Beware the cry of fraud. That’s where American authoritarianism always starts.

An 1892 cartoon in Judge magazine condemns Southern efforts to suppress the Black vote. Mississippi’s 1890 constitution was the first to impose voting restrictions that mostly affected Black voters in the South. Southern states quickly followed, with Congress and the federal judiciary unable or unwilling to enforce constitutional voting protections. (From the New York Public Library: Public domain)

The end of American democracy won’t be a man declaring himself dictator for life or crowning himself king.

It will come incrementally. Through a rapid narrowing of the electorate that can vote without facing state intimidation.

The forms and rituals of the republic will remain in place. But the spirit will be entirely gone.

And we don’t have to speculate about this outcome. Or look to a foreign country for an example.

We have American history.

For nearly a century, millions of Americans lived under authoritarian Jim Crow regimes. Congress tolerated them. The federal judiciary blessed them.

After a brief period of democracy during Reconstruction, and a few decades of sharply diminished voting with many stolen elections, Alabama enacted the 1901 Constitution.

Nearly every Black person in the state of Alabama lost the right to vote. And after a few years, the constitution allowed the Legislature to impose poll taxes, locking many poor whites out of the voting process, too.

Alabama wasn’t alone in this. From 1890 to 1908, southern states violently shook off the thin cloak of democracy and handed power to a small oligarchy that manipulated the system and ensured its members remained on top while populist revolt remained contained.

They held elections. They campaigned. They confronted public issues every now and then.

But they did it on their own narrow terms, free of fear from censure by the broader electorate.

It was racism. But the official reason was that the mere act of voting by opponents amounted to fraud.

“The result will be that the ballot will be left in the hands of those of our present voting population who have demonstrated their capacity to exercise the (voting) privilege in the interest of social order and progress,” the Montgomery Advertiser wrote on Sept. 27, 1901 in support of the state’s racist constitution. “And the right to a place and such permanent registration will be denied only to that mass of vicious or unworthy voters which has so long threatened our welfare.”

Over six decades later, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Mobile Register raged: “When illiterates ignorant of the responsibilities of the ballot are herded together in great numbers to vote en bloc for political masters whose allegiance is to candidates and causes in conflict with the public interest, responsible citizens are drive to apathy and dejection about elections.”

Those are strong arguments for a well-funded public education system, which the oligarchs who ran Alabama didn’t want to pay for. But here, they lost. The Voting Rights Act held, and the first free elections in Alabama in well over a century took place in 1966.

That should be the end of the story. Democracy restored; all disputes now political.

Yet the old, cracked voice of the Jim Crow authoritarian hasn’t gone away. And it keeps whispering in the ears of our leaders that the wrong people are voting.

Republican politicians at the state and federal level are ginning up a wholly nonexistent issue of people who aren’t citizens voting in federal elections. That’s already a crime. It almost never happens, and certainly not to the extent that it can sway an election. But it’s being used as an excuse to scour voting records and even block a federal budget bill.

And in the last few years, in the name of fighting alleged fraud, Alabama lawmakers have tried to make voting an intimidating ordeal for those with the least power.

The state has criminalized some forms of absentee ballot assistance. Lawmakers outlawed curbside voting. Officials quickly dropped a brief pandemic experiment with no-excuse absentee voting, even though more than 300,000 people participated in it.

American authoritarianism starts here. It comes from the men in suits, the calm and blank-faced ciphers who sigh that the masses don’t know what’s best for them and decide that they need to ensure that the “right” people are voting, and to stop “fraud” — which, in their minds, is always part of an adverse election outcome.

They gather in conventions and meeting halls and conferences, and rewrite their bills until they’re satisfied that they can direct the state’s police power toward the ballot box.

And for most of our history, Alabama and other states used this power to stop people from voting. They’ve blatantly and cheerfully thrown constitutional protections aside and dared the federal judiciary to intervene. (For most of its history, the U.S. Supreme Court has meekly deferred to these tyrants or actively connived with them.)

If American democracy ends — if the republic falls — it will die as it did before: with entrenched lawmakers calling political results contrary to their world views fraud and throwing up as many obstacles to voting as they can.

It has happened before. And it could happen again.

The forms and rituals of democracy will go on. But most people will be observers, not participants, watching our purported leaders insist that governance is too important to be entrusted to the governed.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and X.