Trump and Democracy

Last week, Rich made a good argument that Donald Trump would not be able to end American democracy if he won another term as president. One tries to avoid the circle of hell in which we debate Trump all the time, so I am glad to have written up my thoughts on this question already. (Summary for the impatient: I agree, at least in some subjective probabilistic sense, that Trump would not receive the help from officials and government entities that would be necessary for him to become a dictator; like Rich I would refocus discussion on other kinds of harms, though I am not as totally confident that the country will avoid low-probability disasters as he.)

I do have three further thoughts, or three ways of reemphasizing previous themes, to add to our purgatorial political discussion. They may have application beyond Trump.

First, Rich writes that if Trump loses this year “he won’t accept a defeat, which — even if he can’t get anyone to do anything about it — undermines the legitimacy of the system in a damaging way. But Democrats never really accepted his victory in 2016, and would likely go even further to reject a Trump win in 2024. They, too, are happy to trash the system when it doesn’t produce the hoped-for outcome.” This implies that Trump’s not accepting defeat in 2020 was also comparable to Democrats’ never really accepting his victory in 2016.

I would simply invite people to consider what distinctions might be getting lost in the abstraction of “never really accepted” and “trash the system.” When we say that someone doesn’t “really” think or mean or do this or that, sometimes the point is about sincerity, effort, or other attributes and dispositions. (“She’s not really listening to me — she just wants to argue”; “He’s not really trying — he’s just phoning it in.”) But sometimes the “really” elides important distinctions between kinds of acts. Consider someone who insults his neighbor, someone who strikes his neighbor, and someone who kills his neighbor. They may all be alike in having a disposition to express their anger or hatred, in not accepting their neighbor, and so forth, yet we would never maintain that their acts belonged in the same factual or moral categories. On this analogy, I also deny that Democrats’ not really accepting Trump’s victory in 2016 is comparable to Trump-led Republicans’ literally not accepting Biden’s victory in 2020 — that they are both merely cases of “trashing the system” even if they are both that. Let us grant that Democratic bureaucrats tried to stymie Trump, that claims of Russian collusion with Trump were exaggerated or wrong and led to an unfair investigation, and so on. These sorts of problems — unaccountable officials, the weaponization of investigative or legal procedures by political foes — are familiar and do not involve directly trying to subvert a presidential election. An effort by a president voted out of office to subvert the election outcome and remain in power on the basis of outright falsehoods was new, as is the former president’s winning another nomination not despite but largely because of those falsehoods. It is a difference of kind, and no such attempt had ever been made. We should not want to concede that an unwarranted special-counsel appointment and an attempt by a president to subvert the will of the people on the matter of his retention in office are the same sort of act.

Second, Rich notes that “the American constitutional system has been remarkably enduring and stable, and it still retains broad and deep public support,” adding that “it obviously survived a civil war.” This is true, but let’s keep in mind the differences between prospect and retrospect. It’s natural to look back and be struck by the endurance of our system, but we should not dismiss too quickly the magnitude of the catastrophe suffered by those who had to live through or fight in the Civil War. Certainly it would have been much better to end slavery in a way that avoided it. I do not think another civil war is likely if Trump is elected. But in a similar way we should have wanted to avoid the consequences of efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, as we should have wanted to avoid the consequences of the likely attempts at subversion in 2024 if Trump does not win. We also should not forget that avoiding terrible outcomes can depend on lucky contingencies. Under a James Buchanan administration, South Carolina would have succeeded to secede. (It, in fact, did not secede, despite the commonness of that locution, since secession was legally impossible and unsuccessful in the event.)

Third, a huge number of examples from the mental, social, biological, and physical worlds show how pushing something too far along a continuum induces categorical changes. Consider: A riled-up crowd tips over into being a mob; anxieties build and precipitate a mental breakdown in a stressed person; a viral load becomes great enough to cause illness; increase or decrease of temperature produces a phase change in matter. The Civil War is another social example; Americans were debating, shouting, denouncing — and then shooting.

I think the same principle applies to the risks that Trump and the GOP court by persisting in and intensifying their claims that the 2020 election was stolen. January 6 was a taste of what is possible. Most people, and of course most Republicans, would not have predicted a violent storming of the Capitol that day. As I consider possibilities of catastrophic damage to our political system and reflect that in all reasonable prediction they will not come to pass, I remind myself that catastrophes are breaks, not continuities, and that one will not normally expect their first arrival.