September 30, 2021

The New York Times; Photographs by ianmcdonnell/Getty Images, Pete Marovich for The New York Times

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell

Staff Editor, Opinion

Nearly nine months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election, a question still lingers over how to place it in history: Were the events of Jan. 6 the doomed conclusion of an unusually anti-democratic moment in American political life, or a preview of where the country is still heading?

Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and an expert in election law, believes the second possibility shouldn't be ruled out. In a paper published this month, he wrote that "The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules."

It could be a bloodless coup, he warns, executed not by rioters with nooses but "lawyers in fine suits": Between January and June, Republican-controlled legislatures passed 24 laws across 14 states to increase their control over how elections are run, stripping secretaries of state of their power and making it easier to overturn results.

How much danger is American democracy really in, and what can be done to safeguard it? Here's what people are saying.

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How democracy could collapse in 2024

In Hasen's view, there are three mechanisms by which the 2024 election could be overturned:

State legislatures, purporting to exercise the authority of either the Constitution or an 1887 federal law called the Electoral Count Act, swapping in their own slate of electors for president, potentially with the blessing of a conservative Supreme Court and a Republican-controlled Congress.
Fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by norm- or law-breaking officials.
Vigilante action that prevents voting, interferes with ballot counting or interrupts the legitimate transfer of power.

These mechanisms are not outside the realm of possibility:

Recent reporting from Robert Costa and Bob Woodward revealed that the previous administration had a plan, hatched by the prominent conservative lawyer John Eastman, for former Vice President Pence to throw out the electoral votes of key swing states on the basis that they had competing slates of electors. Next time around, "with the right pieces in place, Trump could succeed," the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes. "All he needs is a rival slate of electoral votes from contested states, state officials and state legislatures willing to intervene on his behalf, a supportive Republican majority in either house of Congress, and a sufficiently pliant Supreme Court majority."

On top of passing voting administration laws, Republicans have also recruited candidates who espouse election conspiracy theories to run for positions like secretary of state and county clerk. According to Reuters, 10 of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five swing states have either declared the 2020 election stolen or demanded its invalidation or investigation.
Skepticism of or hostility toward election administration is widespread among Republican voters as well, 78 percent of whom still say that President Biden did not win in November. That conviction, Reuters reported in June, has sparked a nationwide intimidation campaign against election officials and their families, who continue to face threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts with vanishingly little help from law enforcement. One in three election officials feel unsafe because of their job and nearly one in five listed threats to their lives as a job-related concern, according to an April survey from the Brennan Center.

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"The stage is thus being set for chaos," Robert Kagan argues in The Washington Post. Given a more strategically contested election, "Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn't have."

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Some experts worry about democratic backsliding even in the event of a legitimate Republican victory in 2024, Ashley Parker reports for The Washington Post. In such a scenario, Trump or a similarly anti-democratic figure might set about remaking the political and electoral system to consolidate power.

"We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time," said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard political scientist. "Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law."

Experts told Parker that perhaps the most proximate example is Hungary under Viktor Orban, who returned to power in 2010 after being ousted in 2002 and over the past decade has transformed the country into a soft autocracy. Admirers of the country's government include Tucker Carlson, who in August extolled it as a model for the United States, and the high-profile Conservative Political Action Committee, which will host its next gathering in Budapest.

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, believes there are many reasons — the threat of primary challenges against Republicans who defy "Stop the Steal" orthodoxy, gerrymandering, the influence of social media — that the Republican Party's anti-democratic turn might not just continue but accelerate: "There are no countervailing forces. There's nothing that rewards being a sober moderate who believes in democracy and tries to govern by consensus."

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'The quicksand we're already in'

Could a plan of the kind Eastman devised to manipulate the Electoral College count really have succeeded? Teri Kanefield, a lawyer, doesn't think so. The plan was "alarming," to be sure, but "It was never within the realm of possibility that Americans would passively tolerate" a de facto dictatorship, she writes in The Washington Post, "and at any rate, U.S. military leaders had no interest in using force to keep Trump in power, either."

The same argument could apply to the other methods of subversion Hasen outlines. After all, if Republicans feel they must change election rules to win, might they not be said to be operating from a place of weakness rather than strength? "The only person or party that attempts a coup d'état is the one that cannot win by other means," Jack Shafer writes in Politico. "It would only inspire a counter-coup by the majority, and maybe a counter-counter coup, and a counter-counter-counter coup."

But some analysts worry that U.S. elections are already so undemocratic that an anti-democratic movement doesn't need to subvert them. Consider, for example, that the Senate now heavily favors, more than it has before, a minority of voters controlling a majority of the seats, while the Electoral College has become more likely to deny victory to the winner of the popular vote. Conceivably, an Orban-like candidate without a popular mandate could win legitimately in 2024, without violence or fraud, and feel little need to transform these institutions much further.

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"As things already stand today, the Republican Party can return to power in Washington without the support of the majority of the American electorate," Osita Nwanevu writes in The New Republic. "Democrats, by contrast, had to win more than simple majorities or pluralities to gain the power they tenuously hold now — if Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump by any less than 3.2 points in the popular vote, he would have lost outright in November. None of this is privileged information; these and other related facts have been widely disseminated in recent years by academics, analysts, and journalists who also tend to imply, nevertheless, that an undemocratic America is merely a hypothetical looming ahead of us. It isn't. It is the quicksand we're already in."

What happens next? It's up to the Democrats

The partisan biases of the Electoral College and the Senate are not easily altered, and whether they should be is a debate all its own. But at the very least, members of Congress could act to prevent the kind of explicit subversion of existing election rules that Hasen warns of:

In the House of Representatives, Democrats have passed a new voting rights act aimed at stemming the tide of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures. It would reverse two Supreme Court rulings that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, reviving the Justice Department's power to bar some discriminatory election changes and easing the path to challenge others in court.
In the Senate, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has introduced a bill that promises to "expand protections for election administrators by extending existing prohibitions on intimidating or threatening voters to include election officials engaged in the counting of ballots, canvassing, and certifying election results."
To guard against an Eastman-style plan to overturn the Electoral College vote, Congress could modernize the ambiguous Electoral Count Act that governs the counting procedure — far too ambiguously, Meredith McGehee and Elise Wirkus argue in The Hill.

All of these measures would require changing the Senate filibuster, but doing so is completely within Democrats' power, as the Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted. "In that way," he argues, "Republicans perceive the threat correctly: A country that is far closer to being truly democratic, where the unpopularity of their ideas would expose them to punishing electoral consequences."

But so far, conservative Democrats in the Senate have shown little appetite for altering the filibuster. As Representative Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat, told the Times columnist Tom Friedman: "The absence of pragmatism among Democrats is as troubling as the absence of principle among Republicans."

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

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"We Underestimated Trump Before. It Didn't Go Well." [The New York Times]

"Can Congress Insure Fair Elections?" [The New Yorker]

"Harassed and Harangued, Poll Workers Now Have a New Form of Defense" [The New York Times]

"How serious is the threat to democracy, and how do we defeat it?" [The Washington Post]

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In Her Words: ‘Let’s be happy we’re aging’

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September 30, 2021

Monica Garwood

By Lisa Selin Davis

"You know what's anti-aging? Death. Let's be happy we're aging."

— Carol Walker, the character played by Angela Bassett in the film "Otherhood"

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This is the final installment of "In Her Words." Thank you, always, for reading and supporting our work.

When Kate Winslet won an Emmy this month for her performance in "Mare of Easttown," she called her character a "middle-aged, imperfect, flawed mother" who "made us all feel validated."

Ms. Winslet, 45, had something in common with the night's other winning women. There was Hannah Waddingham, 47, from "Ted Lasso," and Julianne Nicholson, 50, from "Mare of Easttown." Gillian Anderson, 53, took the Emmy for supporting actress in "The Crown." And Jean Smart, 70, won outstanding lead actress in a comedy series for "Hacks." Women over 45 were suddenly the biggest winners of the small screen.

Compare this with the 1950 noir film "Sunset Boulevard." Its protagonist, Norma Desmond, is a washed-up silent film star considered far too old to reinvent herself for the talkies.

Her age? Fifty.

Back then, and until quite recently, anything past 40 was considered ancient in Hollywood years. "It's always been this youth-obsessed industry," said Yalda T. Uhls, founder and executive director of U.C.L.A.'s Center for Scholars & Storytellers.

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Men could find roles whatever their age, but women might disappear from the screen during perimenopause, or emerge a few years later in supporting roles, usually as dowdy, eccentric or senile grandmothers, evil stepmothers or spinster aunts.

"If you were 45, or certainly 50 or over, these were the parts you could get: a dying patient or a meddling, horrible mother-in-law," said Susan J. Douglas, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan and author of "In Our Prime: How Older Women Are Reinventing the Road Ahead."

Even if some of these so-called hagsploitation films of the 1960s, like "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" or "Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte," were good films, they portrayed older women as mentally incapacitated or murderous.

Ageism is a pervasive problem, both in Hollywood and in the United States at large. The National Poll on Healthy Aging found that 82 percent of older adults reported experiencing ageism on a regular basis, including being exposed to ageist messages and jokes suggesting older adults are unattractive or undesirable. Women experienced more ageism than men, the poll found. Yet older adults' attitudes toward aging were pretty positive: 88 percent reported feeling more comfortable with themselves as they got older.

A report from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media concluded that even now, there is a dearth of roles for older actresses, and the roles that do exist portray them as senile, homebound, feeble or frumpy. In the highest-grossing films from Germany, France, Britain and the United States in 2019, there were no female leads over 50, the report said, and just one-quarter of characters over 50 were women. Only a quarter of films passed what the report called "The Ageless Test," meaning they had one female character over 50 who was significant to the plot and was presented in "humanizing ways and not reduced to stereotypes."

But it's possible that this year's Emmy winners are a sign of changing times, changing demographics, and changing — or long-ignored — tastes. So how did we go from "frail, frumpy and forgotten," as the institute's report is called, to Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing a hilarious, diabolical and still-sexy politician in "Veep," or Sandra Oh starring as an embattled professor on "The Chair," or Angela Bassett, Felicity Huffman and Patricia Arquette starring as unappreciated mothers who take back their lives in "Otherhood"?

"We are in the midst of a demographic revolution," Dr. Douglas said. As of 2019, there were just under 72 million baby boomers and over 65 million Gen Xers. "There are more women over 50 than ever before in our society. And millions of them are not really ready or eager to be told to go away and obsess about their grandchildren without participating in and doing other things."

Amy Baer, president of Landline Pictures, which debuted earlier this year to focus on the over-50 crowd, said aging had become a much more "dynamic experience" — less about retiring than about starting something new. "They may have raised children and they're finally at a place where they can focus on themselves professionally and personally," Ms. Baer said. "They may be changing jobs. They may be finally falling in love after being professionally focused."

She says this shift — living longer, living better — is just one reason that portrayals of older women in Hollywood are finally improving, both in number and scope. Women over 45 are being cast as leads in complex roles, sometimes the best roles of their careers.

It began with a couple of outlier films in the early 2000s, Ms. Baer said. Two romantic comedies from Nancy Meyers — "Something's Gotta Give," starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, and "It's Complicated," with Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin — portrayed women in their 60s as romantically desirable leads. The films had enough commercial success to alert industry gatekeepers to an untapped audience. They started to realize, Dr. Uhls said, "there's a market we're not exploiting here."

That audience had both time and money, and was conditioned to going out to the movies, but could adapt to streaming. The media for and about this market appealed to other demographics, too. One of Netflix's first streaming megahits, "House of Cards," starred Robin Wright, who was 46 when the series debuted, as the frosty mastermind of the country's most powerful couple. Not long after, "Grace and Frankie," a comedy about two vibrator-designing octogenarians, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, became a hit among many different demographics; it's now Netflix's longest-running original series.

This content is "consistently successful and has crossover to a younger audience," Ms. Baer said. "There's an insatiable need for original content right now in the space that we're in."

When executives at the independent studio MRC Films approached her about Landline, Ms. Baer said she did a "back of napkin" analysis on 25 years' worth of films for and about older people and found that almost all had good returns on investment. "I'm not saying they succeed on the level of a Marvel movie, but they absolutely are financially successful," she said.

The key, Ms. Baer said, is telling the right kinds of stories, especially those that don't pander to older people. "We're creating content that is entertaining, relatable, and deals with life experiences that anyone over 50 is going through," she said, but that people under 50 can also enjoy.

Landline's first project, "Jerry and Marge Go Large," will star Annette Bening and Bryan Cranston in the true story of a retired Michigan couple who found a loophole that allowed them to win big in the Massachusetts lottery and use the winnings to help their town.

Projects like these allow female actors who once would have had dwindling work opportunities to explore new parts of their ranges. Consider Frances McDormand's Oscar-winning performance in "Nomadland," or Ms. Winslet's acclaimed role in "Mare of Easttown," both roles that required looking like non-Hollywood types.

"Great actresses are kind of enjoying being nonglamorous and not trying to look 20," Dr. Douglas said. "They're looking their age and they're proud of that and they work with it."

Suddenly women are being celebrated for embracing their age. Or as Angela Bassett's character, Carol Walker, says in "Otherhood": "You know what's anti-aging? Death. Let's be happy we're aging."

"Every actress I've had a conversation with has been incredibly embracing of our mission and really excited," Ms. Baer said. "These are all women who are still in the prime of their career and are not ready or old enough to simply play the grandmother."

This is not to say that ageism will evaporate or that face-lifts will all of a sudden become obsolete (or that there's anything wrong with playing the grandmother!). "We've got a real turnstile moment here," Dr. Douglas said. "On the one hand, there are more older celebrities and public figures who are out there embracing their age, while at the same time we still have ageist stereotypes."

The opportunities for older women are not without limitations, either. "Most of the roles are straight, white women," she said, as the Emmys painfully revealed.

We urgently need more representations of older women of color, older queer women, older working-class women, and also more stories of strong female friendship, Dr. Douglas said.

Hopefully by next year's Emmys, we'll have more.

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What else is happening

Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed.

Outside the courtroom, fans of Britney Spears reacted to a ruling with hugs and tears.Chris Pizzello/Associated Press

"This man does not belong in her life, your honor, for another day." Britney Spears will be without her father's oversight over her finances for the first time since 2008 after a judge ruled that the "current situation is not tenable." [Read the story]
"Heroines keep evolving, challenging authority and legitimacy, rebelling, resisting and demanding makeovers." Forget the "hero's journey" and consider the heroine's quest instead — Laura Miller reviews Maria Tatar's new book, "The Heroine With 1001 Faces." [Read the review]
"I used to believe that divorce is a terrible thing." Lara Bazelon writes that she learned that divorce can also be an act of radical self-love that leaves the whole family better off. [Read her essay]

In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Alisha Haridasani Gupta is our gender reporter and lead writer. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes. Our photo editor is Maura Foley. Countless hands touched this newsletter over the years. Thank you for reading "In Her Words."

Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com.

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