On October 17, 2016, fivethirtyeight.com gave Hillary Clinton an 88.1% probability of being elected President of The United States. On that date, their model gave Secretary Clinton an average of 347 electoral college votes, a landslide margin over the 270 necessary to win.
Donald Trump, seemingly on the verge of certain defeat, was loudly complaining that “crooked Hillary” was “rigging” the election. In candidate Trump’s telling, he was the victim of “character assassination.” He asserted- with no evidence- that rampant voter fraud was a fait accomplis. Less than half of Trump voters believed that the ballots would be fairly counted.
Op-eds in The Atlantic and Vox had already begun grappling with the political violence that might ensue, potentially even triggering civil war or the end of the Republic.
Donald Trump’s loose talk of imprisoning Clinton and his preemptive rejection of the election’s outcome pose one of the most serious challenges to U.S. democracy in recent memory. They endanger the “democratic bargain,” to quote the authors of Losers’ Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy. That study examines how losing works in democracies around the globe, and the bargain at issue “calls for winners who are willing to ensure that losers are not too unhappy and for losers, in exchange, to extend their consent to the winners’ right to rule.” This bargain is also one of the core components of democracy.
“…[G]raceful concessions by losing candidates constitute a sort of glue that holds the polity together, providing a cohesion that is lacking in less-well-established democracies,” Bowler wrote. Public-opinion surveys from around the world, he noted, indicate that winners and losers interpret the outcome of elections differently. Supporters of losing candidates tend to lose faith in democracy and democratic institutions, even after elections that aren’t particularly contentious. When your preferred politician or party loses, in other words, resentment is inevitable.
This is why the democratic bargain is so important: Winners do not suppress losers, which means losers can hope to be winners in the future. As a result, the losers’ doubts about the legitimacy of the political system gradually recede as they prepare for the next election.
But if the losing candidate doesn’t uphold his or her side of the bargain by recognizing the winner’s right to rule, that acute loss of faith in democracy among the candidate’s supporters can become chronic, potentially devolving into civil disobedience, political violence, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy.
Read that last paragraph again. It was written about what would happen if Donald Trump lost and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the election results.
And it is a precise description of what has happened since Donald Trump’s election as President.
I voted against President Trump in the New York State Republican primary. I voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election.
I am a conservative. President Trump is a populist nationalist. I consider his policies on immigration immoral. I consider his moral character repugnant. I find his authoritarianism troubling, and his disregard for the separation of powers alarming.
Even to the extent that I am grateful for Nikki Haley’s leadership in the UN, and I believe moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem righted an historic wrong that 3 previous presidents declined to rectify, I am terrified of the impact of the right thing being done by the wrong man. President Trump has deepened the partisan divide in regard to Israel which was once a bi-partisan consensus.
I pray that the Democratic nominee in 2020 will be someone I can vote for in good conscience, because I consider it my patriotic duty to oppose the policies of this president.
It is also my duty to uphold the institutions of government.
We now know that Russia preferred Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. We know that Russia employed an army of bots to influence public opinion in advance of the 2016 elections.
We also know that legal elections took place. The citizens of our country voted without coercion. The votes were cast legally, and counted accurately. There is no credible allegation of Russian interference in the vote tally.
Influencing public opinion- openly or through subterfuge- is not election fraud.
Donald Trump was elected in free and fair elections, and is the President until January 20th, 2021 at 11:59 AM.
It is the President’s constitutional duty to conduct foreign policy. The implication that the President cannot or should not conduct foreign policy regarding Russia is ludicrous. The only thing worse than President Trump conducting foreign policy- including with regard to Russia- is the US abandoning foreign policy for 4 years. The idea of trying to subpoena the President’s interpreter to divulge the content of the President’s private meetings with other world leaders is a precedent that will set back the foreign policy of future presidents for years to come.
We are duty bound to do everything in our power to engage in the political process and to oppose legislation or executive action that is illegal or immoral.
We are also duty bound not to “devolve into civil disobedience, political violence, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy.”
Electing Donald Trump won’t end our democracy. Our reaction to his election just might.
