Democrats may only have one chance to stop America from becoming a one-party state

Why the U.S. needs voting rights protections and D.C. statehood, now

Voting.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

The United States has only lived up to basic standards of democracy for a few decades of its history. In parts of the South, the last scraps of Jim Crow tyranny were only rooted out through massive federal coercion in the mid-1970s. That said, there has almost always been genuine competition for national power between the two parties — the one exception being the Civil War, but even in that case the South attempted to secede from the country rather than conquer the whole thing.

That competition may come to an end very soon. Democrats right now control the presidency and Congress by a very thin margin — just one vote in the Senate. Republicans are plotting to win back control of Congress not by getting more votes, but by cheating. If Democrats do not exercise their power now to pass, at a minimum, protections for voting rights, requirements for fair congressional districts, and statehood for Washington, D.C., Republicans will in all likelihood succeed in turning America into a one-party state.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.