Zombie ants are putting our democracy at risk | Opinion

Zombie ants op-ed

The director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University says excluding Americans with political philosophies that fall in the middle has led to extreme groups. Like the parasitic fungus that colonizes Amazonian ant colonies, redirecting their conduct in self-destructive ways -- turning them, in effect, into zombie ants -- the toxic effect of politics saturated with money has put our democracy at risk.

NOTE: This story is part of a project called Democracy Day, in which newsrooms across the country are shining a light on threats to democracy and what action is needed to protect it.

By John Farmer, Jr.

Americans may not agree on much these days, but on one subject there seems to be consensus: our democracy is in danger. Recent surveys suggest that concern for the well-being of the republic has supplanted other frontline issues such as anxiety over inflation, climate change, and the pandemic — remember the pandemic? — as the leading cause for concern.

Beyond that broad concern, however, consensus evaporates.

For President Biden and many Democrats, the chief threat to democracy comes from Donald Trump “and the MAGA Republicans.” They did, after all, attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, ransack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and are now endorsing and running candidates nationwide for critical offices who subscribe to the myth of the stolen election.

But the former president and his followers have a parallel narrative of how democracy is threatened. Theirs recites the infamous Steele dossier, the Mueller probe into whether the Trump campaign assisted Russian disinformation prior to the 2016 election, the first impeachment’s failed attempt to cancel the 2016 election by removing the president, the second impeachment’s failed attempt to hold the president accountable for January 6, and the ongoing investigations by the January 6 Select Committee, the Attorney General of New York, the Fulton County Georgia District Attorney, and the Department of Justice, which seized everything but hair dye, Viagra and used Big Mac wrappers from Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. As the saying goes, just because he’s paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get him!

In the view of the MAGA voters, these efforts represent a continuing, determined — and to date unsuccessful — effort by the Left to nullify the votes of the tens of millions of Trump supporters while he was in office by removing him, and to prevent them from ever voting for him again. From their perspective, that effort is the greatest threat to democracy.

Each narrative has tens of millions of supporters, and there are disturbing elements of both. But both, in my view, miss the larger threat to our republic.


      

I have no doubt, for instance, about the seditious intent of the militias on January 6. The conspiracy was real and should be punished wherever it leads, regardless of whether it ultimately involves the former president. But let’s not conflate intent with execution. The principals were ill-motivated dopes. If you’re a competent president seeking to overturn an election, are you really going to summon a clown posse like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to make that happen? If you’re a serious black ops specialist intent on seizing the Capitol on January 6, do you really leave your weapons stashed at a Comfort Inn on the other side of the Potomac?

On the other side, the many failed attempts to remove Donald Trump from the American political scene are indeed troubling. Each failure reinforces Trump’s threat to democracy narrative and strengthens the former president among his aggrieved supporters. Having worked in countries where the opposition goes into hiding upon losing an election, moreover, I can see the dangerous precedent in prosecuting the opposition. But the force of this concern is undercut by the former president’s egregious conduct. There’s no question that Trump crossed into a no man’s land between the rule of law and the rule of a usurper. Are the authorities really supposed to look the other way?

The parallel narratives each raises are real but overstated concerns about the threat the other poses. But both miss the overarching issue, for the greatest threat to democracy is the stovepiped ecosystem in which politics is now conducted: the politics of the excluded middle.

Gerrymandered congressional districts disenfranchise millions of voters and empower the extreme partisans who vote in primaries. Commercial algorithms applied to political speech steer political consumers into cul de sacs of their own predilections. Cable “news” cultivates niche audiences of motivated partisan/consumers. Most importantly, the dual extremes of this monetized politics require each other; each demonizes the other in order to raise money and convert anxious members of the public to the cause based on the existential threat posed by the other.

The inevitable result is that no views palatable to the other side are permissible. Because entertaining such views makes demonization — and hence fundraising — more difficult, the parties turn on their own centrist members. The middle – essential to our democracy – is excluded.

This is the most serious threat to democracy because ours is a Constitution of the middle, a pragmatic framework for resolving differences, not an embodiment of any single ideology. The willingness to seek and find a middle ground is our Constitution’s first principle. Banish that element of good faith and our system cannot work.

But that is precisely what is happening. The Trump/MAGA Republican party has become unrecognizable; families that have been Republican since Lincoln are dismissed as RINOs. The Democrats are not as far along, but they could get there, as Democrats estranged from the identity politics of the far left are increasingly condemned as bigots.

The politics of the excluded middle subsumes the American center at every turn. Like the parasitic fungus that colonizes Amazonian ant colonies, redirecting their conduct in self-destructive ways, turning them, in effect, into zombie ants, money — the toxic notion that spending equals speech — has colonized our politics, inflaming the extremes in the interest of economic gain while banishing the essential center. It is a recipe for systemic failure.

The zombie ants are already here.

They were on full display on January 6, scaling the Capitol walls and swarming the halls. Zombie ants of a different stripe could be seen on the streets of Seattle and Portland in the summer of 2020, hijacking the peaceful Black Lives Matter protests as they firebombed public buildings and tried to form “autonomous zones”; their deliberations, like those of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, resembled the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where the Judean People’s Front stumbles upon the People’s Front for Judea in a Jerusalem sewer, arguing over who should have priority in kidnapping Pontius Pilate’s wife.

The politics of the excluded middle ensures that the zombie ant armies will continue to grow in impact as our choices narrow to the extremes. Where will that leave us, if nothing is done to disrupt this fallacy?

“[O]n a darkling plain,” as Matthew Arnold would say — in this case Donald Trump’s no man’s land between the rule of law and the rule of authoritarians — “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

John Farmer, Jr. is the director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. He has previously served as New Jersey’s Attorney General from 1999 - 2002, as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and as Dean of Rutgers School of Law–Newark.

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