The Republican DevolutionJuly/August 2019 49
voting, and encouraging aggressive
interventions by activist judgesÏthat
undermine not just eective governance
but also representative democracy itself.BREAKING THE DOOM LOOP
What might foster a better-functioning
democracy? It is hard to see a route
to a well-functioning democracy that
does not involve a serious electoral
rebuke o the Republican Party—one
bigger and broader than the losses it
experienced in 2018. But even with such
a rebuke, any Democratic president, no
matter how moderate and open to
compromise, would face monolithic
Republican opposition in Congress and
the conservative media. The Senate’s
stark and growing rural bias ensures that
the Republican Party’s strength in the
chamber will exceed its popular support,
and Republican senators will be armed
with the Ãlibuster and the knowledge
that legislative obstruction has delivered
them political gains in the past.
Any Democratic president would
also face a conservative Supreme Court,
whose newest members are Federalist
Society stalwarts chosen for their
combination o extreme social conserva-
tivism and Ayn Rand–style libertarian-
ism. Before these judges, reforms
passed by any Democratic-controlled
Congress (assuming they survived a
Ãlibuster) would face a highly uncertain
fate, however obvious their constitu-
tionality might have been in the past.
As bleak as the situation looks, there
are reasons for guarded optimism. The
Ãrst is that eective governance, di-
rected to real public needs, can deliver
far-reaching rewards. The potential for
such rewards, in turn, can create oppor-
tunities for skilled politicians to buildnow have a solid majority on the Su-
preme Court. There, they have enabled
blatant vote rigging in Republican-
controlled areas (by invalidating a key
provision o the Voting Rights Act) and
empowered the plutocratic forces
behind the Republican Party (by gut-
ting campaign Ãnance regulations and
supporting a comprehensive attack on
already battered labor unions). Now, the
Court looks poised to allow the Trump
administration to add a question about
citizenship to the 2020 census—a
measure achieved by circumventing
normal procedures and opposed by
career ocials at the Census Bureau—
which would almost certainly reduce the
count o noncitizens and thereby the
electoral representation o Democratic-
leaning areas.
All these trends have fed on one
another. As inequality has grown, it has
empowered economic elites and given
their political allies an incentive to
substitute antisystem resentment for
real eorts to provide economic oppor-
tunity. Democrats certainly deserve
some o the blame here: both the
Clinton and the Obama administrations
did little to address the dislocations
caused by trade or the growing geo-
graphic divergence in economic out-
comes. But the biggest barrier to
serious action has been the Republican
Party. In the absence o an eective
response, places left behind by the
knowledge economy have proved fertile
terrain for fear-mongering by right-
wing media and, increasingly, Republican
campaigns. And as the ³£¡ has alienated
the racial and ethnic minorities that make
up a growing share o the electorate, it has
found itsel drawn to countermajoritarian
strategiesÏgerrymandering, restricting