This commentary is by Narain Batra of Hartford, author of “The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation,” and the forthcoming “India in a New Key” (February 2022). He is a professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University.
After the November 2020 presidential election, corporate America executives and industry lobbying groups, conscious of their behind-the-scenes role in funding both political parties during elections, raised their voices to defend democracy at home when Donald Trump refused to accept the election results.
They might have to do it again.
Last summer, about 250 companies and business organizations with 4.5 million employees, including tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Tesla, urged Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. They warned that “democracy is at risk in many places across the country, with hundreds of bills proposed that would restrict voter access,” which they argued created “the need for a transparent process, one with a history of bipartisan support, to make voting safe and accessible for all eligible Americans.”
The bill would restore and strengthen the 1965 Voting Rights Act, making it obligatory for states to observe the federal election standards prohibiting discrimination in any form.
In politics, facts and truth do matter but it’s the perception of truth that moves people to action. If, a year after the presidential election, a substantial number of Republicans still believe — in spite of contrary evidence — that the election was fraudulent and it might happen again in the 2022 congressional and 2024 presidential elections, something has to be done to assure them about the integrity electoral mechanism.
Condemning such a large number of people as nothing but ignorant racists would not restore their commitment to democracy. Faith in the transparency of the electoral system is at the heart of democracy.
It’s unfortunate that Senate Republicans have blocked the bill.
There is a widespread diffused fear that these “deplorables,” the Trumpian diehards, might indulge in violent behavior if the next presidential election is perceived to have been stolen from them. This has led some analysts to superspeculation that Jan. 6 was only a dress rehearsal.
In The Atlantic, Barton Gellman writes that Trump’s next coup, which he says is already on the way, “will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.”
When the gerrymandered midterm elections hand over the swing states to the GOP, speculates Gellman, the Supreme Court “may be ready to give these legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors.” With the GOP expected to take over the House and the Senate in 2022, guess who would count the electoral votes?
Gellman is not the only one admonishing us about our dark future. Last month, three senior retired Army generals — Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba and Steven M. Anderson — in an opinion piece in The Washington Post issued a bone-chilling warning “about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk.”
Among the attackers on the Capitol were veterans and “active-duty members of the military,” the generals wrote. More than a hundred retired military officials “released a letter echoing Donald Trump’s false attacks on the legitimacy of our elections.” In a future disputed election leading to another insurrection, the military chain of command might split along the political partisan lines, the generals warned.
The world too was watching. As is well-known, after the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hurried to assure his Chinese counterpart that the United States was stable and “the nation’s nuclear defense chains were secure from illegal orders.”
With these apocalyptic premonitions in some of the media about our bleak future — another insurrection, a second civil war, the fear that both the Supreme Court and the military might be compromised — it’s time for corporate America to make an existential choice: Either to go with the flow of uncompromising political partisanship, or accept the political responsibility of helping to protect democracy in its own enlightened self-interest.
There’s no gainsaying the fact that entrepreneurial, innovative capitalism cannot survive without a well-functioning democracy based on inclusive, fair and transparent elections that generate the people’s trust.
There are several ways corporate America can exercise its political power to protect democracy.
First, launch massively persuasive media campaigns regarding the need for fair and transparent elections, urging the Senate to pass the Voting Rights Act that sets up national standards. Tech giants must unleash the creative power of social media to strengthen democracy, the bedrock of American capitalism.
Second, make collective and coordinated efforts at state and national levels to judiciously fund candidates of both parties who see the need for electoral reforms, and withhold donations to politicians who keep up with misinformation and Trump’s Big Lie.
