In a piece in The New York Review of Books called "Big Dangers in the Next Election," Elizabeth Drew has written an extremely thoughtful article detailing how the Republican electoral strategy for 2016 and beyond is the systematic erosion of democracy itself. The upshot is that it's working:
What is now clear is that the efforts in many states to fix the outcome of the vote by keeping Democratic constituencies from voting have been largely successful. With the white share of the voting population dropping in such swing states as Florida and Nevada, both of which Obama won narrowly in 2012, and North Carolina, which Obama narrowly lost, the Republicans are all the more anxious to hold down the number of black and Latino votes.
Laws restricting people’s voting rights will continue to be passed until the pattern becomes too obvious for even the Supreme Court to ignore, or we get a different Supreme Court, or enough people wake up to what’s going on and see that democracy is being curtailed. For the time being we cannot expect Congress to help.
Drew is hardly a wild-eyed radical, which makes her detailed account of Republican efforts to win and keep power by simply disenfranchising potential Democratic voters all the more sobering. Drew shatters any remaining illusions that the Republicans are committed to a democratic process. Progressives can't fight for democracy by responding in-kind to the GOP, but we can call out our opponents for betraying the fundamental ideals of American democracy. We can also remember the stakes in 2016: the "Big Danger" is to democracy itself.