Wednesday of this week brought a triumph, not just for Democrats in the Senate but for democracy in America.
In Mississippi, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded to Democrat Scott Colom, who will become the first Black senator since Reconstruction from the state that once sent Jefferson Davis to the Senate. Colom’s win came in part because of huge turnout in Black-majority counties, a stirring rejoinder to the Supreme Court conservative majority’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.
But instead of celebrating this historic achievement, Democrats were bickering among themselves. Just eight days after their conquest in the midterms, they were already at each other’s throats.
Some in the House attacked colleagues — “shameful,” “disgrace” — for missing a procedural vote that could have led to the impeachment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (although this hope was based on an unlikely scenario in which all of the missing Democrats showed up but none of the missing Republicans did).
Other House Democrats made noise about trying to oust Hakeem Jeffries as Democratic leader and block him from gaining the speakership unless he agreed to their immutable demands — a tactic lifted from the far-right Freedom Caucus.
In the Senate, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland announced a challenge Thursday night to Chuck Schumer as majority leader, setting up the first such attempt to oust a Democratic leader in decades. He earlier attacked Schumer for his ties to the crypto industry and AIPAC. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who wants a Medicare-for-All vote that would split Democrats, announced his opposition to Schumer, and about a dozen others also signaled opposition.
Meanwhile, several Democrats declared that they would try to block any short-term spending deal that doesn’t immediately eliminate all funds for the Iran war — an idea that splits Democrats and could shut down the government before Democrats take control of Congress.
This has to stop.
I have no dog in the leadership fights, but as a practical matter, it’s hard to imagine this (or any) party would ditch its leaders after such a sweeping win. And those making ransom demands of their leadership only have to look at the Republican dysfunction of the past four years to know where that leads.
My bigger worry is that this week’s internecine battles indicate Democrats have already lost the plot.
After a decade-long struggle against Donald Trump, last week’s results at long last show that small-d democrats have finally beaten the authoritarian threat. But our work is not done. And this is what matters most, for, without a functioning democracy, every other priority — universal health care, cost of living, peace and justice in the Middle East, healing the planet — cannot be achieved.
For a status check on the health of our democracy after last Tuesday, I called my old friend Barbara Walter, an authority on civil wars at the University of California San Diego whose 2022 book, “How Civil Wars Start,” described the U.S. slide from full democracy into anocracy, that liminal state between free countries and autocracies.
The good news, in her view: We have rejoined the democracies of the world. The bad news: We have not yet made any of the structural changes that would prevent us from slipping back toward authoritarianism and civil strife in the future.
I had spoken to Walter for a column in 2021, when she served on the CIA’s Political Instability Task Force, which tracked countries around the world at risk of political violence. Back then, she concluded that ours was one of them, teetering on the edge of “open insurgency.” She wrote in her book: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”
That column was among many grim ones during the Trump era. In October 2015, I wrote about Mitt Romney’s Trump-inspired warning about John Adams’ words from 1814: “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” In September 2020, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder gave me this assessment of American democracy while Trump cracked down on racial-justice protests: “The Reichstag has been on a slow burn since June.” At other points — the sacking of the Capitol in 2021, Trump’s second-term seizing of extra-constitutional powers — it felt as though all was lost.
So it’s worth a pause now to exhale, to congratulate ourselves. “We’re out of the red,” Walter said. “We’ve temporarily halted an autocrat.” By the three main measures of a healthy democracy, the United States is stronger than it was two weeks ago. It just held free and fair elections. It clearly has robust political competition. And, under the Democratic Congress, it will have meaningful constraints on the executive. That should keep things stable for the next two years.
But now it’s time to finish the job.
The problems remain formidable. In the short term, Trump will continue his executive power grabs, and probably increase his lawlessness with Stephen Miller as his chief of staff. And the Republican Party’s racial identity as a mostly white institution (it won half the white vote last week but only a quarter of voters of color) is a formula for political instability — particularly, Walter said, if Democrats nominate a woman or a person of color in 2028.
But trends are moving in the right direction. The dramatic shift of young voters and Latinos toward the Democrats in 2026 makes it unlikely they will return to Republicans in 2028. And the reviled figure of Miller running the White House should pretty much guarantee it.
It is imperative that Democrats win the presidency in 2028 and keep control of Congress if they are to have the chance to make the structural changes that will protect democracy in the long run. That means rolling back Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings that handed control of our politics to billionaires, restoring voting rights and, if necessary to get those done, altering the makeup of the Supreme Court itself.
So, forgive me if I don’t get too excited about which Democrats got stuck in traffic for the Hegseth impeachment vote; Democrats will have a chance for an extensive impeachment investigation into the secretary of defense, with witnesses and sworn testimony, in January.
And forgive me if I don’t cheer on the hostage takers threatening to jettison leaders if they don’t commit to holding show votes on Medicare for All and other topics that will split the caucus and end in failure. That is a sure path back to the minority.
The fate of our democracy is too important for such shenanigans.
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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