Elections as Tools of Autocracy and White Supremacy
Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. I am on my way to California to give the 2026 Witte Lectures sponsored by the Newport Beach Public Library Foundation, but I wanted to give you my thoughts about the blow to the Voting Rights Act, seen the perspective of authoritarian methods and goals.
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Once upon a time, elections were seen as a metric of democracy: if a country had elections, it could be considered an “open” society. Today, that’s no longer the case.
In the 21st century, we have a proliferation of electoral autocracies, or countries with strongman leaders who keep a semblance of democracy going (opposition parties and, sometimes, a degree of independent media), including by holding elections. In a separate essay, I will analyze the bag of tricks autocrats deploy to turn elections to their advantage, including invalidating the will of the people by removing already-elected officials from their offices.
The central point here is that in 2026, the aim of “competitive authoritarianism” is to take away competition: to take the “fair” out of free and fair elections, while redefining freedom as a liberation from the corruption and chaos of democracy. During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump described the act of voting to his Evangelical Christian followers as a kind of burden he would free them from. “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote,” he promised them.
Authoritarianism in all its forms depends on people acting against their own interests, in this case seeing the abdication of agency and giving up of rights as something positive, as almost a relief. Let the leader decide for you! Let the leader, who is an agent of divine providence, decide your destiny! Getting people to believe this is one of the main functions of personality cults that depict the leader as infallible.
Of course, propaganda is not enough to “fix” the problem of voting. That is why autocrats work hard to achieve “autocratic capture” and have the courts, the media, and other institutions retooled to reflect the ideologies, priorities, and methods of the autocrat and his partners.
This is where the Supreme Court decision fits in. By striking down a key element of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has once again made itself the vehicle of the crusade to end American democracy as we know it. “Justices” such as Clarence Thomas (“Corrupted by Billionaires, Including Harlan Crow, Who Has a Garden of Dictator Statues”) and Samuel Alito (“Flew Insurrectionist Flags At His Homes”) act like far-right political operatives. Both long ago jettisoned democratic ideas of conflicts of interest and judicial impartiality.
Giving immunity to a head of state who incited a violent mob against Republican and Democratic lawmakers on January 6, 2021, was one blow to our democracy; legitimizing practices designed to disenfranchise Black voters is another.
Undoing Our Multiracial Democracy So That White Supremacy Can Prevail
Every authoritarian state has a central ideological pillar and fixation. In America, the retooling of institutions to serve autocracy and the fanatical desire to remake the country in the image of White Christian nationalism go hand in hand. I have written repeatedly about the ongoing war on Blacks, and how Donald Trump from 2016 on has made himself the protector of every kind of racist, from neo-Nazis to those who hate immigrants and religious minorities to people who never really accepted the end of Jim Crow and the democratic doctrine of racial equality.
This is why Trump continues his attacks on the Obamas ten years after they left the White House. The very idea of a Black man as president must be “undone” in the public mind. In time, even the democratic opposition may decide that they cannot invest in Black candidates for high (or the highest) office because “they will never win.” Obama must be seen as an exception, and not as a step to the perfection of the image and reality of America as a successful multiracial democracy.
The strike at the Voting Rights Act, which enshrines and protects our multiracial democracy, is meant to accelerate all of this.
Never Give Up On Elections
You have often heard me say: Never give up on elections. I stand behind this, now more than ever.
Elections are often the last democratic institution standing in countries where the judiciary, bureaucracy, and security forces have been captured and made tools of the executive. And as long as elections still exist, opposition politicians who seek to unseat autocrats can pursue creative strategies to get people acquainted with their platforms even in media environments designed to favor the autocratic incumbent, and get people to the polls in numbers sufficient to pull off an upset.
That’s what happened in Hungary, where Peter Magyar found a workaround for media capture (in the 2018 and 2022 elections, the opposition candidates’ messages hardly reached voters outside of large cities). He embarked on a two year tour and a “million step march” going to the voters in rural areas in person to make sure they met him and heard his messages about a better future for Hungary.
We should never give up on elections because, against pessimists’ pronouncements that “you can’t vote your way out of Fascism,” there was an 80% voter turnout and Orban conceded, giving the world a demonstration of the power of the vote to change history.
After the shock of Hungary, autocrats still saddled with elections are hurrying to “fix” every link in the chain of voting so that such a disaster does not happen to them. This latest strike at our voting rights is a product of this climate, as well as the long game the enemies of freedom and equality have played since the end of Jim Crow.
“We will not go back,” read a button from the 2024 election I found at home the other day, and this is the message I want to convey. This is the time to redouble our efforts for voter registration and voter education. This is the time to message that a strike against some of us is a strike against all of us. We will not cede to the forces of White supremacy.
Like the civil rights heroes who preceded us, whose actions led to the Voting Rights Act and the enfranchisement of millions, we can engage in peaceful opposition methods that show our commitment to equality, solidarity, and free and fair elections. Redoubling our faith in elections and in each other is the way forward.
Here in Minnesota one of our democracy champion organizations has developed a framework to build a statewide network of democracy defenders. This is a nonpartisan effort aimed at encouraging everyone, neighbor to neighbor, to participate in their democracy, use their voices, vote. We will be developing this network community by community, person to person. We will help those who need it to get registered, have a plan to vote, help people get to the polls, install poll watchers, have a plan to deal with any ICE involvement. This is about “We the People.” I hope other states are doing the same.
The irony is that the right wants to see Obama Presidency as an exception and Roberts uses it as rationale for gutting need for voting rights... evil