Yes, it was a relief that
increasingly fascist Republicans didn’t
sweep the midterms. But our democratic
standards cannot fall so low as to accept a
split Congress.
Americans invested in the idea of
living in a democracy heaved a collective
sigh of relief the day after the 2022
midterm elections when it became clear that
the dire predictions of a Republican sweep were
overblown. Democrats made greater gains than
expected, winning races in both the Senate and the House that they didn’t expect.
It happened because masses of
people cast ballots, defying long-standing
historical trends of low midterm turnout.
Voters almost
matched the high turnout of the 2018
elections when outrage over Donald Trump’s
first two years in office pushed Congress
into the hands of Democrats. Stung by their
opposition’s showing and by Trump’s
reelection loss two years later, Republicans
ramped
up voter suppression efforts, hoping
to blunt the impact of an increasingly
young, diverse, and enthusiastic electorate.
Liberal-leaning voters showed up to
the polls during this latest midterm
election largely in response to the
overturning of abortion
rights, but also to stave off right-wing
extremism.
Although the worst did not come to
pass during the midterms, simply holding the
line against a descent into fascism is not enough. Republicans are
wresting control of the nation’s steering
wheel as hard as they can and forcing it as
far right as possible. Their party has
divested itself from democratic norms and
thrown its weight behind Trump and his lies.
They have invested in stripping people of
their bodily autonomy and fashioning a
dangerous world ruled by force and a riotous
mob mentality. Much more is needed in the
face of such hubris: Fascists need to be
placed on the defensive, and a split
Congress is not enough to do so.
Three major factors explain why
Democrats didn’t win outright control of
both congressional chambers: First,
Republicans have aggressively reduced the
impact of Democratic votes; second,
Democrats were unable or unwilling to
articulate a clear message of why their
agenda is better than that of the
Republicans; and third, the corporate media
refused to center people’s well-being in
their framing of election-related issues.
Republicans have played
the
long game on suppressing democracy,
redrawing district maps for years in order
to favor their candidates and appointing conservative,
partisan
judges into federal courts to affirm
those maps. They have done so in tandem with
a slew of voter
suppression
laws in states they control—which is
the majority. Analilia Mejia, co-executive
director of the Center
for Popular Democracy Action, says in an interview that such efforts are “a strategy
utilized to negate the power of a rising
Black and Brown electorate.”
The GOP is also terrified (or
should be) of young people voting. Recall in
the 2016 presidential race when Hillary
Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump was blamed,
in
part, on younger voters who weren’t motivated to show up
to the polls. Two years later, that trend
was reversed in the first midterms of Trump’s
presidency. Now, four years after that, young
voters have realized the dangers of
apathy and showed up to the polls in force,
casting a majority of their ballots for
Democrats.
Mejia says “the policies that really motivate
people” to vote are “the policies that we
know will essentially save humanity and the
planet and stop climate change; the policies
that we know will ensure that our children,
that our elders, that those most vulnerable
in our communities have the resources that
they need to not only survive but
thrive—[these] are policies that are
supported by the vast majority of people.”
This—including the overturning of abortion
rights at the Supreme Court—was precisely
what motivated so many young people and
people of color to vote in the 2022
midterms. Varshini Prakash, executive
director and co-founder of the Sunrise
Movement, a youth climate justice
organization, told
Common
Dreams, “For us, it’s never been just
about defeating Donald Trump… We turn out to
fight for the issues our generation faces
every day, like the impending climate
crisis, protecting our reproductive
freedoms, and ending gun violence in our
schools.”
And yet, climate justice, economic
justice, and racial justice were largely
missing from the story that Democrats told
in order to motivate people to go to the
polls.
Rather than tout how his
administration and his party would ensure a
just transition to renewable fuels,
President Joe Biden was fixated
on
gas prices and how to lower them. Instead of
showcasing how the 2021
American
Rescue Plan was a good example of federal
government action on inequality, candidates
running for office were on the defensive
against Republicans’ and the media’s
hammering of inflation as a central election issue. In
contrast to their
2020
promises to tackle racist police brutality
and mass incarceration, Democrats decided to
pass a bill to increase police
funding and stave off GOP accusations of
being “soft on crime.”
Voters showed up in spite of this.
But they may have shown up to elect
Democrats in even higher numbers had
climate, economic, and racial justice been
front and center ahead of the midterms.
“These are popular ideas,” says Mejia.
Not only did Democrats refuse to
fully articulate these popular ideas, but
the corporate media also shaped its coverage
to suit the GOP’s agenda. Outlets
aggressively played up the Republican
Party’s line that inflation was the central
issue of the election—one for which, they
alleged, Democrats bore sole blame.
Take one New York Times article
published on Election Day. “Inflation is
almost certainly the issue pushing the
economy to its current prominence,” wrote
the Times’ economic reporter Jeanna Smialek
in a story headlined, “Inflation
Plagues
Democrats in Polling. Will It
Crush Them at the Ballot Box?” Just hours after it was
published, such a confident claim fell apart
as the Democrats were most certainly not
“crushed” at the ballot box.
Mainstream U.S. corporate news
media outlets could have taken a page out of
their British counterpart’s book, the Guardian, which publishes analyses like
that of former U.S. labor secretary Robert
Reich. “Corporations are using rising costs
as an excuse to increase their prices even
higher, resulting in record profits,” wrote
Reich, offering an explanation for inflation
largely missing from U.S. outlets.
One Wall Street Journal article went as far as explaining quite
convincingly that rather than being sparked
by Democrats’ policies, inflation was
triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and that
the U.S. was in line with other nations and
with historical trends. Yet the Journal
couldn’t resist framing the piece with the
misleading headline: “Midterm Election Could
Make Democrats Latest Governing Party to Pay
Price for Inflation.”
Most U.S. newspapers have spent the
past year banging
the
drum of inflation and exaggerating its impact. They
have accepted
the
dogma that higher wages, lower
unemployment, and government assistance are
the source of rising prices rather than
corporate greed.
Mejia is aghast at the consensus
that is emerging to tackle inflation through
increasing interest rates and slashing
benefits. She finds
it “unbelievable that the way we dig
ourselves… out of an economic crisis is by
inflicting strategic targeted and sustained
pain to those who are most vulnerable.”
She says that “the only way out of
here, out of this moment, is through
investment in people, in civic
participation, and increasing our political
power and voice.”
Perhaps if the Democratic Party had
centered its midterm platform on such an
approach, and perhaps if the corporate media
had not distorted the truth, victory would
not have been defined by simply holding the
line against a fascist GOP; it would have
been—and could have been—an outright defeat
of authoritarianism and injustice. Too much
is at stake, and our standards of success
cannot be low.
This
commentary
was produced by Economy
for
All,
a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
