The United States is a democracy that has not stopped evolving since its founding in 1776; but today its survival as such is in great danger. This crisis is due to a series of loosely interconnected events, inside and outside the country.
The external threat to the United States comes from the repressive regimes led by Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia, who want to impose an autocratic form of government on the world.
But the threat to the United States from internal enemies of democracy is even greater. Those enemies include the current Supreme Court, which is dominated by far-right extremists, and Donald Trump’s Republican Party, which put those extremists on the Court.
What allows to apply that qualifier to the majority block of the court? It’s not just about his decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that recognized women’s right to choose whether to give birth. What qualifies them as extremists are the arguments they used to justify the decision and the indications they have given as to how far they would be willing to take those arguments.
Chief Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the majority ruling, based his ruling on the assertion that the Fourteenth Amendment only protects those rights that were generally accepted in 1868, when it was ratified. But this argument jeopardizes many other rights that were later recognized, such as the right to contraception and same-sex marriage, and LGBTQ rights.
Taking this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, states could even ban interracial marriage (as some did as late as 1967). In addition, the intent of this Court to launch a frontal attack on the executive power is evident. In one of the most important rulings of the session that just ended, the Court denied the United States Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations necessary to combat climate change.
You don’t have to look far to find the common denominator of the Court’s latest decisions: it’s about supporting the causes promoted by Trump’s Republican Party and weakening or outlawing those promoted by the Democratic Party. Take for example the legislation on firearms. The radical wing of the Court is very attentive to the wishes of the gun lobby. So despite national outrage over a recent killing spree, which even led some Republicans to support a new federal gun law, the Court compensated the National Rifle Association for the loss by overturning an old New York law that placed strict restrictions on the carrying of concealed handguns (New York State immediately passed new laws on the matter, which will likely end up before the Supreme Court).
The Supreme Court was once among the most prestigious institutions in the United States, but with its latest decisions, the extremist majority pushed its approval ratings to record lows and disapproval ratings to record highs. The dissenting ruling in the case that repealed Roe unequivocally points out that the majority’s decision “attacks the legitimacy of the court.” Unfortunately, the minority is likely to remain in the minority for a long time, since the extremists are younger and have a majority of six to three.
There is only one way to limit the Supreme Court: a landslide victory over the Republican Party. That would allow Congress to enact laws that protect the rights that had been entrusted to the protection of the Supreme Court. It is already evident that doing so was a big mistake. Congress needs to act, starting by protecting women’s freedom of choice. And if in order to do so, the rules on parliamentary obstructionism (“filibusterism”) have to be amended, then so be it.
But when it comes to staging a landslide victory against radical Republicans, their opponents face almost insurmountable obstacles. Republicans not only packed the Supreme Court and many lower courts with extremist judges, but in states like Florida, Georgia and Texas, they passed a host of laws that make it very difficult to vote.
Although these laws aim to disenfranchise African-Americans, other minorities, and young voters in general, their ultimate goal is to help Republicans win elections. As a Florida federal judge recently wrote in striking down one of these laws, they were passed “with the intent of restructuring Florida’s electoral system to favor the Republican Party over the Democrats.”
Bad enough it would be if these laws only sought to limit voter registration. But now the Republicans are going further, as they have targeted the process of counting votes and certifying the winner. The Republicans are attacking our system of democracy from every angle; this includes changing the laws to make it easier to subvert the electoral system and calling in people convinced of Trump’s big lie that in 2020 they stole the election from him to oversee the process. And in all of this, the radical Supreme Court also played its part, by undermining the federal Voting Rights Act and allowing openly partisan redistricting, with the aim of weakening the voting power of minorities.
Happily, I am not the only one who asserts that the survival of democracy in the United States is in grave danger. American public opinion is outraged by the ruling that overturned Roe. But people need to see that sentence for what it is: part of a carefully laid plan to turn the United States into a repressive regime.
We have to do everything we can to prevent it, and many of the people who voted for Trump in the past must be included in this fight. I am a supporter of the Democratic Party, but this is not a partisan issue. What is at stake is reestablishing a functional two-party political system, which is the core of American democracy.
Translation: Stephen Flamini
George Soros, founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundations, is author of In Defense of Open Society (Public Affairs, 2019).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022. www.project-syndicate.org
