Our democracy is at risk, and 'its defenders have to rouse themselves'

That’s the bottom line of the cover story of The Atlantic magazine’s January/February 2022 special issue, which is focused on “American democracy in crisis.” 

Online, the article, by Pulitizer Prize-winning reporter Barton Gellman, is titled "Trump's next coup has already begun."

In nearly 14,000 words, the article examines the current GOP trends. Here are the main points:

— Ballots cast by American voters may not decide the presidency in 2024. People already are working on that. And "who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today,” Gellman says.

— "For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft,” Gellman says. 

"Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. 

"They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.”

— "By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response,” Gellman says.

"Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire.  … His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.”

— A main concern of Trump supporters is the “Great Replacement” — that Africans Americans or Hispanics eventually will "have more rights than whites,” as one poll put it.

— Since Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans in at least 16 states have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature, Gellman says. Under the banner of election integrity, even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote.

— Trump’s legal team — of top-tier lawyers this time around, according to Gellman — is fine-tuning a constitutional argument to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court. 

It "exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an 'independent state legislature' doctrine, which contends that statehouses have ‘plenary,' or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead," Gellman says.

— President Biden’s response to the threat to democracy so far comes down to “enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws, vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans stand athwart their own electoral schemes,” Gelllman says.

(And Gellman says in an NPR interview about his article: "grassroots organizers who are in support of democratic institutions could be doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.

"And news media, frankly, could be putting a lot more attention on this. … they are not [doing the] sort of sustained war-footing news coverage that says democracy is under threat.

"You're accustomed, as a mainstream journalist, to not taking sides in a political dispute and not being for or against any political party," Gellman says. "But what we're for as journalists is truth. And what we're for as journalists is democracy. We are unambiguously in favor of our democratic system and of allowing the people to choose their own leaders. 

"And the conundrum is that right now we have a political party that is bowing to authoritarian forces, that is systematically lying about the political process, about the election process itself. And so we're not —I'm not trying to advance the interests of the Democratic Party in my reporting. 

"But we have only one party right now that is small-D democratic. We have only one party that is prepared to lose a legitimate election and another one that's prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy. And so I am calling out the mainstream of the Republican Party for its lies and for its election subversion in a way that tonally is different from what I could have imagined writing 10 or 20 years ago.")

— "The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.”

— Gellman concludes his article: "Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.”