More than anything else that the United States successfully introduced to the world, we became the first modern civilization to ritualize the peaceful and predictable transfer of power from one statesman to another. Both parties are now threatening that peaceful tradition.
Whereas wars were fought, divorces and beheadings administered, and false pretenders touted all across the world to establish and reroute lines of succession, the founders specifically created an electoral system that could not be subverted, rescheduled, or manipulated by those with power in the pursuit of maintaining their positions.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped ample attempts to corrupt the legitimacy of our elections. Be it genuine disputes over vote tallies, as with Bush v. Gore, or persistent, nefarious attempts from American adversaries to influence our elections, the obstacles in the way of our electoral process have luckily proven largely futile in practice. But an arms race has long been brewing, not in Moscow or its precincts, but in our political parties racing to delegitimize our elections, lest each’s side fail to win.
After months of media fulmination that Donald Trump wouldn’t accept the results of the 2016 election, the Democratic Party and their media lackeys invented a laundry list of reasons to explain away Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidency. First it was sexism, then it was Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and then, for three years, it was the ridiculous notion not that Russia had attempted to influence our election, which it absolutely did, but that it had succeeded in changing its outcome.
By that logic, the last Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justice Democrats would deem legitimate is David Souter. If the Russians robbed the 2016 election, the Supreme Court robbed the 2000 election and granted George W. Bush the benefit of his 2004 incumbency, and Clarence Thomas was smeared as a predator, then you have no reason to view any of the appointments of Republican presidents since 1990 as legitimate.
And now you see why this is dangerous.
As it turned out, Russia didn’t rig the election, and instead, Clinton was perhaps the only other politician in America capable of losing to Trump. Now Joe Biden has commanded a nearly double digit lead over him, and Trump is foundering for his own way to explain away a November loss. In his attempt to distract from the Bureau of Economic Analysis announcing that we suffered our worst GDP loss in recorded history last quarter, Trump teased the notion of postponing Election Day, a feat that the founders ensured he could not do.
Nobody actually thinks Trump is going to try delaying the election, and in the minute chance that he did, absolutely everyone knows the rest of the government would render his efforts futile. But that’s not the point: There is a deliberate push to shift the Overton Window on the legitimacy of our elections.
If the election were held today, Trump would lose in a landslide, and with his self-defeating tweets and lack of direction, it’s not clear he thinks he can win come November. And so he and his allies are clearly casting their fall guy. Mail-in ballots will be rigged en masse! If only Never Trumpers such as — squints — Liz Cheney got more in line with the MAGA agenda, we would be blowing out Sleepy Joe in the polls! So what if the president spends most midnights tweeting conspiracy theories and D.C. burns to the ground? The real reason he’s losing is because of the deep state!
It’s not that Trump is attempting to delegitimize elections any more assiduously than Democrats are. It’s that Democrats did it first, and thus Trump just turned it into an arms race. For one side to pretend that Stacey Abrams is the rightfully elected governor of Georgia is a mockable act of partisan hackery. For both sides to believe our elections are invalid is a delusion that threatens to subsume the masses and eventually, our nation’s greatest feat. That belief will make people less likely to accept transfers of power in directions they dislike peacefully.
With antifa burning parts of cities across the country to the ground, the nation has a clear appetite for violence. From the dregs of the Left, the threat is no longer quite so veiled that if Trump did indeed eke out a win, they will not take it lying down. The last thing we need is for the Right to follow suit, not if we wish to keep a republic that continues to pass on power peacefully.
