If
you want to know what threats to democracy might look like going forward, you
do not have to imagine Trump returning to the White House and refusing to leave
ever again. Instead, you need only look to what’s going on in states right now,
from abortion bans to attacks on queer and trans people, as a new report from
the nonprofit Movement Advancement Project, or MAP, illustrates. Attacks on democracy
and attacks on bodily autonomy are more closely connected than some might
imagine.
The
new report, Freedom Under Fire: The Far Right’s
Battle to Control America,
released Wednesday by MAP, considers the
connections between different kinds of attacks on freedom. “These varied
attacks may seem disparate and disconnected, but in fact they are part of a
coordinated campaign,” noted Tessa Juste, a MAP researcher. The
report identifies six overarching categories of attack: “restricting health
care and the right to make decisions about one’s body”; “restricting freedom of
ideas and the ability to obtain a comprehensive education”; “restricting travel
and the ability to exist freely in public places”; “restricting the legal
recognition of people’s identities”; “restricting freedom of the press, speech,
and assembly”; and “restricting the right to vote.” The goal of all of these
types of attacks is twofold and mutually supporting: “mainstreaming exclusion
and undermining democracy.”
Taking
these lines of attack together, the headline-making threats of the past decade can
easily be understood as feeding into a comprehensive story of the unraveling of
democracy: the Dobbs decision and the near-total abortion bans in its
wake, “Don’t Say Gay” and anti–“critical race theory” laws, denying identification documents
to immigrants and trans and nonbinary people, new immunity laws for those assaulting
protesters and journalists, harassment and threats of
violence targeting people administering elections—all of these are part of the same
broader fight.
This
insight is important because of how rarely the post-2016 proliferation of
“defending democracy” reports and news packages has treated such issues as
connected. The podcasts and conferences focusing on the threat potentially
posed by Trump typically don’t also consider the threat to democracy of being
forced to carry a pregnancy to term—or of being barred from teaching certain
topics or lending certain books, or of having to break the law to obtain health
care. Those attacking bodily autonomy benefit from people regarding it all as just
part of a “culture war” distraction, rather than as an effort to undermine
democracy by normalizing such attacks.
Another
new report this week exemplifies the more typical approach to defining
the “defense of democracy” problem. In “Courts, campaigns, and confidence in
American democracy,”
the group Bright Line Watch asked close to 700 political scientists (as well as
“a representative sample of 2,798 Americans”) to assess “current and future
threats to democracy,” including what they thought of “the performance of U.S.
democracy” and current legal actions against Trump. They asked about the
likelihood of scenarios like Trump invoking the Insurrection Act to use the
military on protesters or Trump attempting to remain president beyond his term.
The consensus is, unsurprisingly, not great: Most of the experts surveyed said
they believed Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act (59 percent) and attempt to remain in office (60 percent).
But
as grim as the Bright Line report’s forecast may be, it’s also limited: You
could be forgiven for thinking democracy is endangered primarily by things that
Donald Trump says. They asked experts about the likelihood of Trump firing Jack
Smith, and they asked those members of the public about their support for his
firing; they did not ask about the likelihood of a national abortion ban, much less its impact beyond voter
perceptions. They did not ask about the planning documents meant for the next
president, such as Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise from
the right-wing supergroup Project 2025, that lay out a comprehensive attack on
bodily autonomy and the marginalization of anyone outside a white Christian
heterosexual context.
The
Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, or GPAHE, launched a series this week breaking down Project
2025 and its more than 900-page playbook, highlighting common threads. “To be
clear,” one GPAHE blog post reads, “these plans continue
regardless of who is president, and the groups in this extremist movement are
relentlessly implementing initiatives at local, state, and federal levels.”
This
distinction matters, because it determines how the fight to “defend democracy”
is construed. If you approach the problem in the context of the long American
history of reactionary violence fueled by white and male supremacist
ideologies, the defense of democracy grows broader and bigger than defending
the U.S. Constitution, or maintaining the efficient operation of the three
federal branches of government, or—and this is maybe the narrowest
vision—electing Democrats. When attacks on bodily autonomy, such as abortion
bans and gender-affirming care bans, are viewed as existing apart from attacks
on democracy, not only do we misunderstand the full scope of such attacks, we
also miss an opportunity to learn from those communities already under attack,
and who are already resisting attempts to deny them freedom. They understand
that “defending democracy” is not a defense of institutions but the defense of
people.
Source: newrepublic.com
