Will America descend into a one-party rule?

If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread about the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention.

We can talk about the conventional stakes of these elections — their implications for economic policy, major social programs, environmental policy, civil liberties and reproductive rights. And it’s not wrong to have these discussions: Life will go on whatever happens on the political scene, and government policies will continue to have a big impact on people’s lives.

But I, at least, always feel at least a bit guilty when writing about inflation or the fate of Medicare. Yes, these are my specialities. Focusing on them, however, feels a bit like denial, or at least evasion, when the fundamental stakes right now are so existential.

Ten or 20 years ago, those of us who warned that the Republican Party was becoming increasingly extremist and anti-democracy were often dismissed as alarmists. But the alarmists have been vindicated every step of the way, from the selling of the Iraq War on false pretences to the January 6 insurrection.

Indeed, these days it’s almost conventional wisdom that the Republican Party will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper but an ethno-nationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. After all, U.S. conservatives have made no secret about viewing Hungary as a role model; they have feted Orban and featured him at their conferences.

At this point, however, I believe that even this conventional wisdom is wrong. If America descends into one-party rule, it will be much worse, much uglier, than what we see in today’s Hungary.

Before I get there, a word about the role of conventional policy issues in these elections.

If Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress, there will be a loud chorus of recriminations, much of it asserting that they should have focused on kitchen table issues and not talked at all about threats to democracy.

I don’t claim any expertise here, but I would note that an incumbent president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterms. The only exception to that rule this century was in 2002, when George W. Bush was able to deflect attention from a jobless recovery by posing as America’s defender against terrorism. That record suggests, if anything, that Democrats should have talked even more about issues beyond economics.

I’d also say that pretending that this was an ordinary election season, where only economic policy was at stake, would have been fundamentally dishonest.

Finally, even voters who are more worried about pay checks and living costs than about democracy should nonetheless be very concerned about the GOP’s rejection of democratic norms.

For one thing, Republicans have been open about their plan to use the threat of economic chaos to extract concessions they couldn’t win through the normal legislative process.

Also, while I understand the instinct of voters to choose a different driver if they don’t like where the economy is going, they should understand that this time, voting Republican doesn’t just mean giving someone else a chance at the wheel; it may be a big step toward handing the GOP permanent control, with no chance for voters to revisit that decision if they don’t like the results.

Which brings me to the question of what a one-party America would look like.