In middle school, I played on a football team that lost every game. Our coaches tried to keep our spirits high by reciting the proverb once heard on fields and courts across the country: It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. When it comes to the state of our democracy, Americans would do well to heed those words.
That old saying may appear out of place in a democratic society obsessed with election outcomes and legislative victories. Too many politicians interpret a ballot box victory as a mandate to shove their party’s agenda down people’s throats. They believe that winning confers legitimacy on everything they want to do and the authority to do it. This, of course, is wrong. How democracy is exercised — how the game is played — is more important than who wins.
We’re either forgetting this or deciding that we no longer care. Partisans increasingly see the other side as immoral, stupid, unworthy or incapable of good-faith debates. Americans have lost confidence in government’s ability to manage the country, much less address its intractable problems. This erosion of respect feeds an anti-democratic backlash: More than a third of us support violations of democratic norms by the political leaders we favor.
The right has embraced antidemocratic tactics more readily and with more fervor. But the left is not immune to the pull of illiberalism, a word that essentially means the infringing of the political minority’s rights, and a disregard for constitutional order. Whereas democracy requires parties to accept losses, illiberalism is obsessed with winning elections, prevailing in policy disputes and hoarding power — to hell with democratic norms, rules and fairness.
Illiberal impulses arise from different origins on the right and the left. Right-wing illiberalism has roots in the idea that the nation has always been exceptional, but that its destiny is now threatened by faithless or incompatible groups of others: progressives, racial and ethnic minorities, internationalists and so on. Former president Donald Trump’s rhetoric and actions put the impulse front and center. Running on the motto “Make American Great Again,” he repeatedly professed his obsession with winning, attacked the free press and made too many disparaging remarks about people of color to list. The impulse is visible in right-wing support for the “independent state legislature” theory, which empowers state-level majorities to ignore the courts and the public will; in book bans and whitewashed history classes; and in the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.
In the far reaches of the left wing, illiberalism springs from an unwillingness to recognize and praise those aspects of the United States that should be conserved, preferring instead to portray a nation corrupt from the start, beyond repair and in need of a teardown. The illiberal left chills the speech of ideological opponents, hijacks legitimate protest movements to serve undemocratic ends and supports coercive means to achieve policy goals. Although not equivalent to the excesses of right-wing illiberalism, the left repudiates democracy nonetheless.
The two sides are equally obsessed with imaginary utopias — for the right, a pining to return to an America that never existed; for the left, attempting to forge an America that cannot be built.
Given what they have in common, their stark opposition has an odor of hypocrisy. Consider presidential emergency powers. Democrats cried foul when Trump used emergency powers to redirect federal money to build a wall on the southern border. Republicans had a conniption over the idea that President Biden could use executive authority to make abortion available or forgive student loans. Victory, not democracy, is the goal. The blunt exercise of power is excused by the winners as long as they get their way.
Lots of attention has been devoted to the right’s illiberalism, and rightly so. But the mirror tendency on the left — in no small part a response to congressional intransigence during the Obama administration and the ongoing antidemocratic agenda in red states — is perhaps more worrisome. The left’s illiberalism grants a monopoly on national pride, and our symbols of unity, to the right: the flag, the anthem, the very concept of patriotism. It’s as if the two sides ask Americans to choose between a nation that behaves as if it doesn’t need to respect its people and a people who act as though they don’t need to respect the nation.
Nations have identities, cultures, narratives and customs that are needed to provide stability. Such symbols, along with a shared history, connect the people of this large, diverse — and still young —country. Ceding the symbols and stories to the illiberal right wing will leave too many Americans alienated from the nation they hope to improve. Why struggle to build up a country that is not worthy of love?
We know how to deal with undemocratic conservatives. The whole of the civil rights movement took aim at their reactionary illiberalism. The Jim Crow era they sought to enforce was put to bed by folks who offered a better and more optimistic version of the nation’s future.
We need to learn how to oppose the illiberalism of the left, the impulse to give up on the national story, to lose the thread of it, to declare the American experiment dead. “We must not be enemies,” Abraham Lincoln urged; instead, we must all practice a conservatism that preserves the institutions and beliefs undergirding the shared liberal ideals of human freedom and equality. When the political game is played between these lines and by these rules, everyone wins.
Washington Post
