How to Stop the Minority-Rule Doom Loop
The next two years might be America’s last chance to protect the basic democratic principle of majority rule.
April 12, 2021
Dan Calderwood / Unsplash / The Atlantic
President Joe Biden came into office facing four “converging crises”: COVID-19, climate change, racial justice, and the economy. But after a few weeks of fast action on a pandemic relief plan, a fifth crisis will determine the fate of the rest of his administration, and perhaps that of American democracy itself: the minority-rule doom loop, by which predominantly white conservatives gain more and more power, even as they represent fewer Americans.
Mandel Ngan / Getty / The Atlantic
The battle to protect voting rights needs a field general. Vice President Kamala Harris needs a cause to define her tenure. The second problem suggests the answer to the first: President Joe Biden could designate Harris as the administration’s point person in combatting the onslaught against voter access now advancing in Republican-controlled states.
Both Biden and Harris are speaking more explicitly now than they have in the past about that threat; each delivered forceful statements last weekend on the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma. Even though they welcomed the pointed comments, civil-rights advocates I spoke with almost uniformly agree that most Americans remain unaware of the magnitude of the assault on voting rights, an outgrowth of former President Donald Trump’s discredited claims of massive fraud in the 2020 election.