had radically redrawn her district to oust her from Congress.
A political novice, McBath had became a leading gun control advocate after her 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot by a white man in 2012 in an altercation over the volume of rap music he was playing. She went on to stage one of the biggest electoral upsets in Georgia’s recent history when, in 2018, she became the first Black person to represent the state’s 6th District, Newt Gingrich’s home turf for 20 years. Her victory exemplified Democratic inroads in formerly red states like Georgia and the new power being exercised by communities of color in the rapidly diversifying South. But those gains are quickly being erased by the GOP through a toxic combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and election subversion that together pose a mortal threat to free and fair elections.
Georgia is a microcosm of the extreme tactics Republicans are using across the country to entrench power in advance of the midterms. What can appear as a series of seemingly disconnected state-level skirmishes is in fact part of an insidious national strategy that goes far beyond previous efforts to suppress and undermine Democratic influence. Fueled by the Big Lie, this effort picks up where last year’s insurrection left off by putting in place the pieces to steal future elections by systematically taking over every aspect of the voting process.
Over the course of 2021, 19 states passed 34 laws making it harder to vote—the greatest rollback of voting access since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those changes include more than a dozen GOP-controlled states passing new provisions to interfere with impartial election administration, while Trump and his allies aggressively recruit “Stop the Steal”–inspired candidates to take over key election positions like secretary of state offices and local election boards in major battleground states.
“What we’re seeing is a multifaceted, multilevel attack on American democracy,” says Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State.
McBath’s district is a striking case in point: Under a new redistricting map crafted by Georgia Republicans, her diverse suburban Atlanta seat—where moderate white voters joined an influx of Black, Latino, and Asian American residents to elect her—would now stretch all the way to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, with Republicans adding three deeply red and predominantly white counties—Forsyth, Dawson, and Cherokee—where Donald Trump won 70 percent of the vote. (Forsyth is infamous for forcing its more than 1,000 Black residents to leave after a Black man was lynched in 1912.) Her district would go from one that favored Biden by 11 points to one that Trump would have won by 15, one of the most drastic transformations of any district in the country.
“What we’re seeing is a multifaceted, multilevel attack on American democracy.”
After the map passed the legislature on November 22, McBath decided to run in a neighboring district, held by Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, that absorbed some of the most Democratic parts of McBath’s old district. “I refuse to let [Georgia Gov.] Brian Kemp, the NRA, and the Republican Party keep me from fighting,” McBath told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in announcing her candidacy. But even if she wins a messy primary against Bourdeaux, Democrats will have lost a House seat in 2022 in a state that is trending blue, and communities of color will have less political representation—even though they account for all of the state’s population growth over the past decade. Moreover, because of the new redistricting maps, Republicans are set to control nine of 14 congressional districts in a state where Democrats won the presidency and two Senate seats in 2020.
A similar outcome is being replicated in other key battlegrounds, like Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas, where Republican legislatures passed redistricting maps that will hand their party between 65 and 80 percent of US House seats in states where Biden narrowed the GOP’s 2016 advantage. Though Democrats are faring slightly better in the redistricting process overall compared with the last decade, these extreme maps in GOP-controlled swing states, combined with Biden’s sagging approval ratings, will likely help Republicans pick up enough seats to retake the US House in 2022 and lock in dominance of state legislatures for the next 10 years.
And make no mistake, if Republicans prevail in rigging the 2022 election, they’ll be even more emboldened in 2024, especially if Trump is on the ballot. The lies of a stolen election propagated by Trump—and exploited by Republican lawmakers who know better—are now being used to lay the groundwork to sabotage elections for real. “Their endgame?” President Joe Biden asked rhetorically during a major speech in Atlanta on January 11. “To turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion—something states can respect or ignore.” This isn’t just about the normal ebb and flow of partisan politics; it’s a test of whether a party that is deadly serious about ending American democracy as we know it will regain control of ostensibly democratic institutions.
“The insurrection, the gerrymandering, the voter suppression, the attacks on professional election officials—all of this puts our democracy at risk to a degree we have not seen since the Civil War,” former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder told me recently. “That’s how serious this is.”
Jim Cooke
The targeting of McBath is not an isolated incident. It’s a stark illustration of the GOP’s nationwide playbook for undermining voting rights, with Georgia at ground zero of this battle. Georgia was an epicenter of the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, with the defeated president famously telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to nullify Biden’s victory. Raffensperger refused, despite threats against him and his family, but Trump’s Big Lie persuaded Georgia Republicans to pass a sweeping voter-suppression law last March that set the bar for restrictive voting legislation that proliferated across GOP-controlled states.
At the heart of Trumpism is the fear of a majority-minority future where white power no longer dominates. So it’s no coincidence that this battle is being fought hardest in the state where Black voters who vote overwhelmingly Democratic have the most to gain or lose. Along with McBath, Sen. Raphael Warnock is running for reelection in 2022 and Stacey Abrams is mounting a second bid for governor. But the voters supporting them first need to overcome more than a dozen provisions designed to reduce their access to the ballot, including a reduction in the number of drop boxes in metro Atlanta from 97 to 23, new voter-ID requirements for mail-in ballots, a far lower bar for rejecting ballots cast in the wrong precinct, less time to request and return mail ballots, a prohibition on election officials sending out mail-in ballot applications to all voters, and even a ban on giving voters food or water while they’re waiting in line.
These policies are already having an impact—during local elections in November, the number of rejected absentee-ballot applications rose from less than 1 percent in 2020 to 4 percent, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a troubling indicator of how easy it would be to tilt the outcome in a state decided by just over 11,000 votes in 2020.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Atlanta-based voting rights group Black Voters Matter Fund, calls the Georgia law a “death by a thousand cuts” that “has the potential to change the results of the election.” But “the scariest part of the process,” she says, is “what they’re doing with the election boards.”
That’s right: The newest—and potentially most dangerous—anti-democratic threat are new laws designed to give Trump-backed election deniers unprecedented control over how elections are run and how votes are counted.
After Raffensperger defended the integrity of the 2020 election, Republicans removed him—and all his successors—as chair and voting member of the state election board, which oversees voting rules and election certification, and gave the GOP-controlled legislature the power to appoint the board’s chair, allowing them to control a majority of the members.
The reconstituted state board, in turn, has extraordinary power to take over up to four county election boards that it views as “underperforming” or where local officials (read: fellow Republicans) have lodged complaints. In other words, partisan election officials appointed by and beholden to the heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature could control election operations in Democratic strongholds like Atlanta’s Fulton County, where the Trump campaign spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted on election night after GOP poll monitors left. The state board has already appointed a panel, led by Republicans, which immediately began a performance review of Fulton County requested by Republicans in the legislature—the first step toward a possible takeover.
Meanwhile, in at least eight Georgia counties, Republicans have already changed the composition of local election boards—which not only certify elections but determine things like the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes, as well as voting hours—by ousting Democratic members and replacing them with Republicans. Not just any Republicans, of course, but those who claim the election was stolen. (In Lincoln County, the recently reconfigured election board recently proposed closing six of the county’s seven polling sites.)
This radicalization of previously evenhanded bodies will affect not just who oversees elections, but whose votes are counted. During the January 2021 Senate runoffs, the right-wing group True the Vote challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters who it claimed had moved. Only a few dozen votes were ultimately thrown out, but now Georgia’s new law explicitly allows an unlimited number of voters to be challenged and requires local election boards to hear these challenges within 10 days or face sanctions from the state election board. Based on these challenges, local boards could then decline to certify election results or disqualify enough voters to swing a close election—exactly the gambit Trump tried to pull off in 2020.
“More than just reducing turnout, they’re stacking the deck to actually manipulate the results,” Brown says. “That’s very scary to me.”
That’s not all. Precisely because they certified the 2020 election results, Raffensperger and Gov. Kemp are now facing Trump-endorsed primary challengers, raising the prospect that Georgia’s top executive and top election official heading into 2024 could be Big Lie champions predisposed to helping steal a future election for Trump or another Republican candidate.
Former GOP Sen. David Perdue (who lost a January 2021 runoff election to Democrat Jon Ossoff) announced in December he’d challenge Kemp. Perdue has insisted he would not have certified the 2020 election; instead, he would have called a special session of the legislature to enable Republicans to appoint pro-Trump presidential electors to nullify the will of Georgia voters. Just days after announcing his candidacy, Perdue filed a Trump-like lawsuit falsely claiming that thousands of “unlawfully marked” absentee ballots were counted in Fulton County in November 2020.
“More than just reducing turnout, they’re stacking the deck to actually manipulate the results.”
Raffensperger, meanwhile, is being challenged by GOP Rep. Jody Hice, who voted to reject presidential electors from Pennsylvania and Arizona after the insurrection, signed on to a lawsuit by the state of Texas asking the Supreme Court to throw out election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and has said he was not “convinced at all, not for one second, that Joe Biden won the state of Georgia.”
Hice is not an outlier. More than 160 Republican candidates who’ve amplified the Big Lie are running for statewide positions with authority over how elections are run. “That’s akin to giving a robber a key to the bank,” says Colorado’s Griswold. Many more election deniers are running for local positions like poll worker and election judge. And Republicans are not coy about their intentions. “We are going to take over the election apparatus,” former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, an architect of this strategy, said on his podcast in late December, calling for the “overthrow” of county election clerks.
If hijacking election administration fails, extreme gerrymandering makes it more likely that Republican legislators in increasingly safe districts, insulated from public accountability, will decide to overturn the will of their states’ voters in presidential contests.
After new redistricting maps were passed in states like Georgia and Texas last year, the number of competitive congressional and state legislative seats plunged. In Texas, the number of safe GOP House districts will increase from 17 to 23, according to the Cook Political Report, while the number of competitive districts will fall from 12 to just one. Despite being one of the most competitive states in 2020, Georgia will have almost no swing districts in the state legislature and no competitive congressional districts—the closest GOP-held House seat has an 8-point Republican advantage. (Democrats and voting rights groups have filed suit against these maps.)
That means that GOP legislators not only can ignore the views of a majority of voters, but in deep-red districts they’ll be chiefly concerned with primary challenges, accelerating the party’s radicalization against democracy. “They’re going to have more Marjorie Taylor Greenes in their caucus,” says Michael Li, an expert on redistricting at the Brennan Center for Justice.
This is how Trump’s end goal for January 6 becomes far more likely in 2024: If Republicans take back the House through aggressive gerrymandering, they’ll not only derail Biden’s agenda, but they’ll be much more inclined to reject the results of a contested presidential election if a Democrat wins. Sixty-five percent of House Republicans refused to certify the election results in 2020 just hours after the insurrection, and that caucus will become even more radical after 2022.
“The people who don’t want to certify free and fair elections,” predicts Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), “will regain control of the federal government. They will make it harder for representative government to ever exist moving forward.”
While Republicans have been hellbent on subverting American democracy, Democrats have been slow to properly defend it.
Biden didn’t give a major speech about voting rights until July in Philadelphia. By then, 18 states had already passed laws making it harder to vote and Texas Democrats had fled to DC in a Hail Mary effort to block a sweeping voter-suppression law. Though Biden deemed “the assault on free and fair elections” to be “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” for the better part of a year his administration did not treat this threat to democracy as an existential emergency. Biden called passage of voting rights legislation “a national imperative,” but never mentioned the filibuster that was blocking such legislation or laid out a plan to overcome it.
Indeed, a remarkable asymmetry in tactics has defined this fight. While Republicans have made the hostile takeover of the country’s election system their central organizing principle, the Biden administration prioritized economic legislation over voting rights, going so far as to list the passage of the infrastructure bill as the first item in a fact sheet touting the steps it had taken to “restore and strengthen American democracy” ahead of a global democracy summit in December. Biden believed that passing popular pieces of legislation would “prove democracy works” and restore the public’s faith in the democratic process, but the administration’s focus on economic policy—and its pursuit of bipartisanship—failed to blunt the growing radicalization of the GOP.
GOP-controlled states have passed new voter-suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and election-subversion bills through simple majority, party-line votes. Yet recalcitrant centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) have insisted that any federal legislation stopping such measures requires a bipartisan supermajority, portraying the filibuster not as an impediment to protecting democracy, but as integral to its functioning.
Republicans are not coy about their intentions. “We are going to take over the election apparatus,” former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon said on his podcast in late December.
It’s a situation that evokes the end of Reconstruction. Back then, insurrectionist Democrats (then the party of white supremacy) used every means necessary—including violence and vote-rigging—to retake control of the state and federal governments, while accommodationist Republicans (then the party of civil rights) appealed to bipartisan unity, touted economic legislation, and supported the filibuster to block voting rights legislation, leading to nearly a century of Jim Crow.
Finally, in the past couple of weeks, Democrats have made a last-ditch push to protect voting rights, with Biden saying he supports exempting voting rights bills from the filibuster, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) pressing hard to change the Senate rules to overcome GOP obstruction, setting up a showdown on the filibuster by Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “Today I’m making it clear: to protect our democracy, I support changing the Senate rules, whichever way they need to be changed, to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights,” Biden said during his speech in Atlanta this week. “When it comes to protecting majority rule in America, the majority should rule in the United States Senate.” If Democrats do manage to persuade Manchin and Sinema—pretty unlikely—to quickly approve approve new bills banning partisan gerrymandering and expanding voting access, such as the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, it will go a long way toward stopping GOP efforts to undermine democracy. But time is running out for it to have much impact on the midterms.
Most key battleground states have already passed new redistricting maps that courts could be reluctant to alter in the thick of an election year—and, though many states quickly expanded voting options during the pandemic in 2020, it takes time to properly implement pro-voter policies like online and automatic registration. As Li notes, “Congress is in danger of losing the 2022 election cycle” to anti-democratic forces.
Republicans who falsely maintain that the election was stolen say they are extremely motivated to vote in 2022, with the Big Lie functioning as a new Lost Cause movement, similar to how embittered Southerners used the death of the Confederacy as a rallying cry to fuel the backlash to Reconstruction. At the same time, the blockage of voting rights legislation is demoralizing the Democratic base—which views democracy protection as a pressing priority—and threatening to depress turnout, making it easier for Republicans to prevail in the midterms and advance their assault on democracy.
For months, voting rights advocates and scholars of democracy have issued hair-on-fire warnings about the danger that the GOP’s death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy poses to the very foundation of representative democracy. “The American experiment is at risk,” Holder says. This is not hyperbole. And by 2024 the damage may have already been done. The members of Congress, governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, state legislators, and local officials elected this November will determine to a large extent whether there will be fair elections for years to come.
The 2022 election is the most important one of our lifetimes. That is, if you believe in a democratic republic, given the GOP’s embrace of autocracy, as shown by a recent CBS poll that found that a majority of Republicans now justify the January 6 attack as an act “defending freedom.”
There’s another recent poll number that’s even more troubling. President Biden’s sizable drop among Democrats is such a concern because if the Democratic base doesn’t come out in 2022, it could spell more than simply losses for Democrats—it could usher in the loss of our democracy.
Presidents’ approval numbers typically drop after the honeymoon period. Consequently, it’s not surprising that Biden’s approval ratings have slid since mid-2021 from the neighborhood of a solid 52 percent to about 43 percent per the recent average of polls at FiveThirtyEight. He’s had a pretty brutal few months.
But it’s his drop in support among Democrats that’s deeply alarming, since in off-year elections, the base coming out is the key to winning—or losing. As recently as June, Biden still had a remarkable 95 percent approval rating from Democrats per Gallup’s monthly polling. But take a look at the Gallup’s most recent poll in December: Biden’s approval among Democrats fell to 78 percent. That’s nearly a 20-point drop in six months, while his overall approval rating had only fallen in that same period by a little over 10 points—from mid-50s to 43 percent.
Worse, a new IBD/TPP poll released earlier this week found Biden’s approval among Democrats had slipped to 74 percent—down from 76 percent the prior month in that same poll. Why the drop? That’s the key question for Biden to try to address before November.
Issues like Covid-19, inflation, supply chains, etc., all weigh on Democrats like the rest of the nation. The mess in the schools, with new closings happening, has to be a culprit. But in my recent conversations with people who call my progressive political show on SiriusXM Radio, not one person ever raised those issues when they expressed their loss of enthusiasm or frustration with Biden. The two issues that came up repeatedly—and they are intertwined—were: 1) Biden’s failure for the past year in not displaying the “fierce urgency of now” in holding Trump accountable for his crimes; and 2) his not fiercely opposing the threat today’s GOP poses to our democracy. (The only other issue raised by some has been Biden’s failure to cancel student loan debt.)
As to holding Trump accountable for his crimes, no Democrat called my show and starting chanting, “Lock him up.” It’s more a sense of outrage and utter bewilderment that Trump could incite an attack on our Capitol in front of our eyes—from radicalizing supporters with lies about the election to repeatedly summoning them to Washington on January 6 with the promise it would be “wild” to literally directing them before the attack to head to the Capitol to “stop the steal”—and yet he’s not charged for his crimes.
Democrats want Biden to call for justice the same way, as a nation, we called for justice for all involved in 9/11. Calling for a person involved in a terrorist attack on our Capitol to be prosecuted is not partisanship. It’s patriotism.
Second, my callers are equally outraged that the GOP has been setting the stage for rigging elections—also right in front of our eyes—for a year. Yet all we got from Biden was one speech in July, before Tuesday’s voting rights speech in Atlanta. Biden should have made this an issue at least on par with his Build Back Better bill.
The words I have heard from my audience in response to Biden’s inaction on these issues range from, “Why did we elect him if he won’t hold Trump accountable?!” to “People have died for the right to vote, and if Biden won’t make that a priority, why should I make voting in 2022 a priority?” Many have spoken of potentially sitting out the 2022 election.
GOP leaders are great at giving “red meat” to their base. Trump was probably the best at that, serving up all the white supremacy, bigotry, and science denial the GOP base craves. That helps explain why Trump’s approval rating among GOP voters—per Gallup—was consistently in the high 80s and even as high as 94–95 percent several years into his train-wreck presidency, even after Covid-19 hit.
Biden needs to give red meat to liberals and progressives to excite and animate us for 2022. Our red meat, though, is far different from the rancid version served up by the GOP. It’s fighting daily for a foundational principle of our republic, namely protecting our democracy by holding Trump accountable for his attack on it and protecting voting rights. A few speeches won’t do it. Biden must have a concerted plan to elevate these issues, coupled with action.
For example, Biden could travel the nation with a “Saving Our Democracy” tour, using every tool available to publicly pressure Democratic senators who won’t agree to reforming the filibuster to pass voting rights, prepare executive orders on voting rights, and other measures. Plus—if need be—he could replace Merrick Garland with a more aggressive attorney general.
Republican elected officials fear their base. In contrast, Democratic officeholders’ view of their base appears to run from liking them to tolerating them to ignoring them. But few would say Democrats fear their base.
I’m not saying Biden should be quaking in fear, but he needs to listen to the Democratic base and act. If not, the 2022 election could not only be terrible for Democrats, it could be devastating for our democracy.
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