By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, September 09, 2020
One of the many wondrous ironies of the 2016 presidential
campaign is that the very same Democrats who spent the months leading up to the
election demanding that Donald Trump make a solemn vow to “accept the results,”
prelusive to the concession speech he was expected to make, refused to accept
the results.
The demand was repeated everywhere from the New York
Times to “Epic Rap Battles of History” to late-show monologues. It was
never exactly clear what exactly the Democrats expected Trump to do in refusing
to “accept the results” — tweet about it? — but the demand was repeated and
repeated and repeated with increasing histrionics right up until it became
clear that Donald Trump had won the election, at which point Democrats refused
to accept the results, and they steadfastly continue to refuse.
The Democratic case against the 2016 election results is
part conspiracy theory and part constitutional criticism.
There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin’s online goon squad
and his intelligence services did their best to muck about with the 2016
election, as they are doing in 2020.
The point of such Russian shenanigans is less to
encourage the election of this or that candidate (not that the Kremlin does not
have preferences) than to sow discord and distrust, undermining our democratic
institutions and public faith in the electoral processes. In this, the Russians
are succeeding spectacularly. The American Right has spent years denouncing a
“silent coup d’état” against the Trump administration, and the American
Left is working itself up into a pre-election hysteria, envisioning tanks on
the White House lawn and a president who refuses to leave office. President
Trump, in his usual trollish fashion, encourages both of these tendencies.
The current Russian strategy is, in the analysis of the
Alliance for Securing Democracy, focused on the Democrats and on race, hoping
to drive a wedge between the institutional partisan Democrats and left-wing
activist groups such as Black Lives Matter. The most popular keyword on Ivan’s
social-media accounts is “Kenosha.” Americans do not require an invitation from
Moscow to fight about race or to have the activist wing of either political
party savage its detested centrist establishment, but, of course, Moscow can
help to make things worse. It is happy to do so.
We are going to have to figure out a way to live with
that if we are going to live with each other.
Foreign powers have been trying to influence U.S.
elections from the beginning, an effort that has only grown in energy and
sophistication as the United States has evolved from fledging commercial
republic to world-bestriding superpower. From the point of view of any foreign
capital, the American elections are too important to be left to Americans. And
while we should avoid cheap moral equivalency, the United States has an
interest in the elections of other countries as well, and it acts on that
interest.
Moscow has preferences. So does Beijing. (Remember the
Clintons and their Chinese-money
troubles.) So do many others, and they all have Internet access. There is
no way to maintain a legal and social environment of free speech without
opening our discourse up to such influence.
Everybody knows that, of course.
The Democrats would not have given a fig about the
Russian efforts in 2016 if their candidate had won the race, any more than the
Republicans would have been interested in Charlie Trie back in the 1990s if he
hadn’t been tied to the Clintons; the Republicans of the time were quite
comfortable with foreign influence in American politics when it was coming from
the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Opportunism has a friend in cheap nationalism: If
Hillary Rodham Clinton were president of these United States, poor Mark
Zuckerberg would have been spared these four years in the stocks.
Senator Kamala Harris already is out giving speeches
about Russian interference that preemptively discredit the election results, in
case they go the wrong way for her. Expect this to build to a fever pitch by
November, and then — go “Poof!”, if the Democrats win, and turn into riots
(more riots) if they lose.
Much more consequential than the blame-the-Russkies
rhetoric is the very real effort to effect a revolution in American government
by abolishing the Electoral College.
The United States has a federal system of government in
which the states are distinct entities with their own powers and interests, not
buckets full of the undifferentiated commodity “Americans.” Critics charge that
the Electoral College is undemocratic, and it is — so is the Bill of Rights,
judicial review, and many other cherished aspects of American government. It is
true that this has on several occasions produced an outcome in which the
presidential election was won by a candidate who received fewer total votes in
the country as a whole than his opponent: The presidents elected under those
circumstances were John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison,
George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. To insist that this is unjust is to beg the
question. It would be unjust if we elected presidents by means of a national
poll, but that is not how we elect presidents. We have the system we have for a
reason.
(I can hear the cry from a thousand miles away:
“Racism!”)
The federal system is intended to accommodate the genuine
diversity of these United States, ensuring among other things that those living
in less densely populated agricultural states are not politically dominated by
those living in the more urban states. We have a Wyoming for people who do not
want to live under Californian government. Crass majoritarianism gives them a
choice of living under Californian government in California or living under
Californian government in Wyoming.
There is more to intelligent and decent government than
sheer numeric might and majoritarianism — see again the Bill of Rights. To
abolish the Electoral College would mean a substantial change in the American
constitutional order, and such a thing requires broad consent — broad consent
that does not exist and is unlikely to come into being any time soon.
One cannot help but suspect that this issue would have
less urgency if there were more Democrats in Wyoming.
The only thing that seems almost certain about the 2020
election is that the losing side will refuse to accept the results, just as the
Democrats did in 2016. This is selfish and irresponsible.
It is also the short route to chaos.
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