The Thing About Politics Is That It Can Always Get Worse
Progress is important – but downside risks are very real, and we need to guard against them.
A few days ago at Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias, writing about the recent draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, and its effects on the political landscape, argued that:
The larger political benefit to Democrats [from the end of Roe v. Wade] is likely to come from a different angle — the loss of Roe should serve as a powerful reminder to the college-educated liberals who control the commanding heights of Democratic Party politics that losing elections is really bad. When people are scared to lose, they make smart decisions.
I don’t think I’m as confident as Matt is that, in practice, roll-backs of abortion rights will lead the Democratic party to take more popular positions on other issues in order to avoid disaster on other fronts. But whether or not this does happen, I think it absolutely should.
Politics can get really bad
One thing I see fairly frequently from progressives, especially on Twitter or elsewhere online, is a sense that the worst thing that can happen in politics is that we don’t achieve enough progress, or that we don’t achieve progress quickly enough. As a progressive, I certainly agree that this is a problem. We should be making changes to our society to benefit the poor and disadvantaged, and the longer we wait to make those changes, the more people suffer in the interim.
But while not making progress is bad, it is far from the worst thing that can happen in politics. Rights can be taken away, Oppressive systems can be instituted – and locked in for long periods of time. This may sound like an obvious point, but internalizing it has had a pretty major effect on my politics.
In American history, the best example of regression is surely the end of Reconstruction. For a brief period following the Civil War, African-Americans were dramatically more enfranchised, the Freedmen's Bureau built thousands of schools, and multiple formerly enslaved people served in Congress (including in the Senate).
And then Reconstruction ended in 1876, and waves of racist, terrorist violence by the white elite swept the south. Segregation was codified in the form of Jim Crow laws, and it would be nearly a century before the Voting Rights Act restored a similar level of enfranchisement to African-Americans.1
Back to Roe
When faced with a very upsetting potential future, such as the end to the constitutional right to abortion, there is a human tendency, I think, to feel that the worst series of events simply cannot come to pass. Or, that should it come to pass, there will be an explosion of popular protest and energy across the country, which will take out the politicians who are trying to ban abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest.
This strikes me as very likely wrong. As usual in politics, the most likely situation is that the country simply… muddles through. Conservative states will ban abortion, and this may or may not modestly help the Democratic party. But it definitely won’t help the Democratic party enough to produce large enough Congressional majorities to codify abortion rights nationally. With the Senate biased in their favor, and the ability of conservative justices to strategically retire, the Supreme Court is likely to stay solidly in the hands of the right for decades (indeed, I think it’s much more likely it becomes 7-2 than that it returns to 5-4).
A lot of contingent factors went into producing this specific situation around abortion rights. RBG’s failure to retire looms large, but so does Thurgood Marshall’s poor health in 1991, as well as the 2000 and 2016 elections, and Mitch McConnell’s decision to block President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. The reality is that Democrats have gotten incredibly unlucky with the distribution of Court appointments in the last 50 years; this isn’t really anyone’s “fault,” per se, but it is extremely unfortunate.
From my vantage point, it seems like the Court’s decision in Dobbs won’t produce any major changes in politics. The world will have just gotten somewhat worse and more difficult for disadvantaged women in America, since they are the ones who will have the most trouble getting abortions, and are most likely to carry forced pregnancies. There will be more suffering and unhappiness, and the country will be a little less free than it was when Roe was the law of the land. This situation is likely to be stable for decades – just as Jim Crow was.2
Roe isn’t the only potential regression
In the last decade, two very important things have happened in American politics. First, accelerating education polarization has resulted in increased sorting of non-college educated voters into the Republican party, and college-educated voters into the Democratic party. As you can see in the graph below, less educated voters tend to be substantially more amenable to authoritarianism. As these voters have sorted into one party, I think it is unsurprising that the Republican party has radicalized on procedural questions related to democracy, such as the certification of electors, and conspiracy theories about “voter fraud.”
The second major thing that has happened is the rise of Donald Trump, who is, personally and somewhat idiosyncratically, clearly uninterested in upholding democratic norms.
These two events have combined to result in the Republican party turning away from democratic values, and turning towards illiberalism. This is an extremely, extremely worrying trend.
Similarly to the fight for abortion rights, I think many people who cherish democracy have a deep-seated, emotional feeling that America simply will not backslide into a right-wing, illberal, competetive-authoritarian state like Hungary. Or that if this backsliding begins, mass protests will ensue – that the general public simply won’t stand for prolonged right-wing minority rule.
Again, as with abortion, this view strikes me as profoundly misguided. Democracies have risen and fallen numerous times throughout history – democratic backsliding is a fairly well studied phenomenon. True, the United States is one of the wealthiest and most long lived democracies, and these tend to be less susceptible to turns toward illiberalism. But the sample size for democracies like ours is small, and I don’t think we should feel secure or complacent – especially since, as discussed above in the context of the end of Reconstruction, democratic backsliding has previously happened within the United States on a massive scale.
I don’t feel like I have a great sense of what the odds are that the United States experiences significant democratic backsliding, or a shift to a competitive authoritarian system, within the next decade or so. I’m hesitant to make a specific prediction here in large part because I’m not sure how to operationalize the question – there are a wide variety of forms “significant backsliding” could take.
One form, that is particularly salient at the moment, is that Republican controlled legislatures may, at some point later this decade, simply assign their state’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential nominee, without any input from voters at all. This would be a massive violation of norms, but it would be perfectly legal. And this isn’t an abstract concern! In between now and when I started writing this article Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano won the Republican primary for governor. Mastriano explicitly endorsed ignoring the will of the voters (due to baseless allegations of “fraud”) and assigning Pennsylvania’s electors to Trump in 2020, and he has been extremely open about his desire to follow through with that plan in 2024, should he become governor.
And while Mastriano isn’t a great candidate electorally – he’ll likely pay at least a small penalty for being insane – the national environment is looking rough enough for Democrats that he very well might win. As of now, betting markets give him a 38% chance of victory. And Mastriano’s plans to end democracy as we know it in Pennsylvania are, of course, not the only way things could go seriously south.
Overall, I think the odds that, at the end of this decade, I’ll feel that “the United States has become significantly less democratic and more illiberal,” are, roughly, in the range of 10-15%. Some people may see a 10% chance of this happening and think, “well, great, there’s a 90% chance things turn out fine – I no longer have to worry about this!”
I think an attitude like this would be very, very misguided. The United States becoming illiberal would be very bad for Americans, and very bad for the world as a whole. Even if this probability is fairly low, it’s worth taking significant steps to lower it further – even if some of those steps are distasteful to progressives, such as running more moderate candidates for office in conservative states.
Progress is important, but a focus only on progressive change can lead us to ignore or underappreciate downside risks.
The end of Roe is bad; the end of liberal democracy would be much worse. We need a concerted effort by liberal elites to properly address this threat. And as I have written before, I think this starts with re-orienting the Democratic party so that it can win more votes from working-class Americans.
The first African-American Senator was elected in 1870. The second was elected in 1875. The third was elected in 1967.
To be clear, I am not comparing the end of Roe to the implementation of Jim Crow laws in terms of magnitude of suffering – just that the situations of regressions to a new, worse, and stable equilibrium are structurally similar.
The Thing About Politics Is That It Can Always Get Worse
This was a great piece. I think Americans’ relative insularity also contributes to this - Shanghai was a thriving, cosmopolitan city in 1935 - 10 years later it wasn’t. Beirut went from “The Paris of the Middle East” to a synonym for civil war. Overall I liked Obama, but I thought his “arc of history” phrasing was not just wrong, but actively dangerous in the complacency it helped contribute to.
Thank you for authoring this. Extremely well done. As someone that definitely didn't expect the Roe decision, your post was a wake up call.