On
Donald Trump and the Crisis in American Democracy
October
18, 2021
The United States
government is the longest-standing democracy in the world. It isn’t a pure
democracy. It is a federal, representational republic. The constitutional
system of giving small population states a disproportionately large say in Congress
and the Electoral College is proving itself to be a disaster because it allows
the benighted, bigoted populations from small, mostly mid-west or western
states to stop a great many good things from happening. That system gave us the
horrific presidency of Donald Trump though he lost the popular vote in the 2016
election. It has given us other bad presidents who lost the popular vote too.
George W. Bush is a prime example. Still, American democracy, flawed as it is, is
something we must preserve. It is far from perfect, but it is less bad than any
other political system could be. As Winston Churchill once said, democracy is
the worst form of government except for all the others. Our democratic
republic, beset as it has ever been by racism, imperialism, economic and
political elitism, and so many other sins, is the best we can make of the bad
necessity of governing a large nation.
And American
democracy is in serious trouble today. It is in trouble because of one man and
because of the legions of ordinary Americans who have bought into his cult of
personality. That man is of course former president Donald J. Trump. As I have
explained elsewhere on this blog, Trump is an American fascist. He cares not
one whit about the American people and their constitutional form of government.
He cares only about power for himself. He would repeal any part of the US
constitution that he thought limited his power as president if he could. He
believes in our First Amendment rights only for people who support him. His
presidency was an environmental, diplomatic, legal, and moral disaster, but
tens of millions of Americans will make him president again if they can. Those
of us who want to preserve American democracy must stop them from doing it.
Since he left the
White House on January 20, 2021, Trump has conducted a campaign against
American democracy, something no other president has ever done and something
most of us never thought we’d see in our lifetimes. His whole campaign against
American democracy is grounded in one big lie. Trump today repeats the lie over
and over again that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him, that
he really won the election by a huge margin, and that his victory was stolen
from him. There is not one shred of legal or factual support for Trump’s claim,
which stops him and his supporters from making that claim not at all. He keeps
on making it, and our mass media keep on reporting on him saying it.
Trump began
saying that any election result that showed him losing to former vice president
Joe Biden was fraudulent well before the 2020 election took place. He told his
supporters again and again that the election was rigged against him. Even
today, nearly one year after the 2020 election, Trump repeats his big lie over
and over again. Most Republican politicians echo the lie. They do so though
they know Trump’s claims to baseless because they are terrified of being
primaried by Trump’s supporters. He has said that Republican voters will not
vote in the 2022 and 2024 elections if the Republican Party does not endorse
his frivolous, dangerous, and even seditious assertions about the last
election. We get from him a monotonous litany of repeated claims: The 2020
election was a fraud, I won, and my victory was stolen from me. Trump has even
said that the results of the 2020 election should be thrown out and he should
be reinstalled as president. It bothers him not at all that there is no legal
process by which that could happen. Trump sent teams of lackey lawyers into
court all over the country to try to get some judge, any judge, to endorse his
big lie and order that something be done to overturn the election results in
the judge’s state. His lawyers were routinely thrown out of court, often with a
firm reprimand for having brought such a frivolous case. The repeated failure
of his legal teams fazed Trump not one bit. He just kept and keeps lying about
the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s big lie
is not harmless. On January 6, 2021, Congress met to perform its constitutional
duty of certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Though Trump
tried to get his vice president Mike Pence, in his capacity as President of the
Senate, somehow to throw those results out, there was no question about what
Congress would do. Former vice president Joe Biden had won the majority of both
the popular vote and the electoral college vote in the election. Biden was
President Elect, and everyone knew it.[1]
The vote totals had been certified by state election officials in every state.
Unlike in the 2000 presidential election, there was no doubt about the
election’s results. There were no hanging chads. Biden had won, and all
Congress could or would do was to confirm him as president elect.
Before January 6,
2021, Trump, then still president, called on his supporters to come to
Washington, DC, on that date to force Congress to overturn the election
results. Then on January 6, 2021, he staged a big rally in Washington, DC, not
far from the Capitol. He got the crowd all riled up, angrier than ever that
their cult leader had lost the election and hellbent on reversing that outcome.
He gave a speech to the crowd that had gathered. There are contradictions in
that speech that create the appearance of a justification of Trump that says he
called his supporters “peacefully and patriotically” to march to the Capitol.
Trump also said that we should vote out any member of Congress who votes to
confirm the election results. Those statements are in Trump’s speech. Of course
all Americans have the right to exercise their First Amendment liberties, and
voting is the appropriate way to remove a politician you don’t like. There are
a couple of statements in Trump’s speech along those lines.
There are however
other statements in that speech with a very different intent and anticipated
response. Here are some of the key ones[2]:
·
We’re gathered together in the heart of our
nation’s Capitol (sic) for one very, very basic and simple reason, to save our
democracy.
·
We will not let them silence your voices. We’re
not going to let it happen. Not going to happen.
·
Our country has had enough. We will not take it
anymore and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of
you people really came up with, we will “stop the steal.”
·
That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing.
We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t
concede when there’s theft involved.
·
When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed
to go by very different rules.
·
Let them get out. Let the weak ones get out.
This is a time for strength….It’s all a part of a comprehensive assault on our
democracy and the American people to finally standing up and saying “No.” This
crowd is again a statement to it.
·
You will have an illegitimate president, that’s
what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen.
·
We will not be intimidated into accepting hoaxes
and lies that we’ve been forced to believe over the past several weeks. We’ve
amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election.
·
We’re going to see whether or not we have great
and courageous leaders or whether or not we have leaders that should be ashamed
of themselves throughout history, throughout eternity they’ll be ashamed. And
you know what? If they do the wrong thing we should never forget that they did.
Never forget. We should never forget.
Trump delivered these inflammatory
statements grounded in his big lie to a crowd that clearly was becoming a mob.
He saw what was happening, and he did nothing to defuse the situation. He only
threw gasoline on the flames.
We all know what
happened. We’ve seen the videos. Trump’s mob did go down the street to the
Capitol as Trump told them to do. They gathered in front of the Capitol. They
erected a gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” They overwhelmed the badly
outnumbered Capitol police and broke into the building, causing significant
property damage in the process. Congress and Vice President Pence evacuated and
sought refuge wherever they could. The seditious rioters Trump had sent to
“stop the steal” entered the Senate chamber, stole material out of senators’
desks, broke into politicians offices including the office of Speaker of the
House Nancy Pelosi, from which someone stole a laptop computer. They terrified
not only senators and representatives but everyone else legitimately in the
building as well. They continued to chant “Hang Mike Pence,” and security
forces just barely got the vice president to safety.[3]
Capitol police shot and killed one rioter, and several other police officers
died, some of them by suicide, in the following days. The seditious rioters
were in the Capitol building for at least a couple of hours. It was the first
time the US Capitol had been invaded since the War of 1812.
The January 6
rioters weren’t just rioters. What they did amounted to a seditious assault on
American democracy. They sought to compel an unconstitutional act by Congress. They
sought to undermine, indeed to overturn, American democracy and to trash the
constitution in the process. The authorities were eventually able to restore
order. Hundreds of rioters were arrested. The most important facts about
January 6, however, are that Donald Trump, while still President of the United
States, whipped up a mob for the purpose of undermining American democracy.
Nothing remotely like that had ever happened before. President Trump stirred up
an insurrection against the government he supposedly headed, something I still
can hardly believe even about Donald Trump. The facts are, however, abundantly
clear. On January 6, 2021, the President of the United States was guilty of
sedition.
Trump and his big
lie led to a seditious riot, but the harm Trump is causing with his big lie is
far more extensive than that. Perhaps the most damaging thing Trump is doing is
undermining public confidence in our country’s political system. Voter
participation in elections in this country has never been particularly high. A
great many Americans don’t vote because they think their vote doesn’t matter.
In a sense that’s true. Elections are essentially never decided by one vote
except perhaps in very small communities. The thought that one’s vote doesn’t
matter, however, misunderstands what elections and voting are all about. In
theory the results of a general election should represent the position of the
country’s people as a whole. You don’t know what the people as a whole think if
too few of them participate in the election, yet so many of our eligible voters
don’t.
Trump’s ongoing
assault on the results of as free, fair, and democratic an election as we’ve
ever had can only make more and more voters decide not to vote. After all, who
wants to participate in a rigged system in which the votes don’t really matter?
A rigged election is decided by the ones doing the rigging not by the votes of
the people. A great many Americans were cynical about our political system
before Trump began his campaign against American democracy (all the while
claiming to be defending it of course). That campaign by a former president can
only make matters worse. Trump doesn’t care. He cares only about his personal
power. Take about cynical! Trump’s all for democracy when he wins and all
against it when he loses. His cynicism is contagious. It can reenforce the cynicism
of people who are already cynical about our elections and our political system
as a whole. Trump’s cynical assault on American democracy can, surely already
has, and will continue to make even more Americans distrust American politics.
American
democracy had massive problems before Donald Trump began his campaign against
it. The role of big money in determining the outcome of elections had tainted
the whole system for years with a bias in favor of the wealthy and the big
corporation. The unrepresentative power of small population states under our
federal system has kept the will of the people as a whole from deciding public
policy to the extent it should. The way politicians of all stripes promise the
voters that they will do things they can’t possibly do raises false
expectations. When those expectations aren’t met people become even more
cynical about American politics. All or at least most of these problems arise
or at least are compounded because this country no longer insists that people
learn civics, learn the basics of our form of government. Yes, our democracy
had significant problems before Donald Trump.
Trump has,
however, brought American democracy to a crisis point. Either through our
electoral and other political decisions we defeat Donald Trump and his sycophants
who echo his lies out of fear of being primaried by his myriad supporters, or
we will very probably see the collapse of American democracy and constitutional
government altogether. That’s how dangerous Donald Trump and his minions are.
We must take the threat they pose to American democracy most seriously. We are
at a moment of grave danger. Our decisions in these days will determine the future
of American politics for a long time to come. Either we defeat Donald Trump and
his hangers-on now, or we will see that government of the people by the people
and for the people (to the extent we’ve ever had it) disappears from our land.
Let’s not let that happen, OK?
[1] I
work here on the assumption that Trump knows that his claims are meritless. It
would be even worse for us if he actually believed them. Only a mentally
unstable person could possibly believe them. Trump isn’t president any more,
thank God, but a crazy former president running around stirring up all the
worst angels of American voters would be a very serious threat to our democracy
indeed.
[2]
From an article at www.newsweek.com.
[3]
I’ll just say here that I have no time for Mike Pence as a politician at all.
He stands for all the wrong things. He is however a human being and deserves to
be treated as one not threatened with assassination by a mob.
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