Ross Douthat: 'For everyone furiously debating the condition of American democracy, the 2022 midterms were a beautiful thing — a gift to both sides of the argument, a Rorschach test that yields to either interpretation.'
An election worker carries American flags at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, Nev.. on Nov. 4, 2022.For everyone furiously debating the condition of American democracy, the 2022 midterms were a beautiful thing — a gift to both sides of the argument, a Rorschach test that yields to either interpretation.
Well, you saw an embattled president, Joe Biden, decide to make the defense of democracy itself his key election theme. For this, he was scorned from multiple directions — for ignoring kitchen-table issues, for conflating normal conservative positions with authoritarianism, for failing to offer the kind of radical bipartisanship that his diagnosis would imply.
But then imagine yourself a non-alarmist, looking at the same results. For the past few years you’ve heard the alarmists argue that the problem isn’t just Donald Trump or his epigones — that the entire Republican Party has been remade as an authoritarian formation, that its preferred election rules are basically Jim Crow 2.
Between these two interpretations of 2022 — the alarmists celebrating a hard-fought victory for democracy and the non-alarmists seeing a predictable return to normalcy — is any synthesis or handshake possible?
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