How Do You Get People to Care About Democracy?
The preservation of Democracy shouldn’t be a partisan activity.
Every time the January 6 committee holds a hearing, it seems clearer and clearer that Donald Trump was trying to keep control over the government after losing reelection. The past week alone produced the “how to coup” PowerPoint, widely circulated in Trumpworld, and a slew of text messages, including this sorry we weren’t able to pull off a coup note from an unidentified lawmaker to Mark Meadows: “Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked.” It’s pretty clear what Trump was up to: trying to reinstall himself as president and end American democracy as we know it.
Trump’s crew surely knew how bad the events of January 6 were even as they were unfolding. “The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home … he is destroying his legacy,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote to Mark Meadows in a text message read by Republican Representative Liz Cheney during the opening statements of the Jan 6 committee meeting on Monday night. A range of journalists sent similar messages. Actual reporter Jake Sherman—who had been stuck in the Capitol during the riot, and who released his texts with Meadows “out of transparency”—wrote, “Do something for us. We are under siege in the [Capitol].” Another “journalist” exchanging texts with Meadows at the time: Fox propagandist Sean Hannity, who wrote, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”
Meadows himself turned over a huge tranche of texts and emails to the committee before he decided he no longer wanted to testify. That he’s currently promoting his book about Trump rather undercuts the claim in his excuse for backing out of the testimony— reflected in his new lawsuit, against the January 6 committee and Nancy Pelosi—that his service to the ex-president requires rigorous confidentiality. California Representative Adam Schiff noted that it’s “very possible that by discussing the events of Jan. 6 in his book … he’s waiving any claim of privilege.” The House is now seeking to charge him with contempt.
The book itself, The Chief’s Chief, is quite a puzzling artifact. Kirkus called it a “Trump idolator’s dream book,” but Meadows also slipped up and revealed some extremely damaging information—for example, that Trump tested positive for the coronavirus before the first debate with Joe Biden (though he did, according to Meadows, take a second test, which was negative). “The story of me having COVID prior to, or during, the first debate is Fake News,” Trump responded. “In fact, a test revealed that I did not have COVID prior to the debate.”
Only two Republicans voted to hold Meadows in contempt. The rest of the House GOP apparently decided it’s fine that he’s refusing to participate in an investigation led by the very legislative body to which they belong. Meanwhile, the desperate texts that Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade wrote to Mark Meadows, urging Trump to try and stop the riot, are just a bizarre footnote to the narrative Fox News has cemented in its viewers’ minds: that rooting for authoritarianism is simply how you support your team.
Between Fox and Facebook’s radicalizing algorithms, America’s hyper-partisanship has reached a fever pitch. Trumpists don’t care about the demise of democracy if it’s helping their guy. Republicans think Democrats’ pleas for voting rights and other democratic safeguards are partisan. What Republicans can’t seem to see is what an autocrat-led America would really look like.
At the For God & Country Patriot Roundup in Dallas on May 30, a member of the audience said to former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn during a Q&A, “I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here.” And Flynn simply responded: “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.” Do Trump supporters not understand what a military coup looks like? Do they think a coup won’t disturb normal American life? Someone needs to explain to these Republicans that when the military takes over, you may lose freedoms that include the right to complain loudly on television. Remember when Tucker Carlson praised fascist autocrat Viktor Orbán? Well, Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, uses the world’s most invasive spyware to track journalists. In Orbán’s world, Carlson has his phone tapped, his monologues dictated, and his freedoms taken away.
Today, CNN’s Jim Acosta wrote to me saying, “I like to say our democracy is only as strong as those who are willing to fight for it.”
“Americans should care about the next vote or it could be our last vote,” Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell wrote to me on Wednesday, soon after Representative Ritchie Torres voiced a similar sentiment: “Reasonable people of goodwill can and should have robust debate over public policy. What should never be up for debate, however, is the truth itself, as well as the peaceful transfer of power. If we abandon those foundations, as the Party of Trump would have us do, then liberal democracy is left with nothing on which to stand.” Both see what’s at stake here, and it is everything.
But how you safeguard democracy when only one party supports it is a riddle. How do Democrats permeate the Fox and Facebook anti-fact chamber, which paints Trump as the real victim of the insurrection he helped instigate?
I don’t know how you get Republicans to see past this election, to understand that losing democracy is about more than just a win for their guy. Some members of the mainstream media have been defensive, saying they aren’t covering the threat to democracy because lawmakers aren’t talking about it. But here’s the thing: It’s the media’s job to make people care, to highlight the stories that matter. We don’t look to elected officials to tell us what to write about. We journalists may be the bulwark that keeps America from resembling Hungary or Turkey in a few years. Keeping democracy shouldn’t be a partisan fight, but it is, and perhaps that’s the most damning thing of all.