Gutting Voting Rights Act Is Just First Step in Far Right Plan to End Democracy

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

The girl smiled and pointed at the “I Voted!” sticker on her forehead. Her father took a selfie with her outside the voting center. Hours later, New Yorkers danced and honked car horns to celebrate the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. The street parties reminded me of when Barack Obama won the presidency after eight years of Geoge W. Bush, or Joe Biden against Donald Trump. You could feel the people sigh in relief.

Now, six months later, it’s hard to imagine such elation after an election — not after the right wing’s latest act of legal warfare on democracy with the Supreme Court’s further gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Not wasting time, Republicans in Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina redrew maps to end Black-majority districts immediately after the decision. Next, the Virginia Supreme Court cold-stopped Democrats from redistricting four more seats to fight Republican gerrymandering. Even before the Supreme Court ruling, the Trump administration had the FBI raid a voting center while pushing the SAVE America Act. The legislation, currently stalled in the Senate, would erect high walls to voting — such as demanding a passport or birth certificate, rather than just a driver’s license. It could cut off more than 21 million Americans from voting, including the poor, married people with changed names, the elderly, and people of color.

After the Supreme Court ruling, grief swept our community. On the phone, my friend, a Black activist, cried. I heard the fear of a 21^st-century Jim Crow regime. Could we see legal resegregation? These fears obscured the real future that the right wing is trying to build: the end of democracy. The far right wants techno-feudalism, or what some of its members have dubbed a “Dark Enlightenment.” Right-wingers believe that now, as multiple crises pile up, is the time to strike. They think the billionaire class will fund this future even knowing Americans don’t want it. And we, the people being pushed out of democracy, need to know what it is being planned in order to stop it.

Not Politics as Usual

“We Shall Over Overcome (Again): Fight Against White Supremacy” the protester’s sign said. In Tennessee, activists raged at Republicans taking apart Black voting districts. They linked arms on the steps of the state house and chanted. Some were forcefully removed by state troopers.

The Republican Party is actively tearing down democracy. It starts at the top, with Trump sending federal agents to scare state election officials and seize records. He, after all is, the one who stacked the Supreme Court, which granted him wide immunity before eviscerating the Voting Rights Act. Across the country, state Republicans are carving up Black-majority districts like a Thanksgiving turkey. On the surface, there is a one clear reason: They are losing.

The Republican Party is in free fall. Trump’s polls numbers are so low you can play the limbo with them. The man is at 36 percent approval and dropping. Two out of three Americans blame him for painful gas prices. Six out of 10 are sour on the Iran war, even before a war-induced recession and possible famine fully hit. Democrats are comparatively impassioned. Even with legal setbacks, a Democratic tsunami seems to loom. If Democrats win, Republicans will be barraged with oversight committees, taking a microscope to the swamp-like corruption in the Trump administration.

It seems on the surface that Republicans erect barriers to voting to prevent being ousted from office and facing any kind of consequences for corruption. Some may even face war crimes prosecutions for blowing up people in the Caribbean. This is all true. Yet a more terrifying reason exists. In the Trump era, many GOP leaders, donors, and many in the voting base are actively hostile to democracy because they never believed in it in the first place.

The GOP is controlled by a business elite that wants low taxes and deregulation. Since a business-friendly platform does not win mass support, the party glued together a coalition of Christian evangelicals, nationalists, white supremacists, and now members of the misogynist “mansophere” and “crypto bros.” The GOP unites them with a vision of making the future into the past, the idea behind “Make America Great Again.”

In order to keep the momentum, the right-wing mediasphere feeds its base nightmares of the “enemy.” The faces change from Black criminals to drag queen story hour to Muslims to immigrants. Recent versions of the right’s response to supposed enemies include the Stop the Steal movement and the “white replacement theory.” The message these right-wing conspiracies share at their core is that the “good” and “real” American — white, Christian, straight — is under attack, triggering mass fear. A 2024 survey found 4 in 10 Americans are “susceptible to authoritarian appeals” and in that same survey, roughly 27 percent of Republicans say violence is needed to “save our country.”

Almost a third of U.S. citizens are primed to reject democracy and embrace a dictator. Since Republicans can’t outright end democracy, they need a bridge. The bridge is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which builds an authoritarian state within a so-called democracy. Once authoritarian structures are in place within the crumbling scaffolding of a democracy, it creates a domino effect in which a crisis can tip the next domino. We end up in a place very few of us imagined could exist, or ever heard about. We wake up in the Dark Enlightenment.

The Dark Enlightenment

“A monarch is absolutely necessary,” right-wing writer Curtis Yarvin told CNN.

Casually sitting on a park bench, he defended his idea that a monarch-CEO like Trump or Elon Musk would be the best choice to run the U.S. Yarvin repeated scientific racist tropes when prodded about the role of race in governing: “Certain races are better at certain things than others.”

Yarvin paints a portrait of a United States where a voting machine would be in a museum. In his vision, capitalist city-states would be run by CEO monarchs. In his world, you would not be a citizen with the right to vote.

“Voting basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status,” Yarvin told the New York Timeslast year. “…it makes them feel relevant. There’s something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the important question of: We need a government that is actually good…and we don’t have one.” And what would that good government look like? “If you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOS,” Yarvin continued, “just pick one at random and put him or her in charge of Washington, I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there.”

We already know what a world under these conditions might look like, according to Yarvin. “Corporations are monarchies,” Yarvin said on Open to Debate. “Capitalism is the system of little monarchies, little kingdoms that solve all these beautiful problems for us.” What Yarvin is doing is repackaging far right ideas into Silicon Valley consumer-friendly vibes. He is just one ideologue of the neo-reactionary movement known as the Dark Enlightenment. A chorus of public thinkers, from British philosopher Nick Land to venture capitalist Peter Thiel, lead a media echo-chamber of neo-reactionaries who celebrate everything from techno-feudalism to scientific racism. Their movement wants to accelerate chaos to usher in a new dystopia where races are ranked and democracy no longer “obstructs” a technological singularity in which AI is more powerful than human intelligence and achieves sentience.

As fringe as this sounds, it is not fringe anymore.

Billionaires and politicians are listening. Vice President JD Vance cites Yarvin. Venture capitalist Marc Anderseen adores him. Of the competing visions in the far right, the Dark Enlightenment is rising. Using the language of philosophy and political science, it gives intellectual veneer to the desire of the capitalist class desire to discipline workers, use technology to force obedience, be above the law and use racial scapegoats. They think the time is now.

Multiple crises are piling up like cars crashing on a highway. Workers are squeezed by AI and automation, global warming and an expanded police state. The recession from the Iran War will drive more into poverty. The ability for the working class to push for labor reform will hit the walls that Republican are now building. Now the next census will add more congressional seats to red states, exactly as Republican gerrymandering robs Black voters of power. The next decade is decisive for American democracy.

We the People

“This is what democracy looks like”, we chanted at the No Kings protest in New York. People banged drums and shook cow bells. They held angry signs and funny signs. Wherever I looked, images of Trump as king or symbols of royalty were crossed out.

The left and some liberals can see the Dark Enlightenment the far right is pushing us towards. Whether or not they read Yarvin or Land or Thiel, they intuitively know that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The real goal is to give that clear vision to the masses of people, who may still mistake Republican tactics as politics as usual, rather than an existential threat to our way of life.

Fear is not enough. Beyond clearly seeing the danger, we also have to remember why democracy is worth everything. Democracy is not the Founding Fathers in white wigs, taking a quill pen to paper and writing their words, often steeped in hypocrisy, in fancy cursive. Many of our ancestors took the Declaration of Independence and rescued it from that hypocrisy of its authors. When Frederick Douglass wrote his autobiography, he invoked its principles. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought for women’s suffrage, she too invoked its principles. So many waves of progress have been founded in the same promise of radical equality.

I feel it in class when we teach it. On the screen, I show a photo of the yellow parchment of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. I read it and the beauty and promise of the words hold us. Next, I play, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. He rolls out that same truth, “I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” And everyone in the class feels it as if hearing it for the first time. Some nod slowly. Some put a hand to their chest. They remember, how precious it is to decide your own future, to be free, to be in a democracy.