In America’s existential election, choice itself will be on the ballot

David Moscrop is a writer and political commentator. He is the author of Too Dumb for Democracy and a Substack newsletter.

Choice will define the 2024 United States election on Nov. 5.

This claim may seem as trite as it is self-evident. After all, every democratic election is about choice: Add up all the individual voting decisions of the electorate, and lives are shaped based on the outcome. Choosing is how the whole thing functions.

But the U.S.’s looming contest will be unique, tasking voters with something beyond the routine, though consequential, need to make electoral decisions. At once, Americans casting their ballots for president and other politicians down the ballot will be setting the future of the right to choose, both in terms of bodily autonomy and democracy itself.

It will be the first presidential election since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, 2022. That ruling has had far-reaching consequences: As of late April, more than 20 states have some form of restriction on abortion, including 14 with total bans. Voters’ choices on Nov. 5, then, will shape, enable or constrain one of the most fundamental choices we have: the right to choose how one governs their own body, or whether they can at all.

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What’s more, the election threatens to be a choice about choice itself – more specifically, about the very ability to choose in America’s democracy. Donald Trump, one of the two presumptive nominees competing for the world’s highest office, has not hidden his ambitions to rule as an autocrat if he is elected. Eight years after making “lock her up” a regular chant at rallies in his 2016 faceoff with Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump (who himself faces multiple criminal charges in four active court cases) has said that he would have “no choice” but to imprison his political opponents “because they’re doing it to us”; his list includes the members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 coup attempt.

He has even made his intentions explicit: “I said I want to be a dictator for one day,” he said in December, promising to build a southern wall and approve vast numbers of oil-drilling projects in the first 24 hours of a potential second term – as if dictators are generally satisfied with just a single day of autocratic rule.

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The choices at stake here are connected. During his most recent State of the Union address to Congress, Joe Biden referenced the United States of 1941, when the future of democracy around the world was uncertain. He also cited Abraham Lincoln, arguing that “not since … the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.” And then Mr. Biden drew a through-line between those threatened freedoms: “Many of you in this chamber and my predecessor [Mr. Trump] are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. My God, what freedoms will you take away next?”

Given all that could be lost, and given polling that suggests there is a very real possibility the Democrats lose the White House, Senate or both, it’s unsurprising that Mr. Biden and his team are trying to frame the upcoming election in existential terms – at once a choice between freedom or despotism, and a choice between women’s rights or even more theocratic rollback. And while there are many criticisms to be made of the Biden administration and of Democrats at large – including their failure to sufficiently protect abortion rights and their hostility to campus protests, free speech and beyond – he may nonetheless be right.

If he is, there’s something disturbing about putting choice so explicitly on the ballot. What happens if it loses? And how can America avoid that outcome?

American democracy has long been bolstered by a myth: that it is the gold standard of self-government that all others should follow. But scratch away the myth’s gilding, and what you find beneath is rather shabby.

The narrative has fuelled some of the worst transgressions of U.S. foreign policy, as presidents through the decades have undertaken self-important interventions through conflict and occupation in countries around the world. And what’s more, the story isn’t even true, masking the many examples of corruption and disenfranchisement in the history of U.S. democracy.

Here, we’re not talking about Mr. Trump’s more recent bogus claims of “voter fraud,” which he cited in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. That’s not to say that the U.S. doesn’t have a history of that sort of corruption; the 1888 election was perhaps the most corrupt in its history, with the Republican National Committee’s treasurer promising to fund ballot fraud in the swing state of Indiana. But more casually poisonous aspects can be found in America’s history of racist poll taxes and its current traditions of partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and big money and the corrosively influential political action committees it enables.

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It all adds up to an attempt to effectively segregate voters: to suppress some and mobilize others, and to treat them as mere means to an end – passive objects, rather than autonomous subjects who can decide for themselves how they wish to live together.

In the months to come, these base elements of American democracy will converge as an authoritarian takes a shot at the White House to rule as an autocrat. This is, unfortunately, not an exaggeration.

Mr. Trump has promised to use the military for political ends: He has promised to enact draconian border and migration policies that include militarized deportations and detention camps. He has villainized broad swaths of Americans by creating an us-versus-them dichotomy: On Veterans Day, he promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and the American dream.” He has framed his doctrine in keeping Americans safe from the dangers he describes: In a recent speech, he said he would stop “the plunder” and “sacking” of American cities and towns, and called migrants “horrible people” and even “not people” at all. He claims that he has absolute immunity for any criminal acts done while president, making him above the law – and the Supreme Court appears to be taking him seriously. He has admired the “fantastic” leadership of the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban, lauded the “iron fist” of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and reportedly praised strongmen such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “My theory on why he likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is,” General John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, said in an interview with CNN.

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Mr. Trump has already captured the Republican Party; in March, his daughter-in-law became the co-chair of the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, his most zealous supporters have made explicit that they plan a takeover of the state apparatus itself: to replace the bureaucracy with loyalists to Mr. Trump’s vision of the country.

The release of that playbook came after the Trump administration remade the Supreme Court – the same court that overturned Roe v. Wade – and much of the judiciary beneath it. For Mr. Trump and his MAGA faithful, a second administration would continue his mission of remaking all branches of government in his image.

There is some good news: The notion that he would rule as a dictator has now become a part of mainstream-media discourse. In December, the neo-conservative scholar Robert Kagan warned in The Washington Post that this was “increasingly inevitable,” and that, should he win, Mr. Trump will govern with the “awesome powers of the American executive” and “with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.” The threat has warranted a public debate among serious interlocutors who may have been less boldly critical in 2016 and 2020.

But the media, which Mr. Trump has painted as the “enemy of the people,” is a democratic institution that has been under attack, too. Top Trump advisers have said they are “absolutely dead serious” about retribution against journalists who cover Mr. Trump disagreeably.

“We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have,” said Kash Patel, a former national-security adviser for Mr. Trump.

Undermining faith in institutions, assailing groups of citizens, remaking the government so that the modus operandi is loyalty to a leader: That is the behaviour of an autocrat.

Campaigns are always quick to tell Americans that the next presidential election is the most important of their lifetimes. But this will not be U.S. democracy’s first make-or-break election. Writing in Foreign Policy ahead of the 2020 election, Michael Hirsh noted that in 1800, 1860 and 1932, “the direction and very survival of the American republic were at stake.” Had Aaron Burr, “an unprincipled fellow with dictatorial impulses who was in some ways the Donald Trump of his day,” beaten Thomas Jefferson, what would have happened to the fledgling republic? What if Abraham Lincoln had failed to defeat John C. Breckinridge, who joined the Confederacy just one year later? What if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had fallen to incumbent Herbert Hoover as the Great Depression arrived and as the American fascist movement gained steam?

And what if Mr. Trump defeated Mr. Biden in 2020? “An extraordinary consensus exists among historians, political scientists, diplomats, national security officials, and other experts that the stakes of the U.S. presidential election between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden rise to these portentous historical standards,” Mr. Hirsh wrote at the time. (Reflecting on his 2020 essay, Mr. Hirsh told me in an interview last week that “the same argument holds true today for the 2024 election.”)

Not every election is a high-stakes referendum on democracy itself. Sadly, in the years to come, it may become the norm.

One might assume that the choice between democracy and autocracy is an easy one to make. Voters will of course choose democracy – right? But it’s not so simple. For one, not everyone will frame the election in those terms, and even those who do may not care. Given the degree to which American democracy is shaped by partisan identity – you don’t simply vote Republican or Democrat, you are a Republican or a Democrat – the growing number of entrenched partisans may prefer a norm-busting, democracy-destroying candidate over the alternative, simply because he’s their guy.

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Another problem is that in the popular mind, and too often in practice, we reduce all of democracy to voting days, as if the system is a set-it-and-forget-it affair to be enacted every few years. You make a choice at the ballot box; you go home; you wait until you’re called upon to repeat the exercise. And yes, in elections, the choices you make matter – perhaps not in the sense that an individual choice determines the outcome of a race, but in the sense that individual choices matter in aggregate. But as a result of this and the constantly and numbingly high stakes, a call to defend democracy can feel abstract when there are issues affecting your family more directly.

Support for authoritarianism in the U.S. is also higher than you might expect. In February, the Pew Research Center found that 32 per cent of Americans are in favour of being ruled by a strong leader or even the military. Rising support for unconstrained leadership reflects the frustrations and fears of a population that desperately wants government to get things done, particularly in service of improving the material conditions in which they live – and prefers that nothing stand in the way. That the bargain they would make is Faustian, unfortunately, appears to be a secondary concern, if it is even a concern at all.

These trends aren’t likely to reverse by November. But could the other freedom at stake – the right to choose – help focus the mind?

In his State of the Union address in March, Joe Biden directly addressed the electoral power of women and their capacity to shape outcomes in November. And he took a swing at Mr. Trump on one of the issues that matters most to them: abortion rights. “He’s the reason Roe was overturned, and he bragged about it,” he said. Mr. Biden promised to restore Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land again,” though he acknowledged he could only do so if the electorate returns “a Congress that supports the right to choose.”

But he also chose not to say the word “abortion,” even though it appeared in the text of his prepared speech – which, for many pro-choice advocates, reflected their long-time concern that Mr. Biden hasn’t done enough in the fight for abortion rights. “I think it implies that it’s taboo, and it’s not,” said Kellie Copeland, the executive director of Pro-Choice Ohio.

Mr. Biden is a Roman Catholic who personally opposes abortion, but his administration has taken a number of measures, including attempts to protect emergency medical care and other means of access to abortion where it remains available, including the medication mifepristone. Crucially, though, Mr. Biden’s position is in stark contrast to Mr. Trump on the issue. In the late 1990s, Mr. Trump supported a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, saying he was “pro-choice in every respect.” In 2016, however, when running for president, the Republican candidate supported “some form of punishment” for women who’d had an abortion. As recently as last month, he said he was “proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade.” And Mr. Trump has publicly suggested that he approves of a 15-week federal ban on abortion, with exceptions for incest, rape, and to save the life of the mother. As commentators have noted, any previous hesitancy on banning abortion is more about electoral concerns than respect for bodily autonomy. Mr. Trump simply can’t be trusted on the issue, and no one should take him at his word.

Abortion rights may not have been adequately protected, let alone entrenched or extended, during the Biden administration. But a second Trump White House would almost certainly set about accelerating the erosion of choice that’s already happening throughout the country. On May 1, a six-week abortion limit went into effect in Florida, just a month after Arizona’s Supreme Court allowed an 1864 law that bans almost all abortions – a ruling that Mr. Trump, incidentally, said went too far. Arizona legislators passed a bill to repeal the ban this week.

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As flawed as Mr. Biden’s term has been, and as frustrating as the Democrats have long been, America’s dual-choice election is a test of the country’s democracy and rights regime. Imperfect as the two are, a Trump victory would risk putting the republic’s democratic institutions to the sword and, along with them, the struggle for abortion rights. America’s systems are flawed, but autocratic rule by an authoritarian who seems ripe for a full-blown fascist turn would not be an improvement.

But this moment should be an opportunity to crystallize and focus on the things that really matter. The scale of Mr. Trump’s threat to the American republic doesn’t mean that voters need to let Democrats off the hook for their failures nor allow them to blackmail voters with the alternative. Instead, it should galvanize the Biden administration and Democratic establishment to listen more closely to the needs of the American people, to do better on building a robust welfare state, tackling climate change, fixing an economy rigged in favour of the rich, fighting for abortion rights, dismantling a racist criminal justice and prison system, and responding to the horrific human-rights atrocities in Gaza.

For many, democracy is often reduced to voting, a set-it-and-forget-it exercise that happens every few years. But returning a government is only the beginning of a process, not the end. Holding government to a high standard, demanding better of them than they may be prepared to give, pressing them to act in the interests of the public and of fundamental justice, and taking part in the process knowing leaders will nonetheless always come up short – this, in some way, is all an inextricable and never-ending part of self-government.

The election has enormously high stakes. But that should just mean it should be taken with extreme seriousness. For all involved, it should matter more.

Making a choice about the future of American democratic institutions and the rights of millions of people is not a pleasant one to have to make. But it shouldn’t be a difficult one. And the very future of the United States may well rest on the Democrats figuring out how to make it easy for Americans.

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U.S. election 2024: More from The Globe

David Shribman: In the case of Biden vs. Trump, the challenge is overcoming a calcifying political environment

Edward Greenspon, Janice Gross Stein and Drew Fagan: Canada needs to have a plan for the U.S., no matter who becomes president

John Rapley: What if the economy can save Biden?

Lawrence Martin: Kristi Noem killed her dog, and her chances of being VP

Jason Opal: Trump vs. Biden shows how far U.S. political parties have fallen

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