It's been a busy week across the globe in the fight to defend democracy.
People in both Mexico and Israel are taking to the streets to fight back against autocrats.
In Mexico, elections are publicly funded and there is a large and well-paid bureaucracy that manages them. Those funds are big targets for President Lopez Obrador who says this money should be spent on the poor. He says the people’s will is thwarted by the elitists in the bureaucracy.
In Israel, the judiciary has always been independent, a force for the rule of law over the passions of a country perpetually concerned about security. Prime Minister Netanyahu sees the judiciary not as independent, but as unaccountable. He wants to make the judiciary responsive to voters by giving the Knesset more control over judges.
Lopez Obrador and Netanyahu both claim to represent the popular will, and seek to empower the people by weakening institutions of government that are, by design, removed from the partisan passions of electoral politics.
This is rhetoric we hear in our own country, where MAGA autocrats seek to protect election integrity and argue that unaccountable bureaucrats are weaponizing government against the people.
It is the rhetoric of despots everywhere.
Democracies are complicated. In a social media and sound-bite driven era, complicated is hard to defend.
But here’s the thing, whether or not we succeed in educating ourselves about the importance of separation of powers, about the need to establish a judiciary that is protected from partisan forces, the idea of democracy is so deeply entwined with the idea of individual freedom, that people everywhere will resist efforts to erode it.
As many as half a million Mexicans protested in Zocalo square in nation’s capital. In Israel, about a hundred thousand have been protesting on the streets of Tel Aviv.
A protest in Haifa, Israel. (photo credit: SHIR TOREM/FLASH90)
Lopez Obrador and Netanyahu mock the protesters and promise to push through the reforms they claim are so necessary to the protection of democracy. But in Mexico, people remember the PRI, which bent the rules to remain in power for decades. And in Israel, there is an understandable and almost existential loathing of fascists.
What about us?
If I had to pick the one thing that most distinguishes us from every other country it is our deep sense of individual liberty. Alone in the world, when we hear those powerful words, ‘We the people,” we think not of a mass movement, but of a collection of individuals, each empowered, each called upon, to make her own decisions, each asked to own his own actions, each required to find their own path. Only in America would a Walt Whitman come out of a civil war celebrating each individual blade of grass, each unique soul he met.
Because democracy and individual liberty are linked, autocrats always pair their attacks on democracy with efforts to suppress individual expression- a rainbow flag, a book, a college lecture.
Today, the extreme MAGA republicans in states like Florida, Iowa, Texas and Idaho, aim to narrow our minds and attack our individuality. In the capitol, their partisan and illegitimate Supreme Court hopes to give more them tools to do so.
The case of Moore v Harper considers a fringe legal argument that would never have had a hearing if the court were making judicial rather than partisan decisions. This case poses the same question facing Israelis, only worse. In Israel, the goal is to make the legislature partisan. Here, the already-partisan court seeks to make the rest of judicial system irrelevant. The case argues that only state legislatures have a say about elections. The court already ruled in Rucho that federal court cannot consider cases that involve gerrymandering. That decision, and the expected one in Moore v Harper means that gerrymandered legislatures not only get to stay that way, but they get to control every electoral rule going forward.
This cannot be allowed to stand.
And I am confident that it will not.
In January of 2017, after Donald Trump’s election, and sensing what was coming, 400,000 people took to the street in New York, 150,000 came out in Chicago and 750,000 in Los Angeles. In all, more than two and a half million marched that day.
Those marches were just the opening act of one of the most important, impressive, and effective mobilizations in history. In the years since, organizations like Swing Left, Run for Something and dozens of others, helped millions of Americans find on ramps to political participation. The Democratic Party evolved to become, in places like Michigan and Wisconsin, a force for social mobilization that was not only a factor in electoral politics, but brought people together to knit back together the frayed fabric of our communities.
It is always dangerous when autocrats gain control of levels of power. I hope the Israelis can save their democracy. I hope the Mexicans can restore theirs. I know we will keep ours.
I know that not because the threat is not real, but because each of us is stronger and braver than the bullying autocrats with their threatening red waves.
We know, that when they come for trans kids they are coming for us. When they make it harder for some folks to vote they are making it harder for all of us. When they bring their weapons to school board meetings, they aim at all of us.
All of it, with their lies, their conspiracies, their collusion-- our individual decisions, to mobilize to share facts, to look out for each other, has dragged it into the light.
We are a couple of election cycles into this fight, and we have yet more in front of us. But we are reclaiming the high ground. There was a time when FOX-watching autocrats claimed the American flag as their own. We have taken it back. All they have left is the confederate stars and bars. We will not rest.