What's Tony Thinking

Will 2024 Be the Real “Flight 93” Election?

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Amid our divisions there seems to be a point of unity. Everyone agrees that America is at a point of existential crisis. Survival is at stake. Make or break.

However odious the messenger, that was the premise of MAGA. That America was in decline and at risk. Remember the Trump supporters argument that 2016 is the Fight 93 election? It was time to rush the cockpit.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, the events of January 6, 2021 have led liberals and Democrats to the conclusion that Trump will be back in 2024, but better equipped to subvert the election and end American democracy than his cabal was in 2020.

So we’re united, in a funny, not-funny, way. 2024 is the real Flight 93 (after the 9/11 flight that went down in Pennsylvania when terrorists were supported by civilian action) election.

Yesterday President Biden and Vice-President Harris were in Atlanta, calling on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, to gain support for federal legislation to end “voter suppression.”

But is that the right battle? Are the Dem’s barking up the right tree? Or are they making the classic military mistake or preparing for the last war not the present one?

“Voter suppression” has become a galvanizing cry and issue as we have scrutinized our history and the many and various ways African-Americans, in particular, were kept from voting for decades.

But is voter suppression the issue today? Or is the issue what Republicans have been doing since 2020 to get hold of state offices that control the certification of elections?

In a recent column David Brooks argues that it is the latter that represents the real threat. Here’s Brooks:

“Elections have three phases: registering and casting votes, counting votes and certifying results. When it comes to the first two phases, the American system has its flaws but is not in crisis. As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout. The votes were counted with essentially zero fraud.

“The emergency is in the third phase — Republican efforts to overturn votes that have been counted. But Democratic voting bills — the For the People Act and its update, the Freedom to Vote Act — were not overhauled to address the threats that have been blindingly obvious since Jan. 6 last year. They are sprawling measures covering everything from mail-in ballots to campaign finance. They basically include every idea that’s been on activist agendas for years.”

Here’s a link to the Levin piece should you want to track that as well.

So “voter suppression” is a war-cry that connects, for understandable reasons. But if Levin and Brooks are right, that is the wrong focus. The focus needs to be where the right-wing populists are putting their energy, on who controls election certification in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania.

The risk the Democrats are running is not only that they are putting the emphasis on the wrong leg of the three-legged stool of elections, but that they will be perceived as trying to control the electoral process from the top-down, through federal legislation. So you get top-down Democratic legislation versus bottom-up Republican grabs for control.

Tom Friedman also agrees that America as we know it is now and in 2024 at stake. But he has a different, very Friedman-esque, solution. He proposes a national unity ticket for 2024, say, Biden and Liz Cheney. Wow. Give it to him for creative thinking. Here’s Friedman on the crisis we face:

“America is facing an existential moment, Levitsky told me, noting that the Republican Party has shown that it isn’t committed any longer to playing by democratic rules, leaving the United States uniquely threatened among Western democracies.

“That all means two things, he continued. First, this Trump-cult version of the G.O.P. must never be able to retake the White House. Since Trump has made embracing the Big Lie — that the 2020 election was a fraud — a prerequisite for being in the Trump G.O.P., his entire cabinet most likely would be people who denied, or worked to overturn, Biden’s election victory. There is no reason to believe they would cede power the next time.”

I share Friedman’s concern about Trump and incipient authoritarianism. And I share the Brooks/ Levin concern about jimmying the election certification process, which would undermine American democracy.

An unconventional solution like the one Friedman proposes (or how about a Hillary/ Liz ticket?) seems to me a “third-way” beyond the present zero-sum, where one side achieves total victory in the great Culture Wars. To be sure, the Friedman move, would cost both coalition partners big-time. Imagine, as Friedman says, AOC campaigning for Liz Cheney. Or Dick Cheney campaigning for Joe Biden.

But if our present point of unity — American democracy is at risk — is correct, then the solution required may ask a new and unconventional unity among those interested in saving it.

 

 

 

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