8 Where is American Democracy Headed? Parties, Voting, and the Race Class Narrative

Introduction: Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

At one point in time, many observers argued that there was no substantive difference between the two. Back in 1968, for instance, George Wallace, a staunch segregationist and populist who ran for president several times, famously said, “Tweedledum and Tweedledee. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats” (this is not an exact quote). Wallace was referencing the pair of fictional brothers in Lewis Carroll’s book, Through the Looking-Glass. In the book, Tweedledum and Tweedledee are identical except that they are left-right reversals of each other. Wallace’s view was clearly informed by his desire for a national political party to support segregation and his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Put bluntly, he wanted a return to a political party, at the federal level, that openly embraced white supremacy, which he did not find in either the Democratic or Republican parties of the time. For this reason, he ran as a third-party candidate in 1968 (for the American Independent Party).

Despite the racist basis for Wallace’s “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” quip, there were many other observers, including those who held progressive views, who felt the same. One of these was Bernie Sanders, the self-avowed socialist senator from Vermont. Back in 1989, Sanders wrote an opinion article for the New York Times, in which he said:

If there was one profound message from the Presidential election, it’s that the old Democratic-Republican, tweedle-dee tweedle-dum, two-party system needs to be challenged. We need a new, third-party progressive political movement to represent the needs and interests of working people, minorities, the elderly, farmers, environmentalists, peace activists and all people who believe they are not represented by status quo politics (Sanders 1989).

It’s not surprising, however, that two politicians on near-opposite ends of the ideological spectrum would feel the same about the two-party system in the United States. This is because those on the far right and the far left are, by definition, more “extreme” or “radical” in their views than most people. Ironically, though, the desire by Wallace and Sanders for distinctly different political parties has, at least in some respects, come to pass.

On the one hand, since the election of Donald Trump as president, the Republican Party has become, for all intents and purposes, the party of white supremacy. George Wallace, who died in 1998, would likely have been quite proud of what the Republican Party looks like today. I realize that my statement might sound biased and unfair; certainly, there are many members of the party who genuinely denounce white supremacist principles. At the same time, there is little doubt that white supremacists or white nationalists have not only been embraced by Trump—and, by extension, the GOP—but have also been part of the administration. Stephen Miller is the most prominent example; he was a senior adviser in the Trump administration, who played a central role in shaping immigration policy. Miller has denied he is a white supremacist, but his activities and advocacy make it unequivocally clear where he stands; as the old saying goes, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck” (for further discussion, see Hayden 2019). Importantly, the embrace of white supremacy by the GOP isn’t new. As one writer put it, “Since the 1950s, the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice, and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections” (Corn 2022). Still, the party tried to maintain a semblance of “plausible deniability” for most of that period by, for example, using “coded language”; that is, words or terms that are designed to evoke racist messages and deep-seated racial stereotypes, but which, by themselves, are seemingly innocuous (for a useful discussion, see Lopez 2016). Over the past decade or so, however, the embrace of white supremacy has been flagrant. More concretely, the party at the state and national levels has even started to attack one of the pillars of civil rights, which Wallace was so opposed to: The Voting Rights Act (Thompson 2024).

On the other hand, the Democratic Party has been making a shift toward progressivism, which is a little surprising given the election of President Joseph Biden in 2020. Biden, who has held various political offices for over five decades, had long been a part of the much maligned “establishment.” In this regard, in his past political life, Biden was the quintessential Democratic Tweedledum to the Republican Tweedledee; he was a centrist who prided himself on being able to “work across the aisle” in order to find an acceptable compromise with his Republican colleagues. But in his first one hundred days in office as president, according to David Lauter, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, Biden has “governed … as a progressive.” His policy positions have been, Lautner continues, “significantly to the left of his three Democratic predecessors on the issue of government’s role in society. With proposals such as expanded aid to families to cut child poverty nearly in half, a sharp cut in U.S. emissions of gases that warm the climate, and a major increase in spending on domestic programs, he’s gone well beyond what prior Democratic administrations backed” (Lauter 2021). The first 100 days, moreover, was not an anomaly. Biden continued to pursue a mostly progressive agenda for the rest of his term.

Of course, not all of Biden’s positions have been progressive. In particular, his support of Israel’s deadly retaliatory campaign against the people of Gaza after Hamas killed at least 1,200 Israeli citizens and took another 253 hostage on October 7, 2023, drew intense condemnation among progressives and many others. While most progressives condemned the attack by Hamas, they argued that the indiscriminate killing of over 38,000 Palestinians, as of July 2024, the majority of whom were innocent women and children (Reuters 2024), amounts to collective punishment (Amnesty International 2023), at best, and genocide at worse (Bouranova 2024). Both are illegal under international law. Yet, the Biden administration largely ignored progressive voices and barely spoke out against Israel’s action (this was especially true in the first few months after the attack) and, at one point, wouldn’t even acknowledge that thousands of Palestinian civilians had been killed (Kessler 2023). There has been virtually no disruption in arms transfers to Israel.

Importantly, the progressive shift in the Democratic Party does not merely reflect a demand by liberal voters for their representatives to be more progressive. A 2018 study by Peter Enns, a professor at Cornell University, found that, rather than Democratic voters encouraging elected representatives to become more progressive, these voters are more likely to have changed their own views to match those of their preferred candidates (cited in Sachs 2019). In other words, at least to some extent, Democratic voters are taking their “progressive cues” from candidates in the Democratic Party. While this change started before 2016, elected representatives such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ro Khanna, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman—as well as stalwarts such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—likely have played a significant role in leading more Democratic voters down a progressive path. At the same time, one can argue that the same thing, although in the opposite direction, is happening in the Republican Party, as the party’s embrace of increasingly right-wing positions and open tolerance of once-taboo or at least hidden beliefs is attracting many more people to the party who, in the past, may have been non-voters or only tepid Republican or independent voters.

“Mind the Gap”: The Republican and Democratic Parties Since 2016

In important, but not all, respects, there always been a gap between the Democratic and Republican parties, so the Tweedledum-Tweedledee image has never really been accurate. But as the discussion above suggests, the gap has been growing increasingly wide in more recent times and especially since 2016. This can be seen in the parties’ positions on certain social issues, the most salient of which are abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. While seemingly settled not too long ago, both have become front-burner issues in the 2020s, due largely to Supreme Court decisions to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 (in Dobbs v. Jackson), and the 2023 decision in favor of a Christian web designer to refuse to do work for gay couples (in Creative LLC v. Elenis). The gap is also apparent with regard to “bread-and-butter” issues, such as student loan forgiveness, prescription drug prices, and access to affordable health care more generally, which have all been priorities under the Biden administration. On issues of more direct concern to the corporate and monied classes, the gap between Republicans and Democrats has also been widening. For Republicans, preserving or expanding tax cuts for the corporate and upper classes has been a top priority (as evidenced by the 2017 TCJA), while for Democrats, increasing taxes for corporations and the wealthy is the higher priority.

It is obvious, too, that there is a big gap between two parties when it comes to how to address climate change. As Chapters 6 and 8 demonstrated, the Republican position was, first, to deny human-caused climate change was real in order to justify a do-nothing approach. But even for those Republicans who accepted the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, their position on proposed solutions—at least those put forward by Democrats—was to assert that the solutions are worse than the problem. Another, more “moderate” position was to argue that the available solutions are not viable or unfair or, most commonly, that they would unduly damage the economy. For Democrats, by contrast, addressing climate change has been a major priority, as evidenced by the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided hundreds of billions of dollars for low-carbon energy project, supply chains, electric car subsidies, etc. (Lawler and Baker 2024). As I noted earlier, too, a good portion of the taxpayer money to fund the IRA goes back into the hands of families in the wage-earning class, rather than going directly to corporations—although, in the end, the corporate class benefits from the money that goes to consumers, since they use it to buy the products and services corporations provide.

Another major difference between the parties has been decades in the making but clearly came to fruition during the Trump administration. It is also one with tremendously significant ramifications for all types of policy, namely, the appointment of federal judges, not just in the Supreme Court but in all the lower federal courts. With Republicans serendipitously in control of the Senate during critical periods—include the time Barack Obama was president—the party has been able to pack the lower federal courts and, more importantly, the Supreme Court with conservative judges. While the Democrats, under Biden, were able to partly reverse the numerical advantage in the lower federal courts (under Trump, 234 judges were appointed, while, as of May 2024, Biden had appointed 200 judges), the “supermajority” of conservative justices on the Supreme Court—three of whom were appointed under Trump (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barret)—is likely to last for a long time. If lower court judges and Supreme Court justices were neutral arbiters of the law, as they are supposed to be, their ideological positions would not be a major concern. But it has become increasingly clear that many federal (and state[1]) judges are not neutral arbiters of the law. While this has long been true, at least to some extent (Weiden 2010), the courts have clearly become more politicized and partisan than ever before (Wegman 2024). Remember, the courts have immense institutional power, a source of power that can be wielded to profoundly reshape the country no matter which party has political control. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that the courts, and the Supreme Court specifically, can almost single-handedly, determine the future of the United States.

An Aside: Where the Gap Narrows

On other important issues, it is worth noting, the gap is much narrower. On immigration, for instance, the two parties may not be on the same side, but they are not too far apart either. One sign of this can be found in a bipartisan immigration bill—one that included Republican priorities but largely excluded progressive priorities—that might have passed in mid-2024 were it not for intervention by former President Trump, who opposed the bill because, in his view, it would have provided an electoral advantage for Democrats (Kight 2024). The Republican and Democratic parties also share an interest in continuing to support the corporate class with subsidies and other forms of “corporate welfare,” although both parties pretend to be against it. Moreover, while the two parties may target different recipients and have different objectives for corporate welfare, it is still the case that taxpayer money goes to some of the largest corporations in the world. This speaks to the structural power of the corporate class in a capitalist economy. That is, in a capitalist economy, private corporations are, generally speaking, the only viable vehicle for producing goods and services for the economy. They also provide most of the jobs and innovations that keep an economy strong and growing. This doesn’t mean that corporate welfare is necessary. It isn’t. However, it helps explain why both the Democratic and Republican parties are largely on the same page when it comes to subsidizing the corporate class (of course, it doesn’t hurt that the corporate class also uses its material power to fund politicians and parties).

Foreign policy is another area in which the gap between the two parties has been minimal. Until Donald Trump’s presidency, both parties maintained a strongly shared vision of the position the United States should occupy in the world. A particularly important aspect of this shared vision was that the US should play an active and outsized role in world affairs; concretely, this has meant maintaining a network of security and economic alliances around the globe, which included 750 military bases in at least 80 counties and 228,390 US military personnel (168,571 active-duty troops) deployed in 159 countries as of 2023 (USAFacts Team 2024). Republicans and Democrats have also generally agreed on a number of major foreign policy issues, including maintaining a generally adversarial relationship with China, keeping the NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) alliance intact, and promoting a trade policy designed to bolster America’s manufacturing base (Tama 2023). Where disagreements have occurred, as over the Russia-Ukraine war and US policy toward Israel, much is due to vocal elements with one or the other party—e.g., the MAGA wing of the GOP (for an in-depth discussion, see Tama 2023). This last point highlights an important caveat: When in office and as a candidate for the 2024 presidential election, Trump called into question many of the long taken-for-granted elements of this shared foreign policy decision, so his reelection could have a profoundly destabilizing impact.

The Republican and Democratic Divide: Differences Matter

A Pointless Point?

The foregoing discussion is, admittedly, very limited. A deep analysis of the difference in priorities but also the similarities in policy positions between the two parties would take up much more space.  Despite the areas in which the gap between the two parties is relatively narrow, the Democratic and Republican parties are different. Admittedly, to many readers, this is an obvious and even pointless point. Anyone with even a small degree of political/partisan convictions, already knows the two parties are not the same. However, in teaching American government and politics over the years, it’s clear to me that many students don’t think the difference means much, if anything, in their lives. This is especially the case for students who believe—with good reason—that elected representatives, regardless of party, kowtow to the monied and corporate classes. Yet, to return to a key message from the comparative discussions in Chapters 2 and 8, in a democracy, the monied and corporate classes don’t always get what they want or, at least, they don’t always get everything they want. Even in an imperfect democracy, it’s possible for regular citizens to elect representatives who will represent their interests over the interests of the monied and corporate classes. At the risk of sounding overly biased, in American democracy today (in the 2020s), the party that is more likely to represent the interests of “the people” (average American voters and citizens) over the interests of the monied and corporate classes, albeit not always and not on all issues, is the Democratic Party. A 2024 YouGov survey provides some useful evidence for this. In the survey, Americans were asked about different policy proposals from Biden (before he dropped out of the race) and Trump, but without specifying which one proposed them. All but one of the 28 policies proposed by Biden were supported by more people than opposed them; furthermore, 24 of 28 had majority support. For Trump, only 9 of 28 received net positive support and only 6 of 28 had majority support (Orth and Teas 2024). In other words, the survey clearly showed that many more Americans prefer, by a wide margin, Democratic policy proposals over Republican ones.

The preceding paragraph raises an obvious question: “If the Democratic party is more likely to represent the interests of average Americans than the Republican Party, then why doesn’t the Democratic Party win all elections, at the state and federal levels, by a landslide?” Answering, this question brings us full circle. This book began with the premise that class and race matter. From a purely class-based perspective, the bulk of the wage-earning class should be on the same side. But nothing in politics is “pure.” This is especially the case for American politics. As I’ve argued, race/racism has played a central role in American politics; more specifically, in the context of American history—which, of course, includes slavery and the ongoing legacy of slavery—a significant part of the wage earning class has been divided along racial and ethnic lines. US politics, to keep repeating a key point, is characterized by a racialized class hierarchy that has been instrumental in maintaining a strong popular base for the Republican Party. If anything, this base as become stronger since Trump emerged on the political scene, as he has helped to make “white supremacy acceptable again!”; less hyperbolically, it is no longer electorally dangerous for Republican politicians to openly associate themselves with white supremacists or with ideas clearly tied to white supremacist principles. The racialized class hierarchy, in short, cannot be ignored. At the same time, it does not explain everything about the electoral resilience of the Republican Party. To appreciate this resilience, it’s important to consider another important factor, namely, religion.

The Religious Turn

If the Republican Party only represented the interests of the corporate class, at some point, the party’s base of popular support might be expected to wane. However, it is easy to see that the Republican Party does a very good job of representing the interests of parts of the electorate that have a strong interest in social and religious issues—issues, it is worth adding, that are not a core concern of the corporate class. In this regard, the Republican Party is also a “party of the people,” in that the concerns of a key segment of religious Americans have become a more-or-less permanent part of the Republican Party agenda. On this point, it is useful to recognize that the embrace religious issues by the Republican Party was a response to the dominance of the New Deal coalition (Chapter 3). If you recall, the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt, motivated the corporate class to further develop, expand, and an strengthen organizational network designed to promote corporate class interests (also, Chapter 3). While the corporate class was focused on perfecting its organizational network, leaders in the Republicans understood that the party needed a wider and stronger base of electoral support. Race, of course, was the major element of building and maintaining this support (Chapter 4), but as the country’s population not only diversified but also seemed to become more “racially liberal”[2] (Moberg, Krysan, and Christianson 2019), the Republican Party made an effort to move beyond race. A key strategy of the Republican Party, in this regard, was to target specific religious groups, starting with Catholics and Southern Baptists and eventually, but quite importantly, including born-again Evangelicals (Kubow 2020).

The effort to attract key segments of America’s religious population is what made abortion a central and national political issue between Republicans and Democrats. Ironically, prior to the 1970s, as Daniel Williams (2011) points out, the Republican Party and Republican voters tended to be more pro-choice than the Democratic Party in part because leaders of the pro-choice movement, at the time, were primarily medical doctors and Protestant ministers. Thus, Williams writes, “as long as Republicans viewed the right to an abortion as a mainline Protestant cause that was in the best interest of middle-class women, doctors, and American society, they supported the liberalization of state abortion laws” (514). Despite this, the Republican Party saw an opportunity to undermine Democratic Party support by appealing to Catholic voters—at the time, two-thirds of Catholics were Democrats. The shift toward embracing abortion as a key political issues gained momentum when feminist organizations such as NOW (National Organization for Women) became an active part of the pro-choice movement. The larger story is too complicated to recount in detail here (for more discussion, see the article by Williams); suffice it to say that the GOP strategy worked, although it took some time before it led to a significant political realignment. This realignment, which became a reality in the 1980s, led to a massive shift among Catholic voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party and also, as noted above, encouraged an equally strong shift among white Southern Baptists. Finally, it “woke up” Evangelicals, who had not been particularly active in electoral politics before 1980. However, in the 1980 election, which was won by Ronald Reagan, Evangelicals voted at a higher rate than non-Evangelicals and overwhelming supported Reagan and the Republican Party (Kubow 2020).

The political realignment among religious voters also had, it is worth noting, a strong racial component. Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Evangelicals who consistently vote for the Republican Party based on their religious values and principles are, perhaps not coincidentally, overwhelming white. In other words, it was the combination of racial and religiously-based social appeals that helped to revive the Republican Party (Kubow 2020). At the same time, the strong anti-abortion stance, as well as its embrace of other socially conservative values, helped to broaden, at least slightly, the Republican Party’s appeal to socially conservative voters regardless of ethnicity. For example, in 2022, 52% of Evangelical Latino (“Latino” was the term used in the survey) voters said that the Republican Party “represents the interests of people like them,” as opposed to only 28% of Latino voters with no religious affiliation. Interestingly, though, 67% of Catholic Latino voters felt that the Democratic Party represented their interests (Krogstad, Edwards, and Lopez 2022a). These figures very roughly correspond to the two groups’ respective views on abortion: 69% of Latino Evangelical Protestants said abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, while only 42% of Latino Catholics held the same view (Krogstad, Edwards, and Lopez 2022b).

Reprise: “Voting matters”

The previous chapter concluded with a section titled, “Voting matters, race matters.” Of course, the context was different in that Chapter 8 was based on a comparison of California and Texas. In thinking about the larger context of national politics, however, the point remains the same: Voting matters because, at least for the past few decades, significant and even profound differences have emerged between the Democratic and Republican parties. Still, I recognize the statement, “Voting matters” may strike some readers as either banal, as in, “Of course, everyone knows voting matters” or naïve, as in, “Are you kidding me? Everyone knows that politicians only listen to people with money!” For those who agree that voting matters, I will simply reiterate another very basic and equally banal point, which is that the job of the people you help to elect is to make and enact laws. These laws, in turn, have both direct and indirect effects on our lives. We know, however, that the representatives we elect (still less, the ones we did not vote for) don’t always or even mostly make and enact laws in the best interests of regular voters. If elected representatives fail to represent the interests of the majority of voters, they need to be replaced by representatives who do represent those interests.

Those who don’t think voting matters likely have different reasons. For some, they see politicians and parties as hopelessly corrupt and beholden to the monied and corporate classes. Others may want to vote but dislike the extremely limited choice that an embedded two-party system provides. Voting for the “lesser of two evils,” in this perspective, is worse than not voting at all. Even worse, they may view efforts by the two parties to unfairly rig the system in their favor by gerrymandering or engaging in other ethically suspect but legal forms of voter manipulation as a way to ensure that their votes really don’t matter. Some others may simply see their single vote—in a sea of votes—as having no significance whatsoever. Lastly, there are plenty of people who simply can’t be bothered. They are politically apathetic.

Admittedly, these views are not unreasonable. At all. Yet, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. That is, acting on the belief that voting doesn’t matter directly reinforces all the reasons for not voting in the first place. This is especially the case for those who view the political system is “corrupt”: Not voting allows the corruption to metastasize, to get worse over time because it goes completely unchecked over long periods of time. The same is true with the two-party system. Consider, on this point, that Duverger’s Law (Chapter 5) is not a law; rather, it is a tendency based, at least in part, on psychological factors (White 2006). There have been a few Independent (albeit not Third Party) candidates who have successfully won elections for federal office.  The most famous is Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s long-standing senator. Sanders, however, does caucus with the Democrats, which means works closely with Democratic Party members in the Senate (he also ran for president as a Democrat). Angus King (Maine) is another independent senator who caucuses with the Democrats. A few other independents (i.e., Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) were originally elected as Democrats but latter switched to Independent.

The Trump Effect

The basic point is this: Fixing America’s broken electoral system can only happen if people vote. Ultimately, American voters still have the power to control the system and to reshape it so that it reflects their interests. Perhaps counterintuitively, the best example of this is the impact Donald Trump has had on American politics. Back in 2015, few experts believed that Trump had any chance of winning the Republican primaries and ultimately the presidency. Simply put, nobody believed he would be able to attract enough votes. Of course, he did (even while he lost the popular vote for president to Hilary Clinton by a fairly wide margin). During his campaign, his time in office, and in the years after leaving office, he became and continues to be very popular among voters. In fact, between 2016 and 2020, his electoral support grew by 10.1 million votes (Cruz 2020). While he lost the 2020 election—again, by a wide margin—it was clear that he had gained an immense and very loyal following of tens of millions of voters. He built a particularly strong base of extremely loyal voters who would unquestioningly vote for him and those who he endorsed. His personal popularity was so great that most Republicans, including leading figures in the Republican Party, were convinced that fealty to Trump and his followers was their only option, at least if they wanted to remain relevant (i.e., to get reelected). This gave Trump tremendous political power, so much so that he essentially created a Third Party by remaking the Republican Party in his image. As many observers have noted, the Republican Party has become “the Party of Trump” (Waterhouse 2025). In this regard, it’s ironic that traditional Republicans who oppose Trump have been labelled RINOs (“Republicans in Name Only”), since they are the ones who have tried to adhere to long-standing Republican Party values and principles.

The upshot? Trump’s political rise is, in an important sense, solely the product of tens of millions of people who have made the conscious to decision to vote for him. Their votes matter and they matter a great deal.

Where is American Democracy Headed?

The Fragility of Democracy

Looking back, as I noted above, no one could have predicted the election of Donald Trump and his impact on American politics. In other words, no one knew where American democracy was headed at the time. In the same vein, no one can predict, with any certainty, where American democracy will be headed in the next year, five years, ten years, or longer. There are a number of possibilities. One possibility—which was once unthinkable, but now is one that many, many observers take very seriously—is a significant and even fatal breakdown of democracy in the United States. In other words, it’s possible the United States could become a dictatorship or some other type of authoritarian system. In this regard, the most immediate threat to American democracy, bluntly put, is Donald Trump. While many supporters of former President Trump would beg to differ, there is more than enough evidence to suggest that his support of democratic values is limited to his ability to “win.” More seriously, Trump could conceivably dismantle the institutions of democracy if or when reelected (by the time you read this chapter, the 2024 election will have taken place).[3] Keep in mind, institutions are not objectively defined or material things. Instead, institutions are the rules (both written and unwritten), norms, values, principles, and shared knowledge and understanding by members of society on the way things are supposed to be done (Chapter 1).

The Constitution, too, is basically just “words on paper” the people in the United States have agreed to abide by. To be sure, those words are powerful, but their power, to repeat, depends on the willingness of Americans, and especially elected representatives, to believe in the inviolability of those words. Indeed, before taking office, all elected representatives, including the president, must make an oath—not to defend the country per se—but to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Trump had demonstrated a willingness to violate that oath: In 2022, although no longer president, Trump advocated for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” (emphasis added) unless the 2020 election results were overturned. Tellingly, his post did not draw immediate condemnation from leaders in the GOP (cited in Cathey, Steakin, and Pecorin 2022). In this regard, democracy is inherently fragile in the sense that, for it to survive, people have to be willing to abide by its rules and norms even if in doing so, their own careers and interests are threatened.

Indeed, there is little doubt that Trump and many of his supporters, including those occupying positions of significant authority within the government, were (and likely are) willing to violate hitherto sacrosanct democratic norms and rules. Most prominently, this includes his unremitting efforts, first, to rig or overturn the results of the 2020 election, for example, by pressuring state election officials in battleground states such as Georgia to “find” him more votes. Second, Trump’s efforts to stay in office by calling on his supporters to disrupt the electoral count so that illegitimate elector slates (formally referred to as certificates of ascertainment) could be submitted to then-Vice President Mike Pence. According to one conservative legal scholar, Trump’s efforts amounted to a “form of a political coup d’état against our Constitution” (cited in Cohen 2021). Ultimately, perhaps the only thing that stopped Trump from succeeding in 2020 was the unwillingness of a few key figures to violate the norms of democracy.

There is, however, an even bigger issue: Americans, in general, are beginning to lose faith in democracy. In a 2024 survey by Project HomeFire, 24% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and America should explore alternative forms of government” (cited in Jacobs 2024). Of course, this also means that the large majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, continue to support the institutions of democracy in the United States, so the prospect for a non-democratic future in America is not inevitable, by any means. Nor is it even likely, but it is a real possibility when, not too long ago, it would have been unimaginable.

Getting on the Right Path: The Race Class Narrative

Rather than speculate on the possible paths for American democracy, it might be more useful to consider how to keep American democracy on the right path. Admittedly, the concept of a “right path” is subjective and open to debate, so I will simply say that, in my personal view, the right path is one in which the institutions of democracy in the United States not only remain strong and intact, but also that political system and its elected representatives and more responsive to the interests of ordinary Americans. In keeping with the core theme of this book, one way to do this is find effective ways to talk about race and class. Before I continue, I need to emphasize that the discussion in this last (short) section will be based mostly on the ideas of others. As I was struggling with how to conclude this book, I came across an article by Anika Fassia and Tinselyn Simms titled, “The Race Class Narrative Can Win” (2021). The Race Class Narrative (RCN), in turn, was developed by Ian Haney López, Heather McGhee, and Anat Shenker-Osorio (n.d.). A core message in the RCN is simple: Use discourse that builds cross-racial solidarity in order to achieve progressive political goals. Citing RCN research, Fassia and Simms provide an example meant to build solidarity and push back against divisiveness:

America’s strength comes from our ability to work together—bringing together people from different places and of different races into a whole. For this to be a place where everyone can thrive, we cannot let the 1% and the politicians they pay for divide us against each other based on what someone looks like, where they come from, or how much money they have. We need to join together to fight for our future, just like we won better wages, safer workplaces, and civil rights in our past. Coming together, we can elect new leaders who will deliver better healthcare for our families, quality schools for our kids, and a fair return on our work.

Understandably, some readers may feel that relying on discourse to get American democracy on the right path is naïve or even silly. However, I argue the opposite, namely, that dismissing the significance of discourse is naïve. Discourse, after all, played a central and perhaps the central role in Donald Trump’s rise to political power. To be sure, there were other important factors at play—including economic or material factors—but his populist discourse capitalized on brewing discontent. More importantly, as one set of scholars put it, Trump also “mobilised [sic] a specific vision of the national identity as synonymous with the White (male) working class, which served to reify the group, elevating it to become the mythical backbone of US society and, by extension, the US economy and foreign policy” (Holland and Fermor 2021). In other words, Trump used his own version of RCN, although he used it to get American democracy on the wrong path. To get American democracy on the right path, then, requires that we fight fire with fire. This can be done on at a local level; Fassia and Simms point to several examples of organizations using RCN to move voters on important issues, including an effort by activists in Minnesota to “push back against anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric and actions” through a campaigned labelled, “Greater than Fear.” The campaign was a success: “On election night in 2018, the Minnesota House of Representatives flipped, turning blue. Democrats also won the gubernatorial, attorney general, secretary of state, and auditor races.” They achieved this, not by avoiding conversations about race and class, but by leaning into them by telling “a story about how racism is deployed against all of us for the economic gains of a powerful few.”

At the national level, getting on the right path will likely require an inspirational figure in the mold of Donald Trump, but one who can effectively flip the (narrative) script to so that the racialized class hierarchy that has long defined American politics can finally be torn down. When I originally wrote this chapter in the summer of 2024, it seemed possible that Kamala Harris could play this role, but obviously her “power” to do so proved to be limited. Only time will tel if another person, movement, or opportunity arises. In the meantime, local and even personal effort can still make a significant difference.

Chapter Notes

Chapter References

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Bouranova, Alene. 2024. “Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza? New Report from Bu School of Law’s International Human Rights Clinic Lays out Case ” BU Today, June 5. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/is-israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza/.

Cathey, Libby, Will Steakin, and Allison Pecorin. 2022. “GOP Leaders Silent So Far on Trump’s Call for ‘Termination’ of Constitution’s Rules.” ABC News, December 5. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gop-leaders-silent-trumps-call-termination-constitutions-rules/story?id=94511174.

Cohen, Marshall. 2021. “Chronicling Trump’s 10 Worst Abuses of Power ” CNN Politics, January 24. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/24/politics/trump-worst-abuses-of-power/index.html.

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Fassia, Anika, and Tinselyn Simms. 2021. “The Race Class Narrative Can Win ” Dissent, Summer. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-race-class-narrative-can-win/.

Hayden, Michael Edison. 2019. “Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails.” Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), November 12. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/12/stephen-millers-affinity-white-nationalism-revealed-leaked-emails.

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Jacobs, Tom. 2024. “Democracy Is More Fragile Than You Think.” University of California: News, February 1. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/democracy-more-fragile-you-think.

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Krogstad, Jens Manuel, Khadijah Edwards, and Mark Hugo Lopez. 2022a. “Hispanics’ Views of the U.S. Political Parties.” Pew Research Center, September 29. https://www.pewresearch.org/2022/09/29/hispanics-views-of-the-u-s-political-parties/.

Krogstad, Jens Manuel, Khadijah Edwards, and Mark Hugo Lopez. 2022b. “Hispanics’ Views on Key Issues Facing the Nation.” Pew Research Center, September 29. https://www.pewresearch.org/2022/09/29/hispanics-views-on-key-issues-facing-the-nation/.

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Lawler, Dave, and Sam Baker. 2024. “Biden’s Consequential Presidency: His Key Policies, Wins and Setbacks.” Axios, July 21. https://www.axios.com/2024/07/21/biden-legacy-election-2024.

Lopez, German. 2016. “The Sneaky Language Today’s Politicians Use to Get Away with Racism and Sexism.” Vox, February 1. https://www.vox.com/2016/2/1/10889138/coded-language-thug-bossy.

López, Ian Haney, Heather McGhee, and Anat Shenker-Osorio. n.d. “About the Race Class Narrative.” We Make the Future, accessed July 26, 2024. https://www.wemakethefuture.us/history-of-the-race-class-narrative

Madarang, Charisma. 2024. “Trump Tells Christians They Won’t Have to Vote in Future: ‘We’ll Have It Fixed’.” Rolling Strone, July 26. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-if-reelected-wont-have-to-vote-fixed-1235069397/.

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Sachs, Maddie. 2019. “Why the Democrats Have Shifted Left over the Last 30 Years ” FiveThirtyEight, December 16. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-democrats-have-shifted-left-over-the-last-30-years/.

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Thompson, Marilyn W. 2024. “Republicans Hatched a Secret Assault on the Voting Rights Act in Washington State ” ProPublica, February 28. https://www.propublica.org/article/republicans-hatched-secret-assault-voting-rights-act-washington-state.

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